The Golden Age Of British Dance Bands

HARRY ROY

Mention dance music of the thirties to anyone who can remember that strange era of industrial unrest, political upheaval, glorious summers and great songs, and one of the first names that will come to mind is that of Harry Roy.

The clarinet-playing leader of the band that succeeded Ambrose at the May Fair Hotel in March, 1934 was born in London in 1900, and as a young man, came under the spell of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band at the Hammersmith Palais de Danse, as did many aspiring British musicians. He and his brother Sydney had several dance units in the early days after the first world war, but it was the Crichton Lyricals at the famous Café de Paris (as well as the Hammersmith Palais itself, and other places) that brought Harry Roy to the notice of the public generally.

The band toured South Africa, Australia and Europe before Harry Roy started out on his own with a band he called his RKOlians, which played successfully at the London Pavilion and the Café Anglais. Harry Roy used some fine arrangements that satisfied some pretty discerning “hot” music critics even as long ago as 1933; always attracted to this idiom, there are some examples of his enthusiasm included in this set, such as Avalon, Margie (one of the most popular creations of the Original Dixieland pianist, J. Russel Robinson), Spanish Shawl and the British number Limehouse Blues, originally a 1922 revue number that has become an international jazz standard.

To balance them, and to prove that Harry Roy was not entirely bound to the jazz form, this set also includes such nostalgic pieces of sweetness as Music, Maestro, Please, (from the tense summer of 1938), and a jolly bit of Latin nonsense from a happier day three years earlier, when everyone was singing and dancing to South American Joe. You don’t have to be middle-aged, either, to recall Eddie Cantor—whom Harry Roy somewhat resembled, facially and vocally—singing Build A Little Home in the film Roman Scandals; it was revived on television at the end of 1967. This is the oldest track in this album by Harry Roy; it dates from the Café Anglais days of 1933. The set concludes with something Harry composed himself as a feature for his pianists Stanley Black and Norman White. All these memories are revived for us by one of the happiest bands of them all, fronted by their showman-leader, the King of Hotcha—Harry Roy.

LEW STONE

Lew Stone must be regarded as one of the greatest of all British dance-band arrangers. Born in London in 1897, he learned to play the piano as a boy, and was determined to make music his career, despite his father’s wishes for him to be a cabinet-maker. He ran away from home to join a concert party, but was stranded in Durham, and returned to London, where he took up very different work in the docks!

This could hardly last for long, and after gaining some experience in various London night-clubs during the early twenties, joined the ill-fated Bert Ralton’s Havana Band for a tour of South Africa. During this tour, Ralton was accidentally killed on a hunting expedition, and the band returned to London, where it broke up.

Lew Stone became the principal arranger for Ambrose’s great orchestra at the May Fair Hotel, and the success of this unit with the public and dance music connoisseurs alike is due to a very great extent to the rich, imaginative scores that Lew Stone provided. Ambrose was a perfectionist; one of his sidemen told me, “He wanted the best”, and in Lew Stone he certainly got it.

When Roy Fox came to London from California in the late summer of 1930, he set about forming a band for the Café de Paris, and then the Monseigneur Restaurant in Piccadilly, and the arrangements and piano work were in the hands of Lew Stone for the next two years. In October, 1932, Roy Fox formed a new band for the Café Anglais, and Lew Stone remained at the Monseigneur, with most of his colleagues from the original band. Among these were Nat Gonella, the British answer to Louis Armstrong, and his diminutive bass player with the high-pitched voice, Tiny Winters, both of whom can be heard in typical vocal work on this record.

After another two years or so, Lew Stone took his band to the Hollywood Restaurant, also in Piccadilly, and while there, they made most of the titles on this disc. After a while, he turned to tours, doing stage work and more recordings; the war came, and Lew kept his band together as long as he could, but eventually disbanded it. In 1947, he became musical director for the very popular West End production of Annie Get Your Gun, since when he has been semi-retired, frequently supplying arrangements for radio shows.

Every aspect of the band’s capabilities is demonstrated in this collection. The humour of Mrs. Lowsborough—Goodbye (with a hilarious vocal by Lew himself) is matched by the pathos of Little Jacket of Blue; there are mementoes of British song-writers Jimmy Kennedy and Michael Carr in Red Sails and Dinner for One respectively, the first a tuneful love-ballad in what seem to be West Country accents, the latter a slick, sophisticated town-dweller’s number, and top American writers Irving Berlin (Cheek to Cheek) and the team of Dubin and Warren (Latin from Manhattan) provide a light-hearted contrast, in Transatlantic style. For jazz enthusiasts, there is a version of the 1915 hit, I Ain’t Got Nobody, sounding surprisingly modern and giving the members of the band a chance to show that all was not syrup and tripe in the dance music of the thirties. Lew Stone died in February, 1969.

ROY FOX

Roy Fox’s story is one of extremes—of ill-luck, great success, in fairly equal portions, dominated by a courage that overcame the one and carried forward with the other. Unlike most of the top bandleaders in London during the thirties, he was an American by birth—he hailed from California, where he was born in 1901.

He made his first record as long ago as 1924 as the cornet player with Art Hickman’s famous orchestra in California, then joining Abe Lyman’s band before coming to England to form a band for the Café de Paris, and soon after this, for the Monseigneur Restaurant. He was an instant success; instead of the brash, know-it-all attitude of many American visitors with their bands, quiet, modest Roy Fox, tall and distinguished-looking, captured the dancing public who came to hear him and his band of British musicians. For nearly two years, until October, 1932, the Fox magic held sway at the Monseigneur; he then took a new band to the Café Anglais, continuing his success there. There were Continental tours, Royal Command performances and broadcasting galore—until just before the outbreak of war, Roy Fox’s health broke down (he had had to spend some time in Switzerland at the end of 1931 with lung trouble, which flared up again, doubtless under the strain of being a successful bandleader).

He returned to America; but the war came, and he could not get back to England. When eventually he returned, to find the dance band scene almost as decimated as London itself. Times had changed, and most of the leaders he had known in the thirties had given up the business to concentrate on management of stage, radio and television personalities. Roy Fox went into publishing, and more latterly, created an artistes’ agency which he still runs.

The records presented here were made between 1936 and 1938; by this time, Roy Fox had given up playing his sweet-toned “Whispering cornet”, which provided him with a ready-made signature tune in Whispering, leaving most of the trumpet work to Sid Buckman, who was also an excellent vocalist.

The band specialised mostly in slushy numbers, eight of which you can hear again here. Most of them have since become standards in the repertoire of cabaret artists and the more sophisticated singers, but this is how they were meant to be played and sung the first time round.

One of the outstanding vocalists of the period was Denny Dennis; his regular work was with Roy Fox, and he contributed vocal refrains to Too Marvelous for Words (one of Johnny Mercer’s happiest songs) and, aided by Mary Lee, to that delightfully argumentative love-song, Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off. For many years, Denny Dennis was regarded as the British Bing Crosby; indeed, something of the vibrant quality of Bing’s voice can be heard in Denny’s, though there is no conscious imitation. Denny Dennis was a star in his own right; he would never have lasted with Roy Fox if he had not been. For Roy Fox was a perfectionist, and as such people do, he drove himself beyond the limits his health would stand. The results are here for us to enjoy.

RAY NOBLE

The thirties were the Golden Age of British dance music. There were giants in those days, most of them British-born, and a few such as Roy Fox, Carroll Gibbons and Jack Harris were American. Most of them played an instrument themselves, some were also vocalists, but very few indeed were actually composers of dance music in addition to being leaders and instrumentalists.

Ray Noble, born in Brighton in 1907, was a bandleader, a pianist, an arranger and a composer, and in all these branches of the business of providing music for dancing, he excelled. His success was not limited to this side of the Atlantic, either; he was a huge success in the United States, where he went in the late summer of 1934, and except for brief holidays in England, he stayed there until his retirement to the Channel Islands a few years ago.

Practically all his songs became top hits the world over, yet his band had no existence as such outside recording studios until he gathered an American unit together. The musicians we can hear playing the songs of the early thirties on this record were at that time all members of other bands, yet such was their musicianship, and such was Ray Noble’s knowledge of who would sound best playing which part, they all sound as if they had played together as a group for years. Britain’s greatest vocalist of the time, the late Al Bowlly, sings on all but two tracks, and the treatment of the titles ranges from the richly sentimental (but never slushy!) numbers such as Close Your Eyes and Lazy Day to the frankly “hot” You Ought To See Sally On Sunday. Many of these superb records were released in America, to the delight of those who could afford them during the economic depression of that time, and Ray Noble was regarded as the equal if not the superior of most American bands, where violins were ladling out the syrup with nothing to counteract it.

Ray Noble first became known to the music world when he won a Melody Maker competition to find a good arranging talent. That was in 1926. By 1929 he had supplied arrangements to Jack Payne, leader of the BBC Dance Orchestra, and had had some songs published. That year he was appointed Musical Director of the Gramophone Company, and supervised not only dance music as such, but elegant backings to every kind of popular artist, such as Gracie Fields, Paul Robeson, Cicely Courtneidge and Jack Buchanan, for the next five years. It was during this time that all these eight numbers were recorded. The hit songs flowed from Ray Noble’s pen: By The Fireside, Goodnight, Sweetheart, The Very Thought Of You, What More Can I Ask? and Wherever You Are are just a few, and he wrote the entire score of the film Say It With Music, featuring Jack Payne and his Orchestra.

No dance musician in this or any other era did more to promote top quality British dance music than Ray Noble. Here are eight specimens in support of that statement.

BRIAN RUST