This article first appeared in The Wire magazine issue 220 December 2002.
Written by Julian Cowley
On October 1st, 1968, ten musicians met to play at London’s Olympic Studios. Collectively they were known as The People Band and that was the name given to the album made that day. Rolling Stone Charlie Watts acted as producer. Ian Dury, then primarily a painter, was a guest in the control room. Both were friends of Terry Day one of the drummers with the group. Watts admired Day’s playing and had invited him to record, with no preconditions. Day convened musicians he had worked with on a regular basis for a couple of years: pianists Mel Davis and Russell Hardy, drummer Tony Edwards and Nigerian percussionist Eddie Edem, saxophonists Lyn Dobson and George Khan, bassists Frank Flowers and Terry Holman, and trumpeter Mike Figgis. The music was at times fiery and tough, at other times gentle and intricate. It was improvised and touched on free jazz, but it fed from other streams too. Figgis, now acclaimed director of films including Leaving Las Vegas and Miss Julie, still finds the album exciting. “It’s a remarkable blow. Microphones were placed all over this large studio, everybody moved from microphone to microphone all the time.”
Mobility was characteristic of The People Band. At concerts the musicians would wander freely, mingling with the audience, exploring and “creating a total sound throughout the space”, Terry Day remembers. “Fixed instruments such as drums or piano acted as a focus for intense music and close dialogue.” Multi-instrumentalism was encouraged. “Those who wanted to play each other’s instruments did so, and as the evening proceeded people from the audience would invariably pick up instruments that were lying around.” Openness and inclusiveness were in the air during the period from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s when The People Band flourished. Rarely were they translated into action with such commitment and vitality as in this group’s performances. Terry Holman relates that even at the recording date an intrigued session guitarist, who had been there rehearsing to back Frank Sinatra, wandered in and was allowed his moment – uncredited - on the album. “My landlady gave me a violin the day before,” Holman continues. “I’d never played one, but I got a solo! For that record I actually cut hairs off a horse’s tail myself and made a bow from a flexible piece of willow. It was very wide, so I could slacken it off and play four-note chords on the double bass.”
Members of The People Band experimented, but their musicianship was concentrated and intense. Looking back Mike Figgis feels fortunate to have made music with “real giants”. “Mel Davis is entirely a one-off, with energy like Cecil Taylor; otherwise unlike him, but with that ability to make a piano cut through everyone else’s collective sound, a powerhouse technique. George Khan was phenomenally loud and inventive; really powerful. Terry Day is maybe the greatest drummer I’ve ever heard and completely unique. In a class of his own, very eccentric but with power that I’ve never encountered before or since. He’d have this completely free implied pulse going, an incredible high-energy pulse. Even when he was being quiet the sense was that things were moving very quickly.”
The People Band has somehow been sidelined in accounts of improvised music to a point where it is all but forgotten. “A recording puts you on the map”, Day observes. Many informal recordings were made, but The People Band was the group’s only formal release. Day enjoys hearing it but expresses some dissatisfaction. “It lacks the spontaneity and organic flow of gigs; not as raw, free, anarchic, chaotic. The People Band live was like a huge roller-coaster. Once it started the music was unstoppable. At times it was scary in its power like a huge surge of energy. An engineer would have had great difficulty getting a focused recording”. The album remains an impressive document even if the music strains against the limitations of the medium. In 1968, Watts, despite his high profile, was unable to secure an outlet and it wasn’t until 1970 that Transatlantic, best known for folk releases, issued The People Band. Holman recalls that it wasn’t just the music that baffled executives. “We negotiated for the shortest possible contract and the least amount of money. None of us wanted to be tied up. No more thank you; that’s it.”
The People Band had its origins at a jazz club set up in 1965 by Mel Davis, Frank Flowers and big-band leader Derek Goom at The Starting Gate pub in Wood Green, North London. The venue attracted leading figures on the London scene, such as altoist Ray Warleigh, bassist Graham Collier and pianist Chris McGregor. Davis himself drew inspiration from Thelonius Monk and Cecil Taylor, but was also interested in Charles Ives and Bela Bartók and read John Cage. He developed ambitions to “expand jazz” and was trying out new approaches to Monk tunes, playing with Flowers, subsequently bassist with the Hallé Orchestra, and saxophonist Lyn Dobson, who later joined Soft Machine. Then other adventurous musicians arrived, including the Russell Hardy Trio.
Out of public view pianist Hardy had been playing with drummer Day and bassist Holman for five years, evolving a distinctive kind of free music that, according to Day, “took on its own form. It was tuneless, free of strict time, an organic free-flow, open-ended, not based on any sequential, thematic or chordal structure”. Holman recalls, “Most jazz at the time had a theme and you’d improvise a few choruses, but we just started and went on then stopped. Russell was a very quiet pianist but very fast. Terry Day sandpapered his drumsticks until they were very thin and was faster than any drummer I’ve ever heard and I had to learn to keep up. I began using the bow. I also fixed an old one-string fiddle amplified by a horn onto the bass with G-clamps, so the bridges were at the same level, and used it as extra high string”.
The trio had done a few concerts, mainly at the Royal College Of Art, where Day was studying. The small audiences included Ian Dury (“our main buff”), who was also a student there and shared a flat with Day. At The Starting Gate, Davis was preparing his piano and playing with a certain wildness that encouraged the trio to request a gig. Davis in turn was impressed. “The first night they played I had a gig somewhere else. I got back and Derek Goom said you must go up, there’s a drummer using knitting needles! Terry had Salvation Army bass drums and hubcaps and cola bottles as well as all these cymbals and really good kit that Charlie Watts had given him. What an amazing drummer!” Jam sessions followed. Day’s kit grew huge, adaptable to many demands. For Davis, Day’s presence was like a whole orchestra playing behind him.
A group called the Continuous Music Ensemble came into existence. At its heart were Davis, Day and Holman but it grew into an open affair. Day distils its fundamental assumption: “Music is in the air. Music is always there. Catch it when you can, catch it when you want. For music is continuous – it never stops. All you have to do is plug into it. It’s all around.” As Holman puts it, “Our philosophy was that we were tuning in to natural rhythms that were round about us. We had an aversion to electric instruments – it was the State that was supplying your power. We tended to go for acoustic instruments that used human breath or human vibration of strings.”
Others who contributed vitally to the Starting Gate ferment included saxophonist and poet Barry Edgar Pilcher, who had developed his own approach to free playing. Guitarist Clive Kingsley and percussionists Eddie Edem and Glen Sweeney were also involved in this increasingly unfettered music-making. Holman and Davis subsequently played with Sweeney’s Third Ear Band; Davis’s cello can be heard on their album Alchemy (1969). George Khan, poised to make an impact with Mike Westbrook’s Orchestra, started to attend. Drummer Tony Edwards, now with jazz group Big Chief, knew Davis and alerted Mike Figgis, then an aspiring jazz trumpeter and music student at Trent Park College, to the fact that something special was taking place nearby. “I’d never heard anything so outrageous,” says Figgis. “I’d never heard music like it and they were open to the idea of people sitting in.”
Davis initially tried to work with unorthodox scores, including leaves. “I’d been into drawing pictures and playing to a light show. As if we needed to hang onto something. It was Terry Day who said let’s not have anything at all. Why don’t we scrap the whole thing and just play sounds? Gradually we got to grips with the idea of having no idea.” Lights remained an ingredient but now the nature of the music was shaped by “the musicians themselves, the environments they were playing in, the horns they were playing, where their heads were, what they’d been brought up on – you had a form already”. The group outgrew its jazz club origins and started to look for other contexts to open up the form. Many venues were visited including newly established Arts Laboratories in Drury Lane and Robert Street in Central London, and the Wood Green Arts Centre, formerly a church hall.
“The Starting Gate was more focused, not so broad”, Day recalls. “The church hall was big and we could play all evening. Anything could happen. A rich mix of genres, idioms, styles – reggae, funk, jazz, rock, classical, blues, free – flowed together in the improvisation.” The Continuous Music Ensemble became The People Band, in part to affirm that this was music by, for and about people. Additionally the need arose to avoid confusion with John Stevens’s recently formed Spontaneous Music Ensemble. And the new name acknowledged ongoing collaborations with the performance art group The People Show.
People Band music thrived on new encounters. Collaborations brought in elements of uncertainty and surprise that kept improvising fresh. Different venues demanded flexible response. The People Band had a nucleus of musicians preserving its identity but, Day remembers, “There was no guarantee who would turn up for a gig, or how many. New players would arrive. Members would bring along musician friends. There were always unknown factors.” Reedsman Paul Jolly, who joined in 1968, feels that “the best gigs were the ones where people just arrived. Word would go out there was a gig somewhere. The gig was whoever turned up.” This could produce precarious situations. Once Day alone turned up for a concert in Brussels. He became The People Band and quickly involved members of the audience in a typically lengthy performance.
Often there was artistic cross-fertilization with poets, dancers, film, installations, mime and performance artists, including Stuart Brisley. Carlyle Reedy read her poems; Annabelle Nicolson painted; Jonathan Nicoll painted, used slides and film, concocted smells on a kind of portable barbecue and played penny whistle; photographer Ian Jacobs produced sculptural installations and took up the alto saxophone. More ambitious still were interactions with The People Show formed in 1966 by Mark Long, Jeff Nuttall, Syd Palmer, John Darling and Laura Gilbert. It was a feverish collision of theatre, sculpture, poetry and mayhem that initially found a home in the basement of Better Books, on Charing Cross Road, managed then by poet Bob Cobbing. The People Show still exists, conjuring “a certain weird collective magic” (in Nuttall’s phrase). In early days Davis, Holman and Day were drawn into their exploits. Then The People Show moved from the bookstore cellar to Drury Lane Arts Laboratory, founded in 1967 by Jim Haynes and Jack Moore. The People Band joined them. Day describes the Arts Lab as “an experiment in social revolution”. It distilled the radical spirit of the late-1960s, fostering exploration of all kinds.
This was the heyday of Happenings, mixed-media events that thrived on simultaneity of disparate events, unexpected juxtapositions and levelling of aesthetic and social hierarchies. The People Show/People Band alliance at the Arts Lab, Middle Earth club in Covent Garden, on the Fringe of the Edinburgh Festival and even at the Royal Court Theatre fed into this creative surge. George Khan remembers reading in International Times about the first Better Books event. “I thought ‘I’d like to be involved in that’, and soon afterwards I was. I did bits and pieces and in 1978 I joined on a permanent basis and have been a core member ever since.” Mike Figgis was enthralled when he witnessed an event at the Arts Lab in which the audience was placed in four huge cages made of chicken-wire and bedsprings, encircled by musicians, then released into the darkened room one at a time to be grilled by a sinister People Show interrogator.
The People Show reconsidered the status of audiences. Davis’s approach was still more radical: “I was a teacher and used to make percussion instruments with the kids and we’d play them. The People Band said everyone has a capability and can enjoy themselves. Play, learn, but most of all have fun! Words are about definitions; music is much more open and we thought let’s open it more”. This expansiveness could result in friction. Figgis recalls, “At a certain point the anarchy of The People Band started to become unworkable with the kind of structure that a performance art group is aiming at. And The People Show’s need for structure became an irritant to The People Band. One night there was a huge fight involving a sheet of corrugated iron. It was the split-point where The People Band’s frustration at being held in check and The People Show’s frustration at having their lines obscured by very loud music ended inevitably in a parting of the ways. Everyone was fairly young and given how much creativity and energy there was I think it’s remarkable that it held together really well. At its best, when the two groups were firing in a sympathetic way, it was just incredible.”
A fertile and generally harmonious alliance came to an end. Khan and Day kept a foot in both camps, as musicians and actors. Figgis joined The People Show in 1970, opting for their more structured approach, but he remains loyal to the spirit and achievement of The People Band. He recognizes exceptions but is appalled by “the apathy that exists now in terms of creativity, the absence of any spirit of anarchy and the dull conformity of formulaic structures that people have flocked back to. I’m trying to get into a mode of working that refers back to a far more useful model – openness, the ability to make mistakes and not find them devastating but say that’s interesting, hearing what other people can do.”
Other momentous encounters took place. Julian Beck and Judith Malina took their Living Theatre’s liberatory bacchanal Paradise Now to London’s Roundhouse and The People Band swept through the audience in a musical orgy. “Drove everyone wild”, Khan remembers with relish. “We had an ability to drive people crazy. If you were willing to go along with it you could reach ecstatic states. It had that sort of power. It’s what I admire in Coltrane and miss in a lot of jazz. Like speaking in tongues only you can make decisions. It might not have meaning in orthodox terms, but the idea that nobody is going to stop you doing this is an unbelievably liberating experience.” Musica Elettronica Viva member Alvin Curran remembers at shared concert at the Purcell Room in 1969 that led to chaos with “police and fire-service intervention closing the public’s participation in the ‘music’”. There was interaction with The Scratch Orchestra at the same venue in 1970, and trumpeter Mal Dean arranged an exchange with his group The Amazing Band, even though he knew their more restrained improvising would be swallowed up in The People Band’s heft.
Terry Day recognizes that some musicians found The People Band “too chaotic, too anarchic, too raw for their taste”. Khan concurs. “Some musicians didn’t like The People Band at all. They had this idea that you must learn how to play something before you can do something. That’s ok to some extent, but it doesn’t have to be. You’ve got the one life so you have to choose what you want to do. If you want to make noises and do strange things then why not do them. It doesn’t harm anybody. Other musicians sometimes would get annoyed and be scathing. I’ve no idea why because there was no money to be made from it. People did make noises and do whatever they wanted to do. I thought it was fascinating. It was a very different experience from anything I’ve experienced then or since.”
And Khan is a widely experienced as well as a formidable musician. He was inspired to play saxophone after hearing Charlie Parker recordings as a teenager in Karachi, but soon realized there was no point in emulating Parker. Later he unsuccessfully requested tuition from John Coltrane, but knew copying him would be equally unproductive. Khan did take lessons in America from reedsman Sam Rivers. He also read Cage and responded eagerly to the inquisitive spirit he encountered at The Starting Gate. He had already played improvised music at poetry and jazz sessions organized by poets Pete Brown and Michael Horovitz. His collaborators included saxophonist Dick Heckstall-Smith and composer Cornelius Cardew, who played guitar.
In 1966 Khan recorded Local Colour, with rising stars of the British jazz scene, bassist Tony Reeves and drummer Jon Hiseman (both soon to play with Heckstall-Smith in the jazz-rock group Colosseum), Peter Lemer on keyboards, and saxophonist John Surman. Lemer, whose many credits include a stint with Gong, occasionally played with The People Band and Surman also participated. Dave Chambers, who like Khan and Surman played saxophone with Mike Westbrook, became interested early on. “I was only a peripheral member. We did a memorable gig at Robert Street Arts Lab that in a way sums up what The People Band was about. A metal piano frame was leaning against a wall. We were all blowing like mad and at one point somebody pushed the frame over. The noise was incredible! Everybody stopped playing. This gig finished when the frame fell over. That for me sums up the what the band was about.” The musical situation developed its own rules from within and ran according to its own logic.
The music, which would flow for three or four hours continuously, grew denser as more players arrived - numerous saxophonists, several bassists including jazz players Johnny Dyani and Butch Potter, and John Porter who later worked with Roxy Music and produced The Smiths. Pianist John Mitchell astonished everybody with his amazing musicianship. Cardew and members of MEV visited Wood Green. Chris Spedding the versatile guitarist who played with Khan in Pete Brown’s rock group The Battered Ornaments also dropped by. Like Spedding, Khan has an aptitude for moving between contexts. “I seem to have had an ability to slot in anywhere. I remember one day while I was out Terry Day wrote the word ‘chameleon’ all over the walls of my studio. If you played in more orthodox contexts and they asked you to play this free thing it was like a flavour rather than an end in itself and that would occasionally become awkward in my mind. Why not start off that way?”
The People Band album featured key players who brought the group into existence (minus Barry Pilcher). Around the time of its recording there was an influx of new blood, sympathetic to People Band ideals. Those ideals were strongly felt but left unstated. “There were lots of words floating about at the time,” Day observes. “There was also a lot of contradiction between words and deeds. The People Band was defined by actions.” There were emphatically no leaders, but the defiantly anti-authoritarian Mel Davis proved a strong magnet, drawing others into situations where they could exercise their own freedom and make discoveries. “Mel’s house in Palmers Green was a meeting place. Younger musicians like Paul Jolly, Davey Payne and I very much thought of him as a mentor,” affirms Figgis. “We would talk all night about Bach and Schoenberg. He’d explain things far better than any teacher I ever had.”
Reedsman and flutist Jolly had been taught at a Luton secondary school by Davis, who organized jam sessions for more intrepid students. Lyn Dobson, at that time a railway worker rehearsing in his signal box, joined in. Jolly later moved to Birmingham and in 1968 received an invitation from Davis to join an expanded People Band. Davey Payne, now well-known as the vibrant saxophonist with Ian Dury’s Blockheads, received a similar invitation from Albert Kovitz, an accomplished American clarinetist, who had become a member at a gig at The Crypt in West London. Payne had taken lessons with tenor player Don Rendell in 1963, but his expansive musical taste made him restless with straight jazz. “I was listening to avant-garde French flute, Bartók’s ‘Sonatas for Solo Violin’, Schoenberg, sitar player Vilyat Khan.” With The People Band he played sax, flute and sine-wave generator. He had already collaborated with an experimental dance troupe, with a mixed-media group at the Middle Earth and with environmental and conceptual artist Bruce Lacey.
Bassist Charlie Hart, who has subsequently worked with rock musicians including Eric Clapton, Ronnie Lane and Chris Jagger, joined in 1970. He too was with The Battered Ornaments, alongside Dobson who “during a rehearsal turned to me and said 'Do you want to play some real music?' I said yes, and Lyn took me up to Mel Davis’s house. There was a grand piano in a small back room. In the course of the next few months I went there many times and was repeatedly bowled over by Mel's amazing attitude to music. On one level The People Band was to do with American jazz traditions; on another level it was very much to do with what each individual could bring to the collective music. There was a lot of laughter as well as acute aural awareness and often I found myself playing music I had no idea I could play. Terry Day was often there and the whole environment was very inspiring and empowering.”
Figgis recognizes the generosity with which more seasoned People Band members accommodated younger players. “I’d experienced post-bebop groups where there was technical uptightness. Listening to old tape-recordings of The People Band one can hear techniques that were extraordinary, but not conventional.” Regulars took risks and kept their edge. “I found it very exciting and nerve-racking not to know what you’re going to be doing,” says George Khan. “I had confrontations with myself: ‘Do I try to play what somebody else is playing or do I just play what I’m going to play anyway and see how that sounds?’ I never had a pre-conceived idea. It was like sitting at a keyboard and trying to compose all the time, avoiding certain things which you know are easy options.”
In 1969 The People Band travelled to the Netherlands and played to large and responsive audiences in many towns. In Amsterdam they appeared at clubs such as the Cosmos, Milky Way and Paradiso. On their first gig they supported tenor veteran Don Byas. Another American, pianist Burton Greene was drawn to their celebratory spirit and their musicianship and through him the group established contact with improvisers including drummer Han Bennink, pianist Misha Mengelberg and bassist Maarten Altena. Younger musicians such as saxophonist Luc Houtkamp were often in attendance. Paul Jolly remembers Bennink perched behind Day on the stage watching him with great intensity.
Day has vivid memories of Dutch audiences squatting on the floor and gradually edging towards The People Band. After an hour they had closed in, ready to take up any vacated instruments. “I handed them my sticks. Paul and Davey would hand over their horns, adjust the lariat round their necks and help with fingering. Charlie would make sure they held the bass firmly. After a while The People Band had become the audience and the audience had become The People Band. It happened so often in Holland it was uncanny.” After a while the musicians would reclaim their instruments and continue to play.
Involvement of audience members was a signature aspect of the group’s performances, wherever they played. “The music alternated between being very open and being music made by the accomplished,” says Day. “The People Band regarded music as inclusive of all sounds and encouraged belief that all people have musical abilities”. This could lead to rawness but Payne stresses, “We were playing extremely sophisticated music.” Figgis explains that “there was a level of performance that was a median”; the musicians might decide to raise the level of skill involved yet less accomplished participants could “remain within the ensemble and provide texture”.
Holland became a second home for Day, Jolly, Hart, Payne and Kovitz for the next few years. They found accommodation on a moored transatlantic liner, “The Caledonian”. Everyone had a cabin, there was a dance-hall to play in and, Payne remembers, “a cafe that was open all hours, where you could have mint tea, get stoned, listen to Frank Zappa”. Less glowing in the memory was an occasion when The People Band shared a bill with popular rockers Golden Earring. It was an afternoon gig and the improvisers were allocated roped-off space in front of the stage. After a short while the rock audience and Golden Earring themselves started to react with open hostility. The promoters requested an early termination and The People Band complied. It was not the only time they ran into trouble. Day remembers a performance for an Anarchists’ Ball in London that had to be truncated when some audience members waiting for folk-singers threatened violence.
The most ugly gig of all was at Keele University where drunken students verbally and physically abused the musicians. This was a long way from the spirit of the 1968 sit-in protest at Hornsey College Of Art where members of The People Band played for the demonstrators. Day also lived in Paris during the turbulent days of the late-1960s. With Kovitz and Hart he worked alongside Michel Portal, virtuoso reedsman with Stockhausen’s ensemble, recording for French television an improvised session that was followed by a dialogue in which Portal tackled Stockhausen over his distaste for jazz. Payne also spent time with Day and Kovitz in Paris, playing with jazz musicians including trumpeter Alan Shorter, who had worked with Marion Brown and Archie Shepp.
While some of The People Band were in Europe, others continued to perform under that name in England. Davis claims that he and Ian Jacobs formally pronounced the group’s demise in London’s Highgate Cemetery in February 1972, but later People Band gigs may have occurred. There had always been splinter groups providing, as Day puts it, “an outlet for preferences”. Day, Holman and Khan worked as the Nissar Ahmed Khan Trio. Day and Kovitz performed as Abstract Theatre Band, augmented by others including bassist Barre Phillips, percussionist Jamie Muir and poet Adrian Mitchell. Holman and Hardy played with Ian Dury on bongos. Out of that, it seems, grew Dury’s rock group Kilburn And The Highroads, which featured Hardy, Day, Hart and Khan. On occasion they jammed with The People Band. Dury responded enthusiastically to Payne’s vigorous playing and their creative alliance began.
In Holland, Day, Hart and Payne played high-energy music as Ommu The Smooch. Their gigs began, Day enthusiastically recalls, “like the grand finale passage of a rock crescendo. Then it grew faster and faster, more and more intense – sizzling white noise that could go on for hours”. Davis and Jolly formed Evans All-weather Orchestra with bassist Tim Powell. People Band energies were channelled into song forms by the group Mummy formed around 1980 by Davis, Day, Payne, Hart and Jolly plus vocalist Maggie Nicols and guitarist Ed Deane. Davis, Jolly, Day and Nicols have continued to play together in the ecologically aware group Loverly. Before Day’s activities were severely curtailed by illness he left a further indelible mark in the annals of improvising with David Toop, Steve Beresford and Peter Cusack in the influential group Alterations, which shared The People Band’s spirit of formal invention and stylistic inclusiveness.
People Band memories often overlap but rarely match exactly. Emphases fall in different places. Some members stress political commitment, others speak of spiritual elevation, others gravitate to the music itself, some mix all three. Differing emphases elucidate the life of the group; as George Khan says, “You didn’t have to subscribe to certain things to be in it”. All agree that the experience furnished fantastic training in close and sympathetic listening.
In 1989, Figgis called on People Band friends to assume the guise of the Krakow Jazz Ensemble for his film Stormy Monday. Recently he has played again with Khan, Hart and Davis and there are plans to prepare archive People Band material for CD release. They would welcome any tapes currently collecting dust in private archives. Figgis would like to make the album available again. Payne has completed an autobiography that includes People Band material, recalling “the best years both musically and spiritually for all of us.” The unruly and sophisticated People Band is edging back into view, claiming its place in history, re-affirming belief in liberating and creative values.
“I believe we were the English equivalent to Sun Ra”, says Payne, recalling the communal spirit. “Our attitude was similar, although we were doing our own thing. The magic of The People Band was that we weren’t precious or contrived.” Khan feels that lack of contrivance was down to the fact that they were artists, and never had to strive self-consciously or pretentiously for Art. “All true artists break rules,” declares Davis. “To do so on your own can be debilitating.” Remembering the totally supportive People Band environment he adds, “We did it en masse.”
