'I've never wanted to be a pop star " says founder Nigel Tully (left, in striped suit). 'All I ever wanted to do was play tunes that people know and make them happy.'
Above, right: The Dark Blues in the 1960s
In truth, on this particular occasion, as the clock nudges past 11pm, the handing out of awards has dragged on a little long for those keen to get on with bopping and grinding to the band. A steady flow of unsteady diners in full Scottish evening dress or backless frocks showing off discreet tattoos totters in the direction of the toilets as the speeches lengthen.
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"I've got to get the hell out of this, " says one red-faced reveller, who has already removed her shoes in anticipation of the dancing. There is a general whoosh of relief around the huge room when, with a nod to the Basingstoke office, "who achieved the biggest letting in the Thames Valley in a two-year period", the senior partner of Healey & Baker announces the big one. The award for estate agent of the year goes to someone called Ashley ("a great guy who, in these difficult times, has shown us how to make fees"). Sadly; in the long tradition of awards ceremonies, Ashley couldn't be with us tonight. So a colleague goes to collect the award on his behalf and punches the air with a satisfaction that could not have been bettered if he himself had scooped the silverware. |
| Dance king: The Healy & Baker property group annual awards bash. |
Thus it is not until about ll.30pm that the Dark Blues finally begin to play. Which is a fairly typical start to their working day. "Good evening, Healey & Baker," yells Chip Jenkins, the group's singer. Not, she admits, a greeting that merits the description rock'n'roll.
"Yeah, it's not quite, hello, Wembley," she says later. "More like, hello, Wembley, the knocked-down version."
But nobody seems to mind as, in among the opulence, the crockery, the finery and the free bar, the Dark Blues begin their 4,990somethingth performance (not even the band is sure of the exact number). As the first saxophone note of Let's Stick Together growls out of the sound system, from around the room dozens of surveyors, valuers, secretaries and human resources managers head for the dancefloor. Two estate agents in their late 20s occupy the centre of the space, strutting and swaggering, bow ties undone in a raffish, late-night Bond sort of way, each miming the words into a beer bottle ("C'mon, c'mon, let's stick together"). As they stagger arhythmically around the room, waggling their hips at amused female staff; the whole purpose of the Dark Blues, the reason the band can charge more than Gareth Gates for a gig and still be booked for the 25th year by this same client, suddenly becomes clear: for a brief interlude of some four minutes, the band's performance allows Alan and Bazzer from Healey & Baker's head office to labour under the impression that they are as cool as Bryan Ferry.For 40 years, the Dark Blues have tracked the changing shape of British society, taking its temperature through the thermometer of the party. How we have a good time, how we dance, tells us a lot about ourselves, and nobody knows more about the subject than Nigel Tully, the group's founder member. At 59 ("Mick Jagger's two days older than me"), he is the only one to have survived the full four decades, the only one to maintain a thrice-weekly ritual of slipping on a fedora, climbing into a chalk-striped gangster's suit and playing to the well-oiled.
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"God, how things have changed; he says. "People are so much more tolerant, so much less inhibited. When we started, anyone over 30 danced with steps, and we'd have to do a foxtrot every evening. And anyone over 50 asked us to turn it down." There was, in the band's early days, he remembers, such a thing as duty dancing, when the host would dance with every woman at his table in turn, and everyone would dutifully wait until he had finished. "Also," adds Tully, "we used to play slow songs as well as fast ones, and people would smooch. These days, we hardly ever play slow numbers. If people want to put their arms around each other and as good as shag on the dance floor, they do. Often. And it doesn't matter what tempo you're in." |
| Four Beats, an early version of the Dark Blues, with Petula Clark in the audience, 1964. |
In the time he has been the band leader, Tully has recruited two keyboard players, five bassists, four drummers, two sax players and four female singers. The most recent addition to the band is Stuie Ellerton, who once won a young jazz drummer of the year award and was chosen out of more than 50 hopefuls who auditioned for the job last summer. He was thrilled to get it. It is, he says, like an actor landing a part in a soap: a musician craves the regular work that comes with several bookings a month. "A fantastic gig," he adds. " And this band is so professional, so much fun. You spend your life making people happy."
Which was always the purpose from the band's birth. Tully started the Dark Blues - as its name might suggest with three fellow students at Oxford. He arrived at University College in 1961, to read physics, with an interest in rock'n'roll, which he had honed playing the club circuit in the Midlands. " At the time, it was sneered at - Chuck Berry, Little Richard, all that stuff;' he says. "I could play the tune to Tutti Frutti and That’ll Be The Day, and I knew all the words, and everyone saw this as very intellectually inferior."
| So much so that the latter-day raconteur, Miles Kington, refused him membership of the Oxford University Jazz Club because of his subversive affection for Buddy Holly. But he got the last laugh. One summer's evening in 1963, he went to watch his guitar teacher play in a jazz trio at the Victoria Arms, a popular punting destination on the banks of the Cherwell. While the trio took a break for a pint, they condescended to let him plug in his guitar and entertain the audience. He had just bought Love Me Do and, with a rather nerdish attention to detail that stays with him still, Tully had taken it back to his college rooms and perfected playing it. So taken were the jazz crowd with his rendition, as well as with his stab at the rest of the Beatles' repertoire, not to mention most of Bo Diddley and all of Lonnie Donegan, they demanded that he stay on at the expense of the jazz trio. At that moment, Tully knew there was a market for a guitar-based covers group. "They loved me," he says. Then he pauses for a moment. "No, that's not true. They loved the tunes." It was a nice distinction that he has remained aware of since. "I've never wanted to be a pop star or play concerts or write my own songs," he says. " All I ever wanted to do was to play tunes that people know and make them happy." Nick Newell first saw how true Tully was to his idiosyncratic ambition back in 1965. It was at a May ball in an Oxford college, and he was the sax man in Zoot Money's band (he later joined the Kinks for 12 years). "We played R&B," Newell recalls of the Money men. "And we were very cool, about the coolest thing around. So we went out on stage and we said, 'This is what we do, take it or leave it.' No compromise. You know what? They left it. Then the Dark Blues came on and filled the dance floor for two hours. The rest of the band were pretty snooty, but I thought, 'There's something in this'." In 1985, Newell found out precisely what: he joined the Dark Blues and has been helping to entertain party-goers since. And entertain they do. In 40 years, Tully says, the band has had only one complete failure: "It was a gig for the caravan manufacturers' association in Rhyl. Awful. Just couldn't get many on the dancefloor, for whatever reason." Maybe it was because the guests had to pull their partner along behind them. But what is the secret of their success, of keeping a dancefloor full, night after night, decade after decade? "There's no real secret," says Matt Haslett, the band's bassist. "It's just that Nigel can read a floor like no one else. He knows how to chill it down. He knows how to fill it up. He is the master." |
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It is a skill that Tully relishes: he calls it shot selection, as if he were a cricketer at the crease, building an innings. His band never has a set list. Tully simply chooses songs as he goes along, selecting them from a mental Rolodex encompassing some 2,000 tunes. There are certain favourites, certain perennials (It's Raining Men, for example, is a nailed-on definite at every gig), but Tully spends much of his time on stage scanning the audience, thinking what will work next.
"Tonight I have no idea what we'll be playing," says Haslett. "And I love that."
In the middle of the Healey & Baker set, as the Dark Blues run through a cover of Labi Siffre's It Must Be Love, Tully can be seen walking in among the band members, mouthing "Barry White" at them. And next up is a belting interpretation of the Walrus of Love's You're The First, The Last, My Everything. In what might be interpreted as a testament to the group's longevity, this song requires keyboard player Martin Roke - who joined in 1981 - to don his reading glasses to help him with the lyrics as he essays the big man's throaty vocals.
But it was in 1967, as youth was revolting and flowers were a fashion statement, that the trim haired and unthreatening Dark Blues' defining moment arrived. Safe and reliable entertainment for the still flourishing deb scene was their bag, and in the middle of the summer of love they received notice that an important personage was considering hiring them for an important party and they were summoned for an audition. "Well, I told them we don't do auditions," says Tully, who by then also had a job as a salesman at IBM. "If you want to see what we're at, come and see us play. Which turned out to be a shrewd move, because if you audition, it's one song in a sterile environment, whereas if they come and see you play, they get taken in by the atmosphere. So they came to see us and we got booked for what was Princess Anne's coming out do at Windsor Castle."
Such was their success that they became the royals' band of choice: Anne's wedding, Charles's 40th, the jubilee, they have done the lot. Thus, from his vantage point on stage, Tully has been granted an unprecedented opportunity to study the first family at play.
"They do dance, absolutely," he says. " A little force-field surrounds them when they come on the dancefloor nobody wants to get too close, knock the Queen over or whatever. Things get a little more uptight when they are around. But I've noticed the same can happen with certain celebs." Tully, though, is more discreet than royal butlers. Beans will not be spilled. Press him, for instance, on whether, at private functions, Charles adopts that same embarrassed dad-at-a-wedding shuffle he always displays when visiting Caribbean centres in Birmingham, and he is a model of rectitude.
"He dances, he enjoys himself: A lot of royals are patrons of charities, they do a very solid job, and at charity balls we play at, they'll do everything - speak to people, listen to the speeches, dance for an hour. If they're introduced to the band, they always say, 'Oh, are you still together?' My admiration for them is huge because I have seen them working these evenings. And work is the right word." We'll take that as a yes on the Charles dancing front, then. With the royal approval came a rush of bookings. No posh do across the globe was complete without the Dark Blues. Which gave them a broader range of experience than most entertainers advertising in Yellow Pages. "I remember one day turning up at the office rather late and they said, 'Where've you been?' " says Tully. "And I said, Well, I played a gig for King Hussein in Jordan last night, and got the first flight back this morning:"
Through the 1970s and 1980s, the Dark Blues developed a reputation as the upper crust's house band, the entertainers of choice for society weddings and hunt balls, not so much Zoot Money as snoot money. "Well, if you play a private party, say, a combined 25th wedding anniversary, 50th and 21st birthday type thing, with a marquee in the garden, that involves money. Has to," says Tully. "But I'd say of the 80 gigs we will play the rest of this year, 60 will have a wide social mix. Corporate dos involve the entire workforce. I love that. Nobody who plays the Initial Towels' sales force annual party in Telford could be described as exclusively a toffs' band." And what is the difference between the crowd at a posh private party and that Telford sales team? "You don't get girls dancing round their handbags at a posh do," says Tully. "And that's not a value judgement, by the way. The upper crust tends to be more inhibited than the lower crust. As an entertainer, you relish the way these girls go for it at the annual dinner-dance."
And they are certainly going for it at Healey & Baker's do. After a pantomime introduction between Tully and Chip Jenkins ("I don't think the women are singing as loudly as the men, Chip, do you?") during a rendition of I Will Survive, the dancefloor is filled with swaying, sisterly solidarity. The edge of the floor is littered with discarded kitten heels and dropped shawls as women of several generations tell each other how, with all their life to live and all their love to give, they are not about to crumble and lay down and die. So exhausting is one young employee's declaration of intent, at the end of the song she slumps, panting, into a chair and punches a text message into her mobile phone. Possibly calling for oxygen supplies.
It can be a long evening, too, for those doing the playing. On this occasion, they had arrived at the hotel at 6.30pm for a sound check, scurried to the pub for a pint, eaten supper in the hotel coffee shop, and not begun work until many folk of their age are tucked up in bed. It is well after 1am by the time they get their first short break, while Healey & Baker's finance director gets on stage to give a spirited rendition of Robbie Williams' Angels. Several of the band repair to their makeshift dressing room, where Tully lies flat out across a table and uses the Alexander technique to ease a back twisted by a life-time of strapping a guitar across his torso. It is, you think, seeing him clutch at his shoulder, maybe time to slow down. This is a sore point (not his shoulder, the question of age). The idea that a man of his advanced experience should not be engaged in playing S Club 7's Reach irks him.
"This is very much a white/black thing," he says. "White people sneer at it, black people revere it. They don't laugh at Little Richard. They think it's wonderful. So why should we white people laugh at Mick Jagger still doing it at nearly 60? I hugely admire the man, he's a fabulous entertainer, and I think it's fantastic he is still doing what he has always done.
Why shouldn't a musician do it if it's good music?" Besides, he adds, it keeps you young. "It's bloody amazing. When I started, the older generation did not want to know this stuff: Now the older generation is me, they have all been groomed on the same stuff as me, they all have the same file of tunes in their heads. A huge amount of people's brain is occupied by thousands of lines of music. People move across our dance floor mouthing the words of songs they clearly know top to bottom, yet they haven't heard them for years. I did a wedding last summer and the father of the bride asked if he could join us on stage to sing House Of The Rising Sun. He did a great job. Would never have happened in a million years in 1965."
But House Of The Rising Sun is only part of a Dark Blues repertoire that stretches across the rock'n'roll years. In one telling moment, the Healey & Baker crowd is treated to a segue between Bill Haley's See You Later Alligator and Pink's Get The party Started: the full 50-year history of pop in one bound.
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"We could have stayed a 1960s band, or a 1970s band, and made a good living," says Tully. "But I remember the first gig I played at the Dorchester, 1965, we were booked as the beat group alongside Bill Saville's dance band. They were the society band in those days. Did all the gigs. And when we were setting up, Saville saw the bass guitar we had and asked, 'What sort of instrument is that? Bet you don't know how to play: And I thought, 'Right, you boring old tosser, I'm going to put you out of business: And we did. Now I think to myself that no young punk up from Oxford is going to do the same to me. So we constantly innovate. If some new gizmo comes along to make us sound better, I'm going to have it. If there's a record in the charts that people will dance to, we learn it." Intriguingly, as he has seen the erosion of the musical generation gap, Tully admits that his band has never been a favourite of teenagers. Rap is not a form he has yet mastered. And he has never patrolled the rawer edges of pop, of any era. His repertoire does not encompass the Clash or Nirvana or Jimi Hendrix or the Smashing Pumpkins. He has never been tempted to see what Prince Philip's reaction would be had the band cranked up the opening bars of the Sex Pistols' God Save The Queen. Even the more refined product of Pulp and Blur, Coldplay and Radiohead, is absent from his performance. "In the big picture on the dancefloor, it's a minority interest, " he says of that sort of pop. "What I'm trying to do is please 90% of the people 90% of the time. Chip says what we do is go for low hanging fruit. And I guess that's it. That's my life, picking the easy stuff" |
| Tough call: The band has only had one failure says Tully (below) - 'It was a gig for the caravan manufacturers' association in Ryhl. Awful. Just couldn't get many on the dancefloor |
With that, he heads back to the stage, to carry on playing until the hotel's noise curfew kicks in at 2am. By now the free bar is taking its toll on his audience. During his tribute to Phil Spector, arrested that week on a murder charge, a huddle of some dozen or so revellers, their arms wrapped around each other's shoulders, trip over their own feet and clatter to the floor. On the band's PA system is a poster celebrating their anniversary: "Red Hot Year, 40 years of non-stop dancing," it reads. Surveying the hooting, cackling scrum, rolling around on the parquet cheerfully singing Da Doo Ron Ron into each other's faces, it becomes clear that, over that time, Tully has been privileged to get a unique insight into our national psyche.
There is something endearing about a country in which rhythm plays so small a part that falling over during a dance is regarded not as the most humiliating of social gaffes, but as the highlight of the evening.
Article by Jim White ©2003, Pictures by Kevin Davies ©2003
