It never went on to the CV, especially when applying to
be a cathedral organist and choirmaster, but the more I look back on it, the
more I realise it was one of the significant experiences in my musical
life. I played the organ in a strip
club.
I well recall how it came about.
We had done a performance of Handel’s Jephtha in Llandaff Cathedral and, still
on that adrenalin high musicians experience after any successful performance, a
few of us decided to hit the bars of Cardiff.
Jephtha is lengthy and by the
time we had got ourselves together after the performance it was well past
10.30, the hour at which Cardiff pubs used to (perhaps still do) close. Not to be discouraged, the tenor soloist knew
of a club in town which stayed open late and reckoned he could get us in. He could, and for a while we sat at a table
in a noisy night-club discussing the performance. Gradually we dispersed around the club, and for
a while I was alone at the table. At
that point a man came over to me from an adjoining table.
“Did I overhear someone say that you played the organ?”
he asked. I explained that yes, I did,
and told him I was a music student whose first study was the organ. “Would you be interested in a job?” he asked,
“I am looking for an organist in my club”.
I tried to explain that I was training to be a cathedral organist and that
playing in a club was beneath my dignity!
He mentioned £15 a night for three nights a week, and I began to
waver. “I don’t really know any suitable
repertory”, I told him. He asked what
sort of stuff I played, and when I said “Hymns and that sort of thing”, he
declared “That would be perfect!”
Thus it was that the following Friday night I found
myself in the grim setting of the Upper Race Working Men’s Club on the
outskirts of the mining town of Pontypool.
There was a solitary Hammond organ on stage and a few hundred miners in
the hall doing some very serious drinking.
I played a few things to get used to the organ, and nobody seemed to
listen, so I carried on. Then a woman
came up to me from behind the curtain on stage and said that she was ready to
start. She was dressed somewhat unconventionally
for a singer, but I assumed that was what she was, and I duly asked her what
she wanted me to play and whether she had the music with her. “Just carry on what you were playing and I’ll
work to that”, she told me and, as I had been playing a hymn, I pulled out a
few levers and pressed a few switches, and started again in the full expectation
of her joining in at some stage.
Concentrating as I was on the hymn, I didn’t see what happened next
until an item of clothing appeared on the floor beside me.
Then another.
Then another.
A bra appeared, unfilled.
A pair of black panties landed on the organ, with all
the elegance of a squashed fly.
And then I looked up.
The now naked girl came over, collected her clothes,
and gave me a kiss on the top of the head.
“That was lovely, dearie!” she exclaimed. My manners obliged me to say the same to her,
but my confusion never warned me of its implications, and on all of her
subsequent appearances she would, at the end of the act, cock a leg up over the
music stand of the organ. I knew then what
the miners faced each time they went underground to dig for coal in those long,
dark passageways. Altogether four girls
stripped in rotation in four 20 minute segments, and each did so to the accompaniment
of various hymns from my repertory.
By the next night I was prepared and had learnt some
more suitable (I thought) material. But
this was not liked by the girls or the miners who asked to have the hymns back. “We love the ‘ymns”, I was told, “The lads can
sing along while we strip!” And so it
proved. Over the weeks and months, the
singing got more enthusiastic and the stripping became more desultory until one
girl gave up the stripping at the penultimate stage and conducted the ramshackle
choir of drunk Welsh miners in a stirring rendition of Cwm Rhondda dressed just in her off-white underwear. (Thank
goodness the bra was still on. A bra-less
“Busty Morgan”, a well-chosen stage-name, would have beat time in at least
three different directions.)
The requests started coming in from the floor and
certain girls preferred certain hymns.
An all-round favourite was Ar hyd
a nos (translated that means “All through the night”) and as “Leggy Lizzie”
did her stuff to it, the entire hall would hum along like a smooth, velvet
carpet. Eventually the hymns became more
popular than the strippers, but I had had enough and, despite the generous
monetary rewards, after six months I decided to give it up because I was
developing a kind of Brahms Syndrome. I
found it difficult to take the girls of my own age seriously, knowing that what
lay under the carefully assembled glittering exterior was not likely to live up
to external promises. Instead I found myself
strangely attracted to the inaccessible, unattainable women, whose careful assembled
glittering exteriors held promises I would never be in a position to test.
Luckily the Brahms Syndrome was only a temporary
aberration. But a more lasting
consequence of my strip club venture was the appreciation of music beyond the
kind of audiences I had been groomed to expect.
Knowing that drunken Welsh miners in a run-down working men’s club got
every bit as much satisfaction – possibly rather more – than a worthy bunch of
civic dignitaries in serried ranks in a cathedral, or even a be-bowtied
upper-middle-class elite in a plush opera house, has had a profound effect on
how I approach music.
In the world of classical music we try to reach out to
new audiences, assuming that lurking out there somewhere is a vast pool of musically-illiterate
people who need to have their ears opened to the glories of Mozart, Bach and
co.. Perhaps, though, it is not they who
need their ears opened, as us musicians who need our eyes opened to see that
music is perhaps already flourishing where we least expect it.
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