Des Down Under 7
A Musical Life
Des Down Under Chapter Seven
You know by the time the Blackpool Summer Season was over we were
ready for a holiday!!! And we got one… Another CSE Tour, this time to Aden and
Bahrain, in the Persian Gulf. A Busy year 1965!
This show was called ‘High Time’. Don Munday was compere, and
was once Mr. Pastry’s sidekick and, from what I remember, a funny man. I also
remember we were blessed with two very glamorous ladies on the tour, one a six
foot tall magician called Suzanne, who did coin, card and rope tricks, dressed
in an assortment of very bright leotards! (The highlight of her act was when she
stuck a dozen or so knives into the head of an un-primed member of her audience.
Then she would show all that the knives were still present and accounted for, in
their box, but with the head of the unsuspecting audience member completely
vanished!!! She never revealed to us how she did it, though she threatened to
make us disappear on more than one occasion!!)
The other lady was a fabulous cabaret performer, very glamorous
with it, by the name of Lee Leslie, who had some excellent song arrangements! I
have to tell you she worked me pretty hard because she was an explosive artist
and you just had to stay with her! Very disciplined!!
The star of ‘High Time’ was Michael Cox who had a top three hit
with a song called ‘Angela Jones’. It goes like this Do ‘n do do, do ‘n
do de do, do ‘n do do, Angela Jones… Remember
it now? Mike was also very big in Sweden, touring successfully with chart hits
in that country. But out there, in the Arabian desert, he killed ‘em… At one
of the gigs we did, Mike was singing the song ‘Ah Ha, Oh No, Don’t Let The
Rain Come Down’, which was a regular song in his act designed to encourage
audience participation, by getting
them to sing the ‘Ah Ha’ part.
Well on this particular show, which was
somewhere smack bang in that desert, the soldiers had erected a stage and
created a ‘room’ under the stars, which was magical! But soon we became
aware of a ‘noise’, sort of hovering above the show, so eventually we turned
the music lower and lower, until we could identify it. You’ll never guess what
the ‘noise’ turned out to be… Right at the back of the ‘room’ all the
local Arabs had come out to have a look and, in fact, were actually responding
to Mike’s song but they weren’t singing ‘Ah Ha’ they were just humming
VERY LOUDLY!!!
I also remember that my spare snare drum
skin went missing and was found as part of a roof on an Arab’s house in this
small shanty town next to the camp in the desert!!
I must share this with you at this point folks. A couple of weeks
ago I was just having a look through the New Zealand section of Ray’s site,
when I came across a picture of a man sitting on a stool with silver grey hair,
[The stool didn’t have silver grey hair silly!! It was the man], a microphone
in his hand and the caption saying Mike singing ‘Angela Jones’. Is it the
same Mike Cox I wondered… So I sent an Email to Moya, a tireless individual in regards to the
Billy Fury cause, as she ‘runs’ the Billy Fury site in New Zealand. I’m
quite sure Billy himself would be in awe at the way she has kept his name and
personna alive! But that’s another story for another day. I asked her if the
pic was in fact THE Mike Cox. It turns out that it was!!
Just a couple of days later she emailed
me his ‘phone number and we were able to catch up. He has lived in New Zealand
for about twenty years, and is married to a Kiwi he’d met on the boats, where
he, like Vince Eager, was a Cruise Director. Mike and his wife to be, who
managed a casino for another shipping line, were both working out of Greece when
they first met… How romantic eh chuck??
Mike unexpectedly received an offer to
do TV in New Zealand and, being married to a Kiwi, jumped at it! They went to
live there and have been there ever since. He loves it, and, in his words he is
‘pretty fit’, or as they tend to say in Kiwi Land, he’s ‘pretty fet!!’
He’s well and he’s enjoying life. these days, under the name of Michael
James. Good one Eh!!!
We first arrived in Aden apparently
twenty four hours earlier than we should have done, and it caused a bit of a
panic. Extra nights had to be booked at the hotel, transport had to be arranged
to take us to the hotel
there were about a dozen of us, so we just had to wait around in
the heat.
We had left England earlier that day, a cold and snowy November day, arriving in the heat of Aden about 2.00 a.m. local time. Heat? What was that? At 2.00 in the morning? Are you kidding ? I can’t remember how hot it was, but it was strange for us to feel the heat at that time of the day, to say the least, and to see soldiers working in shorts! Shorts ?? Somebody should have told ‘em it was November!!.
After a couple of hours of being
entertained or looked after we were certainly relaxed! You see, one of the
things about these CSE tours was that as you go from each camp and visit and do
shows, each ‘Mess’ wants to give you the best possible time. And, of course,
that’s the one you are going to remember long after you’ve gone home. So we
got the best possible ‘piss ups’ you can imagine, plus the best eats etc. in
every single place we went to.
Now most of these places would be lucky
to have ‘live’ entertainment a couple of times a year, and, after you’ve
been on one of these tours a couple of weeks it becomes hard to know really
where you are. It seemed to me at the time that wherever they were, they pretty
much knew how to party!!! We had our own assigned soldiers who looked after us,
who did all the carrying, the setting up and down, and somehow managed to keep
everyone going!!
At some point someone said the transport
was ready to take us to the hotel, so we went outside and saw a single decker
army khaki bus, with iron mesh all along both sides covering all the windows and
the back and the roof! Four, yes four, soldiers armed with sub-machine guns
jumped into the bus first, one at the front next to the driver, two in the
middle of the bus, one on each side with their guns poking out of a tiny opening
in the windows, and a fourth guy at the back of the bus, scary eh?
But wait there’s more… as our gear
is being loaded onto the bus, we also became aware of two single armoured
‘Champs’ vehicles, with what looked like small canons mounted on board.
There was one of the vehicles at the front of the bus and another at the rear!!
Obviously, we thought, the hotel we were
staying in must have been many miles into enemy territory!! But no, we were
told, it’s actually no more than about three miles. But you see, us guys were
there to keep up the moral of the British troops, and if they could get one of
us guys, we were told, it would make a terrific dent in the British morale. So
as long as we were there, we were considered to be prime targets!!! That was
nice to know!! They might have mentioned that before we got there… What do you
think???
We flew in all sorts of planes, to all
sorts of strange out of the way places, I remember a place called Rhian, I
think, which was just a supply refuelling dump, and had probably no more than 60
people stationed there. They were posted there for 12 months at a time. I can
also remember sitting out all night, literally on the desert floor, watching
what the soldiers said were camel spiders crawling about. Apparently they only
emerge after dark and these things are ‘huge’ folks. I’m talking dinner
plate size bodies yeah!
Every now and again the night silence
was broken with the sound of revving engines as two tractors raced around the
compound - most likely as a result of a challenge to ‘I can go faster than
you’. You know men and beer, it’s always been the same!!
We met the Sheik of Oman and this guy
was rich!!! He used to give away Omega watches to visiting dignitaries, and on
the watch face where the famous Omega sign was, there was a picture of himself
right in the hoop part of the logo!!! This guy also used to have magnificent
‘Falcons’ and a whole fleet of Cadillacs and Rolls Royces just to ferry the
birds around!! He also used to have elephant races, and that’s a strange sight
I can tell you!
The Sheik had his own private beach, and
we were lucky enough to be invited to use it. When the Sheik appeared, all his
servants would be in front of him, walking backwards and brushing the sand away
and laying a red carpet. AND perhaps the strangest of all, for some reason, the
Sheik adored Mike Sarne’s version of ‘Come Outside’. He had the record
playing constantly over the loudspeakers which were hung along his private
beach.
When we were in Aden itself, we stayed
at ‘The Rock Hotel’, a very swish hotel with a nightclub on the top floor.
We were there most nights after the shows, and one time I went up to the roof to
have a smoke and look at the stars and, with little street light glare to affect
the view, it was magnificent.
There I was, digging the stars when the
silence was broken with a rather loud ‘Psst.
Psst.’ I looked across to where the noise had come from and peering
around a brick corner, presumably some kind of a chimney, was a local.
‘Hey’, he said, ‘You and Me, Jig-a-Jig?’. Now folks I don’t speak
Arabic but somehow I understood what he meant, and even managed to answer him
back in the local lingo. ‘Effoff’, I said… I think that’s Arabic??
In the circumstances it was close enough for me!!!
And even with all that ‘danger’ and
the occasional ‘misunderstandings’, it was a treat folks, to be able to
travel and play music at that time! Yes, 1965 was a great and interesting year
indeed…
--------------------------------