FLYING DOWN TO QUEENSWAY
Thirties Society Ball and test-drives the dance band of the Nineties
THE Porchester Hall, Queensway (built in 1925-7 by the not very well-known H. Sheppard) looks like a rather grand muni- cipal wash-house. Close to a huge red neon sign saying, 'Turkish Baths', a Bugatti was ' parked and people streamed in, glittering like lizards, for the first Thirties Society Ball.
The Thirties Society was founded in 1979 by Marcus Binney, Bevis Hillier and Clive Aslet for the protection of British architecture and design after 1914. (It begins where the Victorian Society left off.) Exotic survivors of the Thirties (like Sir Osbert Lancaster, Sir Sacheverell Sit- well, Sir John Betjeman and Lady Diana Cooper) were wheedled or cajoled onto its first writing-paper and the floodlighting of the Oxo Tower (a concrete folly built beside the Thames in 1928 to advertise bouillon cubes) was its first idiosyncratic public achievement.
All new conservation societies need a sacrifice — one scandalous demolition of a good building to focus public attention on both the society and the quality of the buildings it is trying to save. The Firestone factory on the Great West Road (de- molished by the usual thuggees over a bank holiday weekend in 1980) was to the Thirties Society what the Euston Arch was to the Victorian Society. (After the Fire- stone demolition, Michael Heseltine im- mediately listed 150 inter-war buildings+ including Battersea power station.) The Society is completely undoctrinaire about
style. As the decade progressed major campaigns have included the protection of red telephone kiosks (which involved voluntarily advising every local authority in Britain) and saving the distinguished tube stations by Charles Holden on the London Underground. The present Thirties Society committee is rather proud of having been, `a tremendous nuisance both to British Telecom and to Sir Keith Bright'.
The 400 guests, who dined in a huge oak-lined hall on salmon mousse and a Thirties Savoy dish called 'Surrey chicken', were the usual conservation and museum mafia, plus architects who are still on speaking terms with them. (These included Piers Gough, the Sixties enthusiast James Dunnett, Terry Farrell and Jeremy Lever). Two surprise guests were the owners of the Grand Hotel, Morecambe who like the fact it was built by Oliver Hill. The women guests dressed uniformly in slinky black with a few good stabs at marcel waving and Wallis Simpson rolls. Some of us had held off from buttering our toast for the previous week because the svelte ideal was not to look like Mrs Stanley Baldwin. A noticeable couple were the professional ballroom dance partnership, Ruby Fox and Johnny Martin, who led the dancing at 10 p.m. with an exhibition fox-trot. Ruby Fox wore a slippery cream satin backless dress cut on the bias. With very high cheek-bones, wide shoulders and a bronzed jaw, Johnny Martin had the air of a classic 'heart-throb' from the forbidden post-war girls' comic, Romeo. They both looked as if they had dropped off Mrs Simpson's bathroom shelf. The energetic ball chairman, Louise Nicholson wore a backless black silk (again cut on the bias) with a diagonal velvet stripe in it. Although it was not mentioned in the ball program- me, she even laid on a united Germany.
The musical delight of the evening was the Piccadilly Dance Orchestra, an asto- nishingly good dance band of young classi- cally trained players which was only formed 13 months ago. A musically im- peccable dance band usually inspires male dancers to really show off their skills in
taking the lead. This ball is particularly memorable for the male guests who looked wonderful, almost without exception, in white tie. Stephen Jones (the former cura- tor of Leighton House) revealed Astaire- like qualities, as did Charles Jencks and Trevor Grove. Charles Hemming, the de- corative artist (who has just completed acres of work for the Institute of Directors in Pall Mall) wore his late father's white tie and patent shoes and had shaved off half his beard to look like Max Ernst (`he invented designer stubble'). Richard Bas- sett, the Times's Eastern European corres- pondent wore the uniform of the Warwick- shire Yeomanry which was disbanded in the Thirties, and the painter, Tony Eyton (a real Thirties' person who is on the Royal Academy hanging committee) said that he hadn't experienced a tango like it since Buenos Aires in 1928. The most confident male dancer of the evening was felt to be Alan Galicki, husband of the American art historian Marta Galicki (who co-directs the Victorian Society summer school). Sir David English also seemed to be mesme- rised by the band.
The Piccadilly Dance Orchestra and its leader Michael Law much resemble Carroll Gibbons and the Savoy Hotel Orpheans (whose style was superseded in Britain by American swing bands during the war). Their libidinous elegance can be heard, for example, in the rumba 'Carioca' on their first LP, Let Yourself Go (Legacy Records LLP 126) which has already received a considerable amount of air play on BBC Radio 2. Sitting quietly and modestly in a long-sleeved black dress was the band's girl vocalist, Janice Day. Her great strength is the simple English unaffected way she approaches pre-war tunes. Unlike the usual rather forced show-biz singers, she just stands and sweetly delivers the song.
Michael Law's Holland Park flat was warm with morning sunshine, a happy orientation for the home of a musician who works at night and tends to be there in the daytime. In his sitting-room, overlooking a leafy garden, was a squashy cream sofa, two big Sheraton chairs and a workmanlike modern upright piano neatly loaded with pencils and scores. Looking down was a portrait of his endlessly-great-great-uncle, Edward Law (1st Earl of Ellenborough), who was governor-general of India from 1750-1771.
A few hours before, like the other members of the band, Michael Law had been on stage in white tie and a red carnation singing leepers Creepers' in a calm light baritone. This morning he had just got up and we drank tea. Showing me a photograph album of roles he had sung while at the Royal College of Music opera school, he put down his fondness for pre-war light music to having been brought up in Kenya during the Sixties — far away from the powerful influence of the Beatles. His father was a judge in the colonial service and 'whenever we had a house with a piano, he played and sang `Stormy Weather'. As a child Michael Law hoarded 78 rpm records as his parents' friends ditched them in favour of new-fangled LPs. Eventually a wind-up gramophone also came his way. `One time we broke down on safari in Tsavo game park but luckily I had the gramophone with me.' He just played records 'until someone eventually came and got us'. When he eventually studied music at Cambridge, his supervisor was the composer, Robin Holloway (who lived in 'an art deco house full of chrome'). Holloway supported him in 1981 against those who academically opposed his plan to do a dissertation on Duke Ellington.
If anyone had intended to start a cam- paign for real dance music, the Piccadilly Dance Orchestra has already beaten them to it. As his big Fifties radiogram hummed to life before sonorously giving us 'These Foolish Things' Michael Law explained that this was a real orchestra and not an all-purpose nostalgia band. Depending on the acoustics of the venue, it does not use amplification (except for the singers) and `phrases the music properly with the disci- pline of a classical orchestra'. That evening he set off at 5 a.m. to set up the band for a private party at The Savoy, and back home. I have been dancing ever since.
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