It's Thursday night on the outskirts of Southampton, and a straggling crowd is starting to gather outside the Brook, a venue specialising in 'International blues, Rock and R&B', which prides itself in attracting clientele from 'all over Hampshire, Dorset, Sussex and the Isle of Wight'. Inside, rising indie stars the Subways are confidently finishing their soundcheck, this gig having long been sold out. The stage is absolutely full of stuff - racks of guitars, huge speaker cabinets, effects pedals, glowing amps, and two drum kits. As my band, the Dodge Brothers, who'll be opening the evening's entertainment, clamber on to the stage, someone kindly offers to dismantle one of the drum kits 'in order to make space for yours'. 'Oh, don't worry,' says Dodge rhythm king Al, dumping down his small kit bag which contains nothing but a snare, a washboard and a bag of thimbles. 'This is my drum kit...'
Welcome to the wonderful world of skiffle - the original lo-fi genre which has become synonymous with kazoos and novelty records and chewing gum losing its flavour on the bedpost overnight, but which I'm endeavouring to reclaim as the raucous predecessor of punk. The missing link between archaic American jug band blues and modern rock'n'roll, skiffle is the least fashionable but most enduring brand of music this country has ever known. I should know - I've been playing in skiffle bands for over 20 years, plying my trade from street corners to concert halls, scorning 'modern popular music' and putting my faith instead in the enduring power of cat-gut and glue. Since the late Eighties I figure I've clocked up around a thousand hours of skiffle gigging - the equivalent of watching Citizen Kane over 500 times, or 800 viewings of Battleship Potemkin. In my wake I have left behind me a trail of battered and bruised instruments, none of which I could ever play 'properly' (at least in not the classical sense), but all of which I have enjoyed bashing and breaking immensely.
In my day job I'm a film critic, an occupation which requires sitting silently in a darkened room for hours on end, watching somebody else do all the work. Playing skiffle is the exact opposite, requiring little finesse, loads of noise, and (in my case at least) much physical exertion. Although my record collection includes such obscurist rock devotions as the entire Comsat Angels back catalogue, skiffle's resolutely non-elitist ethos has taught me that if you want to hear really great music, the best thing is to play it yourself.
I admit that skiffle is not everyone's cup of tea; I'm all too familiar with the communal groan that echoes around dinner parties as I furtively attempt to slip The Washboard Story on to the hi-fi, or whip out a harmonica and ask 'OK, who's up for three verses of "This Train is Bound for Glory"?' But like the late great John Peel, I never really got over the spine-tingling buzz of hearing skiffle and its jug band predecessors for the first time. The music may be old, but its raw, unproduced power makes me feel ridiculously young - in a militant, obsessive, and somewhat deranged old curmudgeon kind of way.
'Skiffle' as we know it today had its heyday in Britain in the mid-Fifties thanks to the joint efforts of British jazzmen Ken Colyer, Chris Barber and Tony (later 'Lonnie') Donegan. According to legend, Colyer, a trumpet player, jumped ship from the Merchant Navy in Alabama and hitched to New Orleans, where he heard the music of 'spasm' bands - dirt-poor musicians knocking out tunes on anything they could lay their hands on, from china moonshine jars to tin bathtubs. After a credibility-enhancing spell in jail, Colyer was deported back to Blighty where he and Barber starting showcasing rag-tag DIY blues between more formal jazz sets. They called this music 'skiffle' (apparently 'spasm' sounded too rude) and it became a national phenomenon when an upbeat reworking of Lead Belly's 'Rock Island Line' hit the charts in the mid-Fifties. Overnight, the British public were introduced to the wonders of the washboard, and Lonnie Donegan became our first genuine pop superstar. To this day, if you say the word 'skiffle' on British soil it is Donegan's warbling voice, thrumming guitar and gor-blimey trousered dustman-dad that spring irresistibly to mind.
In fact, 'skiffle' dates back to turn-of-the-century Mississippi, used to describe informal house jam sessions at which all-comers would play blues, gospel and work songs. Plentiful recordings from the Twenties and Thirties reveal the earliest roots of skiffle, while in the late Forties groups like Dan Burley's Skiffle Boys were committing this rocking racket to disc. Crucially, no matter how talented the musicians were, the underlying message was simple - anyone can play these songs, and you don't need proper training or fancy instruments to do so. It was an ethos which would give birth to British rock'n'roll, and go on to inform punk's anti-establishment call to arms: 'Here are three chords - now form a band.'
Like so many people, I started playing skiffle by accident. Having been raised on my father's exhaustive Jelly Roll Morton record collection (he even started writing a biography), I knew just how brilliantly bawdy and disreputable Storyville jazz could be, and from an early age I wanted to play music like that. The problem was that, unlike Morton, I was a cack-handed musician who lived by Eric Morecambe's maxim that 'I'm playing all the right notes... but not necessarily in the right order'. I can't read sheet music, I don't understand pentatonic scales, and I renounced all official instrumental tuition after suffering a humiliating failure at a Grade IV French horn exam at the age of 12. (I botched the sight reading, and then asked if I could have another go at it, to which the examiner loftily replied 'Well, if you did, it wouldn't be sight reading, would it?') As a 'proper musician', I'm a dead loss. But since my late teens I've been merrily bashing out tunes on tea-chests, guitars, harmonicas, piano accordions, and (most importantly) double basses, thanks to skiffle's wonderfully inclusive philosophy of 'You hum it, I'll play it'.
It was in Edinburgh in the mid-Eighties that I first really got the skiffle bug. I was working on a fringe theatre show about the life and death of 'Wobbly' activist and songwriter Joe Hill, which was described by one reviewer - disparagingly, I think - as having an 'off the back of a lorry' flavour. Certainly there were a number of tea-chests involved, some employed for percussive purposes in musical numbers. Between shows I went busking with an old friend who introduced me to 'queen of the washboard' Alison Armstrong-Lee, a boisterous young woman who could make a fantastic din with a portable domestic appliance, some gardening sticks and a rubber band. The arrangements were basic but the result sounded brilliant to us. After raising 20 quid in as many minutes, we decided to form a band.
Over the next few years the Railtown Bottlers became a fixture at street festivals and busking pitches up and down the country, from the Sidmouth Folk Festival to Glasgow's 'City of Culture' shindig. On our travels we met up with other street skiffle acts like the terrific Railroad Bill, sharing tips on how to play the kazoo, and swapping carnival huckster spiel for working a busking crowd ('If you've enjoyed the music, and you'd like to make a small contribution, place it in the hat, remembering to fold it carefully first...') TV appearances on shows like This Morning with Richard and Judy climaxed in a bizarre half-hour special with Timmy Mallet in which we taught a group of kids to be 'utterly brilliant' at skiffle by building a tea-chest bass, and playing a watering can with a trumpet mouthpiece stuck up the spout. After a couple of years competing, we finally won the International Street Entertainers of the Year award, and wound up on stage at the London Palladium. And then, in '93, we became the house band on Danny Baker's short-lived BBC1 Saturday night chat-show After All, where such notaries as Suggs, Alison Moyet, Nanci Griffith and Aimee Mann were introduced to the joys of playing their songs with washboards and bull-fiddles. Most of the guests enthusiastically played ball, although mullet-haired bore Daryl Hall (of Hall & Oates fame) staunchly refused to co-operate, and his manager walked off in a huff when told that Daryl wasn't allowed to bring his synthesiser.
Fast forward to February 2008, and the Barfly on Oxford Street, where my current band the Dodge Brothers are getting ready for their first ever London gig. We managed to cram the entire band - double bass, banjo, guitars, mandolin, snare and washboard, plus all four members - into the back of a Vauxhall. This lack of baggage, of clutter, is one of the great joys of skiffle, and means that even at fairly formal gigs like this, no one has to sit around for hours while some hairy-arsed roadie soundchecks the floor-toms. The venue holds around 150 people. Through the gloom I do a quick 'quiff count' and spy at least three admirably well-appointed pompadours proudly silhouetted in the darkness. Over the next couple of hours I will keep checking on this crucial trio to see how the quiffs are holding up over the course of the gig. I do this for two reasons; firstly, if someone's found a better way of supporting their hair than my own trademark combination of Red Top Dax Wave and Groom and Sweet Georgia Brown Pomade (which famously 'slicks, smoothes and beautifies') then I want to know about it. More importantly, if the heads holding the quiffs look like they're enjoying themselves, then the gig's going well. The Dodge Brothers may not be a rockabilly band but much of our material skirts the sources and borders of rock'n'roll, and when it comes to musical judgment, I've never met a quiff I didn't like.
The Dodge Brothers began life about 10 years ago as a grumpy trio - a group of old gits playing songs about transport and homicide who agreed on the rubbishness of all modern music and the importance of good hair products. Our set-list was largely suggested by our original harmonica player Pete Stanfield, a scholar of singing cowboys and authentically arcane minstrelsy. Pete didn't play notes, he played unearthly noises, and for a while we sounded more like the Velvet Underground than Hank Williams. We secured a residency at a Hampshire pub, the Thomas Tripp, where, even as a three-piece, we sometimes outnumbered the audience. When Aly Hirji joined the band things became a touch more melodic, thanks in part to the mandolin which he was effectively forced to learn on stage due to a band rule which states that if you're given an instrument for your birthday you must play it at the next gig - even if that gig is tomorrow. For years no one mentioned the word 'skiffle' - it was always blues, bluegrass or 'western swing' with a strong whiff of rockabilly - thanks in part to the queasiness of our Alabama-born guitarist Mike Hammond, who felt that the 's'-word evoked images of smiling whey-faced English boys in penny loafers and no socks playing 'dingle dangle music' in fake Yankee accents.
But all that changed on the day that Mike's son Alex got his first washboard, and everyone discovered just what an unholy din the damn thing could make. Crucially, there was nothing cute or 'novel' about the sound - in fact, like Carl Douglas's 'Kung Fu Fighting', it was 'a little bit frightening'. If you've ever stood in the same room as a really good washboard player, you can close your eyes and imagine an entire drum kit made of tin and wood and nails, big and brash and ballsy with the merest hint of violence. Even at gigs you rarely need to amplify the sound - in fact, you often need to dampen it down to stop it drowning out everything else. Alex joined the band, at a stroke the average age of the Dodge Brothers dropped by 20 years, and I found myself once again sharing rhythm-and-bass duties with someone playing an ever so slightly threatening household appliance.
It's this sense of edginess which underlies my love of skiffle, in its truest bastard vagabond form. OK, so the Dodge Brothers have been known to play standards like 'Worried Man Blues' after one too many adult beverages, and indeed we even hid a version of it on our first CD. But I really hate the idea that there should be anything safe or cosy about skiffle. To me, skiffle should be disreputable and badly behaved, every bit as rocking as rockabilly, as rude as blues, as obnoxious as punk.
Skiffle should also be about stories, and here's one of my favourites. It concerns American banjo legend Charlie Poole, and Mike likes to tell it at gigs before we attack 'Goodbye Booze' with banjo, washboard, guitar, string bass and harmonica. According to this oft repeated tale, Poole worked the mills in the Carolinas, benefiting from his employers' benevolent policy of hiring European music teachers to enhance the lives of their struggling workers. Charlie achieved fame in the Depression years, churning out everything from bawdy vaudeville songs to civil war ballads with his old-time string band the North Carolina Ramblers. One of his best-loved tunes was 'Goodbye Booze', an old 'temperance' song warning about the evils of drink, which Charlie would sing with a bottle of moonshine at his elbow and a sozzled twinkle in his eye. As one close friend put it, 'Charlie only ever said "Goodbye Booze" between drinks', and by the time the Thirties rolled around, he was back in the mills, his health and career both failing. Then, just when it seemed it was all over, Poole got a call from Hollywood asking him to come to California and record the music for a new motion picture. Charlie was thrilled - so thrilled that, to celebrate his new found success, he went on a 13-week bender and died, the train ticket to California left propped forlornly on his dresser.
I love this story because it combines all the themes which recur throughout the music that mean the most to me: namely trains, heartbreak, alcohol and death. Another mainstay of the Dodge Brothers' set is 'Oh Death' , a gospel song whose cheery refrain cries 'Oh Death, oh Death, you took my mother and gone'. The song was immortalised in 1934 by the blues innovator Charley Patton and singer Bertha Lee. Our version is inspired by their spine-tingling recording, although the way we play it, it sounds a lot more ramshackle. In fact, everything we play sounds rather ramshackle but this rough-and-ready quality is accentuated on 'Oh Death' by the fact that for much of the song I don't actually play the bass... I just hit it.
In my younger and more vulnerable years I had dreamed of being a light-fingered guitarist but skiffle taught me that concrete hands and a propensity to thump things could be an asset rather than a handicap. Since skiffle largely dispensed with conventional percussion (neither money, nor space, for fancy drum kits - even a snare drum was an extravagance) it was left to the bass and washboard to do all the rhythm work. In my case, this meant mastering 'slap bass' - a rockabilly style of double-bass playing involving bleeding fingers, bruised palms, and the regular application of glue to fix the long-suffering instrument which (as whining classical musos constantly tell me) was 'not built to withstand that sort of abuse!'. One popular folk tale has it that 'slapping' was invented by Bill Johnson of the Original Creole Ragtime Band who broke his bow in Shreveport, Louisiana in 1911 but carried on banging away with just his hand - and really liked the resulting sound. By snapping the strings against the fingerboard and then smacking the wood with the open hand, you can effectively mimic the sound of a snare and bass drum with the added bonus of loud bass note. It's not pretty, but it is effective.
I bought my first bass from Johnny Roadhouse's quality second-hand emporium in Manchester in '87, and slapped it until it literally broke in half on stage at the Trolley Stop in Hackney a few years later. Towards the end of the gig there was an ominous cracking sound from the place where the neck meets the body, and a few thumps later the instrument exploded, the weighty wooden head-stop flying out into the crowd and striking a man with a particularly splendid quiff squarely in the middle of the forehead. I kept the broken neck for sentimental reasons - the body we burned for firewood (warm, but smelly - probably all that glue).
Since then I've trashed another two instruments and am now the proud owner of an old Fifties ply-job rigged with an all-but-indestructible Selmer steel bridge, a marvellous instrument which gives as good as it gets, and simply refuses to be beaten. Its structural resilience proved particularly useful when the Dodge Brothers recently took on BBC2's Culture Show 'British Busking Challenge' and we found ourselves playing to a crowd of rain-drenched onlookers in London's busy Covent Garden. Having appeared on some of the country's most prestigious pavements, I knew that the key to busking success was carnival showmanship. Thus I persuaded Mike to clamber up the side of the bass and perform the solo to 'Slow Down' while perched atop the creaking instrument. I know it sounds stupid but it looked really good, and after 15 minutes we'd taken over 100 quid, propelling us (albeit briefly) to the top of the Culture Show's busking chart. Sadly, the next week Supergrass took twice as much money in as many minutes, knocking us of the top spot. But they turned up with a drum-kit. And a PA. And a carpet! Huh!
After our moment of streetside fame was broadcast, I got a text message from quiffed songster Richard Hawley, with whom I'd previously compared hair products (he favours Black & White, which I can never wash out) and arcane record rarities. Turns out he shares my love of skiffle, as do his elders and betters. 'My mum thought you were great!' he wrote. 'Some of us still know and still care!' I was so moved, I found myself wiping away a tear and raising a glass to the ghost of Charlie Poole.
'Of course, it's not quite skiffle...' Thus read the email from Railroad Bill, who got in touch after seeing us on telly extolling the virtues of the most unfashionable music on the planet. We'd built a tea-chest bass on screen and used it to play a Dock Boggs-style 'Careless Love' with banjo and washboard accompaniment, before moving to double bass and guitar for Tarheel Slim's 'Number Nine Train'. The point I was trying to make was that fashionable rock'n'roll emerged from skiffle, but in doing so I'd sparked the age-old authenticity debate. 'The real thing is on our site,' wrote Dan from Railroad Bill, and indeed it is. If you go to skiffle.co.uk you can see Railroad Bill ('Lonnie Donegan on speed') leaping around with tea-chest, washboard, saw, ukulele, kazoo and (in one instance) a ripping roll of Sellotape. They're really good. And they're really skiffle...
So what are the Dodge Brothers? In his terrifically quaint 1958 article 'What is Skiffle?', clergyman and musicologist Brian Bird attempts to define the parameters of this 'new' musical craze, and to instruct his readers on how to form their very own 'skiffle combo'. 'It is perhaps wrong to talk about "forming" a skiffle group,' notes Bird earnestly, 'as these usually develop spontaneously and naturally. So a group of instrumentalists gets together and decides to Skiffle!' Despite this free-form philosophy, Bird goes on to lay down some quirky ground-rules for budding 'skifflists', namely that any group 'should not exceed seven members' and should stick to 'guitar, banjo, mandolin, string bass, drums and washboard', with the possibility of adding 'harmonica, fiddle, mandolin, or even electric guitar' if absolutely necessary. 'And remember to keep the instruments in tune...'
Sound advice indeed, and words which were clearly heeded by the likes of a young Jimmy Page, who in his pre-Led Zep days appeared on television playing guitar in a well-groomed schoolboy skiffle combo. 'And are you going to continue to play skiffle when you leave school?' asked the interviewer earnestly. 'Er, no,' replied Page politely, 'I want to do biological research' - which indeed he did, sort of.
As for me, much as I love the innocence of that first wave of British skiffle, I don't want to spend the next 20 years playing 'Rock Island Line' and 'Don't You Rock Me Daddyo' while blowing on a kazoo. Tim Worman, frontman of British rockabilly heroes the Polecats, once told me: 'We weren't a rockabilly band at all - we were a glam-rock band with a double bass.' That's exactly how I feel about the Dodge Brothers and their relation to skiffle which, after all, should be the ultimate anti-purist genre. The terrific street band the Gutter Brothers used to perform a pumped-up version of Prince's 'Kiss' with washboard and tea-chest. Was it skiffle? Who cares - it inspired my old band to take their washboard to the Undertones' classic 'Teenage Kicks'. Alongside our own compositions, the current songbook includes tunes immortalised by Brownie and Stick McGhee, Dock Boggs, Charlie Feathers and the legendary Washboard Sam, whose bawdy classic 'Who Pumped the Wind in My Doughnut' remains the rudest song ever recorded. The sources range from bluegrass to rockabilly to old English folk ballads and beyond. But you know what? It all sounds like skiffle to me.
Backstage at the Subways' Southampton gig we get our pictures taken with the band, and lead singer Billy tells us that what he likes about having a skiffle support group is that 'it feels like educating the audience about where all this music came from'. He doesn't know it, but he's echoing the sentiments of Ken Colyer, Chris Barber and Lonnie Donegan 50 years earlier, putting low-brow skiffle breaks into their skilful jazz sets as part of an ongoing musical history lesson.
A few weeks later we're playing the Platform Tavern in Southampton, and a woman from the Performing Rights Society is sitting in the wings, scribbling down the set-list in the hope of ensuring that long dead blues and jug musicians get the royalties they're owed whenever we play their songs. It's an admirable pursuit, and I'm attempting to help by shouting (and even spelling) the names of composers and arrangers between songs. Suddenly, my long-suffering bass decides its moment of vengeance has finally come and, in a fitting reversal of fortune, strikes me a sharp and utterly unexpected blow on the forehead.
When I turn back to the audience, blood is trickling down my face and into my eye, and someone old enough to remember Sid Vicious quips 'Oh look - how punk rock!' While everyone laughs at the joke, we take a running skiffle jump at 'Freight Train Boogie'. And as I gaze out through the reddening mist, my hands throbbing with the delicious pain of thrashing out this breed of raucous live music that neither time, nor fashion, nor musical snobbery could kill, I think... "Yeah, exactly! Punk rock!"
· The Dodge Brothers play the Larmer Tree Festival, Wiltshire, on 19 July, and Borderline, London W1 on 3 October (www.dodgebrothers.co.uk)
Rattle and hum: Brief history of skiffle
Although its exact history is hotly disputed, 'skiffle' has its roots in American ragtime, jazz, minstrelsy and medicine shows, which built upon the legacy of jug and string bands. Emerging from the 'spasm' or 'hokum' traditions of New Orleans, skiffle originally featured poor musicians using kazoos, comb and paper, washboards and bathtubs to knock out rough-and-ready folk, gospel and blues.
Early exponents were in the Doc Malney's Minstrel Show in the 1890s, featuring 'Slew Foot Pete' on cigar-box guitar, 'Warm Gravy' on cheese-box banjo and 'Whiskey' on a bass made of a half-barrel. Recordings from the Twenties and Thirties by the Mound City Blue Blowers and the Memphis Jug Band paved the way for bands such as Dan Burley's Skiffle Boys in the Forties. In Britain the skiffle craze erupted in the mid-Fifties, when Lonnie Donegan hit the charts with an uptempo reworking of Lead Belly's 'Rock Island Line'. It was a national sensation. Early Donegan devotees included the Quarrymen, the combo that later gave birth to the Beatles. Other famous former 'skifflists' included the Rolling Stones, and Led Zep axeman Jimmy Page
With the emergence of rock'n'roll, skiffle was relegated to novelty status, but its influences continued to resonate throughout pop (George Michael's 'Faith' was described as having a 'skiffle style' by the NME in the late Eighties). In 1998, Van Morrison recorded The Skiffle Sessions: Live in Belfast with Donegan and Chris Barber. Today, skiffle's most high-profile fans include Billy Bragg.
Roots of skiffle: The essential tracks
Stackalee by Frank Hutchison, 1927
The definitive and best version of a song variously known as 'Stagger Lee', 'Stack-o-lee' 'Stag-a-lee' and several other variations.
On The Road Again by the Memphis Jug Band, 1928
A wheezing pumping gem, with raucous music and lyrics which should be illegal.
Feather Bed by Gus Cannon's Jug Stompers, 1928
Lyrics dating back to the American Civil War, given a blues twist by Gus.
Railroad Bill by Brownie and Stick McGhee, 1946
The legendary McGhee brothers breathe new life into this old standard.
Rock Islandline by Lonnie Donegan, 1955
An upbeat reworking of Lead Belly's classic which kickstarted the British skiffle craze.