“STEAMBOAT jazz has come to Glasgow,” the Glasgow Herald’s William Hunter wrote in March, 1982, “but it has to be reached subterraneanly. Down a narrow carpeted speakeasy stair you go to a douce dunny lounge bar in Waterloo Street.” The Admiral pub had a “kind of pirate captain’s cabin of a hideaway hostelry,” and, “once a week, its timbers are shivered by a happy, aggressive sound.”
The Batchelors of Jazz, put together by radio producer and trombonist Dave Batchelor, were the weekly attraction downstairs at the pub. They were not so much yet a jazz band, our man added, as a set of sounds beginning to happen together. “All of the musicians long ago - some of them quite long ago - mastered their instruments. They now put themselves about in order musically to master each other.”
Vocal duties were handled by Fionna Duncan, seen here at the Admiral with Carol Kidd. Duncan, once of the famed Clyde Valley Stompers, “fronts the Batchelors and in more than one way,” continued Hunter. “She is busy extending her repertoire to the extent of handing out new scores around the stand. Her new partners protest like football supporters when they peruse a sheet that has been put in A flat.
“It is a part of the performance of the Batchelors of Jazz to behave like a bunch of the boys who happened to meet at a street corner and started to blow. They attack ‘Fidgetty Feet’, ‘Indiana’, ‘Hot Time’, and all that, but freshly.”
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