NORTHUMBRIAN BLUES: The Lost World of Big Pete Deuchar by Colin Harper, Volume 1: 1933-60.

No, I’d not heard of Big Pete either, not until Colin Harper sent me a copy of his book which, as labours of love go, might rank alongside Mughal emperor Shan Jahan building the Taj Mahal as a mausoleum for his dead wife, albeit not quite so time consuming as Shan needed almost 20 years to finish the job.

Colin’s skills as a tenacious researcher into the nooks and crannies of modern music first came to my attention in 1998 when I read his Mojo feature on Anne Briggs, the high priestess of British folk music. To come up with 6,000 words on a singer whose determination to leave society behind and take up residence on a remote Scottish island demonstrated extraordinary resolve, and the same can be said for this strangely moreish book about a little-known banjo player with broad shoulders, a moustache and goatee beard who died in 1988.

Colin came across six foot four inches tall Big Pete while researching Bathed In Lightning, his biography of guitar maestro John McLaughlin who, aged  17, long before fame and Mahavishnu beckoned, played New Orleans jazz alongside Big Pete in The Professors Of Ragtime up in the north east of England. This is little more than a footnote in McLaughlin’s career, of course, but Colin delved deeper and discovered the extraordinary life that Big Pete led in and out of the jazz music he loved, so much so that he couldn’t fit it all into one book. He’s working on Volume 2 as I write. 

Quite who’ll be inspired to buy this book is anyone’s guess, but it’s an astonishing tale, partly hinted at in the subtitle ‘Lost World’. It’s not so much pre-Beatles – though the Fabs will make a cameo appearance in Vol 2 when Pete encounters them in Hamburg – as pre-rock and roll, an era when even jazz, its precursor, was looked upon with deep suspicion by the authorities. Those who preferred this kind of music over the ‘light entertainment’ offered by the BBC, let alone performed it in public, were heading for a life of criminality, at least as far as right-thinking people were concerned. “There was still, two years into the 60s, a lingering frisson of seediness, doubt and debauchery about jazz and those who peddled it,” writes Colin his introduction.

This didn’t faze Big Pete. He was born into money, a Scottish dynasty of brewers and pub owners, but it was a dysfunctional family with upstairs cavorting with downstairs and the posh boarding schools to which he was sent didn’t suit his temperament. Indeed, Pete’s childhood reads like a gothic horror story from which he escaped with little more than a banjo and a bicycle, both of which he put to good use as he set about promoting jazz evenings on Tyneside and, in the fullness of time, pedalling across whole continents. 

        The band with which he was most associated, the Vieux Carré Jazzmen, was formed in 1954, lasted until 1976, was revived in 1991 and is still going strong. The venues at which they played were seedy and the rewards meagre but Pete swam against the tide, a bit of a hero who was both loved and loathed by most of those he encountered. Through scouring the local press, Colin has researched scores of gigs that in some way wouldn’t have happened had it not been for Pete’s energy, flair and, it has to be said, cussedness. Pete also had a fondness for the product on which his family’s fortune was secured which, coupled with a rather wanton disregard for authority, led him into trouble with the law. Amusingly, Colin is equally assiduous in detailing Pete’s many appearances in the dock at the local courtroom. 

        An outsize personality, Big Pete made enemies too, including a few ex-girlfriends and, as Colin traces his life up to 1960, he paints of picture of a resolute nonconformist in an era when it was deemed right and proper to stand in cinemas while the national anthem was played after a film’s closing credits. In 1957 he visited New Orleans where he encountered his idol, the clarinettist George Lewis, with whom he performed, on banjo, in the UK in 1959, recordings of which have been made available on the Danish Rarities label and 504 Records.

        As a convert to pure New Orleans jazz from the early part of the 20th Century, as espoused by the more celebrated and equally uncompromising Ken Colyer, it will come as no surprise that Big Pete was no fan of British trad, a vanilla variant performed by men in funny hats with striped waistcoats who, briefly and inexplicably, found themselves popular in the doldrums years leading up to the arrival of The Beatles. Nevertheless, he embraced trad somewhat reluctantly before turning his attention to R&B with His Country Blues band, but there we must take a break until the arrival of Vol 2 in which we will learn of the fate of Sally Stevens, Pete’s younger half-sister, a session singer who emigrated to California. Sally, a charismatic familial link to Big Pete, owned a copy of his ultra-rare self-published, largely autobiographical, 1981 novel Half A Chance. Regrettably, however, less than a year after Colin interviewed her, she died from bronchial pneumonia. 

        Northumberland Blues, published as a limited edition by Jazz In Britain Books, contains 24 pages of photographs, among them one of Sally with Jackson Browne, scores of foot- and endnotes and an unreliable index. It’s a fascinating read, a valuable history of the evolution of jazz in Britain outside of London. I’m filing it alongside Pete Frame’s Restless Generation.