Ivor Cutler: A Life Outside The Sitting Room

The following is an excerpt from Chapter 6 (A Life of Whimsical Fantasies) and 9 (A Life on the Page), from Ivor Cutler: A Life Outside The Sitting Room (Equinox Publishing, 2022).

Chapter 6: A Life of Whimsical Fantasies

Ivor's love of jazz, formed during his teens and early-20s, remained strong and he visited jazz clubs around London. The Phoenix, a Cavendish Square pub with a Wednesday night jazz club, was one of his regular haunts and he would often be there to see the Don Rendell / Ian Carr Quintet. He became friendly with the band's bassist and drummer, Dave Green and Trevor Tomkins. Green remembers him as very warm and personable and the three of them often spoke together although, despite a shared love of the music, Ivor never discussed the musicians he loved or admired with these two young professional players. As for Ivor's own musical talent, Green doesn't remember knowing anything about it: Green played with Dudley Moore at the Establishment, but not until Ivor's own residency at the club had ended. So it's surprising to find that when Ivor offered Green and Tomkins a gig, they accepted. "He said he'd played some jazz," says Tomkins, "but we had no idea what it would be like. But we said 'Okay.'"

Perhaps it was the nature of the gig that swayed Green and Tomkins: an appearance on Late Night Line-Up. Green still has his gig diary from the period and remembers how the group readied itself for the show. "It was recorded at the BBC Television Centre on the afternoon of Thursday 13th January [1966], between 2.30pm and 5pm... Trevor and I just turned up, played to the cameras and that was that. We did speak about what to call the piece and I think it was me that suggested 'Eastern Feelings.' We seemed to get into that sort of sound, a slightly eastern feeling, and Ivor and Trevor agreed to it." It was fully improvised, according to Green: "It wasn't composed at all, no. We just played. I don't think we even got together with Ivor beforehand. We just turned up, got together and improvised the whole thing."

Green thinks it was probably Ivor who named the band The Three Wise Men. It's an inspired title for an improvising jazz trio but its use was extremely limited: Cutler, Green and Tomkins never played together again. As for the performance, it's not just an interesting period piece: "Eastern Feelings" is an atmospheric piece of music. Green and Tomkins have the confidence of a rhythm partnership that's played together many times. Ivor is more reticent, his contributions at first tentative compared to those of the bassist and drummer but becoming a little more confident as the piece progresses.

The Three Wise Men's only performance filled the opening spot of that night's Late Night Line-Up. Michael Dean, the presenter, gave Ivor a suitable introduction, calling him a "musician, humorist, eccentric" and explaining that he was appearing for two reasons. Firstly, as a sort of preview of a new show called

Zodiac, a BBC One series of twelve dance programmes built around the astrological signs. The first of the series was dedicated to Capricorn and Ivor is a Capricornian. Secondly, because he'd recently formed The Three Wise Men and, as the trio had never appeared on TV before it qualified for Late Night Line-Up's "First Time on Television" spot. Once he'd made everything clear, Dean introduced The Three Wise Men performing "Eastern Feelings."

The band's recorded performance begins. Green stands to the left, Tomkins sits behind his drum kit to the right and Ivor sits behind the piano at the centre. The bassist and drummer are dressed smartly, as was the fashion for jazz musicians of the time, in jackets, white shirts and dark ties. The bald and bare-headed Ivor adopts a more casual combination of open-necked check shirt and a light-coloured, cable-knit sweater. All three men are serious and unsmiling, concentrating on the music that's evolving. "Eastern Feelings" lasts for around three-and-a-half minutes, the entire output of the Three Wise Men. As far as Tomkins remembers, Ivor didn't seem interested in playing live gigs with the trio and Tomkins was unconcerned that this was their one and only show, summing up Ivor's musical talent with the comment "He wasn't a great pianist at all."

Chapter 9: A Life on the Page

The period around 1960-1965 saw the brief flowering of a new artistic movement that seems tailor-made for Ivor, or vice-versa, "Jazz Poetry." As the name (sometimes jazzpoetry or Jazz/Poetry) suggests, this was a fusion of live poetry performance and instrumental jazz. Poet Michael Horovitz, the founder of New Departures magazine, was the movement's instigator, taking shows on the road as Live New Departures. Some of the UK's leading jazz musicians took part, including Stan Tracey, Bobby Wellins and Ivor's Establishment Club compatriot, Dudley Moore. Jazzpoetry poets included Adrian Mitchell and Pete Brown, who would both become friends with Ivor. Ivor was not part of the movement but his absence from the Jazz Poetry scene, except, perhaps, as an audience member, is easily explained. Ivor was not yet writing poetry.

Although he was an established songwriter, author and storyteller by the mid-1960s, Ivor at first found poetry to be a difficult discipline and it wasn't until the 1970s that he published his first book of poems. He gave more than one explanation of this late flowering, sometimes describing a painless process, at other times claiming it was a long and arduous activity. In one of his final interviews, Ivor claimed the process was simple: "Somebody described my stuff as poetry, so I just became a poet... it was just a magic word, 'poet.' But it seems that those people who called it poetry were using [the word] in a different way, I think." However, he told Val Hennesy that the process took six years: "I started writing poetry at the age of 42 but wasn't any good until I was 48." When Marc Riley reminded Ivor of this claim, Ivor described the evolution of his poetry over that six-year period: "I used to listen to jazz, go to concerts and then be busy writing all this rubbish instinctively and after about six years the rubbish started to get fairly sophisticated and I gradually started to introduce English words into these poems and eventually it became all words and then my poetry was good enough. I've been busy shaping it ever since, really."

If Ivor's memory is accurate, then he began trying to become a poet in 1965 and achieved his goal, at least its early stages, in 1971. In another version of the story he claimed that he did not begin writing poetry "seriously" until he was forty-three, taking seven years to achieve poems he felt were of a "professional" level, which suggests that he started the process in 1966 and finished it in 1973. He told Alastair McKay that he was making tentative first steps a few years before this, and retained poems written in his thirties—that is, between 1953 and 1963—to keep himself "humble."

Other evidence suggests that Ivor's poetry career took off in the 1960s. In 1968 he published three poems in Ambit magazine: "A Bird Sits in a Bush," in which he contemplates crushing a bird's head between his fingers, "Cloth" and "Alice." Later that year he was guest editor of Workshop, a magazine devoted to new poetry, and published two poems, "An Old Poltroon" and "Vermicular Thinkers," in an issue of The Poetry Review that included work by Vernon Scannell, George MacBeth and Cecil Day-Lewis. He was one of the featured poets named on the magazine's cover, another indication that he was not just a raw beginner trying his luck. In February 1969 he took part in a poetry reading at Kentish Town library, chaired by Ambit's editor Martin Bax, then a few months later, during his first Peel session, he read "An Old Poltroon" and "There and Back via Sweden" and spoke about his forthcoming appearance at the Poetry Marathon. Further work appeared in 1970 and 1971, with readings at the 1970 Poetry D-Day and the publication of "The Even Keel," in The Transatlantic Review. During the summer of 1971 he appeared on London Weekend Television's Alive and Kicking—British Poets. Ivor, described as a "poet and teacher," was joined by five children from Fox School, "and showed the sort of spontaneous poetry that children can produce when given encouragement." If he didn't think he was creating "professional" standard poems until at least 1971, plenty of other people were willing and happy to describe him, book him and publish him as a poet before that date.

Ambit was an important outlet for Ivor's poetry: between 1968 and 1985 he contributed to twelve issues. The magazine first appeared in 1959 and by 1968 it was a well-established literary quarterly with a group of editors that included its founder Martin Bax, artist Eduardo Paolozzi and writer J.G. Ballard, and with a circulation of around three thousand copies per issue. Despite sponsorship from the Arts Council and even from Mobil Oil, it was not making anyone rich and other potential sponsors were put off because, according to Martin Bax, its contents could, and did, offend: "The contributors have either been poorly paid, or often not at all... I thank them. My fellow editors... will never be paid. I thank them." According to

Briony Bax, an editor in the twenty-first century, Martin Bax never had a set rate for contributions and would pay, or not, on an ad hoc basis in an apparently random fashion. Martin Bax and Ambit's music editor, trumpeter Henry Lowther, organised Ambit Jazz Events, offering another outlet for contributors at performances that mixed readings with music. On at least one occasion, the band featured Dave Green and Trevor Tomkins, two-thirds of the Three Wise Men. Martin Bax organised poetry readings under the Ambit banner, one of which featured Ivor, David Gascoyne and Adrian Henri under the title "Post Surrealist Poets," a description of Ivor that, like "surrealistic folk," never caught on.

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