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| Oct 17 2009, 8:00 AM EDT (current) | JamieEvans | 1 photo added |
| Jul 14 2009, 7:59 AM EDT | JamieEvans |
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Brian Innes, a founder member and former percussionist with the Temperance Seven, wrote an extremely entertaining and amusing book, 'A Long Way from Pasadena' about the life and times of the band. We are delighted to reproduce some of his thoughts on Alan Cooper.
He came from one of those vastly interconnected Yorkshire families; toyed with the idea of taking orders; served his time in the RAF; won a scholarship to Leeds School of Art, where he was a fellow student with Frankie Vaughan and guitarist Diz Disley; played clarinet with Bob Barclay's Yorkshire Jazz Band; and came to London in 1956 to study sculpture at the Royal College.
At that time he was tall and elegantly slender in a 20s style, and he took to the tight black tailcoats of the Seven with aplomb. He had a wife, Peggy, a silver-haired schoolteacher, and they lived aboard a small motor cruiser moored out in the stream just upriver from Battersea Bridge.
It was some years later, when Cooper and Peggy were living apart, and she had a small ground-floor flat in Colebrook Row, Islington, that she earned herself a place in history. She was in the Camden Head late one Saturday evening, and a young hooray
was making a bore of himself, rounding the bar to ask if anybody had a French letter to spare. Eventually Peggy stood up, put her foot on a stool, and reached one hand under her skirt: "Well," she said, "if your girlfriend doesn't mind borrowing..."When he is at his best, Alan Cooper is an outstanding jazz clarinettist - something he's proved with almost every band in the land; at his far from best, which can be much of the time, he's still worth hearing; but catch him on the wrong occasion, speak the wrong word into his ear, and he can play, with malice aforethought, the vilest, most out-of-tune rubbish you never expected to hear.
Let's look at Cooper, Alan Swainston Cooper, sometimes called Henry MacHooter, in 1961. The slimness has gone, developing into a pear-shaped form on legs (his back hurts him); the hair is slipping too, off the head and down the chin. Peggy's gone as well; although they are still technically husband and wife, she lives in Islington and Alan in a tiny bedsitter on the corner of Hollywood Road in Fulham, which he shares with about 30 instruments in various stages of decay, including an enormous bass phonofiddle that hangs menacingly over his head as he lies in bed, and a very little monkey that Cephas Howard [former Seven trumpeter] gave him for his 30th birthday. (Not long after he found it strangled in its chain.) But the eyes haven't changed , they've become even more so: hazel in colour, broodingly intent, partly hidden under huge, arched lids. The big nose and slightly fleshy lips look almost semitic, but they're half concealed by the full brown beard: he resembles one of Queen Victoria's younger sons, one of those dukes who went mad - the real Jack the Ripper? - and were locked up for ever, or committed suicide. And there's a strange smile on his face. It may be just fun and enjoyment, or perhaps he's about to come out with some cynically bitter condemnation of the scene around him.
Continued on Pasadena 2
