"A rhythmic, charming, irresistible man"
9 Kingly Street - The Bag O'Nails Club and the story of Jimmy Scott
Squeezed between Regent Street and Carnaby Street, Kingly Street is a more of an alleyway than a street, providing access for deliveries to the rear of Hamleys and Calvin Klein. Now a hub for fashionable restaurants and exclusive members clubs, many of the buildings date from the early eighteenth century. Their use over time reflects Soho’s economic ebb and flow from sought after residences to light manufacturing and workshops for a variety of trades. As Soho shifted to serving the needs of the leisure economy, so clubs began to take advantage of the street’s low-rent secluded basements.
Soho’s music clubs varied hugely in atmosphere and exclusivity. Some — like the Flamingo and Marquee — were open and crowded places, while others — like the intimate Bag O’Nails — were more hang outs for musicians. Located at 9 Kingly Street, a music club had been running there from the 1920s when Duke Ellington’s Quartet was on the bill. But the club really hit its stride in the Sixties, as the NME reported in 1967:
“Swinging London has one club raving seven nights a week―the Bag O'Nails in Kingly Street, near Carnaby Street and just off Regent Street in London's West End, and it's one of the few places where one can still see London at its grooviest.”
On 11 January 1967 Jimi Hendrix and his band dropped in to the club for their first performance in the UK after a full day of recording. The audience included Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, half of The Who, at least one Rolling Stone, Eric Clapton, Lulu, Georgie Fame and Donovan. It was that sort of club.
During 1968, The Beatles recorded many sessions for the White Album at Trident Studio, just a five minute walk away. They would work late into the evening, after which Paul McCartney, accompanied by long-term personal assistant Mal Evans and one or two others, would stroll over to the club for a bite to eat and a relaxed chat with whoever was there. It was during one of these late evenings that Paul met his future wife and collaborator Linda. And it was at the Bag O’Nails that Paul got to know Nigerian musician Jimmy Scott.
Nigerians have been living in London for over 200 years, initially as slaves. Even then, their impact was significant. Olaudah Equiano was a freed slave, born in Nigeria, who became a prominent abolitionist and writer. His 1789 memoir was the first book by an African writer to be read widely in Britain, and was the first published work to describe the horror of slavery.
Nigerians and those of Nigerian descent have made a huge contribution to music in Britain and, in particular, to the music culture of London. Skepta, Tinie Tempah, Dizzee Rascal and Dave are among those Grime artists with Nigerian parentage, as have more mainstream artists such as Seal and Sade. And Shirley Bassey belongs to a musical class of her own. As we explain in another story, Nigerian Fela Kuti - a pioneer of modern African music - lived in London as student and began his music career playing jazz and highlife at all-nighters in the Flamingo Club on Wardour Street.
Migration from Nigeria in significant numbers began in immediate post war period as the invitation went out to work in Britain to support reconstruction. Thousands of Nigerians paid for passage on the liners that ferried between the west coast of Africa and British ports. Of those who couldn’t afford the price of a ticket, some took their chances as stowaways on passenger or cargo ships. This was how twenty six year old Anonmuogharan Emuakpor, without money or a change of clothes, found himself in the Yorkshire port of Hull in 1948.
Not much is known about how Jimmy Scott, as he now called himself, spent the next few years and ended up in London, but by the mid-fifties he was a regular around Soho’s jazz clubs and played congas for Edmundo Ros, a London based Trinidadian-Venezuelan bandleader with his popular Latin American orchestra. As a fellow musician later described him: “There really was an irrepressible good humour to the guy and he was fun to work with as he was always very excited about everything and had an incredible energy on stage where he would show up in full tribal regalia.”
Above all he was an exceptionally talented percussionist. Nigerian music historian The Jidé Taiwo explains how “Growing up in the Urhobo swamps, it must have been second nature to him: people from that area of Nigeria are extremely musical and the percussion of the peoples of southern Nigeria on both sides of the Niger, is highly rhythmic.”
By 1964 he was a regular at the Flamingo Club, playing congas for resident band Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames. The following year he joined the touring band for Stevie Wonder’s first UK tour, and was a familiar face around the clubs. He rapidly gained a reputation as a top session percussionist, and can be heard on The Rolling Stones Beggars Banquet album, and seen playing with them in the film of their 1969 Hyde Park performance.
Popular in the studios, Jimmy Scott was also popular around the clubs, especially The Bag O’Nails, as Paul McCartney explains: “I had a friend called Jimmy Scott who was a Nigerian conga player, who I used to meet in the clubs in London. He had a few expressions, one of which was, ‘Ob la di ob la da, life goes on, bra’. I used to love this expression… He sounded like a philosopher to me. He was a great guy anyway and I said to him, ‘I really like that expression and I’m thinking of using it…”
Jimmy was hired to play congas on early takes of the song, but it was a recording that created friction — both between Jimmy and Paul and within The Beatles. Jimmy wanted a co-writer credit for the song, while the rest of The Beatles disliked the song, and in particular McCartney’s obsessive perfectionism in recording it. It took 48 takes to produce a version the band was happy with. The early version featuring Jimmy Scott was not used until The Beatles’ Anthology was released in the 1990s. But the song was included on the 1968 ‘White Album’ and released as a single in many countries, climbing to number one in seven of them. A cover version by Marmalade got to number one in the UK.
McCartney held out against Scott’s claim for a co-writer credit on the grounds that the entire chorus was his unique catchphrase. Eventually McCartney made a payment to Scott on the condition that he dropped his claim for co-writer credit. The Jidé Taiwo asks “were they unappreciative of Jimmy Scott’s talent and person - and simply took his material as they had done with several other musicians?” It’s a fair question.
Many of our stories describe a culture of openness, sharing and innovation in the clubs, studios and rehearsal rooms of Soho - a culture of exchange, as we have described it. In most cases this was honest and equitable exchange, but there’s a spectrum that ranges from taking to making.
At one extreme we have the case of Paul Simon who reproduced Martin Carthy’s arrangement of Scarborough Fair, which he heard at Les Cousins on Greek Street, and credited to himself on the first Simon & Garfunkel album. This led to a decades-long falling out between the two although, as reported in the Financial Times: “It turned out that (Carthy’s) own publisher had, without his knowledge, copyrighted his arrangement and had been receiving royalties from Simon all along. Carthy had somehow managed to sign away his own claim in the small print of a contract.”
A little way along the spectrum is the case of Bert Jansch, co-founder of Pentangle, who was another regular at Les Cousins. Jimmy Page was a particular admirer of the groundbreaking guitarist, so much so that Led Zeppelin’s Black Mountain Side is an extremely close but uncredited version of Jansch’s song Blackwaterside.
The examples so far are very much on the taking side, but as we move along the spectrum we find examples of how existing musical elements are used in the making of something original. Jimmy Page borrowed guitar licks fairly extensively from other songs to build material for the first Led Zeppelin albums. The central guitar theme from Watch Your Step by American bluesman Bobby Parker was used by Page as the foundation for Led Zeppelin’s Moby Dick. Four years earlier John Lennon had used the same lick for The Beatles’ I Feel Fine.
Other people’s licks and riffs have been seen as fair game for songwriters, especially in the 1960s. Ray Davies was trying to copy the riff from Louie Louie by The Kingsmen to build a song. He couldn’t quite get the rhythm right and ended up writing You Really Got Me - The Kinks’ first hit recorded at Regent Sound Studios over on Denmark Street.
Songwriters have also taken words from others in the making of original songs, including Lennon and McCartney with a Victorian circus poster used more or less word-for-word as the lyric for For the Benefit of Mr Kite and an entire stanza from a sixteenth century poem for Golden Slumbers - both uncredited. During a drunken evening in The Ship on Wardour Street, Karl Hyde wrote down words and phrases he overheard from other people’s conversations which he wove into the lyrics for Underworld’s Born Slippy.
But overlaying these legitimate and less than legitimate approaches to drawing on other people’s work to create new music are the issues of power and cultural appropriation. Running through the history of both American and British popular music is a debate about cultural appropriation. In his damning critique published in the New York Times in 1970, Craig McGregor writes: “it was white imitators, The Beatles, who exploited the black man's music and finally betrayed it.” In his defence, John Lennon acknowledged the key debt their music had to American black music but claimed it was a “love in” rather than a “rip off”. But The Beatles - in common with many others as we have seen - ‘borrowed’ fairly heavily.
Chris Richards writing in the Washington Post asks the key question: “When is cultural appropriation — the act of making art that reaches for new ideas across lines of race and class — ever acceptable in pop music? Finding an answer requires us to clarify the difference between theft and influence.” He continues by differentiating between musicians as travellers or tourists: “Travellers move through the world in order to participate. Tourists simply look around, have some fun, take what they want and bring it back home.”
One critical test is whether artists use existing elements creatively to make something new, while giving credit and overall showing respect to those whose work they build on. These issues become ever more acute in an age when sampling technologies and global media allow us to be musical tourists from the comfort of our laptops.
Let’s return to Jimmy Scott. Was he given sufficient credit or shown appropriate respect? From today’s perspective, no. For us, two white Britons for whom The Beatles provided the soundtrack of our childhoods, making any sort of judgement on how he was treated at the time is difficult to address objectively. In any case, far worse injustices were to come.
In the 1970s, Jimmy Scott played with the soul/funk band Maximum Breed, and recorded his own version of Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da, which we have included in our playlist - an exuberant instrumental that showcases his remarkable playing skills. Scott also ran workshops on African music for the Pyramid Arts Project in east London. He joined the 2-tone band Bad Manners in the early eighties. Then in 1986: “We’d just done this tour of America and he caught pneumonia. When he got back to Britain he was strip-searched at the airport because he was Nigerian. They left him naked for two hours. The next day he was taken into hospital and he died.”
A benefit concert was held to raise money for the two families and twelve children that he left, featuring Bad Manners along with Lee Scratch Perry and the Upsetters. As his widow Lurcrezia Scott said: "Jimmy was essentially a rhythmic, charming, irresistible man with the gift of the gab… If life was sometimes dull, it shouldn't have been, for his stories of people, of places, of incidents, were an endless stream bubbling with fun."
Sources
Gavin Edwards (2015) “Beatles’ 5 Boldest Rip-Offs” Rolling Stone, 23/12/2015 https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/beatles-5-boldest-rip-offs-54145/
David Honigmann (2020) “Scarborough Fair — the ancient ballad that sparked a modern-day grudge”, Financial Times, 10/08/2020 https://ig.ft.com/life-of-a-song/scarborough-fair.html
Craig McGregor (1970) “So in the End, The Beatles Have Proved False Prophets.” The New York Times, 14 June 1970, https://www.nytimes.com/1970/06/14/archives/music-so-in-the-end-the-beatles-have-proved-false-prophets.html
Marco On The Bass (2011) “The Life & Times of Jimmy Scott: From Inspiring The Beatles 'Ob La Di Ob La Da' to Playing Percussion With Bad Manners” http://marcoonthebass.blogspot.com/2011/05/life-times-of-jimmy-scott-from.html
Chris Richards (2018) “The Five Hardest Question in Pop Music”, Washington Post, 02/07/2018 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/style/wp/2018/07/02/feature/separate-art-from-artist-cultural-appropriation/
Joe Taysom (2022) “The legendary guitarist Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page ripped off” Far Out Magazine, 11/03/2022 https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/guitarist-led-zeppelin-jimmy-page-ripped-off/
The Jidé Taiwo (2021) “Cheated By Paul McCartney And ‘Killed’ By British Immigration: The Unfulfilled Life Of Jimmy Scott Emuakpor”, History Made: The Newsletter, 15/11/2021
Masterful commentary and immaculate research - as always.
A Cracking Good Read.