Vipers Skiffle Group - John Booker 1934-2007

[Mike Baxter]

A friend of mine who started the UK Vipers Skiffle Group died recently in Vancouver.

A very compassionate and caring man.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/st ... 27,00.html
http://news.independent.co.uk/people/ob ... 393341.ece
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/commen ... 588678.ece

From the London 'Guardian':

Johnny Booker
Lead singer with the Vipers
Published: 26 March 2007

John Martyn Booker, singer and guitarist: born London 16 July 1934; married; died Vancouver, British Columbia 19 March 2007.

With Johnny Booker (recording under the name Johnny Martyn) as one of their two lead singers, the Vipers skiffle group achieved three hit singles in five months for Parlophone in 1956/57. Booker also left his mark on several later ballad singers with his rendition of the folk song "Wanderin'". The Vipers' producer George Martin (later to produce the Beatles) inexplicably failed to release this track as a single, although it features on the 1957 LP Coffee Bar Session. It remains, though, the track by which the Vipers are best remembered by younger performers.

In 1956, at the height of the coffee-bar fad, Booker had become manager of the Gyre and Gimble Coffee House, just off Villiers Street, Charing Cross. In slack moments, he would take out his guitar and sing a few songs. Often he would have as second guitar Diz Disley, who would later collaborate with the violinist Stéphane Grappelli. Others joined in: Jean Van den Bosch, with his deep baritone voice and percussive guitar style, and myself on washboard. This was the original version of the Vipers. Word got around and other young guitarist/singers, among them the then unknown Tommy Steele, began to drift in to sing and play to the rapidly growing audience of young people.

During his time off, Booker would take his guitar to rival establishments and it was at one of these, the Breadbasket, off Tottenham Court Road, that he met Wally Whyton, who became the fourth member of the Vipers. From the Breadbasket, Whyton and Booker would sally out to Soho's burgeoning music scene, playing wherever and whenever they could. In those days, a licence was not required to perform music in public as long as no alcohol was served. The whole British Fifties pop scene grew out of this.

At one point, during the Soho Fair, Booker and Whyton ducked into the 2Is Coffee Bar to get out of the rain, started playing and were offered the empty basement to perform and pass the hat round. With the bassist Tony Tolhurst, Van den Bosch and me, they played "for the bottle", ie whatever people put in the hat.

The reaction was astonishing. Within three weeks, people were queuing round the block, the 2Is owner Paul Lincoln started charging admission, and the BBC made a half-hour film. When this was shown, it had been cut down to five minutes because the Russian invasion of Hungary took precedence. That fragment, though, still appears from time to time, most recently on BBC Four's Folk Britannia series, and gives a very good idea of Booker's extraordinary dynamism.

George Martin, alert as ever to new trends, came down to the 2Is and signed up the Vipers. He was later to admit that "without my experience of the Vipers in the Fifties I could never have managed the Beatles in the Sixties". Unfortunately, two of Booker's most requested songs, "Kisses Sweeter than Wine" and "Freight Train" went unrecorded by the Vipers. We were told that "they weren't commercial". In fact they became hits for the Weavers and Nancy Whiskey respectively. Booker was quite cheerful about it. "Perhaps it's just the way I sang them that wasn't commercial," he said.

In October 1956, the Vipers recorded their first release, "Ain't You Glad", a white gospel song, and "Pick a Bale of Cotton", learned in the library of the US Embassy from a recording by Huddie Ledbetter (Leadbelly). Usually referred to as singles, they were in fact shellac 78s, later to be issued as EPs. These were group songs, but Booker took the lead, as indeed he did for many of the Vipers' recordings. The record sold sufficiently well for the group to be booked top of the bill into the Prince of Wales Theatre, playing two shows nightly. Nobody had heard of barring clauses, so we returned to the 2Is between and after shows to play sets there.

At this point, and with the charting of "Don't You Rock Me Daddy-O", the decision was taken to turn professional. In a way, this was Booker's downfall. Born with a club foot, his condition exacerbated by an accident at the age of four, he had one leg shorter than the other. The type of presentation favoured by the venues of the time required a front-man without obvious disabilities. I can remember one stage manager refusing Booker a chair. "You're not sitting down on my stage," he said, and Booker played awkwardly and in great pain. So Wally Whyton became the official leader and it is he who tends to be remembered today. Yet the records show Booker's vocal importance and indeed starring role in the group.

Skiffle faded after two years and for a while Booker toured small venues in Britain and Europe. Eventually, he returned to Canada, where he had spent much of his youth, and became a social worker, continuing to do gigs part-time, concentrating on blues and superior ballads. Multiplying health problems and complications gradually made full-time work impossible for him. Nevertheless the extraordinary drive that had fuelled his early successes continued to operate and for years he played gigs, with great success, from the wheelchair he was forced to adopt.

[Roger Rettig]

Sad news! Thanks to Mike, I was communicating with John not so long ago, and he had some illuminating tales to tell about the Vipers and their relationship with skiffle maestro, Lonnie Donegan. While they weren't in Donegan's class, the Vipers and Chas McDevitt's group between them saw to it that Lonnie didn't quite have things all his own way!

It was an age of comparative innocence, and I can recall those times as though they were yesterday - come October 2nd 2007, it'll be fifty years since I took my first faltering steps as a guitar-player, and it's all thanks to those pioneers in 1950's London....

RIP, John Booker Martyn.

RR