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Royal Gazette - Bermuda
It's Showtime
Ladies and Gentlemen: It's showtime at the Neptune Club at the Southampton Princess. the acme of Bermudian tourist hospitality.
At showtime. not counting bar staff and members of hotel management, only a dozen people were in attendance this Friday evening in a room which holds 192. The night is the exception; the room has enjoyed a good year. The hotel had been block-booked for a lawyers' convention from New Jersey, which would later spill in to catch Jimmy Keys' show and fill the room. But given the tiny crowd at the off. Keys, due to entertain for three hours this and every other night for ten months a year, might be forgiven for easing himself into an evening's work.
Nothing could be further from his mind or his abilities. He works at only one pace: flat out. A note pinned to his piano reminds him to "Slow Down!" Moving along at break-neck speed, Keys bends his act to suit the tiny crowd dotted around the enormous room.
He has been bending his act rather a lot during his first year at the Southampton Princess, moving away from the material which worked so well during his years at the Henry VIII and the Golden Hind, toning down the blue, recording and releasing two CD's of live performances. playing at corporate conferences in North America (a rarity: Bermuda is traditionally an importer of conference entertainers), and writing and planning a musical, "on Broadway, off Broadway, whatever".
Keys has the rare and highly-valued capacity to convulse an audience with laughter. His style requires the nightly adoption onstage of an intense, manic, seriously politically incorrect personality entirely unlike his own. The relentless pace of his performance and machine-gun patter are fuelled in equal measure by willpower, stamina and instincts honed in a lifetime spent on the boards. The style he has mastered lies somewhere in the unhip hinterlands of music-hall, vaudeville and pantomime.
He is the Island's highest-paid entertainer. Everyone you speak to thinks they know how much Jimmy Keys is earning, and it's always a different figure. One financial matter on which everyone agrees is that the Southampton Princess is not run as a charity, and that whatever Keys may really be pulling down, he must be providing value for it. For his part, he doesn't talk about money, because for most of the 24 years of his professional career there wasn't very much.
He married Kim two years ago at the Newstead Hotel. She first saw him perfonn at the Golden Hind in 1988, and on a subsequent visit to the Island took 25 people with her to catch his act at Henry's. For a while, he flew to Toronto on his nights off to court her. Both have been married before. They live in a bright, pleasant but unremarkable apartment in Southampton with Kim's 12-year-old daughter Jacklyn, a white upright piano and, in frames, his mother's sheet music and countless photos of family and friends. Kim looks like Demi Moore, and Keys looks like an office clerk, which he once was. At home, Keys credits Kim with helping him become a better person. but onstage he says: "People are always suprised once they know we are a couple. They look at her and then look at me and think "how the heck did she do it"! People scream with laughter when he says it.
He was born James Hewson in Gravesend, Kent, on October lO, 1950. Pocohontas is buried in Gravesend, and so, more or less. is everyone who lives there. It is a grey feeder suburb 25 miles from the City of London, the Square Mile from which the security of the world's economic system once flowed.
"My great-grandfather James Hewson came to Bermuda from Kent in l886," says Keys. 'He married a Bermudian woman called Annetta Jessie Adams, and after my grandfather was born here. they later moved back to England." Keys' father was born in India, and worked as a civil servant in England, in the Social Security Department. As a school~ boy, Keys was good at arts. He took classical piano lessons and passed a variety of exams for the Guildhall School of Music. Music ran in the family. ;'My mother could only play from the written music," he says, "but my Dad could play by ear."
In the Summer of Love, 1967, which was chillier than usual in London, Keys left school to take employment in a City firm, a shipping company, which he served for three years as a clerk. "I had a pin-stripe suit and an umbrella, although I never wore a bowler hat," he says, musing "I don't know why I went into the City. I wasn't really into it."
At the end of the 1965, London was reportedly swinging. In retrospect, it doesn't sound too sharp: the pubs closed before midnight, one or two bars in the centre of town stayed open later, and the dozens of respected bands working the fabled "scene" was tiny. The same could be said of Bermuda today, and no one describes Bermuda as swinging.
But the mild-mannered clerk from Kent had a secret identity.
At night he would play piano and keyboards in a variety of musical groups. He'd been in bands since he was 12 or 13, starting out in a group called 5 Percent Soul ("people said we were 95% crap").
"So one day, a bunch of us from Gravesend gave up our day jobs and went to work as full-time musicians in Germany," Keys says. Six of us, plus a roadie, in a small van, driving down to Stuttgart to play at an American forces base. It was a joke. I remember the black soldiers were on one side of the room, wanting to hear soul music, the white ones were on the other side wanting country and western, and we didn't play either! We were just a pop group. We had to learn rather quickly."
The band played six 45-minute sets a day on weekdays. and eight at weekends. "We had no money, we slept in the truck and we were starving. We all lost so much weight. The bass player left after a month. The truck broke down ... "
The gig ended, and everyone except Keys went back to work minus the illusions they'd had before leaving England. "I just scanned the Melody Maker, a music paper, went up to London and auditioned for the Joyce Bond Set, basically a black soul band. There was no money in it. I was still living at home before we started touring."
Europeans. especially the British and Germans, have always treated with reverence ethnic blues and soul musicians from other lands. Joyce Bond was Jamaican, and her Set, was one of dozens of respected bands working the soul/ska/bluebeat scene in the pubs and clubs around London and the lesser cities to the North. Keys was the only white in what was known in those days as a "mixed-race" band. Today, they are just called "bands".
"Joyce went back to Jamaica, and we carried on as an 8-piece, the Q Set, backing all of the big names who would visit from America. We played for Percy Sledge, Ben E. King, Eddie (Knock On Wood) Floyd, all of them," Keys recalls.
By the end of 1971, "we'd gone as far as we could go with the Q Set," so Keys joined an outfit called Sundance, playing covers on a 30-pub circuit in and near London. "It was hard work. We had to be able to copy anybody: heavy metal, Deep Purple, Yes. some complicated stuff. We worked six nights a week."
A tiny pause follows. Keys' mind works so fast that it's burned all the hair off the top of his head. so a short pause for him is the equivalent of a lengthy interruption in most other cases. He is taking a moment to review his professional career. ''I've worked six nights a week my whole life," he says, without emotion.
Destinies are shaped by key moments. The entertainer Keys is today grew out of a decision made at 20 years of age to be a professional musician, and another. after a year of being the Sundance kid, to join a quartet from the Southampton area in Hampshire, to which he moved. It was crucial to his development not only because it established a pattern whereby in order to progress, Keys had to move to a place called" Southampton. but because the band, called Parrot, "were maniacs. We'd dress up, sometimes in drag. We were good musicians, but onstage basically out of control." Show me the performer of 22, and I'll show you the man twice his age today.
"We went off to Copenhagen. and played in this enormous place, which must have held 1,000 people. It was like the Wild West. Fights would break out, chairs were being smashed over peoples' heads, and we'd play on as if nothing were happening."
Parrot expired. It became an ex-Parrot when one of its members left, but a name change dealt with that. The engagements, and the act, got wackier. "We auditioned for a season on a Spanish cruise ship," Keys says. The only problem was we had to sing in Spanish. None of us knew any, but at the audition the bass player made up some Spanish-style nonsense lyrics, and we got the job." The Spanish cruise residency lasted a year. "We crossed the Bay of Biscay 100 times that year," Keys says with a rueful smile. One Biscay crossing is usually enough for anyone who traverses that windstruck region.
Life on the water had its ups and downs.
One day, with the ship berthed in the exotic Canary Islands just off Africa, a telex arrived, asking if the band would play at a holiday camp in the considerably less romantic northern English town of Cleethorpes.
They did. They played in Holland, and "down in Germany a lot. One afternoon, we set up in this German club, went out for a meal, and when we came back there were Harley Davidsons all over the place. It was a German Hells Angels' club, not exactly our scene. It was scary, but it ended up with us playing every rock and roll song we knew, wearing their helmets."
A fire-dance was added to the act when the guitarist met a Hawaiian woman, "We did whatever we were offered," says Keys of the eight years he stuck with the various successors to Parrot. "I remember on one occasion we played in Dubai: an English comedy showband, playing to Arabs, in a Chinese restaurant."
By 1981, there was no longer a band, "We went to a five-piece, then four, then a trio, and finally a two~piece." says Keys, "And then 1 was on my own." None of the core musicians returned to England this time. They live today in Hawaii, Las Vegas, Germany and Bermuda. "We stay in touch," says Keys.
Most of the ingredients which turned James Hewson into Jimmy Keys ("like the piano keys; I've changed it by deed poll") were in place by this time: a full-time musician, capable of playing to whatever audience shows up on the night, a manic side, a blend of comedy and props, and the invaluable experience of appearing on the bill with the big names of British comedy having given him a mastery of the timing which is any entertainer's stock in trade. The final element was added to the mix when Keys decided to work solo.
"With the band split up, I was on my own, and had no idea what to do next," he says. "I thought I'd just join another band. but a friend said: 'Why not go solo?' We weren't really doing comedy, more visual work, but I said I'd give it a shot."
Keys revisited the pages of the Melody Maker, and in no time flat Jimmy Keys, piano man, was working on the Spanish island of Ibiza. this time seven nights a week. Having to supply all the zaniness by himself proved too much. first time out of the trap. "I overdid it in every way, and ended up in hospital suffering from exhaustion at the end of the season," he says. "It was a wild place, a 24-hour party,"
Not impossibly wild for a man of Keys' tastes. Recovered. he went back for a second eight-month season. Then came a residency at a piano bar in Amsterdam. Then another in Marbella on Spain's Costa Del Sol. Keys found himself on another circuit, the piano bars of Europe. Then, in 1983, a call from an agent offering Bermuda. "I said 'Where is it?' Like everyone else, I thought it was in the Caribbean."
He came to the Island to work a month at the Ram's Head Inn in its Pitts Bay Road incarnation, and stayed three. "They had a different theme every night," he says. "Scottish one night, Irish the next, that sort of thing. It,. was jammed. They'd redecorate the place each night. I remember one night, they switched themes, but somebody forgot to tell somebody. I was just settling down to a little country and western piano when the bagpipe players walked in."
Next stop Florida, not the Keys. Then a call from Andy Allan, the owner of the Henry VIII. to come back to Bermuda. This time he stayed three years. 'That was my heyday," he says. Management transferred him to another property, the Golden Hind on the South Shore, 'The Golden Hind sunk in 1988 and I went back to England and Florida before returning for another stint at Henry's, I don't usually go back," he says. "But I had a good following, and stayed two years. Then I wanted to get out of the pub scene for a lot of different reasons, and move on. I felt I'd done what I could as a pub entertainer, that I could do more."
Keys has started work on the musical, which is to be based on a famous actor's biography. In the standard traditions of work in progress, Keys declines to name the individual, but is certain I wouldn't have him play himself." When his songs are more developed, he plans to find a suitable playwright, and take the result Stateside. ·'It's something I just know I want to do," he says. The liner notes for his recently-recorded cassettes state it even more plainly: "I will write that musical, and get on Broadway."
The two cassettes were recorded live in September and October, and produced and engineered by local maestro Grant Williams at Crossroads Studios in Paget. "A lot of the people who corne to see me have been before, often the night before," Keys says. "Some of them come every night they're here, They like to play my stuff in the car." Kim had a hand in the product design, and Keys will sell the recordings over the piano as he does with the T-shirts and tapes.
In the uncertain world of overnight fame, which always takes 20 years, nothing is taken for granted.
Cut hack to the Neptune Club.
This audience is not smashing chairs. No one is wearing a helmet, except the one Keys dons (marked "Keep Left") at the stage of his performance when he lampoons Bermudian driving habits. By dint of hard work, a seemingly bottomless fund of jokes, and plain old stick-to-it-iveness, Keys has persuaded the small audience to his humorous cause, evoking gales of laughter from two women from Arizona he has accused of possessing unusual qualities!
Despite the new digital grand piano, from which Keys can coax any number of sounds, and despite his unflagging efforts. the Friday night is about to go down as something of a bust when, at around 11.30 p.m., the lawyers' dinner breaks up and 200 people flood into the Neptune Room, Suddenly, two hours into a hard day's night, there is a huge a huge new audience that has arrived to be entertained ...... Lawyers. From New Jersey, fresh from a dull convention. Many half cut. No entertainer could ask for more, and Keys sets about lightly humiliating some of them, and telling some of the funniest jokes known to man, impersonating Rod Stewart and Barry Manilow with the same prop, pulling off a brilliant Joe Cocker without singing a single word, playing a selection from the Phantom Of The Opera entirely straight, raking enormous comic liberties with the truth (and encouraging the audience to shout "Liar!" every time he does), knocking back a couple of drinks bought for him by appreciative audience members, and generally ensuring that as many people as possible have a night to remember.
Before the likes of Sylvester Stallone alld Jean-Claude Van Damme made watching indiscriminate violence in the cinema and on television just about the only available form of amusement, what Jimmy Keys does was known as entertainment. Life in the middle of the 1990's is such a bloody business that a man like Jimmy Keys, who can make you weep with laughter, even despite yourself, deserves all the praise which can be heaped upon him. ~
Roger Crombie is a reporter for The Mid·Ocean News and a regular contributor to RG Magazine. He thought he had never seen Jimmy Keys before researching this article, but realised during the course of interviewing that he must have seen Keys perform in a dark and smoky London nightclub about 20 years ago, when the Joyce Bond Set headlined.
