Payne's Music

I found this advert in the 'Lewisham Borough News' dated 7th August 1946: “PAYNE'S MUSIC SHOP 213 BROMLEY RD., BELLINGHAM, S.E.6. RECORDS, MUSIC, INSTRUMENTS. We have pleasure in announcing the opening of our instrument repair service. Saxophone and Clarinet repairs by expert staff. - Complete stocks, Strings, Reeds, Mutes.”

I found this notice in the 'Lewisham Borough News' dated 24th August 1948:
“PERSONAL APPEARANCE OF HOAGY CARMICHAEL (To Autograph Records) AT PAYNE'S MUSIC SHOP, 213, Bromley Road, Catford, S.E.6. (HITher Green 3134), on SATURDAY, 28th at 4.45 p.m.”

Hoagy Carmichael! That’s amazing! I did not know he visited Payne’s. Hoagy wrote some great standards, including ‘Stardust’, Old Buttermilk skies’ and ‘Skylark’. A musical (and Hollywood) legend.

I found this piece in the 'Harrow Observer' dated 11th October 1991: “PETER Payne, the King of Battersea, is dead. He was cremated at Putney Vale Cemetery last Friday after a send-off from a couple of dozen of his loyal subjects and some of South London’s finest traditional jazz musicians. Pete was not a jazz musician himself. He tried the clarinet once - but gave it up when he realised he was never going to be Benny Goodman. He was not a jazz singer either - although he would sing a couple of numbers with a band when he had the chance. Even so Pete used to sing at the Rising Sun in Battersea Bridge Road in the early seventies and more recently at the Sunday lunchtime jazz sessions at Battersea Arts Centre. He would be called up onto the stage by band leader Pete Smith with a great flourish and be introduced as “Peter Payne the King of Battersea.” He hardly looked like a king - or even a jazz singer. In fact he looked like the respectable pensioner he was - grey hair, horn rimmed specs, crumpled trousers, shirt and tie under an old woolly cardigan. He would shuffle over to the microphone, give the band the name of a song and a key and off he would go with his gravelly old grandfather voice. And just as footballers have a testimonial match so, at the 100 Club in Oxford Street last summer, around 250 people came to the club, including half a dozen bands and anybody who is anybody on the South London jazz circuit. For it was Peter Payne who did more than anyone else to keep traditional jazz alive in the years between the New Orleans revival of the forties and the trad jazz boom of the early sixties. It was also Peter who set up the Delta Club in South London just after the war - one of the few clubs to survive in London and he helped launch names which later became famous - including Humphrey Lyttelton and Chris Barber - although he only paid them 10 shillings a night for the whole band. Later he set up the Mike Daniels Delta Jazz Band with Monty Sunshine and the Crane River Band with Ken Colyer. As if that was not enough he launched the famous Riverboat Shuffles on the Thames and organised the first ever jazz concert at the Royal Festival Hall with the Dutch Swing College Band. But Peter was probably most famous for his record shop in Catford - visited by people from all over London and further afield. With an encyclopaedic knowledge of jazz, one musician referred to the shop as ‘Pete Payne’s University of Jazz.’ Sadly Pete never became a rich man in the forties and fifties as jazz was very much a minority interest and it was out of a sense of committment and not in search of wealth that he ran the shop and his specialist record label - Delta. Ironically he had to give it up in the early sixties - just in time for the revival of interest in jazz. Even so, from his home in Ethelburga Street, he continued to support jazz in every way possible but was modest in that few people, other than musicians, knew of his contribution to jazz over the years.”