Spike Hughes


Patrick Cairns "Spike" Hughes was a British musician, composer and arranger who spanned the worlds of classical music and jazz. He has been called Britain's earliest jazz composer. In his later career he became better known as a broadcaster and humorous author.

Early career

Born in London, Hughes was the son of Irish composer, writer and song collector Herbert Hughes and great grandson of the sculptor Samuel Peploe Wood. His childhood, spent mostly with his mother Lilian Meacham, a Harley Street psychiatrist, involved a lot of travelling in France and Italy, as well as a more settled period of education at Perse School in Cambridge. In 1923 at the age of 15 he went to Vienna to study composition with Egon Wellesz. While in Vienna he claimed to have visited the opera nearly 450 times, always standing at the back of the gallery with a score in his hand. He also began writing his first music criticism for The Times in London. Returning to the UK in 1926, Hughes had a solo cello sonata performed in London, and wrote the incidental music for two theatre productions in Cambridge.

Jazz

His interest in jazz was stimulated by hearing the London revue Blackbirds, starring Florence Mills, in September 1926. It was an enthusiasm he shared with his friends, the composers Constant Lambert and William Walton and the conductor Hyam Greenbaum. Hughes taught himself double bass and formed his own jazz group in 1930. The group was one of the earliest artists signed to Decca Records in England, and over 30 sessions were recorded between 1930 and 1933. Originally billed as Spike Hughes and his Decca-Dents, he reportedly did not like the name and after three sessions it was changed either to "his Dance Orchestra" or "his Three Blind Mice" for smaller sessions. These records were used as the basis for the "hastily assembled" jazz ballet High Yellow, put on by the Camargo Society at the Savoy Theatre in London, June 1932. Choreography for the ballet was by Frederick Ashton and Buddy Bradley. The title comes from the once widely used, now discredited term high yellow, describing mixed black and white ancestry.
From 1931 Hughes played regularly with the Jack Hylton Band. But his jazz recording career culminated in 1933 with his visit to New York, where he arranged three historic recording sessions involving members of Benny Carter's and Luis Russell's orchestras with Coleman Hawkins and Henry "Red" Allen from Fletcher Henderson's band. These fourteen sides were mostly Hughes' own compositions.
Though most were not released in America at the time, they have come to be regarded as classics and are still available on CD. Some of his jazz pieces show the influence of Irish folk melodies and his father Herbert Hughes. Others are clearly inspired by the work of Duke Ellington. Hughes, along with Constant Lambert, met and socialised with Ellington when he was in London in 1933.

Later career

After the New York recordings, Hughes gave up performing jazz. He orchestrated and conducted shows for C B Cochran and wrote influential jazz reviews for Melody Maker, The Daily Herald and The Times. He wrote radio plays with his own musical scores for the BBC, such as Nikki Makes News. And he renewed his interest in opera and classical music, through writing and broadcasting, conducting the BBC Theatre Orchestra, and through composing his own operas, including Cinderella and St Patrick's Day for BBC Television, as well as a musical, Frankie and Johnny, televised in 1950.
As a writer, regular BBC broadcaster and critic his subjects also included food and travel. The two volumes of autobiography are particularly valuable for the information they include on his contemporaries. In between the more serious works, Hughes produced his series of "The Art of Coarse...." studies which opened with The Art of Coarse Cricket in 1954 and was followed over the years by ...Coarse Travel, ...Gardening, ...Bridge, ...Cookery and ..Entertaining. The series was named as a play on coarse fishing; other later Coarse books were written by Michael Green.

Personal life

Hughes married Margery Pargeter in 1931 but the marriage ended in divorce, as did his second, to Barbara Mcfadyean in 1945. He married his third wife Charmain in 1955, and they moved from London to a 17th-century farmhouse at Ringmer, Sussex, near Glynde, where they lived until his death in 1987. She survived him and died in 2003. He had been one of the first music critics to visit the early performances at Glyndebourne Festival Opera in 1934, and made many contributions to Glyndebourne, including writing programme notes, providing subtitles for television performances, and publishing the first history of Glyndebourne Opera in 1965.

Compositions