Last week a living legend of the London gay scene remembered growing up in East London as a girl who wanted to be a boy. This week she talks about her long career as an entrepreneur and “music presenter”. (Don’t call her a DJ). David McGillivray met the shy and retiring, the fierce and feisty, the one and only Jo Purvis…
At some point before World War II, a little girl called Josephine, who played soldiers with the boys, decided that in future she wanted to be called Jo. The woman who was to go on to host London’s inimitable Tea Dances and Time Warp Discos began putting on shows when she was still at school.
“There’s a pub called the Princess Alice on the corner of Commercial Street and Wentworth Street”, she recalls. (It’s still there). “The kid whose parents had it used to go to my school. So when we finished school we used to go up the stairs to the big pool hall they had and we’d perform.
“I used to direct the other kids in shows and even write little songs for ‘em and they’d stand on the billiard table. And you know Bloom’s salt beef? Well, Sylvie Bloom, who died last year, she was my schoolmate and she and I used to stand on the door taking money.”
Jo was also underage when she began going to gay bars. “We were all…what can I say…?” Jo begins. Outsiders? “Yeah, I suppose so, black, gay, prostitutes, it was lovely. It was such a mixed scene, not like today, everything segregated. This lady of the night came up to me and said, ‘Every time I look at you, you look more like a boy.’
“And I said, ‘Yeah, only one mistake.’ She said, ‘Oh, you wouldn’t want that. You’d be a man!’ But that’s exactly what Jo did want. She and her friend Bobby, whose real name was Doris, couldn’t understand why the queer scene, which was so welcoming, couldn’t deal with the beginnings of the trans society.
Jo wanted a medical career. But her father wasn’t having any of that. “When my father told me I couldn’t be a doctor, I said, ‘Right, that’s it, I’m leaving school right now.” She was about 14½. She became an office boy for a succession of firms, but settled in the travel business.
Secret London gay pubs at the time included the Fitzroy Tavern, Charlotte Street; the Green Man, Riding House Street; and (demolished long ago) the Pier Hotel, Chelsea. Jo decided she’d host a queer night herself. “I was at Thomas Cook’s, the travel agent, and I decided that I’d have a one nighter at a pub called the Load of Hay [now The Hill] in Chalk Farm. I had it on a Saturday night.”
She booked a three piece band and sold tickets at half a crown (7½p) each. “I think I found some of the people down the Gateways, which in those days was mixed. It wasn’t just dykey Doras. I got a lot of boys who worked in the travel business because it was full of pooftahs.
The night went very well but, because you had to go through the pub to get to our room, the manager came up to me afterwards and said, ‘You can’t have this place any more.’ I think his customers were looking at the people coming in. They looked a bit dodgy, especially the young men.” Jo wasn’t discouraged and found other venues for her one-nighters.
At some point in the 1950s, Jo emigrated to Canada. “Nobody’s interested in when I went to Canada”, she declares. But it was here she got together with Eileen, who was to be her partner for the next forty years. When they returned to London in the 1960s, the gay scene had grown and homosexuality was about to be partially decriminalised.
Jo’s old mates wanted her to “have another do.” Jo remembers how she began one of her most famous nights at the Rehearsal Club, Archer Street (which would become Barcode Soho, now Archer Street Bar). “This lady of the night said to me, ‘I go to this club called the Rehearsal and my friend Harry, who’s got it, isn’t doing all that well. I’m sure he’d like you to have a night down there.’
“I met Harry, nice Jewish gentleman, and he said, ‘The only night I can give you is Sunday.’ I’d always had Saturdays, but I asked around and people said it don’t matter, as long as we can get a drink.”
The night opened on 2nd July, 1967. “It was brilliant”, Jo says. One night a week became three, then seven. Jo had a pianist who played for free beer and a juke box that mostly played Blue Beat because a lot of the clientele was black.
Jo went to a gay bar in Paris and found drag queens waiting the tables and then singing a song. She told her friend Nigel that she wanted to try this at the Rehearsal. “He said, ‘I’ll do that.’ This was a boy whose only experience of music was playing the organ on a Sunday at his local church. He was so uncamp it was pathetic. But he was willing to learn.
“Eileen brought him in a frock and someone else loaned him a wig. He was diabolical. He couldn’t balance on the high heels, he had absolutely no voice, but he was so unique they loved it.” (At the time one of the only other drag acts in the West End was Danny la Rue).
When the Rehearsal Club closed in the 1970s, Jo moved to the Vortex in Victoria, Spats in Oxford Street and too many other venues to list. Then, in the 1980s, Jack Dobson, boss of an ancient gay bar, the A&B, told Jo that he was being slung out because of redevelopment. Jo joined him in a couple of other enterprises before they fetched up at Stallions behind the Astoria. (Both buildings and many others were demolished to make way for the new Tottenham Court Road tube station).
“Jack said, ‘If we opened in the afternoon when the bars are closed, we could serve tea and cake and have a tea dance. He got this acid DJ banging away at 5 o’clock in the afternoon with all the lights flashing and people were coming in saying, ‘This isn’t right for a Sunday afternoon.’ Jack said, ‘Haven’t you got any records from the juke box at the Rehearsal?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, I expect I have.’ So I brought in some Dusty, Manhattan Transfer, Bassey. He kept playing them over and over.”
To add a little variety, Jo went to a record shop and bought some LPs of dance bands. Then one day Jack said, “I’ve got to go and get some change. You take over.” Jo protested that she didn’t know how to operate a record deck. But she had no choice. She learned on the job how to be a “music presenter.” (She says she’s not a DJ because she doesn’t mix.
“I just put them on like David Jacobs.”) From then onwards (she thinks it was about 1983) Jo played her own eclectic choice of music – everything from military bands to show tunes with a bit of Dockyard Doris and Regina Fong thrown in – at her own tea dances. She admits she didn’t know one dance from another.
“These old queens used to say, ‘Put on a waltz’ and I’d go, ‘Right, which is the waltz?’ I used to get a crowd come down from Speakers’ Corner, all those radical little uniboys. The old queens would say to them, ‘Shall I show you how to tango?’ The old queens had little boys in their arms, which they couldn’t get anywhere else, and the little boys were ever so grateful to be taught to dance.”
It was a winning formula. Jo took it to many other bars including the Paradise, Islington; The Bell, King’s Cross; and, maybe most successfully, BJ’s White Swan. Jo says she was happiest when she was here. But only before the movie Strictly Ballroom arrived.
Subsequently the Sunday ballroom class was split by warring factions – the strict tempo fans who took everything very seriously and the fun lovers who wanted Jo to play ‘Go West’. When Eileen became ill, Jo decided to call it a day. (The White Swan’s “Strictly Sunday” continues under Gary Malden).
Jo has since retired, returned, retired, returned and so on. “I don’t wanna go on forever”, she snarls. Why? “’Cause me feet ache, me back aches and I can’t smoke.” She insists she works only for the money “because then I can buy my starving cat a tin of Whiskas.”
But, as we know from last week, this is “Rosie Bothways” talking. Our interview takes place at the Joiner’s Arms, where she’s still to be found the first Sunday of every month. Her old friend Steve (they met at the Rehearsal) mentions how often younger people stop and listen to one of Jo’s tracks, then want to know what it is.
“Yeah, I do get quite a bit of that”, Jo admits with quiet pride. The next minute she changes again. “I don’t want some poxy little fucker reading QX to know about my aches and pains!” she barks. And we wouldn’t have Jo Purvis any other way.
Jo Purvis is at the Joiner’s Arms, 116-118 Hackney Road, E2 from 7-11pm on 7th August
