Woolf Phillips
In the pop music of the 1940s, a decade before Elvis shook everything up, it was the big bands who reigned supreme. Presentation was as important as tip-top musicianship, with American-style gloss and glitz and slick presentation. But the reality was closer to home – most of the bands were led by East End men, most of them first and second generation Jewish immigrants.
Geraldo, Ambrose and Joe Loss all shared the background, as did the Phillips brothers.
Sid Phillips became a successful band leader. In many of the forties bands ‘leader’ meant just that – some of the greatest were non-musicians who had a slick way with waving a baton. But his brother Woolf, who died this summer aged 84, was much more than that, his musical skills stretching to composition and beyond.
But it could have been very different if Woolf had pursued his first love, cricket. The Phillipses were a musical family, and all four brothers had orchestral careers. But for much of his school career, at the Central Foundation School in Mile End, Woolf considered taking up sport professionally.
Sid would take his cricket-fanatic little brother for lessons at the Aubrey Faulkner cricket school. And so good was the young Woolf, he was offered a contract to play for Lancashire. Regretfully, he decided that cricket offered (at best) a dozen or so poorly paid years work. The game would be a lifetime love, but music became his business.
At 14 he went to work for music publishers Campbell Connolly –it was the publishers who ran the business in those days. He rose to become a staff arranger while still in his teens, and Sid, now an arranger for Ambrose, taught him how to orchestrate. Woolf composed some music of his own, sent it to Ambrose, and was now a recorded composer.
He was playing too. At just 13 he had played his first gig - blowing playing tenor sax in a band working a one-night stand at Lord Rothschild’s home.
Musician’s Union rules meant no visiting orchestras, so when Duke Ellington or Benny Goodman visited they had to use a British band – invariably they played the Palladium and the band at the back was Phillips’s.
As conductor at the London Palladium, his band were to back the new generation of young American talent who came to play London too. Judy Garland and Sammy Davis Jr would top the bill, and Frank Sinatra claimed Phillips was the best conductor he’d worked with.
Phillips became a writer-arranger for big bands. He would run rehearsals for the Joe Loss and Harry Roy orchestras, and often conduct on their radio shows.
And, still in his teens, he was playing for the king of them all, Ambrose.
World War II interrupted but hardly disrupted Woolf’s meteoric career. For the duration, he played with the Royal Army Medical Corps band, in Africa and the Middle East. By 1945 he was the band’s musical director. Even when he was home on leave he was playing, doing gigs and making recordings with Harry Roy, and now playing the trombone rather than the sax.
Woolf was demobbed with a military and musical career behind him, and still only in his mid-twenties. He remembered his delight at being approached by Irving Berlin after one radio show of the time. ‘I must congratulate you, sir,’ said the great composer. ‘He called me sir,’ recalled a dazed Woolf. ‘I was only 25!’
Now began a hectically busy career. His RAMC band provided backing for the Pathe News cinema newsreels. He worked with Ambrose and Geraldo. And he fronted the Skyrockets, HMV’s much-recorded band, featuring a young Johnny Dankworth. He worked as a variety conductor, supporting the last performances of Max Miller and George Formby. And after the Palladium each night, he would head for chic West End nightspot, the Pigalle, and front his own band. He composed for TV too, writing the theme music for What’s My Line?.
Appearances in the movies followed too. He fronted the Skyrockets as they played Compliments Will Get You Nowhere, in the 1949 British movie Vote For Huggett, starring that other showbiz East Ender Jack Warner.
Then, in 1966, his friend Donald O’Connor, co-star of Singin’ In The Rain, asked him to come and work with him in California. Woolf and wife Sylvia settled in Camarillo, and he became an accompanist and arranger to stars including Pat Boone, Shirley Bassey, and East Ender turned Hollywood star Anthony Newley.
Phillips went on to become the conductor of the Camarillo Symphony Orchestra and – just as important - the captain of the California Cricket Association.
Woolf Phillips, band leader, born January 5 1919; died July 11 2003