On our very first day working together, Mick Mulligan and I drove out of London on the Great West Road past the Hoover Building. I asked him what it was; he told me and I said, "All that to suck up shit". It was this that persuaded him to make his permanent job offer.
On another occasion I recall entering his reassuringly sock-scented room, with its unsteady piles of 78rpm records; a wind-up gramophone was playing Louis Armstrong's Potato Head Blues and I was smeared with purple impetigo ointment. "What a lecherous looking bastard," he said.
Because Mick always used working-class slang, people may think he had a cockney accent. Not at all, it was pure Merchant Taylors', where he had worked hard and excelled at sport, the school's measure of success. Then, after the war, his father, the prosperous boss of a wine merchant's, and his older brother, were killed in a plane crash.
Mick had a seat on the board but the trauma of the accident transformed him into a boozer, skirt-chaser and ne'er do well - the sort of man mothers warned their daughters against. But he was also amazingly good-looking and persuasive, and rebellious young girls flung themselves at him, despite his nicotine-stained fingers and dishevelled appearance. When a beautiful and famous woman journalist was asked why she fell for Mick, she explained that it was because he was so "deliciously grubby". Apparently, he once pissed in her shoe, not realising it had a peep-toe.
But at his best he was also a fine musician, and a complex and contradictory human being whom I have loved for 50 years. What follows are but film clips of typical moments.
Respectable suicide: At the family wine company, he proved himself so unreliable that he was gradually squeezed out with a small annual allowance, nothing like enough to support him but sufficient to buy a large motorcar and form the semi-pro Mick Mulligan Magnolia Jazz Band. He turned to a lifelong enthusiasm for beer, sometimes supplemented with spirits, and an insatiable appetite for girls. I didn't hesitate to join him. When I introduced him to my wife, Diana, he told me, "You've got a good one there," and meant it, adding "not much happening on the tit scene though." Diana's response was: "Not your problem, cock." Diana always maintained Mick liked women. As he referred to them as "it", you could have fooled me.
Mulligan's luck: My mother was organising a jazz concert in the Liverpool stadium, and insisted we appeared. The two promoters had never heard of us but agreed reluctantly, as long as we went on first, on the smaller stage. Due to fog, the train was late, and since another "name group" didn't show up, we eventually appeared on the best spot and bought the house down. From then on, Liverpool promoters were at our feet, and Manchester soon followed.
Mick's rare bad luck: We often played the Metro, a tunnel basement in Soho, whose clientele were largely rather snooty French students. There was a girlfriend of mine who got up on the stage to say hello to Mick. Seeing this, and misinterpreting the whole thing, his beautiful and jealous wife climbed on the stage and walloped Mick with her handbag. "And she was," Mick said to me, "your scrubber."
Disaster: Once, we crashed over a bridge in Lincolnshire. None of us were killed, but our woman singer was on the danger list with broken glass stuck in her back. Her father, a south London barber, brought a court case and won her £100 a month for the rest of her or Mick's life. Mick was also ordered by the magistrate, who clearly preferred "honest crooks" to jazzmen, to repair the bridge. This put him in a financial pickle, but he came out alright, although with great and nervewracking difficulty.
The eagle shits tonight: This was a term used by Mick to indicate he was drawing out our meagre wages to pay us off, but he knew that we had borrowed so much during the previous period that we wouldn't know how much that was. I suspect part of the bridge and the singers' compensation were paid for by us.
Loyalty: Mick held great store by loyalty, and I was always intensely loyal to Mick. When our excellent but nervous clarinet player, Archie Semple, handed in his notice to join the king of north-west London, Freddie Randall - Freddie offered much more money I'm sure - I told Archie he was a shit.
Resignation: I resigned in the 1960s because I was in love with Diana, and becoming a successful journalist. Mick did nothing of the sort. He accepted all jobs and promised that I would be there. If I turned a job down down, he simply said I was ill.
He had bought an off-licence in Sussex but, of course, ran out of credit; a mutual friend told me there was only rum left in stock - and that they drank that out of plastic dog bowls. He was barred from many pubs for swearing and his bank manager was making threatening noises. Then two lawyers appeared, and told him that his father's wine business had been taken over and here was his share - £30,000. He took the cheque down to Barclays bank, and the manager who had been making threatening noises changed his tune. Mick said: "I'll have it in halfpennies."
The end: When I heard of Mick's death, I rang up the clarinetist Wally Fawkes, our contemporary. "Ah well, George," he said, with typical wisdom, "there goes our youth."