Flying Down to Queensway
Alexandra Artley steps out at the Thirties Society Ball and test-drives the dance band of the Nineties
The Spectator - 25 November 1989
(Excerpt from full article)

The Porchester Hall, Queensway (built in 1925-27 by the not very well-known H. Sheppard) looks like a rather grand municipal wash-house. Close to a huge red neon sign saying, 'Turkish Baths', a Bugatti was parked and people streamed in, glittering like lizards, for the first Thirties Society Ball. The Thirties Society was founded in 1979 by Marcus Binney, Bevis Hillier and Clive Aslet for the protection of British architecture and design after 1914...

...The Piccadilly Dance Orchestra and its leader Michael Law much resemble Carroll Gibbons and the Savoy Hotel Orpheans (whose style superseded in Britain by American swing bands during the war). Their libidinous elegance can be heard, for example, in the rumba Carioca on their first LP, Let Yourself Go which has already received a considerable amount of air play on BBC Radio 2. Sitting quietly and modestly in a long-sleeved black dress was the band's girl vocalist, Janice Day. Her great strength is the simple English unaffected way she approaches the pre-war tunes. Unlike the usual rather forced show-biz singers, she just stands and sweetly delivers the song...

...A few hours before, like the other members of the band, Michael Law had been on stage in white tie and a red carnation singing Jeepers Creepers in a calm light baritone. This morning he had just got up and we drank tea. Showing me a photograph album of roles he had sung while at the Royal College of Music opera school, he put down his fondness for pre-war light music to having been brought up in Kenya during the Sixties - far away from the powerful influence of the Beatles. His father was a judge in the colonial service and 'whenever we had a house with a piano, he played and sang Stormy Weather.'

As a child Michael Law hoarded 78rpm records as his parents friends ditched them in favour of new-fangled LPs. Eventually a wind-up gramophone also came his way. 'One time we broke down on safari in Tsavo game park but luckily I had the gramophone with me.' He just played records 'until someone eventually came and got us'. When he eventually studied music at Cambridge, his supervisor was the composer, Robin Holloway (who lived in 'an art deco house full of chrome'). Holloway supported him in 1981 against those who academically opposed his plan to do a dissertation on Duke Ellington.

If anyone had intended to start a campaigning for real dance music, the Piccadilly Dance Orchestra has already beaten them to it. As his big Fifties radiogram hummed to life before sonorously giving us These Foolish Things Michael Law explained that his was a real orchestra and not an all-purpose nostalgia band. Depending on the acoustics of the venue, it does not use amplification (except for the singers) and 'phrases the music properly with the discipline of a classical orchestra'. That evening he set off at 5am to set up the band for a private party at the Savoy, and back home.

I have been dancing ever since.

Alexandra Artley
The Spectator - 25 November 1989