Jeremy Taylor

Jeremy Taylor (1937- ) [1] is an English-born teacher, guitarist, folk singer, songwriter and actor.

Biography

Born in Newbury. Taylor was educated at Newbury Grammar School from which he attained an open scholarship to Trinity College, Oxford, reading French and Italian. When he left England in 1959 to take up a teaching post in Johannesburg, his evenings were spent singing in coffee bars and writing short stories and plays. At the suggestion of painter Harold Rubin, Jeremy began to write songs and went on to compose Wait a Minim (see below). The show's success escalated following his debut record release 'Ag Pleez Daddy', which became a South African No. 1. When the review went on tour, he left his teaching job and for two years toured South Africa and Rhodesia and, when time permitted, undertook numerous late-night cabaret appearances. He went on to achieve world-wide recognition in a variety of guises ranging from becoming one of South Africa's most popular solo performers to successful concert partnerships with Spike Milligan with whom he spent much of 1974/1975 touring.

Work in the UK

Jeremy left Wait a Minim before it embarked on an American tour and for a short period taught English Language and Literature at Eton. His parting gesture for the pupils of Eton was a folk concert with Sydney Carter, which was recorded and released under the title of Live at Eton.

He took to the folk circuit full time, released an album Jeremy Taylor, His Songs and in 1968 made regular appearances on BBC 2's late night line-up. His songs and humour prompted Granada Television to feature him in At Last It's Friday, a weekly show based on topical news items. The shows were successful enough for ITV to commission a networked second series Psst. The best items from the two series were later combined and released on an album Jeremy Taylor, More Of His Songs. More television work followed; Anglia requested songs for their Survival documentary series; the BBC used songs for the Birds Eye View series and Granada used a composition called Campaign as a theme for a number of social investigatory programmes. Jeremy then secured his own ITV series Songs From The Two Brewers, regarded as a shop window for Britain's folk artists. Together with John Wells, he also wrote the theme to Joan Littlewood's long-running production Mrs Wilson's Diary.

Jeremy has made frequent return concert trips to South Africa but, on arrival in 1970, was refused entry and turned away at Johannesburg airport. Since then, however, he has kept his foot in Africa by touring Nairobi once a year where audiences, comments Jeremy, "are very sharp and always keep me on the boil".

Contribution to SA theatre, film, media and/or performance

Wait a Minim

Wait a Minim (1961) is a music revue co-authored by Taylor with Andrew Tracey and Paul Tracey. The piece started out as some songs the musicians had written for two musical reviews that played in Johannesburg and in Rhodesia in 1961. It was first performed in its final form at the Intimate Theatre in Johannesburg in 1962 and then toured the country for eleven months. 1962 saw Jeremy appearing in a second show Minim Bili (Zulu for Minim the second). The best items from the two shows were combined and the show, billed as Wait a Minim, moved to London, where it opened at the Fortune Theatre on April 9, 1964. The show then moved to Broadway, where it opened at the John Golden Theatre on 7 March 1966.

The cast album of Wait a Minim was released by Decca, during which time Jeremy, together with co-stars Paul and Andrew Tracy, made an album Always Something New Out of South Africa, a variety of musical styles intermingled with unusual African musical instruments.

For more information, see Wait a Minim

As actor

He starred in Robert Hewett’s Gulls which Keith Grenville directed in 1987/1988. He starred in Harold Brooke and Kay Bannerman’s The Earl and the Pussycat at the Leonard Rayne in 1992.

His shows

1967: Presented together with Russ Conway and the American crooner Dick Haymes by Pieter Toerien and Basil Rubin at the Civic Theatre.

1979: Back in Town presented by Des and Dawn Lindberg at the Arena.

1980: Go for the Gap was performed at the Baxter Concert Hall.

1982: Stoep to Konka (with Sandra Prinsloo) at the Baxter Concert Hall

1983: Stuff was performed at the Baxter Concert Hall and at the Arena.

1984: Stuff presented by Roger Leclercq at the Siegfried Mynhardt Theatre until a fire destroyed the venue and the show was moved to a restaurant next door and then the Intimate.

His albums

• Jeremy Taylor (1961) (which proved an outright success in spite of being banned by the South African Broadcasting Corporation)
• Piece of Ground (1972)
• An Adult Entertainment - Spike Milligan And Jeremy Taylor Live At Cambridge (1974)
• Jobsworth
• Come to Blackpool
• Done at a Flash
• Live at the Vic
• Live at the Festival of Perth

Censorship in South Africa

Jeremy Taylor authored caustic songs that made fun of the South African suburban way of life; he enacted them with counterfeited accents and underlined his texts by making funny faces; his “The Ballad of the Southern Suburbs” (1961) was banned by the SABC because it included slang and mixed Afrikaans and English, and “Northern Side of Town” (1962) was banned as “insulting to the Afrikaner”.

Sources

Programme notes of Taylor's show Go for the Gap in 1980.

Tucker, 1997

Brian Barrow and Yvonne Williams-Short (eds.). 1988. Theatre Alive! The Baxter Story 1977-1987. Cape Town: The Baxter Theatre.

Denis-Constant Martin. 2013. Sounding the Cape Music, Identity and Politics in South Africa. African Minds.

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