Musical moments BY TOM HENSHAW
Ian Carfrae is a well-known character in the Algarve. He and his wife Karen set up Linens-etc and both have been part of the theatre group, the Algarveans for many years. Here Ian, who was the musical director for Pollen, one of the groups big hits, explains that music has always been centre stage.
Ian Carfrae has spent his lifetime immersed in music. His first memories are of listening to his mum’s 78s of Fats Waller and the like. Influenced by his elder brother Ian started piano lessons at the age of five. He then joined the local church choir and dutifully went to Sunday school. His parents were delighted as his Dad could now play football with the Petts Wood team, which he had formed and still exists today, and Mum could go to rifle practise with the Home Guard. At Bromley Grammar School in the 1950s Ian became besotted by Trad Jazz and the emerging Skiffle music of Lonnie Donegan. He wanted a guitar and he got one! A clarinet arrived on his 14th birthday and the life of music had really begun, the family realised he was serious. In the following five years he also acquired a saxophone and a flute and was playing two or three nights a week in London jazz clubs while working in plastics research at the Marley Tile Company from which he was eventually sacked for ‘missing’ the odd day or two, wonder why? In 1968 fortune and talent led to Ian being offered the chance to join the New Vaudeville Band and in February 1969 he emigrated with the band to Vancouver in Canada after their big hits including Winchester Cathedral. Towards the end of 1970 the band was offered a starring role in a show at the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas called Funny Farm, based loosely on The Muppet Show, headed up by American comic Rip Taylor and including seven topless dancers - life was good. The show opened New Years Day 1971 and ran three shows a night, six nights a week for 52 weeks, phew! During Ian’s three years abroad he met many of his idols including people like Buddy Rich, Little Richard and Cannonball Adderley and saw many more performing. At this point the band split amicably with three members wanting to pursue other ventures in the USA and the other three, including Ian, returned to the UK to continue as the New Vaudeville Band with some new members. The band was soon working all the top cabaret clubs plus TV appearances and tours across Europe, the Middle East and even entertaining the British Troops in The Falkland Islands.
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By the early 1980s the cabaret clubs were struggling with the effects of the drink-driving laws and the advent of home videos plus a couple of financial recessions so in 1987, now with two young children, Ian decided to have more family time and try new ventures nearer home. He returned to his first love jazz, playing with a local dixieland band and a 17-piece big band for which he also composed and did arrangements. He also appeared in minor roles for several episodes of the TV series Lovejoy and The Chief and in between time formed his own 10-piece band called Oo-Boop-I-Do. By 1991 his first marriage had ended and Ian met Karen in a jazz pub, where else? Soon they were a couple and it was time to get ‘a proper job’, as his mother used to say. He joined the Bedfordshire Music Service as a peripatetic woodwind teacher and also became the director of the Bedfordshire Youth Jazz Orchestra. “I remember this time with great fondness,” said Ian “the students inspired me with their enthusiasm”. However the idea of writing a musical was becoming ever stronger so with some sadness he resigned from teaching and turned to a friend in the USA for help with the plot and dialogue.
Then Ian and Karen moved in 2003 to Portugal and they set up a villa management company which developed into Linen-etc, as you may have read in our March issue. Ian immediately joined the Good Time Jazz band and after about a year persuaded Karen to be their vocalist. In 2004 he also joined Hugo Alves’ Orchestra de Jazz de Lagos as lead sax and soon after reformed his 1920’s band Oo-Boop-I-Do. Then in 2008 this all suddenly stopped as Ian had a major operation on his jaw and was not sure if he would be able to continue playing. This coincided with the world financial crash which had an adverse effect on the number of venues for musicians and the amount they were paid. Thankfully it was around this time Linen-etc took off and within a year Ian was playing again in the duo Nostalgia with Karen and in 2010 they both joined The Algarveans and performed in the musical Honk. It was at this time Ian happened to mention to director Chris Winstanley that he’d written a musical. So long story short, Pollen: The Musical was performed in 2016 receiving brilliant reviews. Is there another musical being planned? Ian says “We’ll have to wait and see”.