Paul McDowell
Artist, actor, writer and free spirit who found fame as the vocalist of the Temperance Seven
PAUL McDOWELL, who has died aged 84, was, variously, a painter, pop singer, actor, left luggage office attendant, thriller writer and a teacher of Tai Chi at a “holistic” resort in Greece; he was, however, best known as “Whispering” Paul McDowell, the lead singer and co-founder of the Temperance Seven. As he recalled in his memoir All
Those Lives (2014), the band began life in the mid-1950s as an “Art School Dadaist lark” when he and Phil Harrison, fellow students at Chelsea School of Art, formed Paul McDowell and his Gentlemen Ravers, with Harrison on banjo, McDowell on trombone and, initially, Douglas Grey (of the Alberts comedy act) on sousaphone.
Joined by a motley collection of other musicians of varying talent, the Temperance Seven, as they became known (though there were usually nine of them), specialised in deadpan renditions of British 1920s-style trad jazz and, inspired by the surrealism of the Goons and the Alberts, “behaved in the same silly arse manner as those who had employed people like my mother as their maidservants,” as McDowell put it.
Dressed in Victorian or Edwardian clothes bought from Mr Charles Marine Stores on the Fulham Road, they maintained an illusion of aloof detachment, reminiscent, according to one critic, of a time when “gentlemen wore spats, ladies carried parasols, England won at cricket and people listened to the words”.
Off stage, too, band members, McDowell recalled, lived in a world fashioned by a “joyously surreal” mix of the Victorian era and that of the 1920s and 1930s. “We raced old cars... across rainy late night streets... taunting each other at traffic lights with many a ‘yaroo, you rotters’.”
McDowell was soon sacked as not being a good enough trombonist, but was immediately invited back as the band’s singer. To give the illusion of a tinny 78 rpm shellac played on a windup gramophone, he delivered his semi-spoken vocals through a megaphone in the clipped but languid accents of 1920s Received Pronunciation.
A big break came when the Temperance Seven attracted the attention of George Martin, then the recording manager of the Goons. In March 1961, EMI’s Parlophone label issued featuring McDowell’s elegant vocals. After the single was featured on the BBC’s (the group appearing with hair slicked back, impeccably dressed in frock coats and smoking jackets), it entered the charts, reaching No 1 in late May. It was the first No 1 Martin ever produced. Their next single, got to No 4.
The band played at a Royal Command Performance, topped the bill with Shirley Bassey for a season at the London Palladium, and went on tour, while McDowell “put in some serious work on destroying my marriage, committing a series of infidelities with women far less beautiful than my wife”. In the mid1960s he left the group to pursue a career as an actor and was replaced by Allan Moody Mitchell, though the band effectively broke up in 1968.
Paul McDowell was born in London on August 15 1931. His early life was spent moving around rented flats in Fulham as his father was out of work and his mother was a cleaner. She was a country girl who had been in service but had to leave her village in disgrace after becoming pregnant. Her illegitimate son, Paul’s half brother, would die at Dunkirk.
McDowell attended many different primary schools both in London during the Blitz and in the country as an evacuee, followed by secondary education at Bolt Court Technical School, off Fleet Street. He left aged 15 to do a variety of jobs including road sweeping and taking messages to the Polish shipping line.
During two years’ National Service on guard duty at the RAF station in Wallingford, Oxfordshire, in the late 1940s, McDowell flirted with Marxism, anarchism and Dadaism, became involved in amateur dramatics and often found himself “on a charge”, including, on one occasion, for inciting mutiny after telling a “powercrazed young corporal” to “f--- off ”. By “using the posh voice I had so recently cultivated”, however, and the skills learned in the station’s amateur dramatic society, he usually managed to get off.
Back in London, McDowell took a variety of jobs, including working in the left luggage office at Victoria Station. But he soon concluded that the best way to attract girls was to be a painter, “standing alone in the kitchen at parties, looking moody”.
So he set himself up as a portraitist, exhibiting his wares on park railings and winning a few commissions for fees that barely covered the cost of his materials, before studying at Chelsea School of Art. The girls he attracted into his late-night kitchens, however, only seemed to want “long, sad conversations”.
He recalled that when his father died of emphysema at around this time, “my mother told me not to worry about going to Hell. It was right here on Earth. I was wearing my existentialist rope-soled sandals at the time and wondered what Jean Paul Sartre would have made of her statement.”
During his time with the Temperance Seven, McDowell and a friend wrote and recorded comedy sketches which they sent to the BBC, earning a slot on the weekly Home Service programme Monday Night at
Home. Thereafter, and after leaving the band, McDowell became an actorwriter at the Establishment Club and went on to supply sketches for shows including The Two Ronnies and The
Frost Report, and for Sheila Hancock. In the early 1970s he briefly revived his musical career as co-founder, with Chris Pye and Jules Burns, of the pop group Guggenheim which released an eponymous album in 1972. It was not a big seller. During a period in the United States he became a member of the improvisational comedy enterprise, the Second City, and performed in satirical shows with Robin Grove-White.
From the 1970s onwards he developed his career as an actor, appearing on British television in series such as Porridge (as Mr Collinson, a bad-tempered prison officer), Only Fools and Horses, Dave Allen at Large, EastEnders, The Good Life, The Two of Us and Tales of the Unexpected. In Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years (ITV, 1981), he was Churchill’s butler.
His film credits included small parts in The Thirty Nine Steps (1978) and National Lampoon’s European
Vacation (1985). His last film was the cult horror Chemical Wedding (2008), directed by the Monty Python editor, Julian Doyle, and starring Simon Callow as occultist Aleister Crowley, in which McDowell played Symonds, an old associate of Crowley’s. One review described the film as a “homage to Hammer and early 1970s Brit horrorfantasy in general: that is to say, cheap”.
As well as a memoir, McDowell wrote a thriller, Dope Opera, which, according to the publisher’s blurb, was due to be filmed by Julian Doyle in a production starring Bruce Dickinson, of Iron Maiden, “but after three weeks’ shooting the investor – out of his head on crack cocaine – killed himself, travelling 200 mph on a wet night road in Essex. The resulting 30 minutes of film is available through Amazon.”
Aged 70, McDowell became a Tai Chi teacher at a Greek holiday resort.
Looking back on his life in 2014 McDowell reflected on “the many different people I had been in my lifetime and how they were all strangers to me now. And I probably wouldn’t like any of them.”
After two short-lived early marriages, in 1974 he married his third wife, Trisha, who survives him with their son and daughter and two daughters from his earlier marriages. Paul McDowell, born August 15 1931, died May 2 2016