My mother played the piano. She liked old blues music, gospel, classical, as did my father. Growing up in the 1970s, I wasn’t into the charts. My dad would hear me listening to Fats Domino and Amos Milburn and Chuck Berry and steer me into Friedrich Gulda, the Austrian abstract expressionist concert pianist. If you were fortunate enough to have had parents or teachers who opened your eyes, like mine, you can open your own eyes later in life.
Music and art are so important in education because they make people happy. Give people something they’ll love for their whole lives.
My uncle played boogie-woogie piano – pronounced with long “oos” in his south London accent. I thought it was the most exciting thing I’d ever heard. I started playing when I was seven. I didn’t realise it was going to be my lifetime passion.
I wasn’t expelled from school. The exact wording was “invited not to come back”. I felt I’d benefited enough from school once I had learned from my very wonderful, elderly music teacher, Mr Pixley, in his tweed jacket and perfectly shined shoes.
I was the only person in my year at my big comprehensive school to pick music to study. Back then, if you said you were interested in music, they’d say: “Have you thought about joining the army?” I was playing pub shows and getting £10 a night, thinking, “We don’t need this school business.” I was lucky, which you need to be in music. Or I’d have probably have had to join the Grenadier Guards.
I took the advice of Rod Stewart, who’s got an enormous one. He said, put your train-set in the biggest room available and it’ll bring you great happiness. And he was right. Starting small, I realised I could build a little London, a little Europe, a little Eurostar. Now it goes up either side of the attic in a giant U-shape and is about 100ft in total.
Whether I’m on stage or in the dressing room or in a session studio or just at home on my own, I turn to the piano, my lifelong friend. The barriers between cultures and countries… music overcomes them all. If you want to find out about a country, listen to what the artists and the musicians have to say.
We recently celebrated 30 years of Later… I’ve had 65 years of being Jools, so think what it’s been like for me – every morning in the mirror: there he is again. I just bumble along, making it up – I take that back – improvising with great skill. But at some point somebody is going to say, “It’s really expensive to make this programme, considering the number of viewers it gets.” Only the BBC could make a show like it. It entertains, educates, informs, lets nations speak peace to others. Once I’m dead, there won’t be anything like it.
Jools Holland’s latest album, Pianola Piano & Friends, is out now
