Jimmy became half of a great ‘pop music’ duo

Mar 4 2008 by Dan O'Neill, South Wales Echo

LAST year we looked back at the life and times of a very fine Greek-born tenor who settled in Cardiff, before becoming a star of English opera, acclaimed by critics and audiences alike.

Although extravagantly praised by no less a legend than Beniamino Gigli, Tano Ferendinos renounced opera and went to work in the family’s shipping business down in the docks.

Well, you can rely on Echo readers and quite a few remembered Tano, one even recalling a meeting with him in Greece and an invitation to dinner at the family home years after his “disappearance”.

Bill Newby, a reader from Penarth, remembers another Cardiff singer of Greek descent, another whose family ran a shipping business in the docks. And wonders who else recalls him. Jimmy Mesene (sometimes spelled Messeni or Masene), another, like Tano, was a star, another who dropped out of sight.

Yet before the war he teamed up with a true superstar, the peerless Al Bowlly, still considered Britain’s greatest-ever band singer, a pop star before the word “pop” entered the language, a man who went to America and knocked the great Bing Crosby off top spot.

So let’s take a trip down Memory Lane with Jimmy Mesene in the week when he would have celebrated his 100th birthday.

He was born in Cardiff on March 6, 1908, his father John was a ship’s chandler who sent him off to Greece at the age of 15 to learn the business.

He also went to university (most sources say Taunton) where he studied either engineering or languages. No-one seems to know which but as he was supposed to speak seven languages it seems engineering was a no-no.

Sadly, the Great Depression meant the end of the family business and Jimmy, already a maestro on guitar, became a professional musician who would play not only with Bowlly but with the big name bands of the day before starting his own.

Jimmy’s pro career took off when he sang with Nat Gonella and his Georgians, still frequent performers on radio “nostalgia” shows, and he was with Nat when they made a 1936 movie, Variety Parade.

He also worked with Joe Loss and other famous names in that celebrated Big Band era like George Glover and Teddy Joyce – the 1935 film he was in with the Joyce orchestra starred Will Hay and in those days you didn’t get any bigger than that.

But Jimmy’s real claim to musical immortality came when he teamed up with Al Bowlly in the first year of the war.

Bowlly was the Robbie Williams/Justin Timberlake of his time, and then some.

He also had a Greek father so maybe that was what made them such a great double act. They were billed as “The Radio Stars with Two Guitars” and their recordings and shows were big sellers offering such songs as Make Love With a Guitar to I Haven’t Time to Be a Millionaire (not true in Bowlly’s case).

They sang separately on stage, did duets, exchanged cross talk in Hope-Crosby style and seemed destined for a long, long partnership.

But on April 17, 1941, Al Bowlly died when a landmine exploded outside the London block of flats where he lived.

Besides his work with Jimmy he left a legacy of more than 600 songs recorded between 1926 and his death. Jimmy had married his first wife Emily Gilbert in March, 1934, but they broke up and in 1943 he married Hilda Martin, listed on the marriage certificate as “the divorced husband of Emily Mesene, occupation band leader and composer”.

Composer? Yes, but his song-writing credits are difficult to trace because of the huge number of pen names he used.

And he used ’em, some said, to avoid handing over any of his royalties to that first wife.

She, though, clearly still with a soft spot for the lad, reckoned he was simply diddling the taxman.

Jimmy and Hilda left Britain in September, 1947 and got to Port Arthur, Texas, in October.

There’s some evidence that they stayed with Perry Como, one of the truly great recording stars of the time, but because of work permit problems they moved on to Canada.

We don’t know whether or not Jimmy worked as a musician after settling in Montreal.

He died in that city in 1969 aged 61. Hilda died three years later.