Longtime Ago People
In a world where family connections shape us, stories bridge generations. Many of us carry cherished memories of those who touched our lives, which I think deserve to be shared.
Each episode I hope will feature guests recounting touching, funny, and inspiring memories, celebrating the impact these individuals had on their lives. I aim to beautifully remember loved ones, offering listeners nostalgia, warmth, and connection.
I am looking for people to reflect on the impact of these relationships.
Longtime Ago People
Father of Jazz: A Son's Complicated Legacy
Bill McGuffie - Moray 1957
father/son
What happens when musical brilliance collides with the complexities of fatherhood? In this episode, I speak with Moray McGuffie about his father Bill—a Scottish piano prodigy whose life was as dazzling as it was difficult.
Bill’s story begins with a jaw-dropping moment: stepping in at age twelve to play with a professional band, sight unseen. Despite losing a finger to gangrene, he became one of the world’s top jazz pianists, composing for film and television—including Doctor Who with Peter Cushing—and performing alongside icons like Bing Crosby and Bob Hope. Their home was a revolving door of celebrities, from June Whitfield to Monty Python regulars.
But behind the glamour was a more tangled reality. Moray opens up about his father’s struggles with alcohol, erratic behaviour, and the decade-long estrangement that preceded Bill’s death in 1987. It’s a story laced with tenderness: music scribbled on cigarette packets, a trombone bought to nurture his son’s talent, and the enduring advice—“Be yourself.”
This conversation is a reminder that even flawed relationships leave lasting imprints. Moray’s words—“If anyone’s listening, sort it out if you can, because it hurts”—echo with quiet urgency. His reflections will resonate with anyone who’s navigated complicated family dynamics or longed for just five more minutes with someone they’ve lost.
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Have a story echoing through time? I’m listening—300 words or fewer.
"In a world where you can be anything, be kind."
you're listening to miles, and this is long time ago, people. Now, today I'm talking to a very old friend of mine that I worked with many, many moons ago, a few decades back. He's based well, murray. Where are you based, based? In nathan south wales okay, and we did work together way back in the 80s and the 90s.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was eons ago.
Speaker 1:Eons ago. Right, we're going to talk today about your father, so first of all, let's start off with some details about your dad.
Speaker 2:My father was a Scotsman born in Glasgow in 1927. He was born into a strict family and became very talented at the piano and he was like a musical genius when he, when he was young, he loved jazz. He was taken to a concert in glasgow with a great big band a famous band at the time and the leader of the band came out. So I'm really sorry our keyboard player's been taken out, but by any chance, is that is there a skilled, skilled keyboard player? My dad was about 12 and he put his hand up 12?
Speaker 2:Yeah, my dad played the whole gig.
Speaker 1:And he hadn't seen the music before.
Speaker 2:He would never play without music, so they obviously had music. He played right through the whole gig and it went down a storm.
Speaker 1:And that was at the age of 12, so he just literally stood straight in and played the music from the sheets.
Speaker 2:He got awards from the Royal Academy of Music at 12. He was like. Apparently. At one time he was in the top three jazz pianists in the world.
Speaker 1:That is remarkable. If you think about your father now, there's something that what's your first memory of him, your first memory of your dad?
Speaker 2:Most of my memories of my father aren't good because he was a drinker, a heavy drinker. Today it would have been drugs, I'm sure, but the lifestyle and the big bounce you paid with he was a heavy drinker. He'd get quite aggressive. My mother was hard to live with. I suppose, to be honest, it doesn't justify some of the things he did, but he was violent as well.
Speaker 1:Do you think that was because he was in that environment and out on the road?
Speaker 2:quite a lot. Yeah, he was. Yeah, my first year it was on the road quite a lot. Yeah, it was. Yeah, my first year it was on the road. This is in gigs every night, like I was a small child so I can't remember them. He'd back out to theaters, yeah, and he released a record. It was selling it.
Speaker 1:Sales, sell thousands and thousands is this him on his own, by then?
Speaker 2:on his own and he he did lots of things. He wrote music for films, tv programs, um went on tour all over the world. He played for a band player, band leader called joe loss, which you may have heard of. It was a famous kind of big band, um, and there's another one, ted heath. That was a really good band. He had a really big band. He played for him. But he got noticed and people started to ask him to work on films playing, playing in the orchestra, recording the soundacks and then eventually composing stuff.
Speaker 1:So when you said that you were on the road for the first year, how old was your dad when you were one years old then?
Speaker 2:That's a good question. He would have been probably 28, 29.
Speaker 1:Okay. So he was in his late 20s, yeah, Okay. So from 12 to 28,. This is when he was being discovered and then he went.
Speaker 2:He played on about 150 albums, I think.
Speaker 1:So he was famous before you were born.
Speaker 2:Back the day I was born, my picture was in most of the national press with my sisters and my mother. The headline said on one newspaper now he has a son.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Notoriety was. It was crazy really, but you know it soon died off when the beatles came started coming certain things.
Speaker 1:Okay, so the beatles started to to take some of his press away then, so to speak that's right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, that's right. A lot of them rolling in stones and things like that. You know, like he used to bring home records because he was, um, he used to get records, given all the time he brought on beatles records and gave them to my older sister and she said he liked them.
Speaker 2:I think he was probably jealous because they've taken some of his limelight they won ivan of ivan novello awards, um, and he won an ivan novello award. You know all the best songwriters, who are gary barlow people like that. So I've got an ivan novello wall behind me on the back and he'll just play behind me. He was brilliant. But like all geniuses, they've got flawed characters, haven't they?
Speaker 1:So this obviously affected you. How old were you when you started to realise that maybe he had a flawed character?
Speaker 2:I was very young, he'd whip me with the Hoover cable. I don't think it was his fault. I, when I was very young, he'd whip me with the Hoover cable. I don't think it was his fault. I think he was trained to be like that because when he was playing the piano when he was young, he set his finger in a telephone box and it went gangrene and had his finger amputated. People can't play music the way he played it because they've got a finger missing.
Speaker 1:He had a finger missing, so that actually was almost like a superpower in the end.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah, he's like a superpower in the end. Yeah, yeah. So when he used to practice piano, his mother would stand with the ruler and if he got anything wrong, she'd whack him on the back of the hands of the ruler do you remember his mother?
Speaker 2:your your grandmother yeah, not very well. She died when my father left us when I was quite young, when I was about seven, um, so I saw her. Up until that time she was a very strict woman. My my grandfather was brilliant. He was amazing. He was completely not the complete opposite of my father.
Speaker 1:Do you have more to do with him? Later on, when your father had left, he's sporadic.
Speaker 2:He'd come down occasionally. I went to London to see him a few times. I'd be telephoning him really.
Speaker 1:You started in Glasgow. How long were you up in glasgow before you moved?
Speaker 2:he moved down to london where, where all the music scene was. My mother went to a gig when I think he's playing for joe loss, and they kind of got off together there.
Speaker 1:That was in 1949 how did you get down to where?
Speaker 2:I know you from down in dorset well, I was, uh, working in the wholesale industry for a company called book of belmont, book of cash and carries. You probably know them I was working for them in. We moved down to the southwest um the child to devon, to be near my mother's family. So that's why I ended down the south west west.
Speaker 1:I think I was about seven, I think, at the time we moved down so before that you were in the showbiz family, but again, obviously it had its dark moments.
Speaker 2:He was earning big money as well.
Speaker 1:He was earning good money, yeah.
Speaker 2:He was earning good money. I think he earned £35,000, this was in about 1940.
Speaker 1:So that's a lot of money now that is a lot of money back then obviously.
Speaker 2:It had times when you were out of work. That's the thing if you're a musician. The music scene started to change. He appears where he was struggling to get work so he's born in.
Speaker 1:He was born in 1927, as you said. So when did he I mean obviously at 12 he was. He played that piano, as you said, yeah, that concert. At what point did he start to become like a household name or would he?
Speaker 2:in his 20s, I think his 20s yeah I was back up, back up in Scotland about 15 years ago with my cousin. He'd go and talk to. He talked to anybody. He'd say, murray, go and talk to those people. They know your father, my father's quite famous in Scotland. I'd meet people who were fans of him.
Speaker 2:I lost my job, you know, struggled for a while, got out of sales and I sold all my videos off in a shop. I rented this shop because I had hundreds and hundreds of videos. So I started retailing them to get some money. So a guy came in and he said I'm a manager of a local cinema. Would you like to sell movie posters? I said, yeah, I'll have a look. So he had a lot of movie posters, agreed on the price and I stuck them up Great big movie posters. They're probably worth a fortune now. And he got talking and he said I collect movie soundtracks. I've got sounds of movie soundtracks. I said oh, that's interesting. My father wrote music for quite a few films and they're credited for playing on. And he said what's his name? I said Bill McGuffey. And the guy and he fell over, which was quite surprising. The only time it's ever done me any good when I was 18, do you remember Rumbelow's TV?
Speaker 1:I do remember Rumbelow's TV.
Speaker 2:I went into Rumbelow's at 18 years of age, living in a flat on £18 a week, asking if I could rent a colour TV and they said sorry, you can't do it. They said give me your name. If anything comes up, I'll get back to you and said Mo McGuffey, he goes, yeah, as in Bill. I said Bill McGuffey's my dad, bill McGuffey's my dad. Color TV was in my house that night.
Speaker 1:That's a good story, Murray. Well, at least you got something from him.
Speaker 2:He was a really funny guy, very charismatic, absolutely phenomenal musician. When I was 18, I went to, I think, 17,. I went to London and I went on a few recordings, a few recordings at the BBC One, cornered at the BBC One evening he was playing in a tennis club band where they all had to play badly. They had one of the top violinists in the UK, one of the top drummers, two musicians and they had to play like amateurs, which was really difficult. At the end, this violinist, who was one of the top violinists in the world, said Bill, will you play something? My dad played something and this and he went. It was crazy, it was just brilliant. He's on YouTube If you want to have a look. He's got loads of records on YouTube.
Speaker 1:At what age were you when you realised that your dad was a celebrity?
Speaker 2:People come to our house. I remember June Whitfield came to our house. Remember June Whitfield.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I remember her.
Speaker 2:Yeah, definitely yeah, she for like a dinner party. There'd always be singers in the house jazz singers and he'd be playing for them. If he had to write for a film or a TV programme, he'd set himself in the living room and be in there for seven days.
Speaker 1:And compose away.
Speaker 2:Just right away, when he was in a good mood, I used to get here's something you don't know, miles. I used to get some of his manuscripts and try and draw music on them and I'd say, dad, look what I've done. And he put it on the piano and you just go on the piano and then play it yeah, which used to make me laugh. One of the good memories. But one time I gave him a manuscript and he went so when he wrote for films, when would that have been?
Speaker 2:that's some things that he did. He probably did about 10. He was sold composer for he did. Did Doctor who with Peter Cushing, the second one that's got all kinds of accolades. Now I hate the music score. It's jazz but it's the one with Bernard Cribbins, if there's any Doctor who fans. I've got the actual orchestral score. I've got the whole orchestral score. I've written all the orchestral score upstairs in the loft. He did a few House of Hammer Hammer Horror films so 70s is the the main time then?
Speaker 2:really isn't it yeah, yeah, yeah, when he was doing it on his own, worked with Bing Crosby and Bob Hope on the road to Hong Kong. He used to go horse racing with Bing Crosby and Bob Hope. As kids we'd get cards and Christmas scars crazy really. I've got loads of autographs from film stars, bill, from famous people he used to work with. So he worked with a guy called Robert Farnham and he was a brilliant composer and in some of the scenes in Road to Hong Kong he wrote. But it's Robert Farnham that got the accolades because he was the main composer, but he certainly lived an interesting life.
Speaker 1:Starting to understand, because when I think of you, I always think of your film knowledge. You're like me you love a good film.
Speaker 2:We talk about films for hours.
Speaker 1:You talk about films for hours. We love films. I am beginning to understand where that may have come from now, especially if your dad was involved in that and you had those type of people coming in at your house.
Speaker 2:I was only small. I remember June Whitfield thinking how beautiful she was.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:You know she only came. I was sent to bed. I remember coming into the house with her husband. I didn't know who she was. She was a cracker Really really attractive lady.
Speaker 1:I know, lovely. She had a long career, didn't she as well, didn't she yeah?
Speaker 2:she did yeah, she did, yeah A fab at the end. I think she was a lovely lady. There are others that came. There's a guy called Danny Street. That was a really good singer. He used to cut my hair. He was a barber as well. So I've got loads of albums with my father's and the covers are so cheesy it's beyond belief.
Speaker 1:Well, it was the 70s. You were allowed to do that then.
Speaker 2:They are so cheesy it's crazy.
Speaker 1:I think it's a miss album covers myself. I mean, nowadays everything's digital. You don't really get that experience of holding an album cover.
Speaker 2:How many albums did you buy because of the cover? Well, you did, yeah.
Speaker 1:I was in the loft at the weekend and my records some of them are up there and I found my Electric Light Orchestra out of the blue which is the first album that I ever bought.
Speaker 1:Great album. Yeah, it was a great album and, um, I was very happy to see mr blue sky featured in in in gardens of the galaxy 2, the opening credits. They did it. So, yeah, of course, yeah, it was uh amazing with groot dancing to uh, mr blue skies. But what, what an album. That was the first album I ever bought and I think that might be missed on this generation now where you just get your phone and you've got 5g and you just open it up and you don't know what to listen to and having the experience of holding a record and fun.
Speaker 2:Funnily enough, I was talking to a friend about. My ex-girlfriend from school got in contact recently and she sent me a text and she seemed a bit sad. She was going to to a pile of this grave to lay flowers and we corresponded by text and I said I often wish I could. I don't know, you often wish you could be with your father for five minutes. I'm sure people listening feel the same way. I just liked it because I'm a musician as well, Just to show him what you can do with music now, because he dies 40 odd years ago. I think he'd be absolutely gobsmacked.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's probably I mean. That comes on to one of my questions for you, murray. It's like you know, if you could have five minutes, what would you say to him?
Speaker 2:I'd ask him, I'd show him loads of things and say, look, you can do this now. I write lots of songs now using AI, which is mind-blowing. I wrote a song a friend of mine, a song called I Miss you by our parents. It broke a heart when she got it. I remember when I went to see him one of the last times I saw him we were talking about music, I was writing songs and things like that, and he asked me how I wrote songs and I told him that he just like poo-pooed it.
Speaker 1:He just wrote songs that, like you said, locked himself away.
Speaker 2:He could write the music down without even having a piano. When we cleared his haystack, he used to smoke player cigarettes, and we found loads of boxes of player cigarettes no cigarettes. He'd written music on those.
Speaker 1:On the cigarette packets.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, he obviously thought I need to remember that.
Speaker 1:I can write it down on the back of a fag packet.
Speaker 2:We found all sorts of stuff. We found Winnie the Pooh, a signed book of Winnie the Pooh, a signed book by Monty Python with all the signatures of the Pythons. That would be worth a fortune. Now, when I was there, there was a phone message from John Cleese on his phone. He used to knock around with all these people Crazy.
Speaker 1:When did he die Murray crazy? When did he? When did he die Murray? How long ago? 1987 87 yeah, so a few years back. Funny, that's when I first met you in 1987.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's right. Yeah, he died. So I went to. We didn't speak for the last 10 years. Now I, looking back, I know why this happened. I just had my first daughter, called Hannah, and I lived about two miles from the hospital where she was born and I ran with a suit on and a crumbie and I ran all the way home. I was a martial artist and black belt karate, so I was fit.
Speaker 1:I remember that.
Speaker 2:I ran all the way home, got home, called my father. I said Dad, I've just had a little girl she just pulled out. I was so excited and he just went. Oh, that's great. I hung the phone up and I thought he was, he was, he was on, he was dying. Yeah, kidney. Kidney cancer, I think. Yeah, he was very ill at the time. He he hung on for another 10 years. He's very ill, so that's probably why he's probably on medication. When I rang him but I I took that as a snub and I never spoke to him again.
Speaker 2:And then he got ill and I went to see him the day he died and he was just a skeleton on the bed and I was in the room with my sisters and the nurse said his wife's name was called Rosemary Billy Murray's here and he looked at me and the white of his eyes and I said I've got to pop out in a moment. I went into a gentle, lo, and I said I've got to pop out in a moment. I went into a gentler and I was. I didn't cry, but I was just for five or 10 minutes. I didn't know what to do, going around, going. Oh my God, oh my God. I couldn't believe it and when I left I put my hand on him and said see you, dad. When I got home the next morning, the police came and knocked on my door and said what's the bad? Some bad news for you your father's died. I do regret not being friends, so if anyone's listening, sort it out if you can, because it hurts.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it definitely hurts, doesn't it?
Speaker 2:It does hurt. Yeah, even now, I wish we could have sorted it out. So the other thing I'd do is I'd say look, you upset me, but let's put this water under the bridge now. Let's be friends now.
Speaker 1:And you were there at the end. So, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you know it's um, it's a difficult time, for sure.
Speaker 2:Anything else that we can talk about, reference your father when I went to senior school we had a music lesson and my sister, my elder sister, lorraine, was two, two years, three years above me, mr morgan, in his school. He knew about my father. So I went to music lessons and I said, can I learn an instrument please? And he took me and he gave me a trombone Right okay.
Speaker 2:So I set up a trombone, took it on and he said come to orchestra practice. Orchestra practice on Tuesdays and Thursday nights at seven o'clock. So I went to. I was 11 years of age and he said put your trombone to you so you can sit in the orchestra and you can hold your trombone. So I sat in there, held the trombone and started to play and wasn't really invested in it, just played. He called me a sign after the cut and said I want your trombone back. I said why? He said you should be a lot further forward than you are now and I thought I said I'm sorry, I'll practice. So from that day on the fear, because he expected me to be like my father I started practicing and I shot out my first trombone in the orchestra.
Speaker 2:He said why didn't you get? You need this trombone. You've got this battered one. Can you afford to get a new one? My mother was working in a factory sewing shirts. We were scraping, but I never had any money. Three dinners. He said why don't you ask your father to buy one? And I said how much did the trombone cost? Seven pounds. He said Seven quid for a trombone. It was in 1970, I think. So I wrote him a letter. I said this school wants me to buy a trombone. They cost around seven pounds. Could you give me? He wrote back and said yes, the result. Went and saw my teacher and said yes, my dad said it was a brass trombone. On a Saturday morning took me to Exeter, went to this music shop, tried loads of trombones and it was a brass trombone, beautiful. And he said how much is that? I said 50 quid. Mr Moore said yeah, we'll take that. So he bought it and sent my Probably a grand, probably now.
Speaker 1:He went mental. So obviously we just touched on a sad point. Obviously, when your father died, is there any points that you look back and he was funny or there was something that he really made you laugh?
Speaker 2:Yeah, he was just very jovial, very comical. When he was ill we were going to a tennis club and we walked through the tunnel and he farted as he went through the tunnel. He was completely embarrassed. I said don't tell anybody. I said your secret's safe with me. I told everyone. I remember being in a park and us throwing grass at each other. I was only small. I've got a great story for you. When we were in Glasgow, I was about four or five he took us to a golf range, a golfer, he loved golf. Yeah, on the first tee he hit the ball and it flew off. He went Murray, go and find the ball. So I ran down. You were his golfer.
Speaker 2:I wondered why he thought I was running back because I couldn't find it. I ran back with it. Here it is. I thought I'd never seen it. I'd never seen a golf match before, did I? He used to tell everyone about it. I brought his golf ball back.
Speaker 1:Do your kids know about him?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, my sisters are both older than me. Obviously, they have different relationships with him than I do. When I was younger, my mother and father's relationship was really disintegrating, really.
Speaker 1:And they probably got a different experience.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, certainly my eldest sister she can. You know we all had difficult times. Like I said earlier on, geniuses have got flawed characters very often. I think he was trained by his upbringing to be like that and I'm sure if he was alive now he'd say I'm sorry, know, I still love my father.
Speaker 1:I still loved him when we were, when they separated and got divorced, but it was very difficult in any relationship it's good for you to share these moments and talk about these, and we've we've laughed as well, which is which is good. So, yeah, I think that's, um, that that's kind of key, is it? Is there anything from your father that you think has shaped your life now? Is it there's? Is there any one thing that you could say? Well, actually, I got that from my father he told me to be myself.
Speaker 2:I was at his, at his house, every lunch, lunch time he used to go to like a drink. He used to walk up the pub. I was, I came back, I was, I was drunk. He was certainly so because he's doing whiskies and chases. He used to drink. So I came back drunk. He'd play the piano for three or four hours. Then, when he came back, practice every day, every day. There's another story I'll tell you about now. But we got talking and I said he said, what do you want to do yourself? And I said I fancy doing this. I can't remember what I said, but he said be yourself, don't be influenced by other people. Be yourself, because obviously that's what he'd done with his life. Crazy.
Speaker 2:When I was a musician I started songwriting with a songwriting partner and they got me to go and see a musician called Rudy Dobson I think he was called Okay and he was a keyboard player for the Bee Gees and he'd just come off tour with George Michael. Wow, he was a phenomenal musician in his own music studio. We got talking. I said what have you been up to lately? He said I did the Bee Gees last year World Tour. And Bee Gees. I said come on, put me down. That must have been amazing. He said I've just come off with George Michael. I said that's fantastic.
Speaker 2:I off with George Michael. I said that's fantastic. I said people would love to be like you, to play with people like George Michael on the Bee Gees. And he goes no, they wouldn't. He got quite stirred. He said surely you know to play with people like that, people of that hill, that famous full stadiums, surely they'd want to do that. He goes no, they wouldn't. I said why? He said I'd. And I remember as a kid that's what my father did. He was out working all the time, but when he wasn't working he'd play for hours block yourself away for a week and come up with a score.
Speaker 2:He'd just play all day, all day. He had a stroke in his 50s so when he played he'd kind of he'd be doing that, he'd make a noise, and when he went to a recording studio he'd have to say can you play that again? We can hear you kind of singing.
Speaker 1:In effect his playing. It affected obviously just his voice.
Speaker 2:I think it was a strain of him playing. I think. Yeah okay, he'd be doing that like straining, when he was playing and the microphones were so sensitive. They'd pick it up and they'd say Bill can up, but he just and they'd say bill, can you drop in, here, they play. They'd say like bill, we're playing up to here and the music would stop and he'd just drop in and play on from there. He was a genius, he was.
Speaker 1:He was really good, good well, murray, I just want to thank you very much for your time today and sharing memories of your father for you with us. So thank you very much for that. Yeah, it's it's. It's been great to catch up with you again. Thank you.
