Jools Holland on walking back to New Orleans, breaking down barriers and one very big bang

They say you should never meet your heroes, but Jools Holland has been ignoring that advice his whole career. “Absolutely right,” says the musician, bandleader and broadcaster. “Although I’d rephrase that advice to ‘Don’t expect your heroes necessarily to be saintly figures’.”

The friendly, enthusiastic host of BBC Two’s long-running music show Later... is looking back on his career, triggered by his new programme New Orleans Jukebox (Sunday, BBC Four). The heart of it is the reshowing of a Channel 4 film called Walking to New Orleans, which first aired 40 years ago, repackaged with eye-opening insights and performances of artists from that fabled US city, lifted from the BBC archives.

Jools was 27 when he made the documentary, a spin-off from music show The Tube, which he co-hosted for more than four years. “It was a particular time and place in television which doesn’t exist any more," Holland tells Radio Times. "The Tube was a huge success and they had a budget to other things and they said, 'Jools, what would you like to do?' I said, 'I’d really like to go to New Orleans.'

"I’d always loved the New Orleans music and it was a great opportunity for me to learn about it, but also to meet some of the people who were at the very heart of it."

A reconnaissance trip proved successful. “It was very wintry and rather romantic, there were no tourists there and all the things in the film fell into place, in that all the important people in New Orleans music at the time were in it... We never did what we have to do today, which is to write out a script, work out exactly what’s happening. It was just like, ‘Well, go off and give it a go, see what you come up with!’”

What they come up with was a fantastic, on-the-fly journey by Oldsmobile from Louisiana to the titular city (ie not “walking”), meeting music legends along the way. Lee Dorsey customises his car, Allen Toussaint pays touching tribute to Professor Longhair, the Gospel Soul Children sing roadside and Holland shares a piano stool with Fats Domino, whose song Walking to New Orleans provided the film with its title, though probably his most famous hit was Blueberry Hill.

The "Domino effect" turned out to be a life highlight for Holland, not that everything went smoothly... American music festival producer Quint Davis introduced the two at the star’s house, when Holland was on his reconnaissance trip. "He had a huge pink mansion on the hill, literally, with powder-blue Lincolns being polished outside. He had this shotgun shack at the bottom, almost like an entrance lodge, and that’s where he liked to spend his time. He made me some food and he had a piano there.

“Quint said, ‘Tell him what you’re doing, Jools,’ so being young and stupid and a bit nervous I spoke to him about the whole film. All I needed to say was ‘You’re the greatest ever, it would be fantastic if you could be in it,’ but I just went on and on. After about 20 minutes he looked at his friend on the sofa and said, ‘I can’t understand a word he’s saying.’

“So Quint said, ‘Jools, play him something on the piano,’ so I played him something and he said, ‘Ahh, you’re playing my music.’ I said, ‘I love your music, that’s all I’ve ever listened to.’ He said, ‘I’ll be in your film!’"

However, the star’s heavy touring schedule meant the actual filming of their side-by-side piano duet had to wait till he was in London – even though it looks as though they're still at Domino's house! "When we filmed him it was actually in the dressing room of the Royal Festival Hall. So it was a little trick of the television there. You’re probably not allowed to do something like that now, pretend it’s his house when it's not, but anyway we were just trying to make the bloody thing work!"

It makes for a joyous moment of television, as Domino enters into the spirit of things, his face lights up and the two embrace after their duet. “It was so great to have him and I did almost cry after we’d done it. I thought, ‘I can’t believe that’s happened.’”

Delightful cameos abound, proving how well connected Holland was comedically as well as musically. There's Robbie Coltrane, and Stephen Fry on narrating duties – as well as Holland's Tube co-host Paula Yates. A longer edit of the film also featured Rik Mayall and guru of gobbledegook Stanley Unwin.

After a Holland-written closing number called Dr Jazz, a lovely shuffle of a song that conjures up New Orlean allure, the film goes out with a bang: Holland and drummer Gilson Lavis walk towards a car, which then unexpectedly blows up.

But the plunger wasn’t pressed until the pair were beyond a “safety” point (the twig on a road that was covered with twigs). “I’ve learnt that the man that was in charge of it is no longer with us. He was great but he was so loose with everything. The reason we cut the roof off my car, it was supposed to be a convertible and then we got there and it wasn’t a convertible. He said, 'Well it’s no problem, we’ll just take the roof of it.' Everything was like that.

"And when we blew up a car at the end, he made my mum do it. Because if he pressed the plunger and it went wrong, then it would be his fault and in America, with the suing culture... so my mum did it. He had no idea what to do and he was screaming at her to press the plunger and she was looking mystified, and we got closer and closer and closer until you know, you’ve only got one chance at this, we thought, 'We can’t stop and look back.'

“When it went off it literally blew us back into the air. If we’d have been another few steps forward..! I remember Gilson saying to me, ‘If you do another film, maybe I'll be doing something else next time!'”

New Orleans Jukebox is dedicated to Lavis, his “dear friend”, who died on 5 November, aged 74. Holland says, “I’d known him from the very beginning” – they were bandmates in Squeeze – and explains how Walking to New Orleans had been, “importantly, for me and for him, a way of us getting back together.

"Him coming there also rebonded us for the beginnings of what was my Big Band. Just after Walking to New Orleans went out, I started doing small shows on my own here and there, and I’d play a couple of solo songs on the piano and then I’d say, 'Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome my big band to the stage' and just Gilson would walk on. He was the big band. And then it did morph into literally a big band." The Jools Holland Big Band later became his Rhythm and Blues Orchestra, and Lavis stayed with him.

Jukebox also includes BBC archive – much of it from Later... – of other famous New Orleans artists, from Dr John and Allen Toussaint to Mahalia Jackson and Louis Armstrong. “Many are sadly no longer with us but their spirits and the music, of course, carry on wonderfully.” Other artists to feature include Irma Thomas, the Neville Brothers and Trombone Shorty.

Holland is tighter-lipped about guests on this year's Hootenanny: “I can’t reveal that at the moment, partly because I haven’t got the list in front of me but also I don’t think we’re supposed to say yet. But I think there will be a Rolling Stone, that narrows it down, and I’ll leave it at that!”

Few TV and radio presenters have promoted music in all its forms with greater energy than Holland. And few were better qualified to interview the Beatles for their Anthology, a TV series that first aired in 1995 and which has now been spruced up and extended for streaming on Disney+. Holland has spoken about that to Radio Times... coming next week!

Holland is still spreading the gospel of music, which, as his duet with Fats Domino proved, is always capable of breaking down barriers. "Absolutely right. Do you know, I’ve often said that and never used that example. But music is a language without any borders and that was it because it was a wordless language and he understood that I was his friend and loved him. Which I did."

Jools Holland’s New Orleans Jukebox is on Sunday 16th November at 9.30pm on BBC Four and on BBC iPlayer, where viewers can also catch up on the autumn series of Later… with Jools Holland.

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