Patrick Cairns "Spike" Hughes (19 October 1908 – 2 February 1987)[1] was a British musician, composer and arranger involved in the worlds of classical music and jazz.
[4] His childhood, spent mostly with his mother Lilian Meacham (1886–1973), a Harley Street psychiatrist, involved extensive travelling in France and Italy, as well as a more settled period of education at Perse School in Cambridge.
[8] Returning to the UK in 1926, Hughes had a solo cello sonata performed in London,[9] and wrote the incidental music for two theatre productions in Cambridge.
[8] These records were used as the basis for the "hastily assembled" jazz ballet High Yellow, put on by the Camargo Society at the Savoy Theatre in London, June 1932.
[10] But his career in jazz culminated in 1933 with a visit to New York, where he arranged three recording sessions involving members of Benny Carter's and Luis Russell's orchestras with Coleman Hawkins and Henry "Red" Allen from Fletcher Henderson's band.
[11] He orchestrated and conducted shows for C B Cochran and (using the pseudonym "Mike") wrote jazz reviews for Melody Maker (1931–1944),[1] The Daily Herald (1933–1936) and The Times (1957–1967), as well as establishing performance and recording opportunities for American bands in England.
Out of Season (1955) is a travelogue describing a winter journey by train and boat from London to Sicily, with time spent in Vienna, Venice, Milan, Parma, Florence, Naples, Palermo.
He married his third wife Charmain (née Finch Noyes) in 1955; the couple moved from London to a 17th-century farmhouse at Ringmer, Sussex, near Glynde, where they lived until he died in 1987.