LEN JACKMAN was five years old when the piano teacher took his mum to one side.

"You are wasting your money and I am wasting my time," Miss Cummings told Mrs Jackman.

Len smiles ironically at the memory: for most of the 70 years since, he has made a very good living at the keyboard.

He has provided the melody to which generations of Plymouth people have danced through life.

They have met, courted and married to Len's rhythms and tunes. They have celebrated their anniversaries and marked their birthdays to the music he has played for them. Some have even had their final farewells with Len at the keyboard.

He is currently celebrating a couple of landmarks of his own: he has chalked up 40 years as a full-time professional musician and is now aged 75.

There might be another anniversary to mark, too: it is possibly 50 years since Len seriously began to supplement his income as a part-timer on the piano and organ.

"It must be somewhere like that," he says, unsure of quite when he started regularly playing at dances and in pubs.

Since then the veteran performer has lost count of the number of dances, concerts, weddings and balls at which he has performed throughout Devon and Cornwall.

He is certain, though, that he isn't about to quit.

"What would I do if I didn't do this?" he asks and then answers his own question: "I'd sit at home with nothing to do."

Len, who is single, still lives in Ermington, where he was born and grew up – Miss Cummings, who soon ceased to be his teacher, was the church organist.

He has spent only about four years away from the South Hams village but his range is most of the region. He plays regularly as far west as St Austell in a social club and Bridgwater in the east.

His brief spell outside Ermington was during National Service.

Young Len left what is now Plymstock School when he was 15 and was an apprentice to a painter and decorator in Ivybridge for five years.

His qualification duly gained, Len was due his stint in uniform and chose the extended period to beat boredom.

"If I'd done the basic couple of years I would have been a clerk, but by signing up for four I'd do something more interesting," he says. "I trained in fire fighting and air-sea rescue in the RAF."

There was no lack of excitement. While at West Malling in Kent, which was then a Fighter Command base, he was hot on the trail of a Meteor jet which crashed on take-off. Len and a colleague had to pull the two dead aircrew from the cockpit. "You just got on with it," he says.

There were lighter moments when he was later stationed at RAF St Mawgan on Cornwall's north coast near Newquay. "We worked on helicopters there, air-sea rescue," Len recalls. "I told the Flight Lieutenant, 'I can't swim' but he said, 'don't worry – you'll be on the end of a rope!'. I was the winch man."

Not all of those plucked from the sea showed the gratitude that you would expect. On one occasion a call came in saying that a swimmer a long way out off one of the Newquay beaches was in trouble.

Says Len: "We pulled him out and he was complaining all the way 'I'm OK, I don't want to be rescued'.

"He carried on griping at St Mawgan when the helicopter landed. The base commander, Group Captain Bevan John, came along and listened to the complaint and invited the man into the car with him.

"He drove him to the gate and said, 'OK, off you go. If you don't want to be rescued you can walk from here.' And he had to, seven miles back to Newquay, bare foot and only wearing shorts!"

It was at St Mawgan that Len began to play the piano regularly, in the sergeants' and officers' messes and at pubs in Newquay.

After leaving the RAF he was a painter and decorator with a family firm, Jarrett's, in Ivybridge, by day and on the piano with the Cyril Warren Dance Band by night. Cyril, Len remembers, was a tanker driver who led the band from the drum kit.

Then one day he received a call from Joe O'Leary, landlord of the Navy pub in the Barbican, who was also phoning on behalf of the Victoria Club, which was close to the former Grand Hotel on The Hoe.

"He asked, 'if we had an organ, would you play it?'. I said I would and they both bought one. I started playing Sunday lunchtimes in the Navy and Sunday evenings in the Victoria.

"Then I was playing Saturday mornings at the ABC cinema (now the Reel) at their kids' showings and more and more jobs came in.

"That was all part-time for a few years and I wondered whether I could take this up for a living.

"I went to see my bank manager – the Nat West in the lovely building at the top of Royal Parade – and he said 'yes' to a loan.

"I bought a Hammond organ with these tall speakers. It cost something like £800, a huge amount of money then."

Len was already a familiar sound in pubs, clubs, dance and church halls and soon he was a familiar sight on the roads.

"I had a trailer made to tow the Hammond behind my car. I always had this saying, 'Give it hell' when I'm playing and the signwriter put 'Give it L' like a learner plate on the side."

As business built up Len also had spells as a Butlins Redcoat, the training ground for so many performers.

"I did three summer seasons at Skegness in Lincolnshire," says Len. "Yes, it was a good experience and great training .

"You learned camaraderie. You had to get that banter going, that chat with the audience because the bar where I played was huge – there must have been 500 or 600, all from different parts of the country. They didn't know each other and you had to get them going to enjoy themselves and get the atmosphere."

Len could also watch some of the greats at work, big-name stars who knew exactly how to get the audience on their side. "All the acts who were appearing at the theatre at Skegness would come and do a night or two at Butlins.

"I met (Carry On actor) Sid James and (comedian and magician) Tommy Cooper. Tommy was a hero of mine and he was absolutely great.

"I started playing in the band but I was asked to do general duties and entertaining as Redcoat which was fantastic because you were given your own chalet among the holidaymakers. It was just like being on holiday for me."

That spirit of fun has always been a part of Len's act. He likes to dress smartly – when we meet he's in a dapper dark suit complete with shirt and tie – but has always had a relaxed air on stage.

"I do like that banter with the audience," he smiles.

There is less demand for live music than there used to be. In the pre-disco days every wedding and celebration had a band or soloist.

At the peak, Len would be playing 10 or 12 times a week and clocking up 30,000 miles a year on the road. He is still busy, though, playing four or five times weekly with a more portable keyboard. "It's a Technics electronic. It's amazing what they can do, isn't it?

"I play at a lot of tea dances and for ballroom dancing clubs now and they could just put a CD on, couldn't they?

"But they want something more. They want different tunes and a bit of chat."

He has never been a singer "apart from a bit of Louis Armstrong-style" and nor has he been much of a dancer.

"To me, a lot of the dancing is the same ice-cream on a different plate, the same moves to a different rhythm or tune.

"Sometimes I find I'm making my music fit their moves! You can change a rhythm slightly to suit a dance – there's a hymn I play you can do a rhumba to.

"I do more and more afternoon dances now," he says. "I don't mind the evenings, but a lot of older people don't like coming out at night. You wouldn't want to be waiting for a bus on Royal Parade at 11pm on a Friday or a Saturday night with the way the city centre is with drunk people."

His own taste in music is light classical, but he enjoys the tunes he plays just as much as his audiences do.

Some show times have changed although many tunes have not: "I'll always play some old songs like Vera Lynne, the White Cliffs of Dover, We'll Meet Again – mind you, she was top of the charts last year, wasn't she? – and some Glen Miller, and Henry Hall's Here's to the Next Time – I like to sign off with that one.

"I do play some modern tunes, though, Westlife's You Raise Me up is a good one, and you can play it in rhumba time.

"And there's my mum's favourite, Pal of My Cradle Days. She used to sing that. She had a lovely singing voice."

His mum would be proud to hear him now – and perhaps a little surprised, given the piano teacher's assessment of Len's talent and drive all those years ago.

Len reckons his tutor did not make a mistake, though.

"She was right," he laughs. "I never practised. All I wanted to do was go out and play football.

"I never did learn to read music. It all looks like tadpoles caught up on telegraph wires to me.

"But I've always been able to hear a tune and then play it. That's a gift, I suppose.

"I was playing a concert near Bath one time and a man in the audience, who was a professor of music, said to me, 'if you read music, every time you play it's the same. But you are constantly improvising which makes every performance unique'. I rather liked that."

So, if you can hum it, Len can play it – and he has no plans to stop.