It’s Thursday, 6th July 1972. The Guardian lies on the doormat, its front page torn, as usual. I’ve questioned the paperboy. He says the slot’s too narrow, but the flap has a fierce spring, and I reckon he’s frightened of getting his fingers caught. Whatever the reason, I leave the paper where it is, and walk to the newsagent’s on North Street. Evidently anticipating an unusual demand for this week’s New Musical Express, he has kept a copy for me under the counter.
My fingers are ink-stained by the time I get home. Walking along Lillieshall Road with the sun warming my back, I’ve been reading the NME or, rather, thumbing through to the centre pages, where the weekly Gig Guide is printed. Today’s edition contains a new section, which fills a third of the double-page spread. It’s a film guide. It says so in red capitals beneath photos of Mick Jagger in Gimme Shelter and Country Joe McDonald, Graham Nash and Santana from the Woodstock documentary. Under FILM GUIDE, I’ve read the words I was looking for: Compiled by John Pidgeon. I catch myself smiling. I’m in the NME, the UK’s leading pop paper, read weekly by a quarter of a million music fans and by me since the age of ten, when I first encountered rock’n’roll.
I pick up The Guardian, lay it on the kitchen table, and attempt to smooth the creases from the front page without aggravating the tear. Momentarily I regret not having taken it to the newsagent’s to display the daily damage. Another time, I tell myself, and open the NME again. Half the space in my film guide is taken up with rudimentary listings like:
Darlington Odeon: From Nashville With Music
• Wednesday only. Performances by Marty Robbins, Merle Haggard, Charley Pride and others prop up a lame narrative. Strictly for country fans.
But there are longer analyses of other films, my name is in 16pt and bold; what’s more, Concert For Bangla Desh, The Harder They Come and Keep On Rockin’ are all due for imminent release and a Film Guide review; and, I remind myself, it’s a start.
* * *
I was a late starter, delayed by three years in the 6th form, four at university, and two more not realising how lucky I was to study film with Thorold Dickinson. I’d been an occasional reviewer for the BFI’s Monthly Film Bulletin and spent six months researching and writing a history of British blues for a publisher who went bust weeks before delivery. So I was grateful to NME’s editor Nick Logan for commissioning my film guide.
Within weeks though, I was impatient to write more than my weekly listings. Those three July releases had represented fortuitous timing rather than a trend, and there were too few new films with sufficient songs on the soundtrack to justify a review in a music paper. Nick nevertheless encouraged me to raid the left-overs in the review cupboard, but I could feel the eyes of the full-time writers pricking my back, imagine those by-lines made flesh and blood muttering, “Who the fuck does he think he is?”
If I could get a more substantial article commissioned, I knew I would feel less of an outsider. That meant finding a story with a unique angle, a hook that was mine alone. It came to me, as many ideas did and still do, in the night. I would tour with a band.
Open a music paper in 1972, and the odds were that someone was on the road in the States with the Rolling Stones or the Moody Blues or Led Zeppelin. For artists and their record companies it was an opportunity to remind fans, you think we’re big in the UK, you should see the audiences we play to over there. For most music journalists it was an irresistible jaunt, a free holiday, give or take the few thousand words that would have to be written in exchange. This was five years before Freddie Laker’s Skytrain pioneered cheap transatlantic flights, so only the privileged few visited the States for pleasure, and it seemed to me that these lucky writers couldn’t resist rubbing in – as if their enviable intimacy with the band wasn’t enough – just what their readers were missing.
When I first bought New Musical Express, its journalists had been all but invisible, their sole function to introduce the reader to the latest chart contender, any expression of their own personality generally restricted to word play: “Bobby Darin is all set to make a splash…” or “Brenda Lee is a little girl with a big, big voice…” If the star’s name didn’t form the opening words, you could be sure it would appear before the first full stop: “‘I’m no Elvis imitator,’ Cliff Richard is quick to point out…” or “If anyone can be consigned to the ‘controversial’ category, it’s Jerry Lee Lewis.”
Now journalists brazenly positioned themselves at the centre of their story, flaunting their insider status. Yet I remained suspicious as to how close most of them actually came to the artists with whom they claimed to be on first name terms. It might have been to mitigate my own undeniable envy that I summoned an image into my head of the writer propped up in bed, portable typewriter cradled in his lap, tapping out his half-truths while he did his best to ignore the distant, distracting hubbub of the penthouse party to which he hadn’t been invited.
My angle was different. I would not be a hanger-on, which had to be how those other writers were viewed by the musicians they were shadowing, distinguishable from other hangers-on only by their notebook, ballpoint and cassette recorder. Me – 6’ 3”, twelve stone, and football fit – I would earn my keep, and the band’s respect, as a member of the road crew.
I scoured the NME for news of upcoming tours and noted that Ten Years After were due to hit the road. Although their status had been elevated to a level of eternally unrealisable expectation by a fortuitous appearance in the Woodstock movie, they were somehow still riding their luck and what was left of their reputation. A couple of phone calls connected me to the band’s tour manager. The job title had an impressive ring: after all, managing a band’s tour, with all that must entail, surely took some doing. But the man I met looked little different from the roadies I’d seen scurrying across the stage of the Rainbow Theatre in that hunched stoop they seemingly believed made them invisible to the audience. I explained my proposal, appended a list of credentials relating to my age, fitness, strength and intelligence, tactfully refraining from pointing out that I was younger, taller, keener-eyed and fitter-looking than he was. He weighed my offer of unpaid help for a dismissively scant few seconds, shook his head, and said it would take a minimum of a month for me to learn to pull my weight. Excuse me? I’d seen roadies at work. What was there to learn that could possibly take a single morning and afternoon, let alone four weeks? He concluded earnestly, “I just couldn’t take dead wood on the road.”
And there was I thinking that’s precisely what he would be doing. Other spiteful, yet sweetly consoling thoughts crowded into my head. Could Alvin Lee have been aware as he slouched, sweating, from the most famous of festival stages, his pulverised guitar held high in triumph and acknowledgement of the crowd’s applause, that Ten Years After’s career path was peaking at that very instant – a few minutes after 8pm on Sunday 17th August 1969 atop a muddy field in upstate New York? And that it would be all downhill from then on? Hang on, why the hell did I need consoling? It wasn’t me who was going to have to sit through those eleven interminably noodling minutes of ‘I’m Going Home’ every night for three long weeks.
My next try was Cat Stevens. A university acquaintance was working for his management company, so I had a head start. The winsome teen popster turned earnestly bearded singer-songwriter might not have been an all-time favourite, but, unlike Ten Years After, at least his career was buoyant. I even owned one of his records. David was optimistic. He would put in a word for me. He called back a few days later.
“Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, John, but I’m afraid it’s not going to happen.”
I asked why on earth not, and had to bite my tongue while David explained that, being a sensitive artist, Steve could easily be unsettled by the presence of a stranger within his aura. Give me a break. If his tour was to make money, he’d have several thousand different strangers in or around his aura every single night. Again, I wasn’t heartbroken. It didn’t sound as if touring with Steve – a name I would now never get to call him – would be a lot of laughs.
Perhaps I wasn’t aiming high enough? Certainly, going for the second division was getting me nowhere. Two upcoming UK tours had already caught my eye: Led Zeppelin and the Faces. Although I was a fan of both bands, each tour posed a problem. Led Zeppelin’s ran from late November until Christmas, then resumed in January for a further four weeks. For the money I’d make from the article, I couldn’t afford to be out of circulation for two months; on the other hand, I couldn’t imagine that dropping out halfway through would suit anyone but me.
The problem with the Faces was Rod Stewart, or so I anticipated, since repeated requests to interview him for my unpublished British blues book had got me nowhere, but since the man who had fielded my calls, publicist Mike Gill, had always said no with such faultless charm, I knew if I got turned down again, at least it would be politely and painlessly. As it was, Mike laughed down the phone at my proposal, but arranged a meeting with the band’s tour manager Pete Buckland, who, even before we met, had booked three weeks’ hotels for me.
“So I’m on the tour?”
“Is the Pope a Jew?”
When I got home, I phoned Mike to thank him for helping my project happen. He seemed embarrassed that I should have taken the trouble and, when I thought we’d said all there was to say, his voice took on a serious tone. “Whatever you do, don’t ever leave your room unlocked, and tell the desk clerk at every hotel you stay at that no one – but no one – has your permission to borrow a pass key.” Mike’s ominous warning pushed second thoughts into my head, but not for long. This was going to be my first big story.
I don’t recall exactly when Pete owned up about The Plan, but it must have been at a point in the tour when I’d been accepted into the Faces family. This plan, by then aborted, had evidently been hatched the moment Mike had phoned him to say a New Musical Express journalist wanted to join the road crew. The Faces had had a fractious relationship with the UK music press, who, like the British public, had been slower to embrace the band’s brash showmanship than their American counterparts, and here was an opportunity to get their own back. This hack would be worked just as hard as anyone in the crew, and he couldn’t grumble, because that’s what he’d volunteered for. And being more used to pushing a pen than humping gear, he’d be a physical wreck by the end of the first load-out and on his way back to London with no story, certainly not one he wouldn’t be embarrassed to see his name next to.
It was as if the band had anticipated the abrasive review of their Coast To Coast/Overture And Beginners album that Charles Shaar Murray would write for the NME thirteen months later – “Not to put too fine a point on it, their new live album contains some of the sloppiest and most incompetent playing I’ve ever heard from a so-called major band” – and resolved to get their retaliation in first. But the plan hadn’t worked. They’d picked the wrong guy or, rather, the wrong guy had picked them. However they had tested me, I’d passed. I’d drunk as much as anyone, done as many drugs, chatted up more girls.
By then, only months since Nick Logan had taken me on, ambition had goaded me to let him down. I knew the Faces were big in the States and, having recently met Rolling Stone’s London editor, concluded it would be cooler to see my piece in America’s premier music publication. I rang him. He sounded keen. That was enough for me. The next time I was in the NME office, I looked for Nick.
“Would you be interested in a first night review of the Faces’ UK tour? It starts in Dundee. I’m going to be there.”
“I thought you were writing me a tour diary.”
When had I mentioned that to him? How could I have forgotten?
“Ah, that’s for Rolling Stone,” I mumbled.
I got my comeuppance. Rolling Stone went cold on the article, but I was too embarrassed to reoffer it to Nick, who had agreed to take that first night review. A lesson absorbed, I ought to be able to conclude, but ‘Live and don’t learn’ was my motto back then.
