 |
 |
| Library |
| Subscribe |
| Get Newsletter |
| Free on RBP |
| Audio |
| Contact |
| Writers |
| Writers' Blogs |
| Content Services |
| Magazine Archive |
| About Us |
| Press Room |
| Your Account |
| Home |
| search the library
|
How Not To Review The Who
The Who weren’t mods, they were groomed to look that way by Peter Meaden, a pill-popping publicist with so many ideas in his unnaturally active mind that he couldn’t always spot the right one. The mod image was a sound plan; changing the group’s name to the High Numbers and pasting a self-consciously mod lyric onto a Slim Harpo tune wasn’t, and ‘I’m The Face’ died a death. When would-be entrepreneurs Kit Lambert (posh) and Chris Stamp (street-sharp) showed up, Meaden was rowed out, and the group became The Who again.
More lastingly important than the look, which, on all except Townshend, sat awkwardly, as if their clothes were the wrong size and their hair cut for another head, and which, in any case, would soon give way to second-hand ‘op art’ graphic devices, was the care Meaden took to indoctrinate the group into mod culture via visits to the Scene Club in Soho. Townshend absorbed most from the Scene’s scene, the explosive spark for the group’s trio of 1965 hits, ‘I Can’t Explain’, ‘Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere’ and ‘My Generation’.
Eight years on and not for the first time, I met the immensely likeable Meaden, shortly after Townshend had completed his mod opus, Quadrophenia. We talked about the drynamil days. He showed me a letter from Townshend, mounted like a picture in a frame and hung on the wall behind his desk. It was Townshend’s thank you – a cheque had been enclosed – for uncovering this precious lode of inspiration that he had lately mined once more.
I only saw him once more, at the start of the Who’s 1975 UK tour to promote The Who By Numbers. The venue was Bingley Hall, near Stafford, an inhospitable shed in which the stink of a recent cattle auction hung like fog. I was writing a review for NME, Meaden was managing the Steve Gibbons Band, their support spot further evidence of Townshend’s enduring allegiance. We were pleased to see one another. Unsurprisingly, Meaden was still popping pills; given a minute and a chronically weak will, so was I.
Although the gig was on a Friday, it wasn’t until Monday morning, with the shadow of a midday deadline as oppressive as my hang-over, that I searched for my notes. Experience had taught me what to expect, for I had doggedly followed my motto: live and don’t learn. I knew, from too many other Monday mornings, that when I located those notes, folded minutely in my wallet or, ratcheting my panic several notches, still stuffed in the shirt or jeans I’d worn to the gig, the layers of paper stuck with sweat or a drink someone had tipped over me, they would comprise at best an inadequate jumble of cock-eyed observations and bons mots, as if I had set out intentionally to play tricks on my hung-over self, or, at worst, entirely undecipherable: words written blindly in darkness, the ink run into a Rorschach blot, leaving me with nothing more to rely on than my memory, fallible when my brain was in the gym every day, but after a bender of a weekend, as safe a repository for my thoughts as if I had written them in sand with a stick as the tide turned to come in.
I stared at the sheet of paper I’d fumbled into my ancient typewriter – an office Olympia to which I had been known to pray in the absence of inspiration – aware that I had to wrench five hundred words from what was left of my brain. I turntabled The Who By Numbers and stilled my shaking hand sufficiently to lower the pick-up onto one track after another in the false hope that at least one number would trigger a productive memory, and rued my old-fashioned view that I – the intrusive ego – should be absent from the articles I wrote. I knew writers who would go for the hey-get-me-I’ve-been-on-a-booze-and-pills-bender-with-The-Who’s-muse angle, but, apart from my journalistic principles, another concern stopped me, which was that, daft as it seemed even to me, ten years after I’d left home, I didn’t want my parents to know I did drugs.
I took a break to submerge myself in a scalding bath with a cold flannel compress on my head, and read what I’d managed to write, while I leaked sweat from heat and fear, then returned reluctantly to my desk. Somehow I wrung out the remainder of the required words, hurtled recklessly along the Embankment and through the old Kingsway tram tunnel to the NME’s office in Long Acre, where I left my car on a yellow line. The reviews editor made a show of counting off the final seconds on his watch as I panted to his desk.
To help me recover from my stressful morning, I stopped off on the way home at The Plough on Wandsworth Road. Over the first pint of a new week, I promised myself that next weekend I’d wait until the gig was over and my notes intact and stored in a safe repository, before I got completely out of it.
When Peter Meaden overdosed at his parents’ north London home in July 1978, weeks before Keith Moon, the verdict was suicide. There was no connection between these deaths, of course, apart from the haunting link of Townshend’s line: “Hope I die before I get old.”
1973 Let It Rock Critics Poll
Thirty-six years ago, I polled contributors to and friends of Let It Rock, the monthly magazine I edited: what, I wanted to know, were their highs and lows of 1973? Voter turn-out was impressive. While I can’t explain the no-show of John Peel and LIR columnist Richard Williams, I’m reminded what a small world music journalists populated back then. Alongside our magazine’s regulars were Melody Maker’s Chris Welch, NME’s Nick Kent and Charles Shaar Murray, Sounds’ Jerry Gilbert and Martin Hayman, The Guardian’s Robin Denselow, and a strong American contingent that included Lester Bangs, Lenny Kaye, Greil Marcus, Dave Marsh and Ed Ward, as well as London-based New Yorkers Paul Gambaccini, a Rolling Stone correspondent and recent recruit to Radio 1, and Robert Shelton of The Times.
Surprisingly, for such a disparate bunch, there was some consensus, not least in the dearth of positive nominations for the major artists of the day. Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Paul Simon’s There Goes Rhymin’ Simon and the Bob Dylan single, ‘Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door’, made a few lists, but for every vote in favour of Van Morrison’s sublime performance at the Rainbow Theatre in July, there was a nay for his Hardnose The Highway album, and there were as many boos for the moribund recording of Eric Clapton’s Rainbow Concert as there were hurrahs for the event itself, those cheers no doubt inspired at least in part by the sight of our hero on stage again at last. As a follow-up to Exile On Main Street, the Stones’ Goat’s Head Soup was evidently a let-down, as was The Who’s Quadrophenia after Who’s Next, while Led Zeppelin’s Houses Of The Holy’s only mention was as the year’s most disappointing record.
Our favourite single was Dobie Gray’s UK flop, ‘Drift Away’, but we shared record buyers’ enthusiasm for 10cc’s ‘Rubber Bullets’ and Stealer’s Wheel’s ‘Stuck In The Middle With You’. We rated Mott and, ignoring its 1972 release, were thrilled by Stevie Wonder’s new sound on ‘Superstition’. Thumbs were raised for the Average White Band, Blue Oyster Cult, John Fogerty’s post-Creedence Blue Ridge Rangers, the Sutherland Brothers & Quiver, as well as the seemingly reinvigorated Beach Boys’ Holland.
This was, of course, prog-rock’s heyday, but Let It Rock didn’t like ELP, Genesis, Jethro Tull, the Moody Blues or Yes, a collective antipathy which, in the end, scuppered the magazine. Music fans weren’t yet middle-aged and moneyed, with lifestyle options to match, so there were no ads then for cars, whisky or male grooming products, just albums, and there was a limit, it turned out, to the number of times we could denigrate record companies’ flagship acts before their advertising managers angrily withdrew their support. (It wasn’t until 1975 – laughably late – that Yes were given a spread, and it still gives me immeasurable pleasure to report that not one of the magazine’s 35 issues found room for ELP or Jethro Tull.) That lesson would have to wait to be learned. In 1973 prog-rock barely blipped on our radar.
This was not because an attitude ascribed to LIR-er Michael Gray in a lately-published letter from the NME’s Kent and Murray – “his head so far up his ass that his ears are full of shit” – was rife; rather that our ears were aimed elsewhere.
An eclectic, timeless, rootsy music that would be lazily tagged “pub rock” had provided for some London-based writers an overdue alternative to record industry overkill, as it had for its practitioners. Either bruised by the business or uninterested in what it had to offer, bands like Bees Make Honey, Brinsley Schwarz and Kilburn and the High Roads had deliberately taken a detour from the well-mapped highway to Hitsville onto a musical B-road, where they could perform, freed from the pressures of commerce or fashion, a seemingly off-the-cuff mix of R&B, rockabilly, country, jazz, even post-war, pre-rock’n’roll jump jive – styles apparently too diverse to lump together under any more meaningful banner than the name of the modest venues where the bands chose to play. In his poll entry, Time Out music editor John Collis highlighted the appeal of “being able to hear the 1973 version of fifties and early sixties music – and drink at the same time.” Unsurprisingly, the above three bands attracted a significant number of votes. But the mindset that had drawn the Bees and Brinsleys to play in pubs would also make it hard for them to move on, and for Ian Dury to find his feet required more disciplined musicians than the Kilburns. Elsewhere in our poll, though, was evidence of more significant stirrings.
Support for reggae in general, and Toots & The Maytals and The Wailers in particular, was mirrored, I’m pleased to confirm, in the review section of the poll issue, where Graham Taylor wrote of Funky Kingston, “Shout it loud, this is a fine album,” and predicted that Burnin’ “could well turn out the most significant release of 1973.” (The following year, spellbound by the un-remixed pre-release cassette copy of Natty Dread that had soundtracked my summer, I talked Island Records into giving us 500 copies as a subscription giveaway. The response, for a small circulation monthly, was overwhelming, and Island generously doubled that number.)
While Let It Rock-ers were propping up the bar in the Tally Ho and the Kensington, writers in Detroit and New York were digging Iggy & The Stooges and The New York Dolls. Almost every one of Lester Bang’s responses in the best/biggest/greatest categories featured the Stooges, who also impressed Lenny Kaye at Max’s Kansas City, while the Dolls “anyway, anyhow, anywhere” were Dave Marsh’s live favourites.
Remarkably, those bands had been seen in the same cities by Nick Kent, and both had made a big impression. What’s more, his vision of 1974 was a prophesy of punk a year or more – according to your starting point – before it began. He predicted that “hordes of deranged mutant-youth will spring up from the suburbs primed on Iggy Pop and wearing Keith Richard death-head face-masks to assassinate John Denver, James Taylor and Carly (Simon).” Hats off.
A footnote: Was Charlie Gillett’s choice of Manu Dibango’s ‘Dangwa’ as a favourite record of the moment a straightforward acknowledgement of an outstanding track or were his ears already retuning from the USA to Africa? Not according to the sleeve note to his recent Honky Tonk compilation, where he says of Dibango’s ‘Soul Makossa’, “I could never have guessed that this track might be the signpost for the rest of my life, as I began to follow the trail of enthralling music from outside the English-speaking world.”
Voters included Lester Bangs, Karl Dallas, Robin Denselow, Simon Frith, Paul Gambaccini, Jerry Gilbert, Charlie Gillett, Michael Gray, Lenny Kaye, Nick Kent, Greil Marcus, Dave Marsh, Charles Shaar Murray, Chris Salewicz and Chris Welch, nine of whom – plus one non-musical event – provide the answers to the following questions:
1. Whose futile hope for 1974 was prog-rock kings Yes “returning to songs and simplicity”?
2. Whose ‘biggest downer of the year’ was “finding out Bette Midler hasn’t changed her show in two years”?
3. In the same category, who bemoaned “Gram Parsons dying; Neil Young George Harrison, Melanie and Leon Russell not dying”?
4. Who was gratified by “groups rediscovering their audiences” and looked forward to “dancing to live music”?
5. Which event prompted which writer to reflect: “At first it was pure glee to see all the bad guys take it on the chin, but now that we have found out how deep the evil cuts, how bad it really was and is, it is only scary, and no comfort for anyone”? (Two answers)
6. Who recognised as “a feat of some sort” the success of “the staff of the NME… in getting people to talk about themselves more than the artists they were writing about”?
7. Who welcomed “the return of a local (however haphazard) rock scene to New York”?
8. Who commended a David Bowie bootleg on the grounds that “our new kitten hasn’t crapped on the sleeve, like he did with a Neil Diamond album I took home to review”?
9. Whose ‘biggest buzz of the year’ was “falling in love, lying around every nite taking quaaludes and fucking yer brains out to Raw Power”?
As it’s Christmas, I’m offering a pristine copy of my 1991 Classic Albums interviews book to the first person who scores 10 out of 10 – unless I suspect you’ve looked up the answers in a well-preserved copy of Let It Rock. Anyone else got a better prize to offer?
More British R&B: The Stones Start, Blues Inc Stumble
The first public appearance of what would one day be touted as “the greatest rock and roll band in the world” was hardly headline news, claiming no more than a couple of column inches on an inside page of the July 1962 issue of Jazz News. The date of the debut was Thursday 12th July; the venue the Marquee Club (then a basement below the Academy Cinema in Oxford Street, whose tent-like décor had been designed by the surrealist photographer Angus McBean); the band the Rollin’ – with an apostrophe – Stones. These details were followed by a quote from singer Mick Jagger, expressing the fragile hope that the audience in that bastion of musical correctness wouldn’t “think we’re a rock’n’roll outfit,” and the expected line-up, which, alongside the snake-hipped “R&B vocalist”, featured guitarists Keith Richard and Elmo Lewis (Brian Jones’ blues alter ego), pianist Ian Stewart, bass guitarist Dick Taylor and drummer Mick Avory.
Whether Avory actually appeared is uncertain, and other drummers would come and go in the six months before Charlie Watts could be persuaded to abandon a day job in graphic design to pursue a full-time career with the Stones, but on Thursday 12th July the band’s future drummer could be found in the Marquee’s audience, from where he noted a phenomenon that set this new group apart from Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated, with whom he had previously played. “The thing was,” he told me in 1978, “the bands that were doing that stuff, like Alexis’, were really eccentric old men. Now the Stones, the front line at any rate, were young, so there was obvious appeal for the kids who wanted to dance. Alexis’ band was a joke to look at, but this lot sort of crossed the barrier. They actually were like rock stars, I suppose, but they could play.”
The Stones’ Marquee debut was no springboard to overnight success. Although they reappeared at the club, they were dropped by the club’s manager Harold Pendleton after a meagre five more bookings in as many months because, as Pendleton’s partner Chris Barber argued, “they weren’t authentic enough, even then they’d gone into British” – intoned with unmissably dismissive emphasis – “R&B.” (The slight was not quickly forgotten: filming a TV special at the Marquee eight years later, Keith Richards petulantly swung his guitar at Pendleton, but missed.)
During the months before he left the Stones to pursue an unfulfilled aim to attend the Royal College of Art, bassist Dick Taylor had little reason to suppose they were about to break into the big time. “We played very few gigs,” he conceded. “I remember somewhere way out in the sticks, though it probably wasn’t as far as Watford, and we all went by train, took all our gear on the train, and we played in this completely empty hall. The only audience was outside, looking through the window. No one came in, but we really enjoyed ourselves.”
The Stones were welcomed back regularly at the Ealing Club, and also tried out at the Flamingo Club in Soho. Run by brothers Rik and John Gunnell, the club’s renowned All-Nighters – midnight-to-six sessions on Saturday nights – were popular with black Londoners and US servicemen on 48-hour passes from their bases at Mildenhall, Lakenheath and High Wycombe, reluctant to waste on overnight accommodation the pay they had earned guarding Britain against the Red Menace or to spend an unnecessary moment of their precious leave asleep. The audience also included the first mods, their stamina boosted by drinamyl and dexedrine. For die-hards with nowhere else to go, there was a Sunday afternoon session, which doubled as audition time. The Stones’ turn came in November 1962, as John Gunnell told me nine years later.
“We were all pissed from the night before, pouring out afternoon whiskies, and this band comes down, when long hair wasn’t in, and we were thinking, ‘Fuck, who are these? They’ve got to be kidding.’ But they went on stage and they were great, so we gave them a Monday night. This was when they had Ian Stewart on piano and Carlo Little from Screaming Lord Sutch’s band on drums. And they drew no one, because the Flamingo was a black club, a real R&B club. It was saxophones and screaming, and the Stones died a death, no one was there, like one person would come in, which was five bob (25p). I remember paying Mick Jagger off and telling him, ‘If your R&B ever takes off, you can kiss my arse.’ When it did, he came back down to remind me.” The Stones’ truncated four-week residency in January 1963 was nonetheless notable for the first appearance of the soon-to-be familiar line-up of Jagger, Richard, Jones, Wyman and Watts, plus pianist Ian Stewart, who, because his face didn’t fit, would be relegated to roadie by soon-to-be manager Andrew Oldham.
The musical background of the Rolling Stones’ two most recent recruits could hardly have been more polarised, yet Charlie Watts and bassist Bill Wyman, who joined a matter of weeks before the drummer in December, typified the diversity of musicians drawn to R&B.
Wyman had been playing what everyone else played in his corner of south-east London: “Shadows stuff, Ventures stuff, all those semi-instrumental groups, because there were never really any good singers about. So most of the bands had an echo chamber and a good lead guitarist who could play ‘FBI’ and all that shit, and experiment and try and play some American music, but it was always the wrong stuff – it was ‘Poetry In Motion’ and ‘Personality’, all those things – whereas the band I was trying to get together, we were trying to play the R&B kind of American music that was coming over, more like Little Richard, the Coasters, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, black artists, not the Pat Boones and the Bobby Vees. I wasn’t involved at all with the jazz thing that was going on in London, or even the R&B thing. I was more into rock’n’roll, rather than the Korner thing, so (joining the Stones) was very strange to me, and it was only Chuck Berry that held me in with the band for the first few weeks, because I knew all those Chuck Berry songs, and I knew Bo Diddley vaguely. I didn’t know any of the blues people, but at least when they said, let’s do ‘Reeling And Rocking’, I knew it backwards, and doing a blues on the bass was fairly simple anyway. It was just popular music that was being played by black artists instead of white, really, that was the difference, and we suddenly realised it was better.”
By contrast, Watts “came out of the school that never listened to rock’n’roll, or refused to until I was about twenty-one. I was never really that good to play what you might term ‘jazz’, particularly at that time, so I just used to play with anyone really, which was mostly jazz people, but not on a very high musical level, not the best, though some of them turned out to be the best as time passed.”
Blues Incorporated had provided Watts’ introduction to R&B. “When I first played with Cyril Davies in Alexis Korner’s band, I thought, ‘What the fuck is happening here?’ because I’d only ever heard the harmonica played by Larry Adler, but Cyril was such a character, I loved him. But the rest of it! I didn’t know what the hell was going on. Although I knew about playing a heavy backbeat, it wasn’t like Chicago, which was what Cyril wanted. On a good night it was amazing, but a total cacophony of sound. It was like a cross between R&B and Charlie Mingus, which was what Alexis wanted. By the time I joined the Stones, I was quite used to rock’n’roll… to Chuck Berry and that, but it was actually sitting up endlessly with Keith (Richards) and Brian (Jones) – I was out of work at the time I joined them and I just used to hang about with them, waiting for jobs to come up, daytime work – just listening to Little Walter and all that, that it got ground in.”
While the Stones were consolidating their style, the turbulent, cacophonous clash of R&B and Mingus observed from his drum stool by Watts, had brought to an untimely end Alexis Korner’s long-standing association with Cyril Davies, who quit Blues Incorporated in November 1962. “Cyril wanted to work with a sort of recreation of the mid-fifties Muddy Waters band,” Korner told me, “but my argument was, it’s already been done, what’s the point of doing it again? So Blues Incorporated was getting to be this riffing-type R&B band, and I’d always liked horns.” With Davies gone, Korner brought in altoist Graham Bond to complement Dick Heckstall-Smith’s tenor – “and we got some tremendous riffing things going with them and Jack (Bruce) and Ginger (Baker).”
Following his abrupt departure, Davies did not waste time hand-picking individual musicians to play with, instead annexing in its entirety Screaming Lord Sutch’s backing group, the Savages – Nicky Hopkins (piano), Bernie Watson (guitar), Rick Brown (bass), and sometime Rolling Stone Carlo Little (drums) – adding Long John Baldry as second vocalist and a trio of black backing singers, The Velvettes, recruited from the cast of the West End show, King Kong. He named his new band Cyril Davies’s R&B All-Stars.
While welcoming his liberation from Davies’s belligerence and dogma, Korner continued to miss his old partner. “We’d worked together on and off for a long time, Cyril and I, and as long as things were going badly for us, as long as there was a fight, even to find somewhere to play, we were okay together. It was a musical partnership, and once we were playing, we forgot about all the rest. Sometimes we played some extraordinary things together, Cyril and I. We got things going together that I’ve never got going with anybody else, never, not those particular things that I used to get going with Cyril, that he used to get going with me.”
The post-Davies “riffing” line-up of Blues Incorporated lasted barely three months. Recruited as an altoist, Graham Bond made no secret of his desire to double on organ, a move vetoed by Korner, who had “got it very clear that Bondy came in as an alto player. He occasionally did a piano feature, but we had a pianist – Johnny Parker. When he started wanting to play organ, I said it didn’t fit into the band, it wasn’t that sort of sound. Besides, I have a thing about organ players, because they do tend to ride over everything else, they’ve got all that power, and they do tend to bloody well use it, so they swamp the more delicate things that are going on elsewhere. After some arguments, not bitter ones, but some fairly positive arguments about this, that and the other, he left (in February 1963), persuading Jack (Bruce) and Ginger (Baker) to form a trio with him.”
Unwanted at the Marquee, but established at the Ealing Club and the Star & Garter Hotel in Windsor, the Stones next set up camp at the Station Hotel in the Thames-side suburb of Richmond, where they played on Sunday nights from February 1963, making it one of those venues, like the Cavern in Liverpool or the 100 Club in Oxford Street, where, in order to assert earlier-than-thou allegiance to the Beatles or the Sex Pistols, you had to claim to have seen them.
The Sunday evening sessions were run by Georgio Gomelsky, a desultory entrepreneur who might have managed the Stones, had he been half as sharp as he thought he was. Helping Gomelsky was Hamish Grimes, a young graphic designer, who witnessed at first hand the mushrooming popularity of their Crawdaddy Club. “There was only a small group to whom mention of the Rolling Stones would have meant anything at all,” Grimes recalled, “but the word spread that this was something totally different, and every week the figures doubled until the place was absolutely full to capacity. People would queue for hours, literally, on a Sunday afternoon. They would start queuing about five o’clock, people sitting outside the door, so they could be first in and get next to the stage. It was difficult to move around, and if you went out to the bar to get a drink, you could never get back to a good vantage point. It was absolutely mad.”
As at the Ealing Club, when Blues Incorporated had first played there, the audience for the Stones’ sessions at the Station Hotel was peppered with would-be bluesmen and apprentice pop stars, among them schoolfriends Jim McCarty and Paul Samwell-Smith, who, having had enough of the same Shadows instrumentals that had bored Bill Wyman, would soon team up with members of a Kingston art school band, the Metropolitan Blues Quartet, to form the Yardbirds. Another regular was future Small Face Ian McLagan, who affirmed, “There were a lot of musicians who used to turn up early, drink a couple of quick pints, and get to the front of the stage to watch mainly Brian for me, funnily enough, and Stu (Ian Stewart). And that’s when I realised maybe white boys from London can play the blues, because they could, so it gave me a bit more confidence: yeah, maybe we can play the blues and get paid for it.”
By the time the Stones unloaded their gear at the Station Hotel, they had already played one gig, an afternoon set at the Ken Colyer Jazz Club at Studio 51 in Great Newport Street, where Soho meets Covent Garden. This new residency in such a stronghold of traditional jazz, on behalf of which Colyer had remained a tireless campaigner, said much about R&B’s take-over from trad. Although Acker Bilk’s ‘Stranger On The Shore’ was by far the biggest-selling record of 1962, even before the end of its twelve-month chart run Melody Maker was asking “Has Trad Had It?”: “Let’s face it. The trad boom is on the wane. Only a few big names can pull in the crowds – and not all of them are doing the big business of six months ago. A lot of newly-formed trad bands around today are going to the wall.”
The article went on to blame the top bands for following the same big money circuit – “no wonder the fans are beginning to get bored” – but identified as the essential reason for trad’s decline the fact that many of those fans were not genuine jazz enthusiasts. “So many so-called trad fans are really camp followers of the pop disc parade. Thousands of youngsters who buy the trad-pop singles have about as much musical appreciation as those who rush to purchase the latest rock or twist hit. Jazz fans? Not on your Nelly!”
Bandleader Alan Elsdon blamed “certain agents and promoters (who) have flooded the jazz clubs with inferior bands,” while Mike Cotton, whose Jazzmen would emerge from an R&B make-over in 1964 as the Mike Cotton Sound, conceded, “There is no doubt the big boom is on the wane.”
Rhythm and blues was seen as a universal remedy: a cure for dwindling club audiences, an elixir for uninspired musicians, and ultimately a money-earner for the record industry, although not until its London-based, but Liverpool-fixated A&R men had recovered sufficiently from the tunnel vision brought on by Merseybeat to spot what was happening in their own back yard.
Chris Barber: Father of British R&B
By 1963 everyone I knew had a TV. Two black-and-white channels: the one that was on and “the other side”. So when the Rolling Stones appeared on Thank Your Lucky Stars at teatime on Saturday 7th July, miming to their first single, ‘Come On’, I knew millions of teens would be watching the band I had seen at the Ricky Tick club in Windsor almost every Friday night for the last five months. I’d talked the Stones up weekly to my fellow sixth-formers, without persuading one to make the trip to Windsor with me, but I walked into school the following Monday, knowing my less hip peers would by now have had at least a three-minute monochrome glimpse of the best band around.
Anticipating approval of my excellent taste and congratulations on my foresight, what I got instead was a comprehensive thumbs-down, endorsed by sneers, some laughter, even a feeble impression, plus a new nickname – Mick – since, ignoramuses all, they had failed to identify Brian Jones as the model for my blond mop. Their response had me momentarily wondering, not for the last time in my life, whether an absolute belief that my band was heading for the big time was misplaced. No, I quickly concluded, I’m right, they’re wrong, and, what’s more, even if the Stones didn’t make it, I’d rather hear them wailing the blues in the back room of a pub, than too-eager-to-please Liverpudlians yeah-yeah-yeahing their winsome way to No 1.
In the bigger picture, the Stones’ TV debut was confirmation that R&B had become part of pop. Its emergence had been a long time coming, ten years in all – twice the lifespan of modern pop music – since the beginnings of a blues movement in Britain had huddled in the unlikely Trojan horse of traditional jazz. Through the early fifties, the traditional or Dixieland jazz movement, dedicated to the revival of New Orleans’ vernacular music, had been steadily gathering a momentum which, by the end of the decade, would generate a “trad boom”. In its vanguard was trombonist and bandleader Chris Barber.
It was in 1953, four years after he led his first amateur jazz band, that Barber formed the Ken Colyer Jazzmen with the eponymous trumpeter, lately returned – a reluctant, but revered deportee – from the fabled Crescent City itself. Colyer explained the band’s mission in the jazz-friendly music weekly, Melody Maker: “We are going to try to popularise New Orleans music without distorting it, aborting it, or slapping any gimmicks on it.” Having established a Monday night residency at Mack’s (later famous as the 100 Club, a basement at that address in London’s Oxford Street), in September they recorded New Orleans To London, an album which yielded traditional jazz’s first hint of a pop hit, ‘Isle Of Capri’. Although the band bore his name, Colyer grew increasingly disenchanted with its musical course, which, as he saw it, was being plotted solely by Barber, rather than by mutual agreement, and he quit in May 1954, after a final disagreement, remembered by Barber as “a blazing row”. Without him, the band became Chris Barber’s Jazz Band, its new name leaving no ambiguity as to its leader.
Unlike the more tunnel-visioned Colyer, Barber was eager to share with his band’s – and traditional jazz’s – escalating audience his singular conviction that the syncopated jazz born in New Orleans around the start of the century was not the only form of black American music worthy of their attention. There was another: dark, primitive, driven by raw emotion. The blues. Determined to disseminate what he saw as “the folk music of the American Negro” without jazzing up its unsophisticated instrumentation, Barber initiated within his band a stripped-down, skeletal trio to perform this rudimentary music more accurately than any arrangement for a Dixieland line-up would allow.
The trio, which took to the stage during the main band’s interval break, was recruited from existing personnel, and comprised vocalist Beryl Bryden mutely, but eye-catchingly, thrumming washboard percussion, with Barber himself on double bass, while the jazz band’s banjoist Tony Donegan played guitar and sang, the personable Glaswegian’s wholehearted commitment to the material going a long way to compensate for a pinched vocal tone that impeded a broad interpretation of the blues. As Barber acknowledged in our 1971 interview, “Lonnie loved the blues, but he could only sing it in a certain kind of way – he could get quite near to that particular nasal sound of Leadbelly’s.”
The unexpected popularity of the blues trio’s interval sets led to the inclusion of two of their favourites on the Barber band’s 1954 album, New Orleans Joys. Eventually paired as the A- and B-side of a single released late the following year, ‘Rock Island Line’ and ‘John Henry’ showed up in the new year’s first Top Ten, where the record remained until the end of March, a three-month run that turned Donegan – by now calling himself Lonnie in homage to his blues idol, Lonnie Johnson – into a bona fide British pop star who would enjoy a prolific run of hits.
Donegan topped the UK charts three times, an impressive enough feat, yet two other statistics underline his pre-eminence. Between 1956 and 1962, the number of weeks in which Lonnie Donegan had a record in the charts was surpassed only by Elvis Presley, while his thirty hit singles outnumber even the totals attained by those pop colossi, the Beatles and Abba. And if Donegan was seduced by popstardom into recording ‘Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour (On The Bedpost Over Night)’ and ‘My Old Man’s A Dustman’, red-nosed novelties that owed more to music hall than any ethnic tradition, he nevertheless continued to use his records and live performances as platforms to popularise blues, folk and country music.
Of course, the music Lonnie Donegan brought to the attention of British record buyers was not known as blues. His version, communicated like a musical Chinese whisper, emerged as skiffle, originally an American term applied to the jug bands and rent party combos of the 1920s and ’30s, especially those employing home-made or improvised instruments, such as cigar-box guitars, washboards, and blown bottles and jugs. Re-adopted in the UK in the 1950s, the name not only suppressed the music’s true identity, but encouraged disapproving adults, marooned on the wrong side of the recently mapped generation gap, to rhyme it with ‘piffle’.
Besides catapaulting Lonnie Donegan into the big time, ‘Rock Island Line’ opened the charts to Top Ten hits by Chas McDevitt and Nancy Whiskey, the Vipers, and Johnny Duncan and the Blue Grass Boys. Nevertheless, this handful of hits and Donegan’s dozens notwithstanding, skiffle’s seismic impact was not on record sales.
What the success of ‘Rock Island Line’ did was to launch Britain’s first nationwide – north to south, coast to coast – pop craze. Skiffle was ideal everyman music, accessible to anyone with the will to have a go, since its essential instrumentation was as inexpensive as its chords and rhythms were uncomplicated. Adequate equipment to enable a group to perform at a local youth club – where many made their first (and, almost as many, their last) appearance – could be purchased for a few pounds, and didn’t even necessitate a visit to a music shop.
In the lingering austerity of a predominantly white goods-free post-war era, the washboard that skiffle substituted for a drum kit could be found in the ironmongery that was ever-present in British high streets, the same shop providing the broom-handle neck for the bass, whose sound box was a tea chest, still redolent with the aroma of Darjeeling or Assam, a dusty residue dancing in its corners as the string stretched tight to the top of the neck was slapped and plunked. Even a guitar could be bought cheaply by mail order from a ubiquitous newspaper ad, illustrated with a drawing of a check-shirted musician whose beaky features were a dead ringer for Lonnie Donegan.
The fad spread across the UK like an epidemic. In London, Soho’s streets bristled with skiffle clubs; in Liverpool, a teenage John Lennon, having bought – and, as soon as he’d learned the song, sold – a 78 of ‘Rock Island Line’, had his momentous meeting with Paul McCartney at a performance by the skiffling Quarrymen.
In the village where I lived, our fresh-faced, novice vicar startled visitors to the summer fete by fronting his own skiffle group on the back of a flat bed lorry, the skirt of his cassock swinging above his sandalled feet like a bent church bell. Doubtless he genuinely enjoyed the singing and strumming, but, still short-trousered, I was suspicious of the church’s wiles. Surely the follow-up offer of free guitar lessons came with a catch? Wasn’t the group for which he really wanted recruits his confirmation set? Jesus would have to go on wanting me for a sunbeam, my Sundays weren’t worth sacrificing for a few chords.
Skiffle’s runaway popularity was not what its unwitting instigators had intended, and prompted Chris Barber to adopt a different approach to his proselytising. Redoubling the irony, Barber’s jazz band could be fingered for the fanfare that announced the arrival of the trad boom, when their 1959 recording of Sidney Bechet’s ‘Petite Fleur’ – the bandleader’s trombone blamelessly absent from this showcase for his misanthropic clarinettist Monty Sunshine – became one of the year’s biggest hits. Skiffle’s success might have taken Barber by surprise, but he couldn’t fail to notice the looming trad boom. He watched the music’s popularity build year by year, month by month, gig by gig, and, with characteristic altruism, saw his band’s favoured status in this onrushing golden age as an unmissable opportunity to step up his blues crusade.
“From 1955 we had the trad boom to ourselves,” he told me. “We were filling halls everywhere, we had money to spare, we couldn’t get any more people in or charge any more money for the tickets, but we thought we ought to get people to understand that jazz was really this – and all that. There was more to it than what we were doing.” So, early in 1957, he offered his fans a first-hand taste of the blues by stumping up to take on tour as support for his band Big Bill Broonzy and Brother John Sellars. “It was the first British concert tour with blues artists, I think. Big Bill had been over before (he had, more than once, en route to or from Paris) and done a couple of club dates, but not a concert tour. There was no meeting with the British public, only with a few dedicated fans. We were doing so well that we were able to do what we wanted and have these people guest with us. Brother John was doing a kind of Joe Turner blues act, and they both went down marvellously with the audience. Big Bill did waffle a bit, according to how much whisky he’d drunk before he went on, so his ratio of talk to songs used to vary from concert to concert, but people didn’t object to it, they loved it.”
Later that same year Barber brought over Sister Rosetta Tharpe, then, in May 1958, the duo of Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee – “unbelievable, marvellous tour, it was fantastic” – and, crucially, before the year’s end, Muddy Waters. Like Tharpe two years before, Waters offended finger-in-the-ear folk-blues doctrinists by plugging his guitar into an amplifier, but the Barber band’s less pedantic fans were open-minded. According to the band’s singer (and Barber’s wife) Ottilie Patterson, “Our fans were ready to take what was given, because it was our scene. The thing that made them accept the electric guitar was that it was played by a black person – ‘It must be all right, because they’re genuine, they’re the real thing’.”
What Waters was playing was rhythm and blues: not the acoustic country blues that had previously found favour with British jazz and folk revivalists, but the urbanised, electric mutation of post-war black America. Barber, unblinkered as ever, was hooked. “We were all pretty aware of Muddy’s records in the band, but we weren’t doing any of his numbers at the time. We were doing some numbers in the style – almost – but, of course, not being electric, you wouldn’t notice it particularly. But after Muddy did the tour in ’58, we were obviously more keen on his thing.”
Waters had come to Britain with only his pianist Otis Spann, but just weeks later Barber and his band undertook their first American tour, which provided the opportunity to experience the real Muddy Waters on his home turf in Chicago, supported by his own band – for Barber “an unbelievable experience. One of the most enjoyable things ever was to see Muddy performing ‘I’m A Man’ to a black audience – those screams you hear on a live recording, they were all laughing. It was a rave for a black audience.” The night was a memorable one too for Ottilie Patterson, once Waters had managed to coax her onstage. “I was shit-scared,” she admitted. “Here I was, white, English, in a black blues club in Chicago singing, ‘I wonder why that southbound train don’t run.’ How were they going to take that? Luckily they recognised it for what it was.” She and Barber fell so deeply under Waters’ spell that not only did Patterson become the first British singer to regularly perform his ‘(I’ve Got My) Mojo Working’, making it the earliest anthem of the British blues boom, but, six years after kick-starting skiffle, Barber assembled a second offshoot of his band with the aim that every Waters number they performed would approximate the sound of the amplified original that had knocked them out at Smitty’s Corner in Chicago.
“We were playing these numbers of Muddy’s for a year or two,” he explained, “and I thought we really ought to do it the proper way. None of the jazz band’s instruments had a resonant tone. The sound goes on as long as you blow, and then it stops. So we thought, ‘Electric guitar – we’ll give it a go.’ I had known Alexis Korner for years – he was in my first band, ten years before – and we heard he was doing electric blues in England, so someone said, ‘Let’s get together,’ because it seemed we’d get more of a sound.” But the association with Korner and his chalk-and-cheese partner Cyril Davies proved to be problematic from the start and, despite his audience’s delirious response to the R&B repertoire, Barber dropped the duo, just as he had earlier abandoned the skiffle group. Although he continued to include blues numbers in his band’s repertoire and to bring American bluesmen to Britain, notably James Cotton in 1961, his immeasurable contribution to the development of British R&B ceased with that split.
Trad was by then a nationwide fad, but while a caravan of costumed charlatans peddled their vacuous novelties like placebos to a gullible public, Barber stayed true to the spirit of New Orleans and Chicago. So it was an unpalatable irony that when, in 1964, he updated his band’s instrumentation – electric for stand-up double bass, electric guitar for banjo – and returned to R&B, he was branded an opportunist.
“When our difficulties began,” Ottilie Patterson reflected a few years later, “when R&B came up and traditional jazz went down, I remember Chris saying that the blues fans we had brought into the concerts were the ones who were now the nucleus of British R&B fans.” Barber affirmed, “If we hadn’t brought those singers in, because we liked that music and thought other people ought to appreciate it as well, blues would not have been brought into their consciousness.”
Candidates for the paternity of British blues are few, and the line-up for a DNA test does not include John Mayall. Not to belittle his achievement in making membership of his Bluesbreakers an apprenticeship programme whose graduates form their own blues Who’s Who, but Mayall didn’t move south from Manchester until 1963, too late for fatherhood or midwifery. Cyril Davies, dead by 1964, inspired harmonica players specifically. Because the lineage from skiffle to R&B is direct – it is a lot quicker to count the musicians who didn’t start in skiffle than those who did – Lonnie Donegan belongs on the short-list. Which leaves Chris Barber and Alexis Korner.
Recounting the story of British R&B to a 24-year-old would-be chronicler in November 1971, Korner held my eye to add weight to his words as he said, “I must point out that one of the people most directly responsible for the R&B boom was Chris Barber, who must have known perfectly well what he was doing. He was cutting his own throat, and he did it quite deliberately.” Korner, who made no claim for himself, knew who the real father was.
Blues Incorporated: How British R&B Trashed Trad
Alexis Korner’s Parisian birthplace, Austro-Greek parentage, noble features and languid growl endowed him with an aura of exoticism unreflected in his musical partner Cyril ‘Squirrel’ Davies, a balding, ex-banjo-playing panel beater from Denham with a villainous streak, who could nevertheless make a harmonica sing the blues like noone else in England. The pair had already done their bit for the evolution of homegrown R&B with their London Blues and Barrelhouse Club, whose guests at the Thursday evening sessions in an upstairs room of a Soho pub included Muddy Waters.
Long John Baldry, a young, would-be Big Bill Broonzy, who saw Waters there and in concert at St Pancras Town Hall, was impressed. “Up to that time,” the late, lanky singer told me in 1971, “we thought of blues as being strictly acoustic music, and Muddy came over with this electric guitar and a big amplifier, and a lot of people said, ‘Ooh, sacrilegious, dreadful, dreadful, he’s selling out the blues,’ and all that. It was the same reaction as there was when Bob Dylan came over (in 1966) and first did his electric thing – people actually booing, because they were used to people playing acoustic guitar, in various styles, but never amplified. But Cyril, Alex and myself looked at this and thought, ‘Hmm, this is interesting,’ and we started trying ourselves.” Korner concurred, “Many people didn’t like the St. Pancras concert because Muddy was playing electric, and they didn’t think blues should be played electric. Cyril and I were already being kicked out of clubs for taking in amplifiers.”
In 1960, Korner and Davies were co-opted by Chris Barber to play the closing half-hour of his jazz band’s Wednesday residency at the Marquee Club in Oxford Street, a climactic blues set that had even the most leaden-footed audience members dancing. But, despite its popularity, this blues-jazz fusion was doomed, not least because Davies interpreted his supporting role on harmonica as an opportunity to outwail the redoubtable pipes of Barber’s singer Ottilie Patterson.
“Backing his own singing, he wouldn’t play except in the gaps, because he couldn’t,” Barber explained, before highlighting another problem, “and the trouble with Alex was, you’d beat a number in, ‘One, two, three’ – du-duddlu-du – but Alex was likely to go, ‘One, two, three, four,’ and we got sick of starting on the wrong beat, and decided that, if playing electric R&B in England meant working with Alex, we wouldn’t do it. Besides, Alex wanted to do it all night, and we didn’t.”
Offloaded by Barber, but buoyed by the Marquee audience’s response to their music, Korner and Davies resolved to form their own band. As the first electric blues band in Britain, Blues Incorporated was sufficiently unique to be stuck for places to play. Not only was the music was too earthy by half for pop promoters, but, to pop’s teenage audience, the band’s members would have appeared not merely eccentric, but avuncular, if not outright elderly. Korner, pushing thirty-three, was a dozen years older than contemporary pop stars Adam Faith and Cliff Richard, while Davies, who would die three years later, looked far older than twenty-nine. And whereas their looks would not have been out of place on a jazz club stage, Blues Incorporated’s amplified music was too loud, too close to rock’n’roll for trad-dom.
Their solution was to open their own venue in a west London suburb. The Ealing Club opened on 17th March 1962 – St Patrick’s Night, an appropriately date, given that the premises were known to Davies as an after-hours drinking den – in a basement accessed by a flight of steps between a jeweller’s and a teashop across the road from Ealing Broadway underground station. If they were to attract an audience, it would be by word of mouth on the burgeoning London blues grapevine, because, as Korner remembered, “We opened with a few posters around Ealing and practically no advertising.” But, if he and Davies were worried their venture might fail, their concern would have been dispelled before Blues Incorporated took the stage, because the place was packed from that first night.
Blues Incorporated’s original line-up, headed reluctantly by Alexis Korner – “I didn’t want to lead a band, I just got lumbered into doing it” – on guitar, with harmonica-player and singer Cyril Davies his dishevelled lieutenant, had Art Wood, older brother of Ron, as second singer, plus Keith Scott (piano), Andy Hoogenboom (bass) and Charlie Watts (drums). Wood soon left to form his own Art Wood Combo (later the Artwoods), then Jack Bruce and his white double bass replaced Andy Hoogenboom, and Ginger Baker took over from Charlie Watts, whose commitment was curtailed by a day job as a graphic designer. Dick Heckstall-Smith added tenor sax to the line-up, and there was a succession of pianists. Besides Davies, Long John Baldry would take a turn at the microphone, as would a still short-haired Mick Jagger, who Baldry described as being “all lips and ears – he looked like a ventriloquist’s dummy up there on stage.” Another regular, Eric Clapton, is remembered not for his guitar-playing, but for singing ‘Roll Over Beethoven’, shyness gluing his gaze to the floor. And Keith Richard – no ‘s’ then – would be in the audience with Dick Taylor, bass guitarist with the proto-Stones.
Saturday night at the Ealing Club was more than a regular date in London blues fans’ diary, it was London blues and, what’s more, the London blues scene was the only blues scene in Britain, which is why, most weekends, Brian Jones hitch-hiked ninety miles along the A40 trunk road from his home town of Cheltenham, picking up Paul Pond in Oxford on the way. Calling himself Elmo Lewis, a name with a bluesier ring than the one his parents had given him, the future Rolling Stone duetted with the future Manfred Mann vocalist, who would soon change his own surname from Pond to Jones. Brian Jones’ speciality, learned from Elmore James records, was bottleneck slide guitar, a technique every bit as mind-boggling on first sighting as the most accomplished conjuror’s sleight of hand.
Although Blues Inc members’ knowledge of the blues and approach to the music differed, what did unite the band – and their audience – was a shared antipathy for the tiresome mummery of traditional jazz. “(Blues Incorporated) was basically a reaction against trad,” Korner confirmed. “Most of the people in the first band had played trad jazz at one time or another. Cyril had worked with local trad bands in West London, and I’d worked with Barber and various other bands. Jack Bruce, when he came to us, came straight from Jim McHarg’s Scotsville Jazzband, Ginger Baker had worked with Acker Bilk, Dick Heckstall-Smith had played Bechet-type soprano at one time in a university band. Most of us had been through trad jazz, and for various reasons we wanted to play something that was the complete antithesis of trad jazz, which by then had got very finicky and very kitsch altogether. Trombones played specific parts and clarinets tweedled over the top, and everyone played every beat exactly the same way, and we got fed up with it. You couldn’t have found anything more fundamentally opposed to the concept of trad jazz than Muddy Waters.”
Despite disenchanting Korner’s crowd, trad – the populist monosyllable symbolic of its musical atrophy – had become a pop phenomenon. Having entered the Top Twenty in December 1961, Acker Bilk’s fourth top ten hit, ‘Stranger On The Shore’, was barely a third of the way through its year-long stay in the charts; the Temperance Seven, boatered and blazered like an am-dram chorus from Salad Days, had vodeo-doed their way to a string of hits, including the chart-topping ‘You’re Driving Me Crazy’; and, like Acker Bilk, Kenny Ball and his Jazzmen had been in the charts since the previous year with ‘Midnight In Moscow’, whose formulaic follow-up, ‘March Of The Siamese Children’, was already in the Top Ten.
Two and three-quarter hours of Saturday evening air-time was given over to the BBC Light Programme’s Trad Tavern, while BBC TV had Trad Fad, whose presenter Brian Matthew also hosted the Light Programme’s weekend pop shows, Saturday Club and Easy Beat, their running-orders peppered with trad singles and live sessions.
Matthew had appointed himself the trad boom’s chronicler. In Trad Mad, his feverish account of the era, he recorded the rules laid down by Trad Fad’s (and future Top Of The Pops’) producer Johnny Stewart: “No beatniks and no weirdies! He wanted no one on the screen wearing jeans, and all the girls admitted had to wear skirts. He knew, of course, that in any jazz club you will always find some members of the great unwashed, with their bizarre clothes and off-beat habits, but he felt that they represented only a very small minority of jazz fans, and were completely unnecessary to the programme. ‘Jazz is still jazz,’ he said, ‘whether it is played on Salibury Plain or the lounge of a luxury liner. But it is not enhanced by dingy surroundings and odd hangers-on. I want to prove to its detractors that it is a most interesting form of music, which does not have to be presented in dirt and discomfort. I have built a clean, bright set, and I want it filled with clean, bright people who enjoy jazz’.”
But the trad bandwagon was dangerously overcrowded. In London alone, an estimated fifty trad bands were vying for work, most more intent on making a living than meaningful music. Ted Heath, a bandleader as old as the 20th century, who had been repeatedly wrong in predicting the demise of rock’n’roll and the return of his beloved big bands, was spot-on for once about trad, when he declared, “There’s no future in trad from the musical point of view. As long as people are given the lowest forms of musicianship, they won’t discern between good and bad. Some of us tried, with some success, to get the public to appreciate taste and musicianship. Now the fancy dress boys are teaching youngsters to associate jazz with funny clothes.”
There would be few more trad hits, and by 1964 the music would be dead and buried, but while Brian Matthew had attributed trad’s success to the fact that “rock fans require more from the music than a sheer jungle beat,” what got feet stomping in that damp basement in Ealing and still had heads nodding and toes tapping on the homeward tube was the closest rhythm to a jungle beat since Tarzan’s came up with the chest-thump tom-tom.
Noting the buzz about Blues Incorporated, Chris Barber extended another helping hand to Korner and British R&B. As co-custodian (with Harold Pendleton) of British jazz’s Oxford Street bastion, he booked the band to play the Marquee’s first ‘Rhythm & Blues Night’. Through the summer of 1962, the audience for Blues Inc’s Thursday residency, which had initially been populated almost exclusively by refugees from the Ealing Club, unable to wait for Saturday to come round, swelled weekly, prompting the first press coverage of rhythm and blues in August, when Melody Maker’s Chris Roberts urged readers to “take a trip to the Marquee Club on a Thursday night when Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies are stomping along with Blues Incorporated. That is, if you don’t mind people standing on your head – the club’s popularity has to be seen, heard, and felt to be believed. Their kind of music – using a line-up of guitar, harmonica (amplified), sax, piano, bass and drums – is sure to put in a big take-over bid in rock clubs and dance halls all over Britain.”
Interviewed in the same paper later that month, Korner ventured, “I think the music has a very strong future. In fact, I believe it will be the next ‘big thing’. The audience we get includes trad fans, modern fans, beat fans, real R&B fans, and folk music fans, and it includes most age groups. All of them like to dance, and many twist themselves to a standstill… And basically, whatever else we try to do, we are a dance band. We want to play for dancing. The point is, we are not following a popular trend. There’s never been a band like this in Britain.”
Asked if he thought rhythm and blues could break trad’s stranglehold, he offered this prediction: “I don’t think it can this year, but some time next year it may, if trad stays as it is, of course. I anticipate that there’ll be a hell of a lot more R&B bands by the end of the year.” He wasn’t wrong.
As well as alerting the music press, Blues Incorporated also attracted the attention of BBC Radio’s Jazz Club, whose producer booked the band to perform a live session on 12th July 1962, a red letter day in rock’s calendar – not that Blues Inc’s broadcast was the musical milestone. The date being a Thursday, doing Jazz Club meant finding a band to fill in at the Marquee, but, before attending to that arrangement, Korner had to resolve a dispute with the BBC, who refused to contract the entire line-up to perform a scant handful of songs, arguing that the teenager who took an occasional turn as singer was the most dispensible. Korner baulked, the BBC refused to budge, and a band meeting was held, at which Mick Jagger gamely offered to end the stand-off by fulfilling the Marquee date with a band of his own: the Rollin’ (sic) Stones.
The Flamingo Club
One warm spring Friday night in 1964, cooling off between sets outside the Ricky Tick club in Windsor, I share a match flame with a sharp-suited mod whose jaw works in perfect time with the record wafting from the upstairs room. He chimneys a lungful skywards and asks have I seen Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames? I haven’t. He says they’re the best band around by far and that they’re on at the Flamingo – “up west”, indicated with a head tilt towards London – every Saturday night. I thank him for the tip-off, but figure if a group’s that good, they’ll turn up at the Ricky Tick before long. Although I don’t see him the following week, the Friday after he wants to know what I reckon. When I tell him I haven’t seen them yet, he exhales a smoky sigh and walks away.
Saturday nights soon take on a new pattern. Dex and I still rendezvous in the Antelope, but we leave before closing time and aim my Ford Pop east along the A40, watching house lights go out in the cosy commuter country of Beaconsfield and Gerrards Cross, the suburban estates of Greenford and Perivale, built when being handy for Western Avenue’s sclerotic arterial was a selling point, and the Lego-like semis of Acton, as yet unspoiled by stone-cladding and secondary glazing. We stop off at the bowling alley by Gipsy Corner for as long as it takes to rinse down half a dozen doobs with a waxed-paper cup of coke, and by the time the car is parked in W1, in a space vacated by the straights and squares who’ve already headed home after their idea of a night-out, the amphetamine magic is working, and we are doing our mod swagger down Wardour Street, hoping the Marquee-ites, homeward bound themselves, will notice our dark, dilated pupils, the urgent way we chew our gum, and our walk – oh yes, a walk so cool it ought to be a dance.
At most clubs where R&B groups play, back rooms of pubs, like the Ricky Tick, with a bar in one corner and a makeshift stage, the audience is art-studenty, the scruffy side of smart, with Stones-length hair or longer. The Flamingo, a firetrap of a basement south of Shaftesbury Avenue, attracts an altogether different crowd. Because the All-Nighter operates from midnight to six, they come from a netherworld where people don’t keep regular hours: US servicemen from Mildenhall and Lakenheath on 48-hour passes, determined not to waste pay on a hotel room or precious leave asleep, young West Indians from Notting Hill and Brixton, insomniac musicians, drunks, junkies, hookers, and drynamil-fuelled faces. Mods will be misremembered as the pansy prey of rockers, but the mods-versus-rockers match-up is essentially a media invention, and the notion that a dedicated dress sense is a disqualification from violence a dangerous misconception.
Like the Marquee up the road, the Flamingo was a jazz club originally, modern jazz though, unlike the Marquee’s trad. An illuminated sign assures punters who are unimpressed by the nondescript entrance between a Chinese restaurant and a shoe shop that, “Here is the internationally famous Flamingo Jazz Club.” An arrow points at the doorway leading to a flight of stairs. A second sign, on which a pink flamingo is depicted cartoonishly, boasts that the place is “Britain’s Finest Modern Jazz Venue”. Only on a third sign, smaller than the other two and unlit, are the words ‘Allnighter’ and ‘Rhythm & Blues’ printed. But it’s the word ‘Jazz’ – in jazzy lettering, naturally – that I have fixed on to legitimise my Saturday nights. That and the fact that Dex happens to have a barrister uncle in Belgravia. Even though my old man is less bothered about me spending an evening in sinful Soho than that I’ll be having my ear bent by the modern jazz he abhors, my mother is relieved that I’m avoiding a late drive home by staying over in SW1. If only.
Outside the Flamingo, the audience from the evening session, over at eleven, has gone. Everyone waiting now is here for the midnight hour. The white-knuckle ride of a rush from the pills has smoothed into a surge of euphoria so intensely exhilarating it nearly takes my breath away. Inevitably I turn to Dex and whisper hoarsely how fantastic I’m feeling.
Inside, the lights are dim, and the heat, under the false ceiling, ferocious. Tony Clarke’s ‘Ain’t Love Good, Ain’t Love Proud’ comes over the PA, or James Brown’s ‘Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag’, which I hear for the first time queuing on the stairs to the basement, and inevitably before the night is over, since it is a favourite of John Gunnell’s, Lord Kitchener’s priapic ‘Dr Kitch’. Gunnell, who runs the club with his older brother Rik, introduces the acts and, between the sets, plays records from the band room beside the stage, spicing his MC’s patter with a crude parody of Jamaican patois, which nevertheless amuses, rather than offends the West Indians in the audience. There are always two bands on, each playing two alternate sets, with Zoot Money’s Big Roll Band or Chris Farlowe and the Thunderbirds or Ronnie Jones and the Nightimers opening, and Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames closing the session.
The Blue Flames were once Billy Fury’s backing group, and it was Fury’s manager, Larry Parnes, begetter of Tommy Steele, Marty Wilde, Vince Eager, et al, who changed their pianist’s name from Clive Powell to Georgie Fame. But since the start of their Flamingo residency in 1962, Fame and the Blue Flames have undergone an extraordinary evolutionary process. Other bands have likewise added horns and replaced piano with Hammond organ, but what is unique about the way their music has developed is the input of the Flamingo’s audience.
Much of the band’s material has come from the GIs who frequent the All-Nighter. Keen to replicate the music they would be dancing and drinking to back home – were they not guarding us from the red menace that lurks behind the Iron Curtain – and gratefully aware that Fame and his fellow musicians are not only capable of meaningful interpretation, but enthusiastically open to influence, they lend him their own records. If Fame likes what he hears, the song will be in the band’s set the following weekend, just like James Brown’s ‘Night Train’, Rufus Thomas’s ‘The Dog’, the Phil Upchurch Combo’ ‘You Can’t Sit Down’, even Paul Anka’s ‘Eso Beso’. And, of course, it’s a GI who has introduced him to maverick jazzer Mose Allison, reshaping his singing style overnight. The album that hooked him is I Love The Life I Live, its title track now a staple in the Blue Flames’ set, along with Allison’s ‘Parchman Farm’ and ‘Work Song’.
Even when I search out Allison’s originals, I don’t like Fame’s approximation any less. Plus I am now a sucker for Hammond organs and horn sections, and there isn’t one number in the Blue Flames’ repertoire I don’t think is great. The Rolling Stones may have been lost from the Ricky Tick to the wider world of pop, but I don’t care any more, because Georgie and the Blue Flames make the most exciting music in town. The All-nighter is unmissable.
From midnight to six we dance and fidget and talk nonsense, start to feel not so great, swallow more pills and feel great again, and suddenly we’re outside in the cold, cold light. Those six hours can flash by so fast, I once ask on my way out why the bands haven’t done two sets tonight. “What’re you on, son? Here, you sure you’re old enough to be in this joint?” I wasn’t.
We have a wash at Charing Cross station, a coffee in the Strand, occasionally shop for bluebeat records at a stall in Petticoat Lane, anything to put off the return to the real world and the inevitable come-down. Some hardcore Flamingo fans even go back for more. There’s a Sunday afternoon session, where John Gunnell, easing his way through the day with a bottle of Scotch, heckles the bands he’s booked. In theory, and in amphetamine-powered defiance of fatigue, you can attend six sessions between Friday and Sunday.
For out-of-towners, like Dex and me, whose alibi of the bed in Belgravia means there’s no hurry to get back to High Wycombe, the morning-after usually begins with a time-killing detour via the 24-hour Heathrow Bowl on the A4 until it’s late enough to be starting a normal Sunday. Except by now my jaw aches, my eyes sting, my synuses burn, my feet throb, my throat is raw, my stomach convulsed, and my penis shrunk so small I struggle to pull it from my pants for the dribble of dark urine which is as much as I can summon. On my tongue there’s a permanent ball of spit, which taints everything I taste. Not that I have an appetite.
We can’t go to anyone’s house unless they’re in on our secret and their parents, who would think us ill, are out, so we usually wind up in the one coffee bar in the entire town that is open on a Sunday afternoon. It becomes such a regular sanctuary that I start taking one of the waitresses home after her shift. A fumble in my car, parked at the end of her drive, momentarily reverses the day’s downward spiral.
Bottoming out of my come-down at school on Monday, I meet Dex by the tuck shop and swear I’m never going to the All-Nighter again. I’m still adamant on Tuesday, but by Wednesday we’re singing snatches of that new number that went down a storm. What was it called? ‘Yeh Yeh’? Georgie and the band ought to record that. Who knows, it could be a hit. On Thursday we scan the Flamingo’s weekly ad in Melody Maker to see who the other group’s going to be. Friday I hand Dex the money for my doobs. I can’t wait for Saturday night. I love the Flamingo, right until the weekend before I leave for university, when I realise what a dangerous place it is for a middle-class boy masquerading as a mod.
Ronnie Lane
It may well have been his ‘Song Of A Baker’ on the Small Faces’ Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake that first had me believing that Ronnie Lane was wise beyond his years. The opening line caught my attention. “There’s wheat in the field and water in the stream,” he sang, which had me wondering, “A song that opens with the basic ingredients of bread? That’s not something you hear every day.” Then, as the theme unfolded, I realised that it was about more than baking. What the singer was saying was that as long as there’s wheat in the field and water in the stream, there’s no reason why you should ever go hungry or thirsty, provided you’re prepared to make the effort to turn that wheat into flour and to fetch drinking water from the stream.
In essence, and without finger-wagging, ‘Song Of A Baker’ was preaching the benefits of self-sufficiency, and in 1968 that struck me as deep for a pop song. Ronnie even made the loaf’s ‘texture and… flavour’ a rhyme for the baker’s ‘labour’. I found out later that he had borrowed his theme from a Sufi parable. To have considered the writing of a Muslim mystic suitable source material was impressive erudition from a 21-year-old from Manor Park in east London.
I guessed the song was Ronnie’s because he sang it rather than Steve Marriott, as clear an assertion of ownership as John Lennon singing ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ or Paul McCartney ‘Eleanor Rigby’, and it was because of that conclusion, no doubt, that I listened more closely than usual to the lyrics. Like Lennon-McCartney, the joint Marriott-Lane credit was essentially a convenience, since few of their songs were either written in the same room or derived from equal input. Across a handful of singles or the two sides of an album those individually unequal contributions would balance up, but, more importantly, as writers, each needed the other’s spur. The songs that emerged from their association could not have been written in isolation, only with the direct or indirect input of the partner. “We would come up with something to knock each other out,” he explained, so, with ‘Itchycoo Park’, the Small Faces’ most famous song, Ronnie had knocked Steve out with a melody he had lifted from a hymn, ‘God Be In My Head’, and words he had concocted after reading a magazine article about the attractions of Oxford, which had spotlighted the city’s “dreaming spires” and its “bridge of sighs.” “It wasn’t me that came up with ‘I feel inclined to blow my mind, get hung up, feed the ducks with a bun’ – that wasn’t me!” he protested, though arguably Marriott’s tongue-in-cheek, East Ender’s take on the spirit of ’67 contributed as much to the song’s success as Ronnie’s verses.
The real worth of the melody and poetry that Ronnie brought to their partnership was only revealed once Steve Marriott had abandoned the Small Faces to form Humble Pie. Whereas Ronnie continued to develop as a songwriter, his one-time mentor atrophied. In fact, it’s hard to come up with a single notable song with Marriott’s name on after the Small Faces’ melancholy cheerio, ‘The Universal’.
Humble Pie’s American fans were at least partly to blame for his slump. After all, it was they who cheered his black-white-boy shtick and whooped and hollered at his vocal histrionics and hyperactive posturing, and, if all it took to send an audience into an orgasmic frenzy and propel an album as unimaginative as 1972’s Smokin’ into the US top ten was a handful of overloud blues chords, a repertoire of – for a pint-sized Cockney – improbably throaty growls and trills, and a stage persona prone to throw extravagant shapes, why bother with the hard slog of actually writing words and a tune?
Ronnie’s songs, meanwhile, fitted the born-again Faces perfectly, nowhere more obviously than on the group’s third and most cohesive album, A Nod’s As Good As A Wink… To A Blind Horse. Despite sharing their blokey, anti-intellectual, working-class-and-proud-of-it philosophy, his songs are not only musically less flamboyant than the Rod Stewart-Ron Wood rockers, but lack their rampant hedonism. Even in a song about sex, where the road-wise roué of ‘Stay With Me’ trades a groupie’s promise to be gone by the morning for a post-coital cab fare home, Ronnie, in ‘You’re So Rude’, was reliving an in flagrante teenage fumble in the front room of his parents’ house; while in ‘Debris’, as if consciously counterbalancing the rowdy bravado of ‘Too Bad’, Ronnie explores childhood memories of his father, underpinning the evident reality of both these songs by setting them with chronological precision on a Sunday morning and evening, and, in lines like “Oh, you was my hero,” by deliberately expressing himself in vernacular that would have earned him a detention from his English teacher.
* * *
“If you’re going to be on the road, you might as well be on the road,” he once told me, “because if you don’t totally accept that you’re on the road and that’s it, that’s your lot, private jets back to London for a few hours a day ain’t going to make it home. What’s wrong with life on the road? I can’t understand this rushing there and rushing back business.”
True to his word, he would do his best not to rush on the Faces’ US tour in the spring of 1973, renting a Winnebago camper whenever time and distance allowed. Even so, somewhere between Minneapolis and New York an unarguable truth hit him: this wasn’t why he’d learned to play guitar, not this uninspiring, sapping routine of travel, gig, hotel, no. The equally inescapable consequence was that he would have to leave the group.
Once he had started thinking that way, it wasn’t hard to come up with other reasons for not staying in the Faces. He was in no doubt that Rod held back his best songs, as he had most recently with ‘True Blue’, for his own records. He would not turn a blind eye to the looming shadow of Rod’s solo success, which he recognized as a threat, not just to the longevity, but to the very entity of the Faces. He couldn’t ignore the slow, but unstoppable spread of separate billing on posters – Rod Stewart and the Faces – by promoters bothered more by the prospect of missing a single potential ticket sale than bruising musicians’ egos. And he felt gagged as a singer, especially on stage, where his vocal role was reduced to backing harmonies and the opening verse of ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’ – “and not in my key either, you can guess whose key it was in.” He was also frustrated by the slow progress of the Faces’ follow-up to A Nod’s As Good As A Wink, especially Rod’s infrequent attendance at sessions and unhelpful appraisal of tracks necessarily recorded in his absence, and, when Ooh La La was eventually released, he was disappointed by its critical reception, and appalled by Rod’s faithless distancing of himself from the record.
On 12 May 1973, as the Faces were waiting to go on stage at the Civic Centre in Roanoke, West Virginia, Ronnie said the words that had been used countless times by different members of the band, but until now only in fun, parodying a pop star’s foot-stamping tantrum at a trivial setback, like a lukewarm cup of tea or a brandy-and-coke with no ice: “I’m leaving the group!” He left no one in doubt that he meant it. During the set he spat an obscenity at Ian McLagan, the keyboard player retaliating with a vicious kick which left 10,000 West Virginians wondering whether it was part of the act. One more US date, four nights to fulfill in London, then Ronnie was gone.
Fortuitously, the timing of his exit from the Faces and his decision to pursue a more eclectic, rootsier music closely followed the surge of a forceful undercurrent in London’s music community. Either bruised by the business or uninterested in what it had to offer, bands like Brinsley Schwarz, Kilburn and the High Roads, Bees Make Honey and Eggs Over Easy had deliberately taken a detour from the well-mapped highway to Hitsville onto a musical B-road, where they could perform, freed from the pressures of commerce or fashion, on an array of interchangeable instruments, a seemingly off-the-cuff mix of R&B, rockabilly, country, jazz, even post-war, pre-rock’n’roll jump jive – styles altogether too diverse to lump together under any more meaningful banner than the name of the modest venues where the bands chose to play. Pub rock, as it was known, was to provide three key members of Ronnie’s next band, Slim Chance: Bees Make Honey’s Ruan O’Lochlainn (saxophone, keyboards, guitar); Charlie Hart (keyboards, fiddle, accordion) from Ian Dury’s ramshackle first band, Kilburn and the High Roads; while the group Steve Simpson (guitar, mandolin, fiddle) left behind became pub-rock regulars as Meal Ticket.
Slim Chance brought a broad musicality to the melodic charm, conversational lyrics, and subtle themes of Ronnie’s songs, and, bolstered by this band, his voice, by his own 1975 description “an instrument I only picked up eighteen months ago”, grew strong, emotive and sure, able to skip nimbly and sure-footedly along the melody lines. Whenever he sang, it was hard not to smile, harder still not to join in.
The multi-instrumental abilities of O’Lochlainn, Hart and Simpson weren’t employed to impress, but to allow Ronnie to follow diverse musical directions and to provide his material with an apparently infinite variety of sympathetic settings. On record the unseen interchange of instruments was efficient, but, owing in part to that invisibility, unremarkably low-key. On stage, however, once his musicians had freed themselves from the recorded arrangements and made the songs their own, a Slim Chance gig was an intoxicating event, a cross between a pub sing-song and a country hoedown. The set was not only neatly balanced, but, in the manner of pub rockers, wilfully challenged the convention that confines set lists to past hits and excerpts from the current album. Naturally, Ronnie didn’t ignore ‘How Come?’, his first (and only substantial) solo hit, or its bafflingly underachieving follow-up, ‘The Poacher’, but both were enormously enhanced in live performance.
The chorus of ‘How Come?’ became impossible not to sing along with, such an audible show of public affection endowing it with a far heftier status than that of a single that hadn’t quite made the top ten, while the somewhat prissy oboe and string arrangement that had made ‘The Poacher’ a lightweight 45 was replaced by the duelling fiddles of O’Lochlainn and Simpson to create a show-stopping knees-up. Oldies Ronnie had revived, like Fats Domino’s ‘Blue Monday’ and Chuck Berry’s ‘You Never Can Tell’ (both on 1975’s Ronnie Lane’s Slim Chance), were there too, but several live Slim Chance highlights, notably covers of the Rolling Stones’ ‘Sweet Virginia’ and Leroy Van Dyke’s ‘Walk On By’, never made it onto record.
His new-found freedom meant he could even find room for the forty-year-old Depression ballad, ‘Brother, Can You Spare Me A Dime’, a song weighed with poignant meaning in the wake of 1974’s Passing Show, an ill-judged attempt to take his music to the people, when a caravan of decrepit circus vehicles limped from town to town with insufficient advance publicity to attract enough paying customers to the big top, pushing him to the very edge of financial ruin. What bailed him out was the American Airstream caravan, sleek as a cigar tube, that he had had kitted out as a mobile recording studio during his last days with the Faces. Hired out to Led Zeppelin, The Who and Bad Company, it generated enough income to disguise, albeit temporarily, his fragile finances.
In the autumn of 1975 Ronnie used that mobile studio to record a third album at his farm on the Welsh borders. With One For The Road he created something unique in British music: a genuine form of native country music, no capitals, no inverted commas, not anglicized Nashville, just music that came out of the country and could not conceivably have been created anywhere else. When that record didn’t sell, he had to let the band go, unable to fund the full-time wages of five musicians and a road crew from his own, diminishing income.
Broke, he approached Pete Townshend for a loan. An old pal and, like Ronnie, a follower of Meher Baba, Townshend turned him down, but proposed instead that they should make a record together, which, if for no other reason than that it represented half a solo album by the leader of The Who, was bound to generate record company interest and, with it, an advance: a financial boost for Ronnie without the burden of debt. Although Rough Mix was less than a true collaboration, with only the title track co-written by Townshend and Lane, the album contained the most enchanting, sublime song Ronnie ever wrote.
It’s a cliché to call a song timeless, but ‘Annie’ sounded as old as the century. It could also have been the work of Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie or George Gershwin. Or a century older and by John Newton or Charles Wesley, since, sung in church by a choir, it would certainly have sounded like a hymn. Expressed most directly in its “God bless us all” plea, the song was infused throughout with a hymnal tone, its melody uplifting, its message that in spite of mortality, life was ongoing, that even in death was optimism. A hymn by Ronnie Lane would almost be worth going to church for.
An unforeseen outcome of the Rough Mix sessions was an immediate opportunity for Ronnie to resuscitate Slim Chance, opening for Eric Clapton on his spring 1977 tour. Clapton, whose acoustic work on the Rough Mix sessions highlighted the selfless restraint and sensitivity he could bring to a supporting role in the recording studio and earned him a co-writer’s credit on ‘Annie’, had fallen under Ronnie’s spell, envying the freewheeling eclecticism and determinedly low-key approach that offered an antidote to the pyrotechnics commanded by Clapton’s own audiences. The guitarist even adopted Ronnie’s Romany look of bucolic shirt, scarf and waistcoat.
In his early thirties the symptoms of multiple sclerosis became harder to ignore, and the next time I saw him he walked as if he was permanently tipsy. Being forced by the remorseless creep of immobility to accept the role of observer rather than participant intensified the aura of wisdom that had surrounded Ronnie as long as I had known him. More than ever, he came across like an ancient sage, one with a long lifetime’s knowledge and experience to impart, the appearance of a younger man adopted to disguise his age. But if increased wisdom was a side effect of MS, it was a cruel trade-off.
In 1984, Julia and I had a son who was born too soon and lived for a day and a half. Ronnie telephoned with a question.
“You know when you see a baby bird dead on the ground? Well, if you look up, there’ll be a nest, and in that nest there’ll be more, healthy babies. It’s like a little Pidgeon has fallen out of the nest. There’ll be more, you’ll see.”
There was more solace, humanity and hope in that succinct analogy than in a hundred Bible stories or Sunday sermons. Julia and I weren’t short of love or support, but nothing made the future look less bleak than the simple, life-affirming image suggested by Ronnie.
He was living in Kentish Town, but within weeks had moved to Texas, where he had been promised regular access to hyperbaric oxygen treatment in Houston. Because the claims made in some quarters for HBO treatment encouraged unreasonable expectations for what it could achieve, the therapy was controversial, but Ronnie knew, having tried it in London, that spending an hour a week in a sealed chamber where the normal amount of oxygen in the air was multiplied many times worked for him. It wasn’t a cure for MS, but it alleviated some of the symptoms. Undeniably, it made him feel better.
I was keen to visit him, but hard up. Someone told me you could fly for free as a DHL courier in exchange for escorting their mail sacks through customs, so I signed up for the Houston run. There was a 48-hour stop-over, and I spent two nights at the house Ronnie shared with his carer, James ‘Big Bucks’ Burnett, an amiably goofy young Texan who drove Ronnie to and from his weekly sessions at the HBO Medical Centre and for a daily swim at the YMCA. I was happy to be able to tell Ronnie that Julia was pregnant again, and repeated our thanks for the help and hope he had given us.
“There’s another Pidgeon in the nest.”
He tilted his head as he looked at me, one eye slightly off to one side, his bony fingers cupped over the top of his walking stick.
“You sure it was me said that?”
Part of Ronnie’s exercise regime was a daily walk, but even though spring had not yet turned to summer, Houston’s climate was debilitating, and I watched him wilt, oppressed by the cloying humidity, so I was relieved to learn that he had moved to Austin, 130 miles west, in Texas’s more temperate hill country. I visited him there in March 1990. He had signed up for a short tour of Japan, a bold undertaking for someone whose central nervous system was under daily attack. Having recruited a band of Austin musicians, he twisted Ian McLagan’s arm to play keyboards. I’d wanted to record them both for my Radio 1 series, Classic Albums, for which the Small Faces’ Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake was an overdue candidate, and figured that, with Mac at his side, Ronnie would be a livelier interviewee than on his own. I was right. The interview, recorded at Ronnie’s house between rehearsals, was punctuated with laughter and impromptu repartee, hilarity I hadn’t heard from them since 1973. But, back in Austin two years later, when I phoned him to say I was in town and would love to drop by, he replied, “No, that won’t be possible.”
“I only want to pop in to say hello.”
“Sorry, mate.”
“See you then, Ronnie.”
Click.
Silence.
Like George Harrison, Ronnie Lane played in the shade of louder talents. Like him too, he left an undeniably impressive body of work. His influence is quiet, but enduring. Ronnie Lane mattered, and still does. And I haven’t even mentioned his bass-playing.
NME’n'me
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.
Little Richard’s look
I am nine years old, watching Don’t Knock The Rock in High Wycombe’s Rex cinema, when I make a connection between music and the way the person playing it looks. Even at that age I identify something not-quite-right about Bill Haley and his Comets. Agreed, Haley doesn’t sound the same as Dean Martin or Rosemary Clooney or Johnny Ray, but his records are embroidered with the same thread of novelty as ‘The Naughty Lady Of Shady Lane’, ‘Where Will The Baby’s Dimple Be?’ and ‘Hernando’s Hideaway’. It is no stretch to picture Bill and the boys happily performing ‘(How Much Is) That Doggy In The Window?’. And Haley looks how he sounds: cheery, avuncular, uncool.
But when Little Richard shimmies across the screen, a flush of excitement sets my skin on fire. With his brazen eyes, pencil-’tached pout, Mr Whippy quiff and shiny suit, he instantly makes everyone else since the opening credits appear ordinary, which, compared to him, they are. In a film whose message is “Hey, these kids are just having fun,” Richard might as well be wearing a black pointy hat and riding a broomstick, because surely he is the embodiment of white America’s most frightening nightmare? Were make-believe Melonville’s residents to open their door and find a leering Richard Penniman on their front porch, ready for a date with their daughter, most would be reaching for a shotgun.
Side by side with him, Bill Haley is an overgrown boy scout, no more authentically youthful than Terry Scott in schoolboy drag singing ‘My Brother’. I do not share the palpable thrill provoked by Little Richard with my chaperone, Mrs Ord. Even as we are exiting the cinema, she and – treasonously, unforgivably – her son agree that both the film and its music are bilge.
Outside the Rex, while we wait for the bus home, a fight starts, which quickly spills from the pavement into the street. Attackers and victim are teddy boys who have attended the film. There is swearing, spitting, and the fight, brief and one-sided as it is, is a disturbing event. I have never witnessed a real, fierce, mean-spirited fight, only seen boys scrapping at school, all headlocks and rolling on the ground, or indestructible cowboys trading percussive punches in westerns. Most fights, I learn later, are over once the first solid blow lands, which is why you should get yours in first. The teddy boy under attack cowers like a leashed dog being beaten by its owner. As he scrambles bloodily away, trying to avoid both kicks and hooting cars, I glance up at Mrs Ord’s face. Its grim set confirms that, like the good folk of Melonville, she links this violence directly to the music brought so vibrantly to life by Little Richard. Rock’n’roll is delinquency.
The following weekend, I recognise the handsome leader of the brawling teddy boys in the window of the Station Café. I cannot miss him. In place of his acolytes’ brylcreemed quiff, he wears a fringe cut high on his forehead, like Marlon Brando’s Mark Anthony. His hard stare defies passers-by to meet his gaze, so I look away before he can lock eyes with me. I am on my way to buy a 10-inch shellac 78 with ‘Long Tall Sally’ on one side and ‘Tutti Frutti’ on the other – the two songs Little Richard sang in Don’t Knock The Rock. I’ll play first one side and then the other until bedtime.
Without his towering pompadour and zoot suit, jacket long as an overcoat, trousers tapering from tented thigh to a 12” cuff, would Little Richard have bewitched me so completely? Yes, I think he would; the voice would have done that. But would my eye have lingered so long on the cover of Elvis’s Gold Records, if he hadn’t worn that lame suit? No. And when I picture Eddie Cochran, he is knock-kneed in peg-top trousers, singing ‘Twenty Flight Rock’ in The Girl Can’t Help It; Billy Fury has his collar turned up, as if against the cold; and my lasting impression of Johnny Burnette at the Slough Adelphi in 1960 is not his hit, ‘You’re Sixteen’, but his white leather suit. With Ray Charles, it would be his dark glasses.
Little Richard… Ray Charles… Little Richard… Ray Charles… I couldn’t choose then, and I can’t choose now. They are the same, but different. Both are from Georgia. Did I know that then? I doubt it. Both play piano and sing. Both have a catch in their voice – a voice, what’s more, that seem to resonate simultaneously on two octaves. Both are backed by similar instrumentation. And yet. And yet.
Has Little Richard ever sounded anything other than happy? As if a twinkle is never far from his eyes or a teasing pout from his lips? Even when he wails about ‘Miss Anne’, who has left him for another man, or vocalises the sound of crying in ‘Boo Hoo Hoo Hoo’, he can’t sound sad. Whereas, when Ray Charles sings about living on a ‘Lonely Avenue’ or that his mother warned him there’d be ‘Hard Times’ or threatens to ‘Drown In My Own Tears’, you believe him. Sure, he celebrates his sexuality and boasts about his woman saving her loving just for him, but you believe that too, because Ray Charles is real.
Plus, he introduces me to jazz, or his version of it. ‘One Mint Julep’, on 1961’s Genius Plus Soul Equals Jazz, is the first time I hear an organ or a big band and don’t reach for the off-switch. In pop music organs are habitually a novelty, even on Johnny and the Hurricanes’ hits, although Britain’s best known organ belongs to Reginald Dixon, who plays evergreen medleys on the BBC Light Programme, while making every tune sound like ‘I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside’, which is where he broadcasts from: Blackpool. Reg manhandles that Mighty Wurlitzer the way a road hog drives a car, but he comes from another era, one whose music sounded a hundred years old the instant rock’n'roll arrived.
After ‘One Mint Julep’ comes the serpentine groove of Booker T. and the MGs’ ‘Green Onions’, and then, one after the other, Jimmy Smith and Jimmy McGriff. I take McGriff’s 1962 I Got A Woman album to school and slip it onto the Jazz Appreciation Society’s turntable during a lunchtime session. Several senior members walk out in protest, others who stay insist it isn’t jazz. It’s the same when I play them Genius Plus Soul Equals Jazz, which actually explains what it is in that simple equation. What do they know? About as much as the Newport Festival-goers in their bermuda shorts and blinkers who headed for the hot dog stand when Brother Ray was there in 1958. It was the gospel shouting and relentless rhythm of ‘I Got A Woman’ that drove them away: too close to rock’n'roll, man. Which is the way I liked it, and still do.
Cyril Davies and the Stones in January 1963
The first time I hear Cyril Davies blow his harmonica is January 1963 at Leo’s Jazz Club in Windsor. As I approach, shoulders hunched against the cold, I watch billows of cigarette smoke, lit pink and yellow by the lights inside, spill from an open door, before the thin, chill evening air is split by an inhuman scream, a siren wail that rises a tone, then subsides. The sound nails me momentarily to the pavement, then propels me to the entrance of an unprepossessing British Legion Hall, which by day is a hang-out for pensioners who have served time, as most have, in the armed forces. At a folding table by the door I fumble distractedly in my pocket for the four shilling (20p) entry fee, entirely absorbed by the source of this extraordinary sound: a balding, badly-dressed man, who looks middle-aged to my teenage eyes.
I struggle to relate the sound I hear to what I can see. Davies’s hands are cupped in front of his mouth, a cable trailing from his fingers, but his instrument is invisible, apart from a glinting sliver revealed whenever he parts his hands, a movement matched by a modulation in the sound.
Unseen it might be, but what I’m listening to is as powerful and evocative an instrumental voice as Little Richard’s piano, Buddy Holly’s guitar or Ray Charles flat-top Wurlitzer soloing the opening bars of ‘What’d I Say?’. Davies can make this thing he had hidden in his hands cry, shout, and howl so my hair stands on end. And there is no room for doubt, these sounds can only be coming from him, because the other instruments on stage are drums, bass, guitar and piano, and I know the sounds they make. So does my companion – a jazz fan, hence our visit to Leo’s Jazz Club – who is soon hissing from the side of his mouth that what the R&B All-Stars are playing is little different from rock’n’roll, an opinion to which I am able to nod urgent agreement, without letting on that this is not the least of the reasons that I love it. I don’t want to piss him off. He’s the one with the driving licence and his mother’s car.
As the set progresses, a beanpole singer with a blond fringe and a teasing smile takes his turn at the microphone, but his singing is too smooth, too jazzy for my taste. Meanwhile, a black female vocal trio attempt an approximation of the Raelettes, Ray Charles’ backing singers, whose visceral harmonies I know from my live Ray Charles At Newport album. Indeed Davies and the Velvettes recreate Charles’ ‘(Night Time Is) The Right Time’, though without the sex-fuelled fire of Marjorie Hendricks, and, anyway, all I have ears – and open-mouthed wonder – for are Cyril Davies and his harmonica.
The wail of Cyril Davies’s harmonica tears straight to the centre of my heart, and the next day, a Saturday, I catch a bus into town and find a Hohner Marine Band harmonica in the music shop. On the way home I slip it from its snug blue box to study its simple features: twelve holes to be sucked or blown, each of them numbered – pointlessly, it seems to me, since the numbers are lost from sight even before the instrument is pressed to one’s lips. On the face of it, there is even less here to master than on a recorder, and yet the repertoire of sounds conjured from it by Davies is infinitely more expansive. This comparison triggers a suspicion that learning to play like him isn’t going to be easy.
In my bedroom I cup the harmonica the way I saw Davies do last night. I try some experimental sucks and blows, enough to teach me that the blow is only a tuneful means of emptying my lungs before switching to the suck that creates the more evocative notes. Remarkably, the modulated suck that ‘bends’ the notes a semi-tone comes to me quickly, and by lunchtime I am able to ape Davies’ wail at different points on the scale, but I have no records from which I can learn melodic sequences and none that I heard him play have stayed in my head. I know I have to see Davies and his R&B All-Stars again.
Fortunately, in spite of his aversion to amplified ‘beat music’, my Leo’s companion has taken a pointless shine to one of the Velvettes who, he has convinced himself, was giving him the come-on. I don’t openly question why he imagines a statuesque African professional singer should have been eyeing up a grammar school sixth-former, barely out of short-back-and-sides, but gratefully accept his invitation to revisit the club the following Friday.
Although Cyril Davies thrills me as before, Baldry’s unctuous vocalising is even less to my taste, while the Velvettes’ strident harmonies grate on my ears. During the week I have listened to Ray Charles At Newport, cementing my opinion that these three are no match for the Raelettes. As the All-Stars step off stage for the interval break, Davies waiting for no one as he hustles to the bar, my companion, blaming the smoky atmosphere, but perhaps also seizing the chance to play hard-to-get, insists that we should stretch our legs and clear our lungs.
Minutes from the British Legion Hall, in a narrow street that sides the Star & Garter Hotel, I stop, astonished, at the sound of more upbeat blues and another harmonica. I search for the sound with my eyes and see dancers silhouetted in the open windows of an upstairs room attached to the back of what is plainly more pub than hotel. On either side of the doorway that leads upstairs, black posters with white lettering announce The Ricky Tick Club and The Rolling Stones Every Friday 5/-. Judging by those cooling off outside, the Ricky Tick crowd is younger and hipper, and the girls prettier, than at Leo’s. There are studenty types and some snappy dressers. While I move involuntarily, and, I hope, inconspicuously, to a spirited version of Benny Spellman’s ‘Fortune Teller’, the rhythm driven by maracas, my eyes lock with the wide-eyed gaze of a girl wearing black ski pants, whose dark hair is cropped as short as Jean Seberg’s in A Bout De Souffle, but, as if struck by a thought, she looks away, grinds her cigarette under her heel, and disappears inside.
Hands, as always, in my pockets, I weigh the two half crowns my mother has given me as petrol money for my driver, who has halted a few yards further on and is giving me the hurry-up sign with a finger on his watch face. I shout, ‘I’ll see you at the car at ten thirty,’ and duck into the doorway.
Once I’ve seen the Rolling Stones at the Ricky Tick, there is no going back to Leo’s. The Stones are what I’ve been looking for without expecting to find: a young white English group playing black American music. And they really have mastered the idiom. They won’t become famous because they wear their hair like girls or urinate on a garage forecourt or get busted for drugs, but because they are white boys who play black music better than anybody has before.
The group’s residency at the Ricky Tick lasts six months, from January to July 1963, but more than forty years later I can revisit those Friday nights at will: I can see the upstairs room with the bar against one wall, a small, barely raised stage in the opposite corner, and, incongruously, fishing nets hung from the ceiling; I can hear the crowd singing along with the Stones’ closing ‘Bye Bye Johnny’, answering Mick’s circling wave of a hand; I can feel the floor move under my feet as I dance with my Jean Seberg lookalike, the bouncing boards and rafters loosing plaster from the ceiling below onto the roof of the Stones’ parked van, inside which Ian Stewart is trying to grab some sleep before driving the band back to their West London flat.
Recent posts
- Yo La Tengo Has the Field Covered
- All Hopped Up Music and Maps: Chapter 11
- Review: Sting’s Symphonic Tour in Cincinnati
- Barney Bubbles caught in action at work
- It Doesn’t Get Easier (But It Still Counts as Fun!)
- It Doesn’t Get Easier (But It Still Counts as Fun!)
- The Long Song – Andrea Levy
- WAYNE’S WORDS: TOTTENHAM TAMES THIERRY BULLS
- “Good eeeevening…”
- No Fracking Way
- ROBERT SANDALL R.I.P.
- HAGGARD & BALDRY
- British Remains: “We hate everything”
- JIM KWESKIN TURNS 70
- BOB UNLOADS HIS HEAD IN PARIS
- The Who To Tour “Quadrophenia” In 2011
- BEYONCE DOES NOT WRITE HER OWN SONGS. REALLY?
- Press releases
- “People say he’s a bit touched…”
- Valves gave rock’n’roll to you…
Authors
- Alex Ogg
- Archie Patterson
- Barney Hoskyns
- Beverley Glick
- Bruce Pollock
- Bud Scoppa
- Carol Cooper
- Charlie Bermant
- Chris Charlesworth
- Chris Welch
- Colin Irwin
- Dan Gennoe
- David Hughes
- David McKenna
- Don Snowden
- Francesco Calazzo
- Fred Dellar
- Gary Pig Gold
- Hank Bordowitz
- Harry Doherty
- Jeremy Gluck
- JoE Silva
- John Pidgeon
- Johnny Black
- Joss Hutton
- Kandia Crazy Horse
- Kris DiLorenzo
- Len Brown
- Leyla Sanai
- Lindsay Hutton
- Mark Leviton
- Mark Paytress
- Mark Pringle
- Mark Williams
- Martin Colyer
- Mat Snow
- Michael Azerrad
- Michael Gray
- Mick Middles
- Mike Jahn
- Mike Mettler
- Mitchell Cohen
- Noe Gold
- Paul Gorman
- Peter Makowski
- Peter Silverton
- Richard Riegel
- Rob Steen
- Robot A. Hull
- Roy Trakin
- Simon Warner
- Steven R. Rosen
- Terry Staunton
- Tim Clifford
- Tim Footman
- Tony Fletcher
- Wayne Robins
Subscribe
|
||||||
 |
||||||
|
||||||
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
Content Services | Magazine Archive | About Us | Press Room | Your Account | Home