CHAPTER 8

I WRITE THE SONGS

WORDS AND MELODIES have always been a powerful and all-consuming passion. I have a pretty high percentage recall over where I first heard songs, my emotions on hearing them and how they affected me. In my infancy, a song was a song. Music appreciation was a blank canvas: there was no cool involved, nor any peer pressure, artist bias, hype or expectations. I understood at a very tender age (actually all ages are pretty tender one way and another) that it was the perfect marriage of words and music that made a great song. A sizzling tune with trite words rendered it quite useless to me, as did a strong lyric with journeyman crochets and quavers that even a small baboon could have written. Perhaps I was a strange child. On those golden summer pre-school days I’d trail my mother around the vegetable garden, prior to pea-shelling and cherry-picking duties, and catch strains of her singing ‘Me and Jane in a Plane’, ‘Mairzy Doats’ or ‘Papa Piccolino’. How could I possibly imagine that in the year 2000 I’d be discussing the origins of ‘Mairzy Doats’ with the song’s 87-year-old writer, Milton Drake, and talking about his brother Ervin’s bestselling ‘I Believe’? It was wonderful to hear first-hand how these songs had come about.

My paternal grandmother was not too shabby on the piano when she put her mind to it, while my maternal grandmother, Grandma Mitchell, had a pretty good singing voice. Her repertoire comprised songs from not only her youth, but my great-grandmother’s. Snatches of ‘Lily of Laguna’ and ‘I Wouldn’t Leave My Little Wooden Hut for You’ wove themselves around the household amid her tribe of barking dogs, whistling kettles, washing machines and a cleaning lady who made me squeal with delight by kicking her shoes up to the ceiling. Kids love stuff like that, simply because it’s not what adults normally do. I had no idea where these places like Laguna were, except that they sounded too exotic to be anywhere local. My grandmother was no one-trick pony in terms of her set list, as was shown by the more raucous ‘Kelly from the Isle of Man’, with ‘If You Were the Only Girl in the World’ being her showstopper.

My maternal grandparents always had piles of sheet music lying around, in case anyone fancied bashing something out on the piano. This was where, well before reaching double figures, I discovered a treasure trove of Stephen Foster songs such as ‘Some Folks’, ‘The Old Folks at Home’ and ‘Oh! Susannah’. At home we too had a much-used upright, as well as a totally unused baby grand. The radio was always on and, bizarrely, we did have an early jukebox. My two favourites were ‘Mutual Admiration Society’ and ‘Music, Music, Music’. We were sadly lacking in the sheet music department, but one of the few pieces we did have was ‘On the Gin Gin Ginny Shore’. With retrospective wisdom, I ascertained that it was a Walter Donaldson song extolling the aquatic virtues of Virginia, but at what can only be described as a forgivable age, I thought it was about Virginia Water, which was not too far from us in Surrey. Not a cataclysmic mistake, I’m sure you’ll agree, but I compounded my error by singing the words to the tune of ‘Davy Crockett’, thereby brilliantly discovering songwriting and plagiarism simultaneously. Let’s be honest, it saves time.

Let’s bring in my maternal grandfather at this point, for he too had a not insignificant part to play. He opened my ears to what is, somewhat scornfully, referred to as ‘light classical music’. He was naughty. When my grandmother’s attention was diverted, his guilty pleasures included reading comics, eating crisp sandwiches, dressing up to amuse me and listening to radio detective serials. I had no idea then what the stories were about (I know now, for I have dozens of them on CD) but it was the theme tunes that captivated me. The theme to the radio serial Paul Temple was a real winner and evoked the atmosphere of steam trains long before I knew the tune was called Coronation Scot, or that one day I’d sit next to the composer at lunch. Sadly I never met my favourite light classical composer, Eric Coates, the man responsible for such classics as By the Sleepy Lagoon (the Desert Island Discs theme), The Dam Busters March and my all-time favourite, The Knightsbridge March, but at least he has a trio of blue plaques.

Now songwriting at an early age is one thing: you hit a few notes on the piano, tell the singer to get on with it and wait for the royalties to pour in. Simple. Performing, however, I found a little trickier. The first time I attempted to entertain my family I exposed my inability to hold a note. As my sterner critics eagerly pointed out, the weak point in my armoury appeared to be breathing. Not that I couldn’t suck it in and pump it out as well as the next chap. I have a fine pair of bellows. It was the control that was beyond my grasp. My debut, a soul-stirring classic from the other side of the water called ‘Roll the Cotton Down’, failed to set the crowd alight. Many cried tears of mirth, but I had no aspiration to be a comedy turn. I was the romantic, angst-ridden, misunderstood songwriter and performer, and the small but unappreciative family audience needed to realise that.

My cotton-rolling period gave way to the more English ‘Out of Town’, a song suggested by my tap-dancing teacher, Auntie Joan. Dancing lessons were held in a spacious wooden-floored room in our house, with Auntie Barbara on the upright, plus ever-present cigarette and a glass of something medicinal. I was one of Auntie Joan’s ‘tinies’. Joan and Barbara weren’t my real aunts, but they were in fact Julie Andrews’s aunt and mother respectively, Joan Morris and Barbara Andrews. For a while I was rather proud to be thought of as ‘tone deaf’, following Auntie Barbara’s frustrating declaration one afternoon. I could overcome this. I had passion, enthusiasm and youth on my side and they must count for something. In fact as late as 1998, and not having performed it since the age of six, I was able to bring both a smile and tears to Auntie Joan’s face when I sang ‘Out of Town’ to her word for word in her nursing home, not long before she died. Auntie Barbara would continue to be supportive in my attempts at writing songs and performing. She was both encouraging and influential and I remain indebted.

As a lad I clearly had an open mind musically. Not for me the juvenile devotion to Pinky and Perky covers, in an almost undetectable range, nor the blinkered fascination for bland ditties accompanying children’s stories. As well as the areas already covered, my appreciation also included cowboy themes like ‘Riders of the Range’, ‘Davy Crockett’ and ‘Home, Home on the Range’, in tandem with Celtic classics and hymns. In among the obvious and much-loved standards such as ‘Jerusalem’ and ‘I Vow to Thee, My Country’ were such aisle-rocking nuggets as ‘Glad That I Live Am I’, ‘Non nobis domine’, ‘For All the Saints’ and the moving (spiritually, topographically and geographically) ‘Hills of the North, Rejoice’. I still enjoy delving into Hymns Ancient & Modern, once even spending a happy quarter of an hour absorbed in its pages while visiting Charlie Brocket and waiting for him to emerge from the shower (I know, I know, I only take five minutes too). Freshly scrubbed, the strapping former Army officer glanced at the gargantuan volume of hymns and exclaimed in a surprised voice, ‘Crikey, I’ve got that book too.’ I gently explained that it was his and that I wasn’t in the habit of toting the world’s heaviest copy of Hymns Ancient & Modern around the country with me in case chums were showering when I arrived.

Before I move on from early musical influences, and while we’re in the Army camp so to speak, my father’s repertoire also had a profound effect on me. It featured novelty numbers from the uniformed men at the front, like ‘Ginger You’re Barmy’, from a PC LP also containing ‘Kiss Me Goodnight Sgt Major’, ‘They Were Only Playing Leapfrog’ and a song I imagined was called ‘Aura chickerau, chickeracka roona’, which I learned to sing (and still can when called upon) if not to spell. Heaven knows what it means. There was also a smattering of hymnal material. My father was also a keen whistler. He was good, if inclined to embellish a little rather than cracking on with the melody. If I had to select a couple of high points in his repertoire, I’d have to plump for the theme from Moulin Rouge and ‘Oh Mein Papa’. Although a boy chorister, I rather suspect his whistling talent came from being pretty adept on the harmonica. A lifelong golfer, even in his more mature years when one guesses his handicap had slipped from a career high of six back into double figures, he habitually attempted to smuggle a mouth organ into his bag of clubs for golfing holidays. My mother of course would always rigorously check the bag for instruments and remove any she found. Another would be substituted. She thought it ridiculous and demeaning to whip up a tune on a mouth organ at the nineteenth hole, after a round of golf. Mind you, she didn’t think much of the golf either. I don’t recall her thoughts when he created a nine-hole putting green in the garden, complete with realistic mini-bunkers, but I loved it, although the grass tennis court was also a heck of a pull as well, despite not being particularly even.

Beyond the putting green and the tennis court were the Sherwells. They were American. I’d never seen Americans before and my first thought, as I glimpsed them through a screen of fir trees, was that they looked much like us. They turned out to be ‘OK’, as their two sons, Robert and Michael, taught me to say, and again, the family furthered my musical education. As well as giving me masterclasses in lengthy songs from the New World, with a minimum of twenty-nine verses, they were a conduit to important aspects of life that, until then, had no place in mine. They had streamlined bicycles that you couldn’t get in England, they ate waffles with maple syrup, their family had a Dodge automobile and they read American comics. While my compatriots, and I, were reading the Beano, Dandy and Eagle, I was also learning to speak the US vernacular through the antics of Sad Sack, Huey, Dewey and Louie, Nancy and Casper the Friendly Ghost. The back pages were crammed with attractive offers, but there were bewildering boxes to fill in, including one that said ‘My mom agrees’, and another requesting your zone and zip code number. I had neither. We argued over which Dennis the Menace was the real McCoy. US Dennis was freckly with blond hair while the UK Dennis, of course, had black spiky hair and not a freckle in sight. The Sherwells also had a pretty American nanny whose voice wafted over from their orchard as she sang the first version I’d ever heard of ‘Don’t Let the Stars Get in Your Eyes’. Her version remains the most abiding for me.

Yet another style of music that cast its spell on me was that of the Sea Scouts band. They held their annual fete in our garden, which led to my not very secret ambition to be a Sea Scout. The fact that I couldn’t swim was of no matter to me. Their music, which I could hear a mile away, heralded the opening of the fete and I loved it. There were exciting stalls like Pick a Straw and Bowl for a Pig, but I was always seconded to Ye rather tame Olde Wishing Well, which didn’t do much except yield small amounts of wet money … presumably to pay for Ye next year’s Olde Wishing Well. The fact that it was neither old nor a well didn’t stop the good folk of Walton-on-Thames exchanging their loose change for a wish. Years later, I discovered that Madame Notlaw, the fete’s rather scary gypsy fortune-teller, wasn’t genuine either. Neither the deep, masculine voice nor the fact that her name was ‘Walton’ spelled backwards stopped me from believing. It taught me about the cycle of life more than the Book of Ecclesiastes ever did.

The Sea Scouts fete was the first time I heard rock & roll. Heaven knows what the group was called and heaven knows what the rest of their repertoire was, but the song I remember was ‘Party Doll’. Call me naive if you wish, but I was raw, inexperienced and short-trousered and knew nothing of this devil’s music. I was more into the songs of adventure, derring-do and wholesome love of one’s country that we sang at school, in the vein of ‘The Ash Grove’, ‘Sweet Polly Oliver’, ‘The Minstrel Boy’ and ‘Westering Home’. However, ‘Party Doll’ was my induction into rock & roll, although I had no idea it went under that name or indeed why a bunch of older boys were singing about a doll. A wet subject, I thought. I had much to learn.

I’d appeared in plays, some with music and some without, while still in single figures, playing Lysander in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which I wielded a wooden sword against Demetrius. A better golfer than carpenter, my father nevertheless made me the silver-painted weapon for the on-stage scrap. To Pa, a chip was not so much a piece of wood, more a shot with which to get out of a bunker and onto the green. I was apprehensive about appearing in front of an audience. My mother caught me in the bathroom with my head in a basinful of cold water. She observed for a minute before demanding an explanation. I admitted to being nervous and was trying to catch a cold so that I wouldn’t have to perform.

I navigated Shakespeare’s lines; the sword got broken but not my spirit. I graduated to local shows, junior variety concert parties and the like, more often than not with Mater producing. I even convinced her to let me perform some music with a few friends after I’d learned my first handful of chords.

‘Do you know enough songs?’

‘Yes, yes. Please … we’ll rehearse.’

‘I should think so. You’ll still be acting in a few sketches in the first half.’

I was fourteen and incensed, as fourteen-year-olds are. ‘I can’t do that.’

‘What do you mean, you can’t do that?’

In my mind I was already a rock star. ‘It’ll spoil my image.’

Cue my mother’s shrieking and the wrath and frustration of the misunderstood teenager taking himself just a tad too seriously. It didn’t deter me from acting, though, as I played juvenile roles in adult productions of plays such as I Capture the Castle and Dear Octopus. I fondly imagined that I might land a child’s role on The Adventures of Robin Hood as Nettlefold Studios where the series was made was in my hometown of Walton-on-Thames. As kids we’d find rolls of discarded film in the adjacent woods around Ashley Park and sometimes would stumble across a scene being shot. One of my parents’ friends, Gilbert, was an art director at Nettlefold and for the Robin Hood series. Through him, my mother was able to take me on set on a couple of occasions. Ostensibly for my sake, but I rather think as much for hers, for I feel she had no small crush on the handsome Richard Greene. To have had a small part as a child of Sherwood Forest would have been the ultimate, but as history relates, Robin stayed loyal to Maid Marion and my mother went back home to see whether my father’s golf clubs had returned home. Robin and Friar Tuck did at least sign my autograph book, Alexander Gauge writing, ‘lots of luck from Friar Tuck’. Almost until the time I would lurch into Radio One I was appearing in one play or another.

I could point an accusing finger at many songs and singers who pushed and jostled me along hitherto unknown and unexplored musical thoroughfares, but I feel at least some of the blame should fall on the shoulders of Ian Gibb. Later to become a top sports and boxing correspondent, at school he was the one with the New Musical Express folded discreetly under the desk in Paddy Skues’s maths lessons. Until then I had no idea that there was a paper devoted entirely to pop music. Of course there was Radio Luxembourg, the BBC’s Saturday Club and Easy Beat and the TV shows Juke Box Jury and Thank Your Lucky Stars, but within these few pages I could learn more about the singers and the songs. If this was a drug, I’d swallowed it.

Woking was an eye-opener. Not only the education side of things, but the learning of master’s names, their nicknames, their foibles, their bêtes noires, the way they wrapped their gowns around themselves, and prefects who seemed to be at least 7 feet tall, with gold tassles dangling extravagantly from their pale blue caps. One prefect approached me on my first day and protectively told me that if I was ever in trouble to go and seek him out. Fights were, on the whole, left to police themselves; ice slides of some 40 feet in length attended by a never-ending queue of boys weren’t cordoned off in case somebody slipped over. The prefects kept a weather eye out from the upper quad onto the lower areas, inhabited by the hoi polloi, but rarely intervened.

The school had an excellent sporting and educational strike rate as well as fiercely contested inter-house competitions. I was in Drake House, as I had been in my previous school, and continued to volunteer for everything ‘for the good of the House’. Football, cricket, tennis, boxing, cross-country, chess, basketball … I was there. I’ve been dogged by cross-country dreams all my life, but heaven knows why, always a different course, but always much faster than in real life. I revisited the old buildings some years ago and was regaled with tales of ghostly happenings and extraordinary temperature changes. I can believe that.

Several Old Wokingians became eminent musicians, including the leader of school group The Hustlers, Mick Green, who went on to enormous success with Foreigner. He was my guest on Saturday Superstore one week, and just before we went live, I whispered, ‘Rigby Hardaker sends his love.’ Mick’s face was a picture. Our deputy headmaster and head of Latin, while resembling a miniature Mekon from Dan Dare, wallowed in the delightfully Dickensian name of Rigby Hardaker.

As in sport, humility was also the name of the game in academia. I only discovered years later, on buying some books I wanted, that they’d been written, as had many others, by our history master L. C. B. (Godfrey) Seaman. Our biology master and leader of the school treks, Kenneth Fudge, had the appearance of a being from a much earlier period and would amuse us by watching a piece of chalk like a hawk, to see if it moved. We watched too, thinking that it just might. It never did. I have even chatted with him on Facebook once or twice over the last year or two, but didn’t dare mention the chalk. Still the schoolboy at heart. Anyway, the love affair with music was definitely on … and it looked like lasting.

Sensing my exuberance and desperation to be involved somehow, my grandfather bought me a guitar. It was a small acoustic, not a flashy electric like the real stars played, but it was a start and my attempts to convert it into something more spectacular by drawing on it failed dismally. I morphed into a piece of human blotting paper, absorbing anything I could and avidly learning rudimentary chords from anyone who could be bothered to show me. Unlike other kids with guitars, I had no desire to be a lead guitarist, as long as I was able to play enough chords to write songs. Then there was the all-important aspect of forming a group. Forget the standard of musicianship, if you had an instrument you were in. If someone you knew had a van, they were the manager. Business acumen? Forget it, a van was the way forward. Of course within a short space of time, the stragglers lost ground and were ejected either pleasantly or unpleasantly, as the group took one step nearer to becoming the next Beatles or Stones. Most of the time was spent thinking about a name. Getting the right name was surely the first step to success. At odd times I and whoever was around would play as the Layabouts, the Rivals and, for one gig, the Riverbeats.

My earliest song was an instrumental which my mother dubbed ‘Sheer Hell’. What was it like? There’s a clue in her title. More melodic attempts followed, with such classic lines as ‘All the lights on the hills break my heart, all the stars in the sky play a part’. I can’t honestly say what part the stars played and to be perfectly frank I’d never had my heart broken, but it seemed the right road to travel. Another early lyric was the deeply profound, or was it tediously basic, ‘It’s me and, you know, it will always be’. At least it threw up a degree of self-awareness. The title of another song was ‘Ever Decreasing Circles’, which just possibly summed up its direction.

Our earliest attempts at being a group were rough hewn but filled with schoolboy enthusiasm. We were rehearsing upstairs one day when the buzzer on our dumb waiter started going berserk. It was my mother. I stuck my head down the lift-shaft only to receive orders to present myself downstairs. I was used to receiving orders. I became a dab hand at giving the dumb waiter just the right amount of tug to let it free fall and knowing just when to grab it, inches before a crockery disaster. I climbed over and crawled into most places as a kid, including roofs and cellars, but the dumb waiter would have been madness and I was probably too big. We had an elaborate bell system as well, which meant I could be summoned from anywhere in the house. My mother did a lot of summoning. I assumed, on this occasion, that the bass was throbbing through floors, walls and ceilings as it was wont to do. Preparing my usual answer, ‘It doesn’t sound as good if we play quietly’, I was surprised to see that she was with two men and introduced one of them as Mr Gomelsky. He was bearded, his colleague clean shaven. They’d heard the music from the open windows and were looking for somewhere to start a club for groups to play in. Did I know of anywhere? I knew nothing of buildings, property or suitable spaces, so probably looked rather vacant. Anyway I was keen to get back to rehearsals and left my mother chatting to them over a drink. I should have stayed a little longer. A year or two later and I’d have been more inquisitive: ‘Music club, eh? Do you need a group? Maybe we should keep in touch.’

‘Who were they?’ I asked later.

It transpired that the sidekick was called Hamish and the other was a Giorgio Gomelsky. The mater said that he seemed to be the one in charge. Of course I knew the name. Giorgio was the former manager of the Rolling Stones and was then looking after the Yardbirds. He was heavily involved in the Richmond music scene and had helped put together the early R&B festivals at Richmond that would morph into the Windsor and then the Reading Festival. Missed out there.

One local group were head and shoulders above the rest and that was the Echolettes, who were resident at the youth club, but in reality far, far better than that. Slightly older than us, they featured Rod Roach on lead guitar, who by rights should have been up there with the greats. Rod’s technique, style and execution were so ahead of the times that one wasn’t sure whether to be inspired or give up. The Echolettes made it to TV’s Ready, Steady, Win, an offshoot competition from Ready, Steady, Go!, and featured on the ensuing LP and later CD with their song ‘Our Love Feels New’. A later line-up, still featuring Rod, recording in De Lane Lea Studios, encouraged me to turn up at the session with one or two of my songs, as Dave Siddle, the engineer/producer, might well like them. They followed me on ‘Thoughts of You’, but we hadn’t rehearsed it and it didn’t come over as I’d heard it in my head and I wasn’t confident enough to relax and take my time over it.

‘It’d make a great B-side,’ said Siddle, whose work would eventually encompass musicians from Deep Purple and Jimi Hendrix to Herman’s Hermits and the Goons. I was thrilled. At around the same time I played some songs to Screen Gems and received a similar response. I reasoned that it was a start. Surely it was but a short step from writing B-sides to writing A-sides. When older and wiser, I learned that this was a time-honoured way of someone saying they weren’t keen on a song. A critic might say that my first real songs revealed a very diverse approach or, if one were a little harsher, that I was thrashing around looking for a direction.

Another up-and-coming Walton/Weybridge outfit was Unit 39, fronted by our local doctor’s son, David Ballantyne, who majored on soul and blues and was bloody good at it for a white boy in his mid-teens. Within months he signed a deal with EMI, who released a few singles, including ‘I Can’t Express It’ and ‘Love around the World’, the latter becoming a huge pirate radio hit. We’d later team up before he went on to play with Geno Washington and wind up as a classical DJ in the States. Another one who should have made it. He looked great and had a stunning soul voice. His sister Celia later became Julian Lloyd Webber’s first wife.

At college, I ran the music club, such as it was, wrote a comic opera called City Sounds that leaned heavily on John Gay and Charles Dickens, and was art editor of the rag mag. I also wrote songs about Dickens (‘What the Dickens’ emerging on a 2013 compilation), a friend’s psychedelic roadshow and Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe, and attempted to emulate Bob Dylan’s ‘stream of consciousness’ songs. Bob had certainly drawled something very similar long before me … and had executed it with more commitment. Even so, I like to think that lines such as ‘getting caught in the spider’s web of uniformity’ have a certain ring even today, even if I didn’t know what I was talking about. Many of the songs I put down in that period have disappeared, but just as many remain as a musical diary including ‘Nicola’, ‘Charley Brewster’s DJ Show’, ‘Pictures on my Wall’ and ‘If She’s a Day’, all appearing on a ’90s album for which I actually got good reviews for my singing. Viva retrospection I say. I shamelessly quote: ‘Well-crafted ballads with Read’s folksy delivery reminiscent at times of Donovan, Mick Jagger and Bob Dylan.’ The reviewer also noted that the eclectic mix included ‘Edward E. James Rainbow’, ‘an infectious upbeat homage to poet Edward James, the godson of Edward VII, whose sizeable inheritance enabled him to become a patron of the arts’. Despite the diversity of subjects, another reviewer, who’d clearly led a sheltered life, wrote, ‘For what are essentially bedroom recordings, Mike Read’s early work is surprisingly strong.’ Where was that reviewer at the time?

The Welsh Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins was also a big influence on my writing, or at least I like to think he was. It was more the internal rhyming and sprung rhythm that inspired me rather than the copious dollops of alliteration or the darker side of his subject matter.

It was while having tea at the house of a great-aunt and -uncle that I scribbled down the germ of an idea that was to become my first published song, ‘Evening Paper’. I know it sounds like a cliché but it was genuinely written on an envelope. When writers come out with this old chestnut in interviews, they tend to be pooh-poohed by the sceptic that’s questioning them. I’m no pooh-pooher. I believe them, because I wrote on that envelope.

With the song complete, and not wishing to do things by halves, I strode purposefully along Savile Row, knocked at the door of No. 17 and marched boldly in. This was the home of one of the biggest transatlantic publishers, Carlin Music. After the striding, knocking and marching came the wavering. These guys published song for Elvis, Cliff and hundreds of stars. Maybe this new song and a couple of others I’d recorded for good measure weren’t that good. But amazingly I was ushered upstairs to the office of Dave Most, the brother of record producer Mickie Most. Before listening to my songs, he played me a couple of new releases, due out the following month. This was it. I was part of the inner circle. Hearing tracks before they hit the shops or even the airwaves! Maybe more out of encouragement than conviction, Dave listened to my songs and muttered something that sounded like ‘suitable for Herman’s Hermits’ – or maybe it was ‘not suitable for Herman’s Hermits’. It was now surely a short step to writing for Cream or John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. Then surely the American market would open up. I was convinced I could knock up something pretty reasonable for the Byrds, or maybe the Lovin’ Spoonful. I got a contract, but in the eyes of contractual law, I rather embarrassingly still needed my father to sign for the dream to become a reality, as I was under age, which turned out to be a lot harder than actually getting the publishing deal. He made me wait for a whole week before he consented, imagining that I might be signing away any meagre goods or chattels that I possessed. I never heard another word about ‘Evening Paper’, the song that may or may not have been suitable for Herman. The cutting-edge lyric involved a guy who bizarrely places a newspaper small ad offering ‘happiness for hire’. In retrospect, a rather arrogant action, but not an earth-shattering song.

One summer holiday, I was on the receiving end of a phone call from a friend, imploring me to jump on a train immediately and only alight when I saw the sign Bognor Regis. Always up for an adventure and not getting too many straight answers to my questions, I submitted to his entreaty. OK, it wasn’t exactly a blues-guitar-playing hobo riding a freight train to Milwaukee, but it was the way we English folk did it. ‘Single to Bognor, if I may? Thank you so much.’ The Shoreline Club and its sister establishment within the same building, the Caribbean Hotel, was a world first – a hotel run by teenagers for teenagers. What could possibly go right? Musically, everything. The story of the birth, life and death of the club lurks in my revealing tome The South Coast Beat Scene of the 1960s, but here let’s just note a handful of the acts that performed there and opened up even more musical avenues (and a few cul-de-sacs): David Bowie, Bluesology (with Long John Baldry and Elton John on keyboards), the Equals, Geno Washington, Jimmy James, the Artwoods, Pink Floyd, Arthur Alexander, the Who, John Mayall, Arthur Brown, the Herd … the list is by no means endless, but you get the vibe, I’m sure. The place had a cast of characters that you couldn’t have invented, with the all-nighters full of mods popping pills not for kicks but simply to keep awake. It was a different and more decent era, but I’m sure the older guys with a little more savoir faire took advantage of the situation in any way they could. Down the years I have remained friendly with some of the folk that I met all those years ago, especially Percy Nowell, Hugh Wilson and Blair Montague-Drake. We still talk with enthusiasm and love for those distant days, keep the characters alive in our conversation, both the good and the bad, extol the virtues of the camaraderie if not the food, and I rather suspect would love to take a time machine back to those heady days when the world was at our feet. The Shoreline was a unique place, where you could chat, hang out or even play a bit of guitar with some seriously interesting guys. The media, of course, had a field day, assuming it was a den of iniquity. It wasn’t, at least not for me, but I was pretty naive. I had several letters from both my mother and my maternal grandmother insisting that I leave the place at once. They must have been kidding. I was discovering new music, new people, a new way of life, playing guitar each night and going to the beach every day. I could handle that.

The man behind the Shoreline and the Caribbean Hotel was the incredible and inspirational Eric St John Foti, a man who has truly lived life to the full and whose middle names should have been carpe diem. He is still in full flow well into his eighties, with projects, flying lessons and an inexhaustible supply of ideas and energy. He offered me a few pounds a week, which for holiday money was fine, as all the food (such as it was) was free, as were the music, the incredible camaraderie and the experience. I’d have paid him for all that. Circa 2004 my pal Eddie Grant, who played at the Shoreline with his group the Equals was so delighted to know that Eric was alive and well and living in Norfolk that he insisted we caught a train up there to see him. A great reunion. Eric was and still is a driving force that brought people together and got things done. I still go to Eric’s various anniverseries, which seem unlikely to end.

Every teenager working at the place had to participate in the menial and day-to-day jobs necessary to keep the place going, but at night I was put on stage with my twelve-string guitar to play between the groups. In principle it sounds like a hot ticket. In reality the floor emptied when the heaving, sweating crowd rushed to get a drink, the sound of the Who, the Action or the Untamed still ringing in their ears, as I tottered on in my Cuban-heel boots and corduroy jacket to play a handful of Donovan- and Dylan-style songs to the few remaining souls who simply weren’t in a fit state to make it as far as the Coke bar. My job, it seemed, was to leave again as soon as the crowd returned for the second half. The manager of the Untamed, Ken Chaplin, promised me an audition with top record producer Shel Talmy, who’d worked his magic on the Who and the Kinks as well as Chaplin’s band, but despite sitting in the reception of Regent Sound in Denmark Street in my painted jeans and clutching my twelve-string Hoyer for the whole of an afternoon, the legend never emerged from the studio and I eventually went home. There was talk of joining the Untamed, but A-levels rather obviously won out. I was also pushed in the direction of another manager who was making a name for himself, Ken Pitt. I remember playing for him in his office in Curzon Street, but despite making promising noises, nothing came of it. Looking back, I should have pushed a little more, been more assertive and projected some attitude, but I was probably too polite.

The Shoreline was an education. It was where I grew up musically. Until then I’d bought fairly mainstream pop records. I loved them then and still do, but at Bognor I discovered other music that hadn’t been on the radar. One of my jobs was to buy new records for the club, which meant heading off to the local record shop, Tansley and Cooke, once a week with a fistful of dollars to spend. The music world opened up. I bought tracks on Sue, Tamla Motown, Bluebeat, Stax and many other labels, returning with the likes of Billy Preston, Don Covay, Prince Buster, Otis Redding, the Temptations, Justin Hines and the Skatalites. The club scene was so different to the radio. I even went out on a limb and bought Frank Zappa’s early Mothers of Invention single ‘It Can’t Happen Here’. It was weird, you couldn’t dance to it and the milkman would have had a hell of a job whistling it, but it broadened my horizons.

I wrote a few songs at the Shoreline, including the Beach-Boy-esque ‘Shoreline Surfin’’ and the pop-orientated ‘Find Her’, in collaboration with Dave Hooper, much-respected singer with top south coast outfit Dave and the Diamonds. I was also challenged to write a song by a couple of holidaying Cadet Corps lads from Lancashire about Colne, their home town. I haven’t played it since, but I can still remember sizeable chunks of it:

Latchkeys are fumbling | In the distance rumbling

Sounds of the rail | Aurora to the West

Silhouettes against the night sky

Seems to infest | The assembled rubble nearby

Separate echoes now of Colne.

The TV show Whole Scene Going, came to the Shoreline to film at that time and I borrowed a blue polka-dot tab-collar shirt from one of the cadets to wear for my scene. They filmed me playing my twelve-string Hoyer and singing ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone’. I desperately wanted to play one of my own songs, or at least something with a hint of credibility, but for them it was gentle guy plus twelve-string guitar equals folk song. Oh well.

Some summer holidays or odd gap months in the school or college holidays, I’d attempt to earn some cash as most kids do. One of my most exhilarating weeks in a school holiday was spent at the old Cheeseborough Pond cosmetics factory in Victoria Road, Acton which had stood on the site since 1923, although the Cheeseborough chaps didn’t take over the Pond people until 1956. The remit was to spend the morning collecting every faulty bottle in the factory and in the afternoon smash them to pieces against a wall in the yard. Had I been an avant garde painter, I could have sold that wall five times over. A schoolboy’s dream. I also used to escape to Lancashire and spend some time with my maternal grandparents. On one occasion I saw an advertisement in the Manchester Evening News for a group wanting a rhythm guitarist/vocalist. The Impact were based in Stockport, the other side of Manchester, but who cared about distance? If I needed to take four buses I would. I auditioned at the house of their leader, Graham, with their outgoing rhythm guitarist present, and yes, I had the gig if I wanted it. Indeed I did. We had a kind of uniform; I seem to recall matching shirts at least. The most prestigious venue we played was the Oasis, a very cool Manchester club where all the top groups from the Beatles down had appeared. The highlight of the Oasis night for me was playing The Temptations’ ‘Since I Lost My Baby’, which I’d bought in Bognor, the day after hearing the Action do it live on stage at the Shoreline Club.

One night the Impact didn’t collect me for a gig. There were no mobiles then, so I stood in the street for an hour waiting for a van that never arrived. I received a call later saying the van had broken down. I was disappointed, but these things happen. Well, they do, but not twice. I didn’t realise that I was on the way out. Now I’d be on it like a flash. I’d sense something wasn’t right. Their old guitarist had decided that he had made a mistake in leaving and wanted to return to the fold. It was a no-win situation for me; they were mates and had history. The third time the van ‘broke down’, I actually did that trip involving four buses and made the gig. They clearly weren’t expecting me to turn up, but again, in my naivety, I failed to pick up on the half-whispered comments and merrily joined them on stage. I played with them one more time and only then did they have the courage to tell me, on dropping me off, that they were going to revert to the original line-up. I was devastated. Didn’t I fit in? Wasn’t I good enough? Did I look too different? Did I not have the right geographical credentials as a lad from Surrey? I didn’t know. Years later there would have been a shrug of the shoulders and I’d have moved on. My grandmother was livid and telephoned the new-old guitarist’s mother. Not one to hold back, she had a real go at her about her son’s attitude, how they’d let me down and why this was not the correct way to treat someone who’d been so dedicated. Looking back, I’m not sure that I put enough into it. I was possibly enjoying the kudos without paying attention to the musicianship. But it certainly knocked my confidence at a time when it needed boosting.

Probably the first half-decent records I made were with Amber, a name I liked from reading Kathleen Winsor’s Forever Amber at school. Having drafted a trio of very good musicians that I vaguely knew from the Bognor Regis area, Martin Bury, Dave Gibb and Alan Smith, we recorded three songs at RG Jones studio in Morden, near Wimbledon, ‘Time and Tide’, ‘Yellow and Red’ and ‘Shirley’. They still sound as if we meant it, especially ‘Yellow and Red’. In 1999 it appeared on the compilation album The Story of Oak Records, alongside songs by groups such as the Mike Stuart Span, the Game, the Thyrds and the Bo Street Runners. The sleeve notes rather embarrassingly record, ‘“Yellow and Red” is chiefly notable for Read’s excellent guitar work … any resemblance to “Astronomy Domine” is entirely intentional…’ I played it entirely with an art deco perfume bottle. As one does. The vinyl album From There to Uncertainty was released on the Tenth Planet label at about the same time, and contained many of my very early songs including those recorded as Mic Read and Just Plain Smith as well as Amber.

Trying to push the group meant spending some time in London away from the tennis courts and parties of Surrey. Dave Gibb’s girlfriend allowed us to stay in her bedsitter in Notting Hill. As kids we thought little of there being five people in one room. Dave and his girlfriend had the bed, obviously, and we had the floor, awkwardly. Did we notice the discomfort, the cold, the aroma of socks, and the lack of food? Of course not, we were young. It didn’t matter. Food did arrive, but in an unusual manner. When the communal phone in the hall rang it was never for any of us Amber lads, it was always for Angie in flat three. We’d knock on the door and let the occupant know that she was wanted on the phone. The odd thing is that Angie was never in. We heard this mantra several times a day from a voice that we presumed belonged to her flat-mate. One night we gave voice to our thoughts.

‘How come the calls are all for Angie and not her flat-mate?’

‘You’re right. She’s the more popular of the two, but she’s never there.’

‘What’s the other one called?’

Gallic shrugs all round.

‘Anyone seen her?’

Several heads shook in unison.

‘Why doesn’t the other one get calls?’

‘Even weirder, why doesn’t the flat-mate ever take a message?’

Days later I fleetingly bumped into one of them on the stairs and mentioned our bemusement en passant. Clearly in a rush, she shouted over her shoulder, ‘If you answer the phone again, could you just ask them to call back later?’ And she was gone. Which one it was, I was still unclear.

It was after the fleeting meeting over the bannister that the bags of food were discovered hanging from the handle of our door. We ate and asked no questions. Pre-occupied with life, we failed to link the food with the countless phone calls. I then encountered the same woman in more relaxed mood.

‘Is the food OK?’ she asked.

‘Oh, it’s from you. We wondered where it was coming from.’

‘Well, you’re answering the phone, aren’t you?’

‘When it rings, yes.’ Always the ready wit.

‘It’s payment for answering the phone.’

I had to ask. ‘We’re slightly perplexed as to why all the phone calls are for your flat-mate, who’s never there, and never for you, who’s always there.’

She smiled as an ancient guru looking upon an unworldly innocent would smile. Or at least how I imagined an ancient guru would smile in the circumstances. ‘I don’t share with anybody, Angie’s my professional name.’

I still didn’t get it. ‘So if you’re working you’re too busy to come to the phone?’

She thought I’d got it.

I hadn’t. ‘So what do you do?’

‘Well, I’m with a client. I can’t very well answer the phone, can I?’

My naivety marched on unabated. ‘Couldn’t you just leave the meeting for a minute?’

‘My “meetings” are in bed, luvvie … you know … with men.’

I got it. It took me a while, but I got it. When I passed the information on, we wondered whether we should take any more phone calls or any more food.

The Mad Bongo Player of Powis Terrace was another character associated with the house. He would arrive at any time of day or night, come in, drink tea, tap his bongos and disappear off into the cauldron of Notting Hill. We never knew his name, his purpose or anything about him. We knew even less about the transvestite that tripped down the stairs in size twelve slingbacks and make-up that looked as though he’d fallen into a basket of overripe fruit. These folk simply didn’t exist in Weybridge.

Fed up with the cramped conditions, I often slept in the basement of a West Indian café called the Surfari Tent. Nights there, though, were often disturbed by the local steel band deciding on an impromptu session in the wee hours of the morning. Complain? Not me, I’m easy going and laid back, especially if the musicians were four or five mean-looking dudes from the Caribbean. ‘Rehearse away, boys,’ I’d say, ‘Sleep is nothing to a seasoned muso like me.’ It was safer operating from the stockbroker belt.

I said I owed a debt of gratitude to Barbara Andrews and I do. As well as the encouragement when I was a ‘tiny’, she now let me and the group live in her house, and rehearse in the ballroom. She even gave us much-needed singing lessons! Also it was her art deco perfume bottle that I used to achieve the ‘Syd Barrett–Pink Floyd psychedelic guitar sound’ on ‘Yellow and Red’, strangely raved about by record reviewers on assorted CD sleeves (see above). A very keen potential manager called Joe Nemeth appeared at the Old Meuse (for that was the name of the Andrews’ house) one afternoon, offering us the moon. Instead he took us to the local shop and urged us fill our baskets with food. We needed little urging. This guy was hot stuff. Back at the house he outlined his plans; pacing, expounding and postulating, he gave a speech to put Churchill to shame. Now a real player knows exactly when to quit. You’ve built up to your peak, hammered home the salient points and captivated your audience. At that point you depart like morning mist, leaving everyone open mouthed and bewitched. Joe Nemeth timed it to perfection. He turned on his heel, opened the door and walked straight into the larder. He emerged with his face the colour of a beetroot, found the right door and departed, with our explosive laughter ringing in his ears. We never heard from him again.

Barbara was also indirectly responsible for my first single being released, ‘February’s Child’. I’m not giving any state secrets away when I reveal that my mother, Barbara and their friend Molly Edge liked a glass or two and when the mood took them (which it did quite often) they had a wee dram. From one of these sessions, which occasionally got a tad maudlin, the idea of introducing Molly’s daughter to Beryl’s son emerged. I have to say at this point that my mother wasn’t Beryl Reid the comedienne, she was Beryl Read, a comedienne, and coincidentally happened to be a passenger in a car with the other one when they had a minor road accident. My father wasn’t Les Reed the songwriter, but was the Les Read who played golf with Les Reed the songwriter. And of course, I was never in EastEnders claiming ‘Pat’ll be livid’, nor presenting Runaround and shouting such meaningful lines as ‘Wallop!’ Mike Reid and I did, however, appear together in one episode of Through the Keyhole, as some wag, possibly Ian Bolt, thought it would be jolly humorous to have Mike Read/Mike Reid as the answers to both parts of the show. Anyway, Barbara introduced me to Valerie Edge and we became boyfriend and girlfriend, although part of the deal appeared to involve Barbara playing teenage love songs to us on her piano in the ballroom and getting deliciously weepy while we sat there with suitably reflective expressions. From this was to come my first single release.

Local musicians tend to gravitate towards each other and drift in and out of various groups like butterflies trying to find their favourite buddleia bush. At one point we drafted in Ric Parnell from the nearby village of Claygate, reasoning that as his father was one of the country’s top drummers and bandleaders then Rick should be able to at least hold a pair of Premier E sticks. Hold them? Led Zeppelin’s ‘Communications Breakdown’ with its unusual nine-beat intro, straight in, no messing. He played on one or two of my demos, including a powerful re-working of ‘What the Dickens’, where he and Virgin Sleep guitarist Keith Purnell really let rip. Keith also played with the seasoned rocker and highly respected singer Jackie Lynton, who popped his nose into one session and ended up kicking some life into a rather lacklustre song of mine we were recording, ‘January, February, March’. Even attempting to rhyme ‘March’ with ‘much’ was lyrical madness. Ric Parnell was rising faster than the rest of us, moving on to Rod Roach’s new band, Horse, and playing on their debut (and only) album, and then touring the States with Engelbert Humperdinck at the insistence of Parnell senior.

It was during the recording of the Horse album at Olympic Studios that I met Mick Jagger. We walked in together one day. ‘Hello, Mick,’ I said.

‘Hello,’ said Mick.

You could tell we clicked. I haven’t seen him since.

On Ric Parnell’s return to the UK, he immediately gave me his immaculately tailored midnight blue DJ, which had been made for him. He hated it. I loved it. He joined Atomic Rooster and acquired a much more appropriate snakeskin suit and snakeskin boots, which he wore until they fell apart and took on a life of their own in the corner of his bedroom. I swear I heard that suit hissing. I shared two flats with Ric. When there was no work on he’d stay in bed all day. That’s just passable in itself as a part of a rock & roll lifestyle, but his culinary habits were the stuff of legend. Under his bed lived a white Mother’s Pride loaf, a jar of peanut butter, a knife and a rolled-up pair of socks that existed in a world devoid of launderettes and washing powder. Following yet another slice of dry bread coated with crunchy peanut butter, the fastidious Parnell would gently place the knife, thick with spread, on the rolled-up socks to avoid getting it dirty on the floor. I swear each sandwich contained more sock fluff than peanut butter. I also swear that it was this natural rock & roll behaviour pattern that led to him becoming the drummer in Spinal Tap. He was a shoe-in. God made the rock & roll lifestyle especially for Parnell.

The key to success in those days was to release a single. You couldn’t simply cut your own records back in the day. Now, anybody can do it. You set up the technology in your bedroom, record it, mix it, upload it, make a cheap video, stick it on YouTube and even cut CDs where necessary, print your own labels and your own liner notes and design the cover, all from the room that you were once sent to for being naughty. But then, to feel the thrill of holding a piece of vinyl in your hand meant that someone other than yourself, in the all-powerful record industry, believed in your talent as a performer or a writer. It was proof to friends and family that there was a chance you’d make it. I had several songs at the time that might have been considered commercial (which seemed to be the all-important byword), including a song about a Florence Nightingale-type character, ‘Lady of the Lamp, I Won’t Look Back’, which included references to ‘double-breasted businessmen’ and a former Uppingham scholar who lost his life in World War One, and ‘Pictures on My Wall’. The latter song, as with a few of my demos, had the delightful addition of my friend Tricia Walker on her family’s great Canadian harmonium, with lyrics extolling the virtues of pictures scattered around at home. The lyric took in Chatsworth Hall, Sybil Thorndike, Katmandu and the cartoon character Toby Twirl! Heady stuff. As it turned out, the first single release that I could wave in front of my parents was ‘February’s Child’, a song inspired by Valerie. Valerie’s mother, Molly, caught us kissing in the music room (nothing really serious, but enough to put a mother’s nose out of joint) and banned me from the house. Limited to riding past on my bike and waving I simply had to vent my spleen in a song. Not surprisingly, the spleen-venting was done in a very Home Counties way, via a twee little ditty featuring harpsichord and flute. Sure, it might have been released on a small classical label, whose previous single had been ‘Esmeralda Fufluns’, a children’s song about a dragon, but at least there would be a piece of vinyl and that was what mattered. Our group, Just Plain Smith, comprised two friends from Uppingham School, Bill Heath and Chris Hatt, and their schoolmate Jake, Colin Standring from Surrey University, who’d been in the Jimmy Brown Sound and Horse, and Dick, like Bill a budding law student. Chris literally dreamed up the name, while Bill coined the song’s media strapline, ‘On a scene of its own’. Quite.

Our backing vocalist on this exploratory disc was Tim Rice, credited on the label as playing the ‘mitsago’. At the time, and occasionally since, people have stolen stealthily up to me and whispered in a covert voice that they had no idea that people still played the mitsago, in a classic case of emperor’s new clothes. The erroneous assumption that it was maybe related to an ancient instrument such as the sackbut or the hautboy was heavily wide of the mark, as, with the scintillating humour of youth that only youth considers to be scintillatingly humorous, I simply reversed Tim to get ‘mit’ and added ‘sago’ instead of Rice. For his sins, and the thrill of musical camaraderie, Tim joined the band at the odd gig and, as top record producer Norrie Paramor’s former right-hand man, was closer to the hub of the business than we were. For some obscure reason he became unavailable the following year, after Jesus Christ Superstar shot to number one in the USA. There’s gratitude. Where was the publicist who could have given us such possible newspaper headlines as ‘Just Plain Smith backing vocalist tops US chart’? To date T. M. B. Rice is the only Just Plain Smith backing vocalist to have been knighted. A version of the group appears sporadically to this day, but even Tim’s global glory hasn’t added much to their fee or their set list over the years.

Mention must be made of the Hatt–Heath B-side, ‘Don’t Open Your Mind’, on which we really let rip and stopped trying to be commercial. Gentle and pretty it wasn’t, but it should probably have been the A-side, being described over twenty years later in Record Collector as ‘a dynamic piece of freakbeat akin to “Arthur Green” by John’s Children’. ‘February’s Child’ was described as a ‘beautifully crafted slice of late ’60s pop in a similar mould to the Kinks’. In the ’90s the single was listed at number twenty-seven in the Record Collector chart. No mean feat two decades on. It’s now listed as a having a value of around £150 a copy. It didn’t cost that to make the record!

Orlake, the pressing plant, was way out at the end of the tube line in Upminster, but there was no way I was waiting for our copies of the record to arrive by post and I hurtled up there on the appointed day. I got there early and had to wait some three hours. Would I like to come back later? No I wouldn’t, thank you. I’d like to wait. You can’t trust the music industry: go for a cup of tea and the factory closes and that’s it. Eventually, they gave me a box containing the first six copies. I hardly noticed the long trip home as I examined each one over and over again; first the A-sides then the B-sides, then the letters scratched onto the section where the groove runs out, then the grooves themselves and then I started again on the A-sides. We got a few reviews; I think it was the Melody Maker who declared that we were like Skip Bifferty. We were thrilled as they were a serious musical force, but it turned out that the only likeness they were referring to was that both groups were living in a house in the country. Having the same real estate values as a genuinely talented and respected group was surely no bad thing.

In another interview I was holding forth with such earth-shattering comments as ‘A deadline can work wonders and we play much better under pressure’. The only pressure I remember is that Jake’s family lived in the Bahamas and he got to the studio half an hour late. The producer was also quoted in an interview, inspiring all and sundry with his aperçu that ‘the harpsichord is an essential gimmick and without it the song will never get off the ground’, which was good to know. Another of his quoted classics, this time regarding the microphones was, ‘It all depends on strategic positioning. It’s this that will make or break you.’ Nothing to do with our songs, haircuts or youthful good looks then? How very disappointing. One interview ended with a flash of visionary brilliance from ‘Just Plain Mic’, as they insisted on calling me: ‘Even if the record doesn’t make the chart, I don’t think we’ve wasted our time.’ The jury is still out.

The record actually got some airplay: Emperor Rosko spun it a couple of times and Bill Heath’s incessant and terrier-like campaigning bagged us a spot on Radio One Club. I hoofed up to Leicester, although I was still bearing the final scars from a horrific car crash a few weeks earlier. The axle sheared on my friend Roger Tallack’s Triumph Herald and as the car somersaulted I apparently went through the gap where the windscreen had been and ended up unconscious with battery acid pouring over me. How we survived goodness only knows. There was petrol everywhere. If either of us had been smoking (luckily neither of us smoked) we’d have been engulfed in a ball of flame. I remember briefly coming to in the ambulance and muttering ‘We can get some press out of this for the single’. A trouper through and through. Having done my PR I passed out again, coming round in A&E. I was naked except for a piece of elastic around my waist and a few tatters hanging down Robinson Crusoe style. Not realising that the battery acid had eaten my underpants I entered the realms of somnolent apologia: ‘Oh no, my mother always told me to wear clean underwear in case I had an accident.’ I couldn’t see a thing for the first three days in hospital as the petrol had burned my eyes and soaked into the dozens of lacerations on my face and head. Apart from the severe pain I had no idea what state I was in. I was still semi-conscious during first visiting hours when I heard my mother say to my father, ‘My God, I hope they don’t let him look in a mirror.’ I wasn’t sure how my new Quasimodo look would fit into the image of a young pop group. Maybe I could go solo. Maybe I’d have to. My mother at that point, not yet aware of my total lack of sight, didn’t know that they could have held up every mirror in the place and I wouldn’t have known.

After my honourable discharge some three weeks later and a few more weeks convalescing in the sun, I bore my remaining scars with youthful embarrassment as I appeared on Radio One Club, alongside Jeff Lynne’s underrated Idle Race and Bobby Vee. According to the music press, there was much talk of servicemen from Walton-on-Thames taking a copy of ‘February’s Child’ with them to the Far East, where it was copied and pressed illegally, reaching number ten in the Malaysian chart. You can’t beat a good rumour.

I did a one-off gig around this time, forming a trio with two other young hopefuls to play at the Dorchester Hotel. The occasion was the second wedding of property magnate Sefton Myers, who’d recently formed a management company with showbiz agent David Land. The guests included Sefton’s daughter Judie, later to find fame as Judie Tzuke. The three lads who took to the stage to entertain (I use the word loosely) were also looking for appreciation of their musical abilities and as such were still on the very shaky first rung. I played guitar and sang, my fellow vocalist just sang and our third member pounded the piano. My confederates were keen to make an impression, as they’d not long been signed to Sefton and David’s management company, New Ventures. I was on board too, not as an artist, but as the young lad attempting to do their PR from their office in Mayfair, at 1 Charles Street. I had no experience of course, but the singer of our trio had rather recklessly recommended me in what must have been an unguarded moment. Had you wanted to interview Tim and Andrew and be the first to spot their global potential, you only had to call me on 01-629 **** and you would have been on a winner, or rather two winners. Too late now.

I have no idea what we served up that night. I don’t remember any rehearsals. I don’t remember any soundcheck. I’m not even sure that I remember any applause. We certainly weren’t approached by anyone else in the room eager to book a rather odd trio. It was a case of three men in a boat without a paddle … actually, no, make that without the boat.

‘Tim and Andrew’ were Rice and Lloyd Webber respectively. Their big project at the time, post-Joseph and pre-Jesus Christ Superstar, was a musical based on Richard the Lionheart, with the rather lengthy working title of Come Back, Richard, Your Country Needs You. They wrote some of it on a barge on the Thames and recorded the songs at Chappell’s in Bond Street, where I added my dulcet and not unharmonious backing vocals to some of the tracks. The two I can recall were ‘Come Back Richard’ and ‘Roll On over the Atlantic’. Now if only it had been Superstar.

Many artists and musicians lived locally, but I was always more interested in the songwriters. I’d heard a whisper that Barry Mason had bought George Harrison’s old house, Kinfauns in Claremont Park, Esher. I knew where it was as we’d played several times for Claremont School dances. The invitations (black tie or military uniform) were always worded by the headmistress as being from ‘Miss Doran & the Claremont Seniors’, which I thought was a cracking name for a doo-wop band. Miss Doran would utter cries of anguish at the volume of our amplifiers, in sympathy for ‘Queen Victoria’s ceiling’, but we were sure that the Old Queen was past caring about the coved cornices, decorative roses and plaster icing over our heads. Barry had co-written many classic hits, including ‘The Last Waltz’, ‘Delilah’, and ‘Everybody Knows’ for the Dave Clark Five. I had it all worked out. I’d cycle down, knock on the door and offer to play him a few songs; he’d like them and my songwriting career would take off. Well, I did the cycling and the knocking, but expected little else. I hadn’t counted on being invited in, being given a cup of tea and having my rough demoes played. That’s when they stop sounding as good as you’d imagined. Barry listened, offered to record them in better quality if I brought my guitar round the following week and was genuinely encouraging. I cycled home on a wee bit of a high.

He was as good as his word and remained encouraging at odd times over the next few years to a hungry, eager songwriter with nothing to offer in return. He was convinced I’d make it. In the early ’80s, when we were booking guests for Pop Quiz, then pulling in ten million viewers every Saturday evening, I suggested Barry. He was wonderfully emotional. ‘I remember when you came and knocked on my door with your songs and now I’m on your TV show.’ Yes, there were a few tears. Why not? Even in 2013 I had him as a guest on my BBC radio show and we walked together for the best part of a day, broadcasting along the Thames. Our industry is a wonderful family.

Common sense might dictate that, following a modicum of media exposure (as it wasn’t called then), we might have stuck with the same name for our follow-up single, admittedly two years later. Or, if we were going to change our name, we might have gone in an entirely different direction. In fact we did neither of those things, rather indecisively changing it to Just Plain Jones. We may well have discussed Just Plain Brown for a third release. This way of doing things could have taken some little time. By the time we got to our millionth Russian release as Just Plain Zvorykin the Earth would have been a cold, virtually lifeless desert inhabited by baby amoebae asking silly questions like ‘Who were the Beatles?’

My old Walton pal Dave Ballantyne became a member of Just Plain Jones, with Bill Heath and myself hanging on in there as well. I’m not sure who else played on the track, ‘Crazy, Crazy’, but the publicity shot was simply of Dave, me and bass player Barney Tomes. We got even less publicity on that song. As I said, local bands are fluid, organic and sometimes socially difficult animals. Who comes? Who goes? Who plays what? Who falls out with who? In the end, those who are dedicated and mean to see it through come hell and high water do so, and those for whom it was a short but fun ride drift back to their more sensible jobs. Ballantyne and I slid rather effortlessly into a situation with the experienced Dave Mindel from Noel Gay publishing, putting together a non-performing group initially called Saturday. The idea was that the three of us individually wrote enough songs for an album and we’d record it at Sarm Studios in London. I’m struggling to recall all my songs, but ‘If She’s a Day’ and ‘Love Is Over’ were two of them, while Dave B. came up some pretty diverse stuff, one being a clever anti-Johnny Cash parody called ‘12 Bore Blues’. Another had no title, so Mindel, imagining Ballantyne to be a Lothario, said, ‘Oh just call it after any bird you know.’ So Dave called it ‘Chaffinch’.

From this diverse and unreleased album (no surprises there) came the single ‘If (Would It Turn Out Wrong)’, with Saturday becoming Esprit de Corps. Tony Blackburn made the track his record of the week on Radio One. What foresight and good taste he had … oh, and still has of course – there may be future singles. With Junior Campbell pulling out of that week’s Top of the Pops, the vacancy was quickly filled by … yes, TB’s record of the week. This was it! The third single and we were there. Well, not quite. Mindel and Ballantyne along with musicians Barney Tomes and Bill Pitt performed, while I sat disconsolate in the dressing room. I wasn’t a member of the Musicians’ Union. It hadn’t even crossed my mind. It did then. It crossed, criss-crossed and double-crossed. This was the big moment, the one that would lead to a string of hits and tours of Britain and the States, and I was missing it. If I’m completely honest there was also an unspoken undercurrent of hostility, as happens in groups. With the impatience and intolerance of guitar-toting youth come the differences of opinion over song policy and musical direction. As it turned out, there was no UK tour, no US tour and no hit. The Top of the Pops performance hadn’t cut it. Maybe it wasn’t that, maybe the masses had been deterred from buying it because, being on the Jam label, there was a large pot of jam on the record sleeve, or maybe they knew somehow that it would in the distant future appear on the Rubble compilation series and they could buy it then. I consoled myself with imagining that my presence would have made a difference. Rubbish, of course, but it was a much-needed temporary boost as I bemoaned the loss of my only chance to be on Top of the Pops, or so it seemed at the time.

As I had since college, I continued to perform live at as many venues as would book me. OK, the pubs and tennis clubs of Surrey may not have been the Roundhouse or the Marquee, but they paid for tins of beans and sausages and Vesta curries. To be fair, there was the odd London gig, including one at the Pocock Arms in the Caledonian Road and another at a pub in Shepherd’s Bush that was subsequently pulled down. As far as I could see, there was no connection. Sometimes the gigs were solo, sometimes as a duo. My most frequent partner was Big Stan (Colin Standring), although I did many with ex-Gracious frontman Sandy Davis or Dave Ballantyne and the occasional one with Rod Roach. In 1973 I got my first cover, when Henry Hadaway’s Satril label released Jon Lukas singing a song I’d written the year before, ‘Summer Sun’. Not a hit, but what a thrill. My version was quite gentle, and he gave it a bit more oomph.

My next recordings came via Sandy’s home studio and somehow found their way into the hands of David Bryce, who worked closely with Cliff Richard. David played them to Cliff’s manager, Peter Gormley, who invited me to the organisation’s office at Harley House. The walls were lined with gold discs by Cliff, the Shadows, Olivia Newton-John, the New Seekers and John Rowles; these guys had really shifted some records. Surely I was motoring now. Peter informed me that he probably had a deal for me with EMI after playing the demos to Roy Featherstone, one of their top executives. Peter put me with Tony Cole, who’d written great songs for both Cliff and the New Seekers, but I found him rather scary. Older, wiser, bearded, more talented, at least that’s what he implied, and, I gathered, not overly happy about being given a new boy to work with. I found him so intimidating that I didn’t really give my best in the studio, despite being given Cliff’s musicians to back me. The confidence has a habit of slipping away when the producer and engineer switch the intercom off and talk between themselves. You interpret every shake of the head and grimace as being a negative and imagine (with good reason) they’re despairing of having to dig deep into your well of meagre talent to salvage something half-decent. Of course if you’re a great singer, you rise above it with the arrogance of youth. But it was becoming clear that I was a better writer than a singer.

The three songs that emerged from the session at RG Jones studio were ‘Have You Seen Your Daughter Mrs Jones’, ‘Beatles Lullaby’ and ‘Girls Were Made to Be Loved’. Sadly ‘Captain Noah’s Floating Zoo’, a song I felt had a lot of potential, didn’t make the cut, so I only have a rather thin-sounding demo of it, recorded on cassette on a boat at Maidenhead an hour after I wrote it. Although I remained part of the extended family at Peter Gormley’s office, the deal with EMI fell through for various reasons, thankfully nothing to do with the performance or the songs. ‘Mrs Jones’ came out as a single on the Rainbow label in 1975, complete with a talkie bit which has made me (and others) wince ever since. Bad image too. We came up with the name Micky Manchester and they put me in a rather ghastly striped jacket. Not destined for the chart then? I still find the B-side, ‘Chamberlain Said’, quite listenable. It was a musical representation of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s return to Heston Aerodrome after his 1938 meeting with Hitler in Munich and his subsequent assurance to the people of Britain. I wrote of a yet unchanged Britain, with blacksmiths and district nurses still content pottering about in herbaceous borders and playing cricket! It was backed primarily by bass and mandolin. A little heavier and it would have been prog rock, a little lighter and it would have been a poem. For some obscure reason ‘Mrs Jones’ escaped for a second time in 1975, this time on the Satril label. Were no lessons learned from the first release? ‘Chamberlain Said’ popped up again as the B-side of ‘Are You Ready’, a raucous little number that took about ten minutes to write, if ‘write’ is not too elevated a word for it. The UK clearly wasn’t ready for this 7-inch chunk of fun, recorded in Sandy Davis’s studio with more than a dozen fairly well-lubricated mates on sound effects and backing vocals, all vying to get their individual voices heard over the cacophony of sound. It was wisely released in Belgium on the Biac label. I suppose I could pretend it went to number one, as I doubt whether you’d find a Belgian that would argue the point, but it didn’t. It didn’t get to number anything. No taste. That was my first and last Belgian release. The single was re-released on Satril after I joined Radio Luxembourg. The cover shot for the sleeve was taken outside the old Roxy in London in a vague and ill-conceived idea to make me look punkish. I didn’t, I looked like Nick Drake with a mild perm. The B-side this time was ‘London Town’, the song I’d written in the Blue Room in John Lennon’s old house, Kenwood.

When I joined Radio One late in 1978, the station was about to change its wavelength from 247 metres to 275 and 285, and to that end, a single was being recorded as part of the awareness drive. My very first job at Radio One was to be part of the group of station DJs that were adding their voices to a song co-written by Peter Powell and Showaddywaddy, who provided the backing and the better-sounding vocals. ‘New Wave Band’ by Jock Swon & the Meters (you couldn’t make it up … although somebody must have done) was released in November on the BEEB label to a wave of apathy. I don’t remember it being played on the station, but maybe it was. Showaddywaddy were probably press-ganged into it, but it was fun to be a part of, and it was a little piece of history. It was the only ‘New Wave Band,’ that was emphatically not New Wave.

By the time the next single came out I had been at Radio One for six months and was presenting the evening programme before John Peel came on air. I had a batch of new songs that I’d played to friends and thought a couple of them quite commercial, but they all went for one I hadn’t considered, ‘High Rise’. The song was inspired by the block of flats in Walton in which Sham 69’s Jimmy Pursey lived. He was on the eighth, and top, storey. Keith West of ‘Excerpt from a Teenage Opera’ and ‘Tomorrow’ fame had once lived in another of the flats and Martin Briley from Mandrake Paddle Steamer and Greenslade had lived in yet another. The block was on the site of the old Nettlefold Studios, one of the UK’s pioneering film studios, where they shot the Adventures of Robin Hood TV series with Richard Greene. It was also where I fell 60 feet out of a tree, when the area was heavily wooded, miraculously grabbing the last branch before I would have hit the ground at a speed from which it would have been tricky to get up. Backed by the Stadium Dogs, I went back to RG Jones to record ‘High Rise’ under the name of the Trainspotters, and it was picked up by Arista, who released it as a single in May 1979. Produced by Colin Giffin, who as it happens had been at Woking Grammar School a few years before me, the single was incredibly well received and even got Radio One airplay, until the powers that be thought it a bit close to home and it was quietly dropped. Though not before I’d made personalised jingles from the backing track for many of the DJs. Even though they all used them, it was mine that seemed to catch on and find a life of its own. I was in Leeds doing a show from the university when I first heard someone singing it in the street. I was actually shocked. They sang the whole thing, unwieldy as it was. This was no snappy two-second soundbite; it was a gruelling marathon that almost rivalled Wagner’s Ring cycle: ‘Mike Read, Mike Read, 275 and 285, Mike Read, Mike Read, National Radio One.’

I have no idea why that jingle should have caught on and ended up being sung around the world by UK travellers. The postcards, letters and, later, faxes poured in with vivid, dramatic and often embarrassing descriptions of where the jingle had been performed: at the North Pole, at the South Pole, on the top of Snowdon, in a submarine, at Buckingham Palace, at the world’s southernmost radio station, swimming with dolphins, on the back of an elephant, on top of the Berlin Wall, with the Red Arrows and thousands more. Extraordinary. Not only was the jingle well travelled globally, but it also travelled through time and is still sung (and even tweeted) to me with amazing regularity to this day.

The Trainspotters’ follow-up single at the tail end of 1979 was virtually written on the day of the recording. I’d been doing a Radio One gig in Barnstaple the night before and only realised that I only had one song when the Stadium Dogs van overtook me on the M4 en route to RG Jones. I drove off the motorway, sat in the car with the guitar for thirty minutes, wrote ‘Unfaithful’ and arrived at the studio with a few minutes to spare. The focus of the session rather slipped away, as I had two delightful assistant producers who turned up add their input to that of producer Colin Giffin, namely Ian Page from Secret Affair and Jimmy Pursey. It was fun, we laughed, we threw crazy ideas around and everyone chipped in, but there seemed to be little cohesion. I still have no idea how to categorise that single. It appears to have a light ska feel with punk overtones but no devotee of either of those genres would have given it a home. In hindsight, the B-side, ‘Hiring the Hall’, was much tougher, more direct and should have been the A-side. Arista, bless them, even went for a third single, but why on earth I changed the group name to the Ghosts rather than sticking with the Trainspotters brand I have no idea, apart from the fact that we were entering a new decade. Pete Waterman had been very taken with ‘High Rise’, and came in to work with me on this third single, ‘My Town’, which probably leaned a little towards the Jam. It seemed pretty commercial to us, and really should have been the Trainspotters’ third single from a completist point of view. Close again, but still no cigar.

Later in 1980 I veered off in an odd direction, when the Hot Rock label released a fun single I’d recorded full of Elvis Presley song titles, ‘Big as Memphis’, which came out under the wickedly witty name of the Memphis Tenor Cs. The following year saw yet another single release, yet another direction and yet another failure to trouble the accountants. ‘Teardrops Fall like Rain’ had been the B-side of the Crickets’ ‘My Little Girl’, both good songs from the early ’60s, but really having no relevance in 1981. The only bonus was the writer, Jerry Allison, telling me that he loved our version of it. He may or may not have actually liked it, but he was Buddy Holly’s drummer, that’s what he said and it was good enough for me!

Matchbox, who’d had already taken five songs into the top thirty in a two-year span, covered one of my songs in 1981. I’d already demoed ‘24 Hours’ but hadn’t really thought about placing it, when their producer, Pete Collins, asked if I had a song as they were one short for the new album, Flying Colours. What is now the polo bar at the Langham Hilton was an old BBC recording studio, and that’s where Matchbox put the track down. It turned out well enough to be included on the album, was also a single in Germany and has notched up a few thousand hits on YouTube.

By 1982 I’d put the Rock-olas together, named after the jukebox of course, with the aforementioned Keith West, Barry Gibson and Paul Foss. We performed on the Radio One Roadshows, gigged occasionally, appeared at Oxford and Cambridge balls and even supported the Beach Boys at Alexandra Palace. No, I have to be honest we topped the bill. Seriously. Well, to be even more honest, they wanted to get away early and asked if we minded them going on first. ‘As long as we can say we topped the bill and the Beach Boys supported us.’ Bruce Johnston and Mike Love said that was fine by them. We were thrilled, forgetting the reality that we’d actually have to follow one of the world’s most successful groups. We had Tony Rivers in the band with us that night, whose Beach Boy harmonies are as good as the real thing, so when the group left the stage after their encore and the crowd were shouting for Sloop John B., we decided to open with it. I can’t remember whose mad idea it was but we launched into it unrehearsed and unplanned, only to see Bruce and Mike peering back onto the stage with incredulous looks on their faces. How we had the audacity I don’t know. It was like topping the bill over the Beatles and opening with ‘She Loves You’. The Rock-olas also played a lot of tennis and released three singles. At one point when Pete Waterman and I were looking for our second single, quite late one night I had a sudden thought. I called Pete: ‘“Let’s Dance”, the old Chris Montez number.’ Pete’s reply was short and to the point. ‘Print the silvers!’ Despite appearances on Saturday Superstore (even though I fronted it, it wasn’t a shoe-in) and Crackerjack, there were no silver discs. There weren’t even bronze discs. The third single under the Rock-olas banner was what I considered a fair re-working of Tommy Roe’s ‘Dizzy’, which as far as I recall included Ric Parnell’s brother as part of the session crew. At around the same time, and I’m not sure whose idea it was, Paul Burnett and Dave Lee Travis, who were with me at Radio One, Radio Luxembourg’s Tony Prince and I released a novelty version of the old Four Lads song ‘Standing on the Corner’, with most of the music industry appearing in the video. A bit of fun but, not surprisingly, no chart position.

In 1984 I was back in RG Jones with Stuart Colman at the helm. A necessarily hard taskmaster in the studio, Stuart was responsible for Shakin’ Stevens’s string of ’80s hits and Cliff Richard’s version of ‘Livin’ Doll’ with the Young Ones. We put down four tracks with Cliff’s backing vocal team, led by the hugely talented Tony Rivers, and ‘Tell Me I’m Wrong’ was released in the spring. Rather than coming up with yet another weird and wonderful name, some bright spark suggested that I used my own. Nick Wilson, one of our producers on Saturday Superstore, directed the video, which we shot in a car scrapyard near Wembley and which featured fork lift trucks, old car parts and fenders (guitar meets car). Written by John David, who’d penned classics for Cliff, Status Quo and Alvin Stardust, the song almost made it, storming (my own word) into the chart at eighty-something, and sitting above Duran Duran and Michael Jackson. OK, they were probably on the way down after a blistering run in the higher echelons and I doubt whether it affected Michael’s career one jot, but it was a ‘moment’. Actually that’s all it was. The following week it had disappeared from the listings. Hey ho, there was always the follow-up, ‘Promised Land’. Admittedly, a much-covered song, but it wasn’t simply a case of saying, ‘let’s do the Chuck Berry number again,’ as dozens of artists had before us. In the studio we’d fallen to talking about the romance of American place names and how they worked so well in songs. New York, San Francisco, Chicago, New Orleans … there was a great ring to them, while British names like Basingstoke, Hounslow, East Grinstead and Bognor Regis somehow just fell short of the mark. Never one to shirk my own challenge, I beetled off to the local garage, bought a road atlas and re-wrote Chuck’s ‘Promised Land’ with English place names. I needed a good long road that would give me as many options as Route 66, and went for the 284-mile A30, running from London to Land’s End. I figured that I could make places sound moderately attractive by qualifying them, as in ‘Memphis, Tennessee’ or ‘Houston, Texas’, and so used ‘Basingstoke, Hampshire’. I also pepped up the town’s romantic image by having it ‘bathed in the morning sun’. Unlikely, I know, but I needed the rhyme. I even attempted to make Hounslow and Staines sound thrilling. I was on firmer ground by the time I’d sang my way to the West Country and more American-sounding places like Indian Queens and Launceston.

The potential catchment area for sales was enormous. Surely folk would want a record with the name of their town or village writ large, with the bonus that it was a picture disc, bearing the features of Bert Weedon. On top of that, the song was promoted through another Nick Wilson video, featuring my old MG TF, the red-bereted Captain Sensible, the oldest surviving garage in Surrey and a Cajun knees-up at a local pub. What more can a chap do to please the record buyers? Or maybe we were just pleasing ourselves. We probably didn’t please MCA Records as there was no third single.

Back on the comedy road, the Legacy label released ‘Hello Ronnie, Hello Gorbi’, a spoof of Alan Sherman’s ‘Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah’, for Comic Relief, which consisted of a two-way between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. Paul Burnett was Ronnie and I was Gorbi, but it was too much of a last-minute idea to pick up plays or make a dent in the listings. Let’s not dismiss, though, some of the convoluted rhymes such as ‘I met Maggie at Brize Norton, | She wants a long chat, I want a short ’un.’ Eat your heart out, Oscar Hammerstein II.

One of the singles I released was a version of John D. Loudermilk’s ‘Language of Love’. A good writer is John, with songs such as ‘Angela Jones’, ‘Ebony Eyes’, ‘Indian Reservation’, ‘Sittin’ in the Balcony’ and dozens of others, giving him a phenomenal catalogue. When he came to play the Country Music Show at Wembley, I met him through my old friend Trisha Walker, who’d moved to Nashville years earlier. He asked me to stop by his hotel and pick a little (see how effortlessly and naturally I’ve slipped into the American phrasing) so I stopped and I picked … well, strummed. I must have slipped through the chord sequences with enough dash and elan to impress him, as he asked me to join him and his wife on stage to perform ‘Language of Love’ at Wembley. My new buddy and I played and sang, while his wife performed the song in Indian sign language. Somewhere there is a photograph of us on stage with me dressed in a decidedly un-country pullover and John sat on a canvas stool looking for all the world like he was casting for speckled trout. It turned out that he liked my version of the song; it’s always good to get the ‘thumbs up’ for a cover from the guy that wrote it.

All went quiet for a few years on the recording front, but then in 1987 I got involved in a charity single. It had been conceived by The Sun in the wake of the Zeebrugge cross-Channel ferry disaster, with their journalist Garry Bushell securing Stock, Aitken and Waterman for the project. I’d had to cope with the news live on Saturday Superstore over a three-hour period, a situation that I was expected to deal with back then. Children’s TV wouldn’t be anywhere near a story like that now; it would be in the hands of rolling news. One-hundred and ninety-three passengers and crew had been lost when the Herald of Free Enterprise went down and The Sun, having promoted cheap tickets for what turned out to be a fateful day, spearheaded the fund-raising campaign.

Over a three-day period in March, a cavalry charge of artists invaded the PWL Studios in Borough, south-east London, to record a new version of Paul McCartney’s song ‘Let It Be’. Paul sang the basic track, with contributions from the likes of Kate Bush, Boy George, Kim Wilde, Nik Kershaw, Mark Knopfler, Gary Moore and Edwin Starr. I was in the choir of backing vocalists alongside such luminaries as Rick Astley, The Drifters, Suzi Quatro, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Bonnie Tyler, Go West, the Alarm and Errol Brown. The song went to number one in the UK, Norway and Switzerland and made the top ten in several other countries. I even presented an outside broadcast for Radio One, from a ship in the English Channel, with surviving crew members from the Herald of Free Enterprise going back to sea for the first time since the disaster.

Anyone who owns a horse will tell you that their feed and vets’ bills far outweigh any scraps of money they might pick up in a selling plate at Towcester. I’d been a co-owner in a quartet of the four-legged fiends that sapped my bank balance for a while. From the mid ’80s, Lambourn trainer Charlie Nelson selected our animals at the Doncaster Sales and brought them to peak condition. John Reid, who rode almost two thousand winners, steered our most successful horse, Sir Rufus to several victories, although every nag we had ate more than it won, as you’d expect. That earlier investment was now about to pay dividends. Not on the racetrack, but in the chart. Cast your mind back to Valerie Edge, who inspired my first single, ‘February’s Child’. In 1991 she and her then husband, Peter, invited me and Alison Jenkins, my girlfriend at the time, to a lunch party, which included Simon and Rosie May. Over lunch Valerie brought up my racing period and the moderate success of the final nag, Sir Rufus (some three or four wins as I recall), was discussed. Simon expressed complete surprise at my not inconsiderable knowledge of the more basic points of the Sport of Kings and probed deeper than one normally would over the gooseberry fool. I guessed that he might be hankering after squandering a few of the BBC postal orders he received for writing the EastEnders theme, or indeed many others, on a horse. Not so. He’d been asked to look at writing the theme for a new TV series that focused on the loves and lives of a racing community. Would I like to write it with him? Yes please. I thought the song, ‘More to Life’, might suit Cliff Richard, so I approached him with the idea. He liked the sound of it, loved the demo and a few months later we were back at RG Jones laying the track down, rounding the session off with rather smashing Indian cuisine and a few glasses (oh, all right, bottles) of wine in Wimbledon Village. Cliff performed it on Top of the Pops, wearing a shirt that rather cleverly resembled jockey’s silks. We were over the first, as they say in jump race parlance, and possibly on our way to being first past the post. The run-in, though, wasn’t the simple task we had imagined. There were other runners jostling us as we headed towards the top twenty. Cliff’s usual team at EMI (the owners) would have dealt with it via their promotion team (the trainers), but because it was a TV theme, it was put with a different part of the company which just assumed that because it was Cliff (the jockey), and his last single, ‘Saviour’s Day’, had been a number one, there was no work to be done. In tandem with that simplistic and assumptive approach, EMI had a major company gathering somewhere outside London the week that the song cruised effortlessly to number twenty-three, meaning that no one was around and at a crucial time, the single was left to its own devices. Despite that, we got news through that the sales had doubled and that a top ten place looked inevitable. However, as Martin Luther King said, in far more important circumstances, ‘change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability’. In fact the wheels rolled the other way and the record slipped a little. However, whenever I feel a wee bit disappointed about a chart position, I project myself back to my schooldays and the unthinkable prospect of somebody like Cliff Richard performing my songs and charting them. If anyone had suggested that to me at the time, I’d have bitten their hand off. ‘More to Life’ has turned up on a couple of Cliff’s albums, including the re-released Small Corners.

Trainer was sold to many other countries, but failed to last beyond a couple of series. Directed by Gerry Glaister, it was filmed in the village of Compton, near Newbury, and featured Mark Greenstreet, Susannah York and David McCallum and was transmitted on a Sunday night. The second series was relegated to a midweek slot as they laboured to spice up the plots. One of these brought in singer Kym Mazelle as the ‘love interest’ for a couple of episodes, for which they also needed a song. Simon and I wrote ‘Woman of the World’ for Kym, a number which gave the woman the role normally associated with the man. Lovely girl, great voice, infectious laugh and by her own admission, seriously well endowed. We all wondered how, in the episode where she and Mark Greenstreet ‘got to grips with each other’, he managed to avoid any flicker of emotion as Kym loomed over him on the bed, displaying her more than ample assets. Again we recorded at RG Jones and mention must be made of the timeless, youthful and omnipresent Gerry Kitchingham, one of the great engineers. After the passing of old RG himself, Gerry was the studio. Kym arrived, Kym went. Where, no one knew – the ladies’? the shops? McDonald’s? – but surely she’d be back soon. No, we discovered that she’d gone to New York. We waited. Allegedly she left a taxi with the meter running at Heathrow while she did a quick round trip to the big apple. Now that’s rock & roll, and one heck of a bill for EMI. We were dealt another blow as EMI were set to release her from her contract just about the time that they put out the single. Maybe it was the excessive taxi fares.

Leaving Trainer on a high note, Simon and I did finally get into the winner’s enclosure to pick up the Television and Radio Industries Club Theme of the Year award, a TRIC as they’re known. During our speech Simon delighted the industry gathered at the Grosvenor House Hotel by thanking director Gerry Glaister for providing him with his three children. Was there no end to Gerry’s talents? Of course Simon had meant that through working a lot with Gerry he’d been able to support his tribe and educate them. I had a lovely note from the chairman of the BBC, Marmaduke Hussey: ‘On behalf of the BBC I would like to congratulate you on the Trainer signature tune winning TV Theme Music of the Year at yesterday’s TRIC Awards ceremony. This is immensely well deserved and a tonic to us all at the BBC.’ What a kind thought. However, having given the BBC a tonic, it was at this time that I was wooed to Capital Radio by Richard Park, as the word was that the station was going to be awarded the national commercial licence and he wanted me to ‘open the batting’.

Late in 1991, I approached Frankie Howerd’s manager, Tessa Le Bars, with an idea for a cover of Right Said Fred’s ‘I’m Too Sexy’. I could see him delivering it in his own inimitable way. We had a meeting at his London house in Edwardes Square, so he could see how the project would work. It was getting dark by five o’clock as we put the final nuts and bolts together and in the gathering twilight Frankie shouted to Dennis, his partner and manager, ‘Switch the light on, it’s so gloomy in here.’ Dennis turned on an old standard lamp which illuminated Frankie but no one else. Imagining himself on stage, he said, ‘Oh, I’ll do at least an hour now.’

We recorded the song at Red Bus studios in Lisson Grove and during a lull I popped down to Church Street market to buy something for lunch. On the way back I spotted a bargain. Five pairs of gaily coloured boxer shorts for £5. Unbeatable value. Frankie couldn’t believe his eyes. ‘What are they?’ I explained the brief history of boxer shorts and he was captivated. In fact he was so enamoured that I had to go and buy another five pairs for him. At least I was part of his education. Rather splendidly, Right Said Fred let us have the original backing track and Frankie got the feel for the song and the doctored lyrics I’d written. I suggested he throw in the odd catchphrase. You know the kind of stuff, ‘Nay, nay and thrice nay’, ‘Titter ye not’ and the like.

‘No,’ he said, ‘you write it where you want it, and I’ll say it in those places.’ I told him I felt slightly fraudulent writing his personal lines. ‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘that’s the way I like to work.’ I still felt fraudulent. Sadly Frankie died not long after the recording, so we weren’t able to give him that last hit. Hitter ye not. We used a top British Frank Sinatra tribute act to sing the B-side, ‘I Did It Howerd’s Way’. I suspect the title might well have been more amusing than the song.

The following year I got a call from George Martin, asking me to perform on a new album. We had worked together before on a musical I had written based on the poems of John Betjeman, which you can read all about in the next chapter. Anneka Rice had been asked on her TV show, Challenge Anneka, to put together an instant album to raise money for Tommy’s, a new maternal and foetal research charity based at St Thomas’ hospital in London. She called George and George called a few likely folk. Essentially a children’s album, it contained songs and poems, sung and read by a variety of artists, including Joanna Lumley, Phillip Schofield, Maureen Lipman, Pam Ayres, Nanette Newman and Emma Forbes. We recorded the album at Air London studios at Oxford Circus and George asked if I fancied doing ‘My Old Man’s A Dustman’, with Right Said Fred backing me. Of course. What a hoot. Move over, Lonnie Donegan. The album has recently appeared on iTunes, so the Fred boys and I are skiffling all over again and the charity is deservedly having a second bite of the cherry. After the recording was done I had a delightful thank-you letter from George Martin:

Wasn’t it a wonderful, crazy weekend … I’d like to thank you especially for a super performance … I’m so glad you did ‘Dustman’, it really was super,

Love George

The same year, I was asked to write and record two children’s albums for Avon (yes, the door-to-door cosmetics company), A World of Colour and On the Move. I can’t for the life of me recall whether the titles were the briefs they gave me or my idea. Not that it really matters; they were fun to create and turned out extremely well, with George Martin’s right-hand man, Rod Edwards, and me laying down both albums in a very short space of time in a studio in Shepherd’s Bush. The songs on A World of Colour had titles such as ‘I’m a Frog’, ‘Rainbow’, ‘Balloons’, and ‘Paintbox’, while those on On the Move included ‘Toby the Toboggan’, ‘Chummy the Funny Car’ and ‘Postman’s Bike’. They were only meant to be for young people to have fun while they were learning, but Record Collector magazine later commented:

‘Postman’s Bike’ has a distinctively psychedelic feel about it. Had it been recorded back in 1967 at RG Jones, or at Graham Clark’s studio, it would undoubtedly have been a pop-psych classic. For now though, it’s lost among the bubble baths and smudge-free lipstick in a discontinued Avon catalogue, awaiting its rediscovery at psychedelia’s centenary celebrations in 2067, when a mere twenty years either way won’t make any difference to anyone but the purists.

That’s kind of comforting to know.

Also in 1992 I had an idea for a song based on Baywatch. I wrote it, demoed it and approached Timmy Mallett, with the idea of him being the skinny guy on the beach who beats all the muscly guys to the girls, or something along those lines. The idea moved on and we ended up recording the old classic, ‘Hot, Hot, Hot’, which involved shooting a video in a Majorca-type resort and re-naming him. I juggled with naming him Costa del something, but decided on Del Costa. My girlfriend Alison and Dawn Andrews, Gary Barlow’s future wife, were the dancers and the result of the shoot was terrific, but it made a hole in my pocket that wasn’t compensated for by any great chart position or sales graph. The single pottered up the charts and was looking moderately healthy, but it staggered to a standstill outside the top seventy-five and refused to budge. What happened to that fan base from his number one, ‘Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini’? Timmy needn’t worry about his chart career, he’s actually a seriously good painter. History will re-assess him, relegating ‘Mallett’s Mallet’ and promoting Mallett’s palette.

‘Hot, Hot, Hot’ came out on Silhouette, the label I formed to circumnavigate the problem of always having to do deals with different labels. Great idea, but a financial drain when the buck stops with you. With independence comes responsibility.

The year 1992 was a great one for playing with highly unusual groups. One you’ll find in Chapter 14, but this one was a rock & roll hierarchy gig. Well, apart from me. My old buddy Bert Weedon was King Rat that year and as we’d been sparring partners since I started in radio he asked me to bring my guitar to the annual ball. On the evening, someone kindly took it from me and put it backstage. ‘I’ll give you the nod,’ said Bert.

‘Nod for what? What are we playing?’

‘Oh, a twelve-bar maybe.’

Good enough for me. After something nameless and custard had followed the other massed ranks of culinary delights in a southerly direction, I received the nod. Replete and somewhat heavier than an hour earlier, I excused myself and winched the body from the table. Backstage it was dark. Very dark. I fumbled around among a mass of what I assumed were stagehands until I found my guitar. I staggered out onto the stage to meet Bert for our impromptu duet and was outraged to discover there were interlopers trying to get in on the act: George Harrison, Bruce Welch, Brian May, Lonnie Donegan, Joe Brown and Chas McDevitt. The gig extended to one elongated song, but what a wonderful five minutes. I hoped we might stay together and tour the country. An album or two maybe and then a series of US gigs? It turned out that they had their own bands. Well, they passed up a great opportunity. I still have the photograph, though. As Frank Sinatra once said, ‘They can’t take that away from me.’

As I left Radio One to join Capital Gold, I found myself represented on two chart albums simultaneously, Slade’s Wall of Hits and David Essex’s His Greatest Hits. It had been suggested at Radio One that I should make my mind up whether I wanted to be a songwriter or a broadcaster, but I’d shown it was perfectly possible to do both. Surely it’s a major plus if you live, breathe, play and write music as opposed to just doing the voice. Now, as even the most cursory glance at the Radio Six Music schedule confirms, they pull in rock stars to present programmes.

On re-visiting this period of my life, I’m frankly staggered that I had time for TV, radio, books, croquet, poetry and tennis. Being a great tennis lover and avid player, when I was asked to front a tennis single in the spring of 1993, for release in time for Wimbledon, I pondered for perhaps a tenth of a second and agreed. They needed a fun band name for the doo-wop-flavoured song, so I came up with the not terribly inventive Don Wimble and the Aces. In the video for ‘Game, Set and Match’, featuring former British number one Annabel Croft and Des Lynam on backing vocals, I played a match at David Lloyd, Raynes Park with that rising star of the court, Cliff Richard. Plenty of posing, lots of tennis, great fun … but no hit. I’d masqueraded under many names so being Don Wimble for a fleeting moment was no real hardship. Aficionados of the game point to this video as the inspiration for our future greats Tim Henman, Greg Rusedski and Andy Murray. ‘Training, talent, stamina and mental strength are only a small part of it,’ they say. ‘The avant-garde armoury of shots displayed by Don Wimble and Cliff Richard were ground-breaking.’ At least, that’s how it plays out in my dreams.

That same year I wrote a couple of songs with a guy that I consider to have been one of the great and innovative songwriters of the ’60s, Geoff Goddard. ‘Johnny Remember Me’, ‘Wild Wind’, ‘Son This Is She’, ‘Just like Eddie’ and ‘Tribute to Buddy Holly’ were just a few of the seriously influential songs that poured from his pen. He was a shy, modest man who had studied at the Royal Academy of Music, but along with the legendary producer Joe Meek, he challenged the chart domination of the major record companies and won a decisive victory. We routined and later recorded ‘Flight 19’ and ‘Yesterday’s Heroes’ at Reading University, where he worked. As well as writing the songs together, Geoff and I corresponded as we honed them: ‘I have written in riffs and basic ideas for arrangement [for ‘Flight 19’] which I hope you may like’ and ‘Please find enclosed two copies of ‘‘Yesterday’s Heroes’’, which I have developed from our song “Do You Remember Me” … the vocal range is one and a half octaves, the same as “Johnny Remember Me”.’ We planned to write some more songs. While Geoff was waiting for the muse to strike, he wrote, ‘Not having felt very creative lately. I have no new ideas at the moment but should inspiration return I’ll send a tape if that’s OK.’ Sadly Geoff died in 2000, but I was delighted to be invited to a red plaque unveiling at Reading University and a commemorative evening for him in 2013, along with two great singers who worked with Geoff, John Leyton and Mike Berry. John Leyton was keen to record the songs and even talked of me writing a musical around them, but it didn’t happen.

I pick up the guitar most days and write a song a week on average, the good ones I demo, the others I keep working on and sometimes there’s a bonus. A few weeks back a Matchbox singles collection landed on the mat and there was 24 Hours. I also had the good fortune recently to be asked by Nigel Elderton at Peer-Southern Music to write English lyrics to an international hit made popular by Yves Montand. Written by Francis Lemarque, A Paris was full of so many notes that it was mathematical as well as lyrical, but enormous fun to work on.