The hippy/flower power/protest era is dead – we’re all bored with watching Joan Baez and Dylan drone on and we want a lot more fun. So glam rock and bubblegum are here and suddenly the charts are full with simple songs from The Sweet, Glitter and co. that make you smile and get up and dance. Top of the Pops is awash with silver platforms, long hair and too much make up, and that’s only the boys. We’re watching Some Mothers Do ‘Ave Em, Are You Being Served? and, to add a bit of culture (but only a bit) we have the movie version of Jesus Christ Superstar.
Of course I loved most of the bubblegum and glam rock – it was around my level of musical intellect. The biggest successes of the year were artistes created by the indies and newer managements companies and labels such as Dick Leahy and Bell, with Gary Glitter, and Mickie Most with his RAK Records and music publishing. With writers Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman he made huge stars of Suzi Quatro and Sweet – and turned a four-piece band who had been batting away for several years trying to make it into the charts, into one of the biggest pop groups of 1973–75. Their name was Mud. By the later years of the decade, this was, literally, true, but for a few years they had hit after hit and became one of my favourite groups of young men – because they were just so damn nice to be around.
I first met the Mud boys – Les Gray, Dave Mount, Ray Stiles and Rob Davis – up at Tony Barrow International PR. Barrow had done The Beatles’ publicity for several years in the ’60s then struck out on his own, and in the ’70s became possibly the most successful music PR in London. He was a pleasant man who had wonderful parties for the artistes he represented, including Cilla Black, The Jacksons, and very many others.
A good PR was worth almost more than anything to the bands of this era – they could get all the journos along to do interviews with the most dire people by a mix of charm, flattery, wheedling, cajoling, and blackmail in the best possible manner (you come and interview this band now and later, when I have someone really hot, you can get an exclusive …). While most of Barrow’s artistes weren’t particularly dire, Mud didn’t have a great deal going for them at the time after several years of single flops and no great image to recommend them. Even after they were taken on board by RAK and Chinn/Chapman in late 1972, things were slow to change for the four men from Mitcham, Surrey. Although the first two singles released in 1973 crept into the charts, it wasn’t until the autumn that ‘Dyna-mite’ stayed in the top 10 for five weeks and, finally, Mud was flying.
They were perfect Fab 208 material as the tunes were happy, basic, beaty things, the boys were clean-cut, brother-types, and they were a good live band, better than they were given credit for. They could also hardly believe that their luck was changing at last, and thus were anxious, almost over-anxious, to do every single bit of promotion that was put their way, including almost endless interviews with me, or, I am sure, so it must have seemed to them.
They’d travel miles to do things like Fab readers’ parties, which were held several times a year in all corners of the country, and would never turn a photo opportunity down. After a while it became apparent, according to Georgina, who for some reason occasionally accompanied me on these forays, that the drummer, Dave Mount, had taken a fancy to me.
It became apparent to me, too, when Les Gray sidled up to me one day and asked if I’d go out for a drink with Dave. Now Dave was a lovely boy – not the best looking of the team, but nevertheless the kind of guy you could trust with your life. But of course, being with The Boss, I wasn’t available. Truly, if Dave had been Andy Williams I would have gone for a drink with him, but he wasn’t, so it wasn’t worth giving him hope when I knew I just wasn’t ever going to fancy him. So I said no.
Shortly afterwards, we all headed up North for a readers’ party (I believe it was Leeds but it could have been Glasgow or Newcastle – going to these parties was like being an American tourist in Europe; you never quite knew where you were) and I had the problem of getting all the Mud news and angles and quotes about the party, the town, and so on, while doing my best to make sure that Dave didn’t think I was leading him on, and also doing my best to make sure that he was kept happy and sweet. This was why falling for and/or going out with the people one was paid to interview wasn’t a particularly good idea, I was beginning to realise.
It was in April that, thanks to The Osmonds, I finally got on a plane and headed out to The States.
I hate sharing the bedroom with Veronica Hill – and I know she hates sharing with me. She won’t let me have Luxy on under the bedclothes at night and she does spiteful things to try to keep me awake, like pinching my feet. Thank God she’s gone away for now – she got herself a job with horses, down in the West Country, so I have the bedroom to myself. I have my poster of Richard Chamberlain on the wall and next to that, I have another poster – an aerial shot of Los Angeles, showing the dual-carriageways snaking across the city, the cadillacs and the skyscrapers of downtown … I often stare at that poster taking in every little detail as much as I take in Dr Kildare’s blue eyes and the rest of his face.
One day, I am going to go there. It’s got to be the most exciting place on earth. Imagine – living in the city where all the movies are made, where the TV shows are made. Where you might bump into people you see on the screen, just walking around, just shopping, in the bars …
In my early teens, I truly thought that Los Angeles was the holy grail. Even at 15 to go there was my main ambition. I recently found an old school essay book and in it, an essay we’d been asked to write titled ‘Castles in the Air’. The only teacher I liked at Bicester Grammar School was the English teacher, whose name, sadly, I can’t recall. He had had polio so his body was in a pretty poor state, but he was a wonderful man, the kind of teacher schools should hope and pray they find, because he was encouraging, patient, and with a wicked humour. I loved him, actually – he saved my school life, he really did, as well as giving me the confidence to believe that one day I really might be able to write for a living. So I put all my energies into giving him essays he could enjoy. Extract from ‘Castles in the Air’:
I for one, hope to have many years before me in which, after dreaming, I can attempt to make each dream come true. Most ambitions are possible … to take a defeatist attitude from the start is to squash any hope of fulfilling them.
After analysing each one of my secret hopes, I find that they are all possible. For instance, I want to visit the USA more than anything else. I also want to work in Fleet Street, write books, and meet a well-known person who shall remain anonymous [this was Billy Fury but I was too embarrassed to say so in this essay, prompting the teacher to write ‘spoilsport’ in the margin].
Many people work in Fleet Street, so why not me? Then I could go to America, to work as a correspondent, for example, and write books as a side interest. From such a position, I would meet many famous people.
I know that most of us dream of wealth and happiness. Happiness I would gain from my work, and I never want to be overloaded with money in any case [that was a good job, then]. This all sounds very boastful now, but even if it is only wishful thinking, in about fifty years’ time I will be able to look back with some amusement at my young ambitions…’.
‘Some amusement’ is a bit of an understatement; the earnest and pompous way I wrote was hilarious. But every bit of it came true – even down to looking back on the predictions years later. Thank God for castles in the air, I say.
The States trip, which was planned for 14 to 21 April, was for two main reasons. Firstly, it was to see The Osmonds in their own country, performing, and to spend enough time with them all to enable me to begin writing articles for the forthcoming Osmonds’ World magazine, which I was to spend the next few years compiling virtually single-handed (with Osmond help, of course).
Secondly, it was the prize trip of a lifetime for a young girl who had applied, via Dream Come True in Fab, to meet Donny Osmond.
When we had announced the competition, we had received thousands of entries (at that time, what teenage girl didn’t want to meet Donny Osmond?). After sifting through and coming up with a shortlist of ten or so likely candidates for the trip, I talked to them on the phone or visited them in person to find the ideal reader to take to America to meet Donny. This wasn’t the normal way competitions worked, but it was a ‘dream come true’ rather than an actual competition, so we could make the rules up as we went along – and the last thing I wanted to do was take with me a reader who wouldn’t enjoy the trip, who would find it daunting, who would get to meet Donny and then not say a word to him – you know the sort of thing. I had had enough experience by this time of wanting to strangle readers who, when faced with their idol, would just stand there and look dumb. (Anyone seen the photo of me at 16 with my idol Billy Fury, just standing there and looking dumb?)
I also wanted someone with whom I could rub along for the duration. Judi Matthews, who was around 14 at the time, turned out to fit the bill as well as anyone and thus on 14 April, The Boss kindly drove us to Heathrow for our Trans World Airlines (TWA) flight to LA.
Having spent nearly six years working for Fab, having been abroad several times and having met everyone on my wish list, it took quite a lot to get me excited, but I remember so well, thinking, at last, I am going to the States. I am going to LA!
The fact that I wasn’t having to pay a penny for the trip, that I was getting paid to go, and that I was going to be seeing a sheaf of stars while out there was all rather good.
We were met at LA airport by Cyril Maitland, Fab’s long-serving photographer out there. Cyril was a short, bearded man probably in his 40s, who obviously knew LA inside out. We arrived at our hotel, The Roosevelt in Hollywood, and in my spacious room there was a big bowl of fruit and a note saying, ‘Welcome to LA – love from The Osmonds’. Nice.
During three hectic days in Hollywood and LA, Cyril took us to Disneyland, to the beach, to various authentic American diners, to meet Ben Murphy (who was the star of a huge ’70s TV series called Alias Smith and Jones) at his condominium block apartment, to meet Mark Spitz, the swimmer who had just won a chestful of golds at the 1972 Olympics, and to the American equivalent magazine of Fab which was called Sixteen.
On Wednesday 18th we took the short flight to Las Vegas and checked into the Tropicana Hotel, where we stayed for two days and met up with Betty Hale, who had flown out from the UK. She’d arrived on the pretext of having a business meeting with the Osmond parents re. Osmonds’ World, but I have the feeling she may have felt the need to check up on how I was coping with everything – looking after Judi, doing interviews, finding my way around, and so on. I think the verdict was favourable, which was no surprise – I was more or less grown up.
It was in Vegas, at Caesars Palace, that Judi finally got to meet Donny Osmond before the show, and had a front of house seat for The Osmonds’ performance, during which Donny sang to her. It was during this short run that Marie Osmond was finally given her chance to take to the stage – she sang a duet with Donny and although she was nervous she got through it okay. She was wearing a long gown, with full heavy make-up and an old-fashioned hairdo, and I remember wondering if the whole look was such a good idea. Within weeks she was topping the charts in the USA and UK with her first single, ‘Paper Roses’.
One of my tasks on Osmonds’ World magazine was to write the Marie Osmond problem page, a feat that took some dexterity of thought and pen, as Marie was a 13-year-old virgin; had never dated a boy – in fact, had hardly even seen any boys apart from her brothers, as far as I could tell – and wasn’t going to be allowed to date until she was 16 in any case; had never been to school (all the Osmonds were taught by correspondence courses in between gigs) and had a mindset as far removed from the average UK teenager as you could imagine. But I got by.
Next day we drove with the Osmonds up to Lake Tahoe, a leisure and gaming resort near San Francisco, where the family rented a lakeside villa. It was at this villa that Olive Osmond suddenly produced for me a paperback copy of The Book of Mormon, and, after reading a few passages from it for me, proceeded to round up as many members of the family as she could to sign it. She managed to get all the signatures except for Jimmy, who had disappeared down to the lake to get up to some boyhood mischief. I wasn’t sure if it was an unsubtle hint that I should read the book (they can’t have failed to notice by this time that I drank alcohol and caffeine and smoked tobacco and was in definite need of saving) or simply a nice gesture from Mrs Osmond with no strings attached. I took it as the latter. And spent a while wondering how they reconciled their religion with the gambling, drinking, fast-living town of Las Vegas that they chose to perform in so often.
After a couple of hours chatting to the family and gazing out at the expanse of ice-blue water, which reminded me, in its boring beauty, of the lakes of Sweden, Judi and I headed by taxi down the coast a few miles to the Sahara resort where we were staying, and watched The Osmonds perform there in the evening. Finally, on the Saturday we flew back to LA and caught the flight home. Judi had been a real trouper, she’d enjoyed herself and we had had no arguments, and although the trip had been too crammed to actually take much of it in properly, for me it was a taster.
Once home I realised that, in fact, I would not like to live in LA, my initial impression being that it was a rather one-horse town of little charm; I would not like to spend much time in a resort like Vegas or Tahoe – where every time I touched the elevator buttons I got an electric shock, that’s how wired the places were. Little Jimmy Osmond’s hair literally stood on end as he got out of the lift at the Tahoe Sahara to walk through the side of the casino area, which, luckily, he found hugely funny, but I was annoyed that my camera wasn’t to hand.
As soon as I got back to London from the States, The Boss and I flew to Portugal for a late spring holiday, and when we returned I received two press tickets for the forthcoming David Bowie concert at Earls Court on 12 May. On the day, we walked from Avonmore Road down the Warwick Road to the Earls Court Exhibition Centre and as we approached we began to see dozens and dozens of fans, male and female, all dressed in slightly different versions of Ziggy Stardust.
We sat feeling rather old and boring, as Ziggy acted and sang and played on stage in front of 10,000 crazy, shouting, dancing fans. It wasn’t my favourite music, he wasn’t one of my favourite performers either – but I had to admit, he had brought himself a long way since the day I first saw him up at Fab.
A few weeks later, I saw another very popular David – the latest star of pop and the West End stage, David Essex. Like Bowie, Mud and several others, he had spent several years trying to find elusive chart success but had finally ‘cracked it’ when he won the lead role in the musical Godspell which had been a sell-out at Wyndham’s Theatre since November 1971. He was also the star of the pop culture movie That’ll be the Day – a story about a fairground worker who becomes a pop star – which also starred my old friends Keith Moon and Billy Fury, and had been released just a few weeks before our meeting.
I met him, and his long-term manager, Derek Bowman, backstage before his performance and David, bless him, was trying as hard as hard could be to be laid back about his sudden huge success both in the movie and stage worlds. He bounded into the dressing room like a lanky puppy and began his role of the afternoon – to charm me and impress upon me how natural and ordinary and East End he was.
I sat there taping his replies but was too transfixed by his lower legs to pay any real attention to what he was saying at the time. The expanse of skinny, hairy, ghostly pale-fleshed ankle exposed below half-mast trousers, the white socks, the huge black shoes which almost filled my line of view as he sat, legs crossed, in front of me, held a strange and bewitching fascination. Legs and feet that were a complete turn off on the hot sex symbol of the day. It was so weird. I found, when I could tear myself away from his lower regions, that he did have a beautiful face with these huge blue sad gypsy come-to-bed eyes. They were a close second to Nimoy for twinkle rating, too, when he smiled – but they didn’t do a thing for me because, unlike Nimoy, all his twinkling and all the rest of it just didn’t seem sincere. Probably mean of me, but that’s the way I felt. And you know by now what a good judge of men I’ve always been.
Forgive me, David, I am sure your legs are just lovely now. I don’t think you’d grown into your looks at that time, you were just too young.
A few weeks later I came back to the same place to see the same person, but this time with a reader, Karen Gill, for a Dream Come True meet and greet. To be fair, Essex was very pleasant to, and patient with, the young fan and it was a date she remembered for decades – a fact I know because she was still writing to me talking about it well into the ’90s.
Around the same time, I interviewed Chris Jagger, in my opinion the nicer of the two Jagger brothers, who was trying to make it as an actor, and I also had the chance to observe Bianca Jagger up close, at a reception at The Ritz. She strode in as if she owned the place, beautifully turned out in a very sharp black trouser suit, with short, perfectly groomed black hair, and holding a walking cane (for show, not use) with a gold handle. There were also two gay men trailing in her wake. She shook hands with two other men, and they all sat down at a table about 5ft from me. The talk was obviously business and I wasn’t interested in the subject – but what fascinated me was her self-confidence, her attitude and her manner. She was sharper than her suit and dominated her companions throughout. I realised that she must wear the trousers at home as well.
The Boss had his own busy social and business life but, because his office was just a few doors from mine, in Maiden Lane, right next to Rules restaurant for whom he worked as the PR, we often saw each other at lunchtime and would also meet in Rules after work. Sometimes I’d take him to one of my freebie bashes – in June, for instance, we sat and yawned our way through Applause at the Haymarket Theatre, starring Lauren Bacall. Miss Bacall was one of the last of the great Hollywood stars, but in our opinion, her stage acting career was something she should have reconsidered.
Later in the year, we went to one of the best parties ever – a bash at The Dorchester held by Bell records for Gary Glitter in recognition of all the records he had sold. The bit that sticks in my mind is Alan ‘Fluff’ Freeman, the disc jockey, wearing some kind of female fancy dress and sitting on a ‘throne’ near the stage area, surrounded by young, handsome male fairies dressed all in white robes. Freeman was the guest of honour because, so the story went, he was largely responsible for the Glitter phenomenon because he was the only DJ who had spotted the potential of the first hit, ‘Rock and Roll Parts 1 and 2’, and played it non-stop on his Radio 1 show. Freeman thus had a lot to answer for.
The Boss remembers going to the (male) loo and finding Suzi Quatro in there, shouting and kicking a locked door ‘Come on, Len, what the fuck are you doing ….’. Len Tuckey was her guitarist, and her husband, but they divorced a while later. The place was actually heaving with all the stars of the day, you’d tread on them every time you moved – so much so that when we got home it was a great relief to sit down with a cup of tea and watch TV. Z Cars or Z-list stars? Take your choice. Maybe I was suffering the beginnings of disillusion with the whole pop scene. You can have too much of a good thing.
In return for these freebies and fun, The Boss would treat me to unlimited drinks in the bar of Rules. Rules restaurant was supposed to be a bastion of fine and discreet English dining. ‘London’s oldest restaurant’ according to the PR blurb that was always handed out (this claim, still bandied about today, was totally invented, I have to say, by The Boss).
However, the barman, Buck, ran his little bar area just inside the main entrance as an independent state. If you were prepared to pay his prices, you could just pop in for a drink like it was your local pub without having to have a meal. Plenty of people – including the stars from nearby West End shows at The Savoy, the Vaudeville and the Adelphi, most of the staff of Woman’s Own magazine from Southampton Street round the corner, an assortment of Fleet Street photographers, hacks and cartoonists, including Jak of the Evening Standard and Frank Dickens, spent more hours than any of them would care to recall at ‘Buck’s bar’, as it was always known. Whoever was there, Buck would introduce you; it was his own daily cocktail party.
Buck was a superbly entertaining barman as well as a good-hearted man, a shoulder to cry on at times, and at others, a wily guy who had every trick in the book for making a few extra pennies out of his little empire and for keeping you there as long as possible – not that anyone ever complained. Sometimes he would get out a game called Shut the Box, or he’d start a game of spoof, and it was fun to sit on the bar stools and just see what would happen next.
What happened one time was that a female snake charmer arrived, hot from one of the local shows, clutching a case which, indeed, contained a python. The Boss, having had a few drinks by this time, persuaded her it would be fun to let the snake out. She did and off it slithered amongst the tables and diners. The mayhem that followed within seconds was wonderful, and the incident made the Evening Standard. Whether this gave The Boss, who was being paid plenty to do Rules’ public relations (in an ironic sort of way, obviously), brownie points or not, I am not sure. The owner at the time, John Wood, veered between being delighted that he made so much money out of the bar, and being annoyed that his straight-laced restaurant seemed at times more like the rowdiest boozer or wildest circus in town.
Another time I caused the stir. The tables in the bar area were laid with large thick linen tablecloths, and that day The Boss, a couple of people from Woman’s Own and I had ordered a large jug of buck’s fizz and four champagne glasses. They all arrived, and suddenly one of the WO people remembered that old trick, where you pull the cloth off the table and leave everything else in place.
‘Which one of you is going to attempt this feat?’ she said.
‘Oh, that’ll be easy – I’ll do it!’ I replied. And before The Boss could stop me, One … Two … Three … I counted, gripped the edge of the tablecloth and pulled, as hard and as fast as I could, with my eyes shut. When I opened them – the champagne, the glasses, everything, were still on the table.
‘There! No problem …’. I said, nonchalantly. That story had a long run.
It was in this tiny bar that I bumped into Liza Goddard again, and it was here that I met Joe Brown and his wife Vicky, Jean Simmonds the film actress, Millicent Martin, Anna Massey and Max Wall, the music hall comedian who was plotting his career revival in a new stage version of The Entertainer. The Boss and I would often have lunch with him and listen while Max monologued in that distinctive voice about his miserable life, his dreadful marriage and anything else on his mind. Eventually, once I had got over the slight thrill of lunching with a legend, I came to dread Max arriving unnannouced at our table and asking if we’d mind if he joined us – he was a nice guy, I guess, no harm in him, but boy, he was self-centred. Max did always seem depressed – like so many of the great comics.
It was also in Buck’s bar that we met our American friends Wyn and Gerry. They collected celebrities like other people collect discount vouchers, and it didn’t take them long to cotton on to the potential of Rules. One day they invited us to their Belgravia mews house for Sunday lunch, with a promise of a ‘real great entertainer’ on the guest list. He turned out to be the comedian Frankie Howerd. Frankie arrived on his own, his latest boyfriend having let him down, and for the first fifteen minutes was very jolly, his TV self, full of ‘oohs’ and ‘aaahs’ and high-pitched squeals and raised eyebrows. But suddenly, and over the course of thirty seconds flat, he did a 100 per cent personality switch, and for the next two hours was so morose that at one point we thought of putting him on suicide watch.
In September The Boss and I finally got the energy to find ourselves a one-bedroom ground-floor flat with a garden in Cathcart Road, on the Chelsea/Fulham borders just off the Fulham Road. This was a giant step-up for me. I was getting further and further along the District line with each move towards the West End – now our nearest tube was South Kensington and we’d walk up there most days to catch the train to Embankment and then walk down The Strand to work.
I still hadn’t begun to take for granted the pleasure of living and working among all the landmark streets and buildings of London. And we now had some famous neighbours. Our garden backed on to a larger garden in the posher Tregunter Road, and if we happened to be outside during the daytime or early evening, there would very often be the most amazing, booming, female voice carrying over the garden wall, shouting at her children. It didn’t take us long to realise that the voice belonged to the Avengers actress, Honor Blackman. Even inside the flat, you could still here her booming on, and I got to feel quite sorry for her kids and the state of their ears.
Valerie Singleton from Blue Peter shopped at the little deli across in Hollywood Road, while popular young actress Judy Geeson was often in the queue at the greengrocery. Judy would shop carrying a small fluffy dog – she was way ahead of her time. Patrick Mower (Tom Haggerty of TV’s Special Branch) would scream around the roads in an open-top sports car, looking as if he was quite fond of himself. And Leonard Rossiter, who became huge in 1974 with Rising Damp, would wander up and down the Fulham Road carrying his shopping in tatty old plastic bags, shooting slightly poisonous looks at anyone who dared to look at him first, which included me, once, but only the once.
After we came back from a holiday to Cyprus in the autumn, I went up to Notting Hill to interview one of the most popular TV stars at the time – Richard Beckinsale. Richard later worked with Rossiter in Rising Damp and became better known as the star of Porridge, along with Ronnie Barker, but at this time he was famous for a TV sitcom called The Lovers, in which he had starred with Paula Wilcox.
The pilot episode of Porridge had been screened and Richard was waiting to discover if it would be turned into a series. I suppose some PR seemed in order for him, and so I arrived at his basement flat in a street off Notting Hill Gate.
As a celeb interviewer you’re never quite sure what you’re going to get. Sometimes people are as you think they will be, but often, they are not. And, as with any first meeting, some people you get on with better than others. With some interviews, you just both muddle along and hope that when your half hour or hour is up you’ll have enough material to make a decent read, with others, you sit and listen and don’t have to say a word, which sounds good, but often it means that you can’t get a word in, to take the chat in a direction you want it to go. Some celebs who want the publicity but don’t want to talk about their private lives will, quite deliberately, seize on a neutral topic and then manage to hold forth about it without ceasing for the full duration of the interview. And there were – and still are – plenty of celebs who will only answer yes, or no, or just raise an eyebrow to any question, or keep saying, ‘I’m only here to talk about the film/TV show/album.’
I was never the best interviewer in the world but I usually got by – and I did get better at unobtrusively directing the chat and getting what I wanted out of the celebs. Often, a shy, quiet and retiring manner would often get a better interview than any amount of hard-hitting, bullying tactics.
Richard Beckinsale was one of those people with whom I just clicked at first sight – we began chatting and giggling straight away, while he made us a cup of tea. After a few minutes I realised that he seemed to keep looking towards a door off the small sitting room.
‘Is anything up?’ I asked.
He looked a bit sheepish. ‘Well, actually – I’m babysitting!’ he said. ‘We had a baby recently (he was with the actress Judy Loe, whom he later married). Would you like to see her?’
‘Oh, yes please!’
I wasn’t that comfortable with babies, having been the youngest, and the memory of trying to set Warren Carter on fire was still in my mind, but not to worry. Beckinsale virtually ran to the bedroom and, beaming from ear to ear with pride, brought out his daughter. While I held her, he went back for her cot. And so we spent the afternoon babysitting together, playing with the baby, who was beautiful and probably around 2 months old. I got well into the cooing and we had a great time swapping baby stories and horror babysitting stories, including the Warren incident which had Richard hooting with laughter.
I left Beckinsale, with what few celeb meetings ever gave you – a warm feeling in the pit of your stomach, like he was a really nice person, he wasn’t just putting it on. How lucky Judy, and the little daughter, Kate, were to have such a lovely guy, I thought, for a husband and a dad. Within a few years he was dead from a heart attack, but the little girl grew up to do his memory proud. Thus I have babysat a huge Hollywood actress.
Around this time I decided I had to learn to drive. The nearest driving school was the BSM just off Trafalgar Square so I went along and signed up for a course of ten lessons. Having been driven around by The Boss for a couple of years, my impression of driving was that it was imperative to go everywhere as fast as the car would let you go, that it was imperative to shout and swear at all who got in your way, whether pedestrian or other driver, and that all women drivers were appalling and should never be allowed into the driving seat.
Although, then, my brain told me I should drive, my heart really wasn’t in it. Quite frankly I was terrified. Thus it was that on my very first driving lesson I was dismayed to find, after ten minutes’ chat, that I was expected to drive the vehicle down a road through Central London, albeit in second gear. We started to move and, to my horror, I saw a car coming towards us.
‘Help!’ I screamed. ‘There’s a car coming … what do I do?’
‘Just stay on your side of the road and you’ll be fine,’ said the instructor patiently.
On my second lesson I found myself driving round Trafalgar Square. On another lesson, I was driving along the Euston Road in the inside lane and, glancing across to the middle lane, found myself staring straight at Jimmy Savile in his open-topped Roller. He waved his cigar at me and nearly had my bumper in his passenger door as he drove off. Whether he recognised me from Top of the Pops I wasn’t sure. As he was at the height of his fame that was another moment I felt I really was right at the centre of the UK pop scene – as I said, I never was a good judge of people. But I did manage to pass my driving test first go.
The rest of the year included my first meeting with the charismatic Marc Bolan of T.Rex at the New Bond Street offices of Warrior Music. I was a huge fan of his music – every single was perfect pop, in my opinion – and he was quite beautiful to look at, in those days.
The next time I saw him, three years later when his popularity was diving and the hits had dried up, he arrived at a press reception near Tottenham Court Road for Dennis Waterman, who made a couple of records for the DJM label on the back of his success in The Sweeney. Why Bolan came to this event, I’m not sure, but I was shocked to see him. Overweight, overbearing, his young fresh looks already beginning to fade, he spent the whole occasion looking round the room to see who was looking at him, and trying to muscle in to every press shot that he could. In his lifetime, he never had another hit.
I also spent another few days with The Osmonds, who returned to the UK at the end of October for concerts and TV appearances, staying at the Britannia Hotel. By this time they were absolutely huge in the UK, with a string of hits from The Osmonds and Donny all year, and Marie about to release ‘Paper Roses’ in the UK. I went to Heathrow to meet them with photographer David Porter and we watched amazed as thousands of girls screamed and yelled and tried to get near the boys. I later found out that a viewing balcony had collapsed because of the amount of people on it – not even The Beatles in their heyday had received such adulation. Little Bill Sammeth had been right after all …
I was in constant contact with the family not only when they visited the UK, but by phone to Utah, because of Fab and because Osmonds’ World magazine was a monthly sell-out. Olive had a great interest in the magazine and had her own column extolling the benefits of a close family and of having values in life.
As someone who smoked, drank, had had sex before marriage and generally did not live a particularly wholesome life, I constantly amazed myself at how well I interpreted the Osmond line and converted it into copy for the magazine. Everything went back to the States to be approved before going to press, and I don’t recall the family ever wanting to change anything I had written. Perhaps deep down there was an Osmond clone inside me dying to get out …
Also in November, I went along to see Elton John at the Inn on the Park, who was having a press reception for his latest album, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. As I had been fixated on David Essex’s legs, so I was fixated on John’s wrist, as it held what was undoubtedly the most expensive watch I had ever seen – more or less the size of Big Ben and completely encrusted with diamonds. The rest of him was, relatively speaking, understated, but that soon changed.
A couple of weeks on, in late November, I was peculiarly nervous as I headed towards Peter Gormley’s Savile Row management offices to meet, for the first time, the King of UK pop, Cliff Richard. As a youngster I had never been a great fan of Cliff – I used to have regular and heated arguments on the school bus with a girl who was an avid Cliff fan, about the merits or otherwise of Cliff versus Billy Fury. Since The Beatles’ days Cliff had struggled to maintain his place in pop, and had been lumbered with a goodie-goodie image via his religious beliefs and his super-clean appearance when all around him were going down the hippie, then glam rock, then punk roads.
Indeed, so uncool was he considered that earlier in the year he had gone for broke and had sung the UK’s Eurovision Song Contest entry, ‘Power to All Our Friends’. In a few years’ time he was to find his way back with a string of much more credible songs such as ‘Devil Woman’ and ‘We Don’t Talk Anymore’ – but at this time things must have been quiet enough that the interview with Fab 208 was agreed.
As I waited for him to arrive, my nerves grew, and I still didn’t know why as he would surely be a little Osmond-like, and I could get along with them just fine. Perhaps it was like waiting to be have an audience with the mother superior of a convent. But as I waited a little more and watched as people put out the first of the Christmas decorations in a display window opposite, I realised that they had just presented me with my angle. I would talk to Cliff about Christmas.
He gave me a great interview and at the finish I realised I was another convert – not to Christianity (I had never been back to church since being confirmed at the age of 12) but to Cliff. He really was ok.
Now believe me, I don’t have, and never have had, a leg fetish – but a few days later I had occasion to be sitting in the back of another West End office, on a low sofa, opposite yet another pair of strange legs. These were incredibly skinny legs. It was 27 November so it was quite cold, but the legs were bare below a miniskirt. And the legs were covered in long, dark hairs. I sat in my groundhog moment wondering why their owner didn’t either a) shave or wax them or b) cover them up in thick dark warm tights.
The owner of the hirsute limbs, and the owner’s husband, were chattering away opposite me not realising that my mind was on hairy legs rather than the new Wings album they were here to promote – Band on the Run.
Yes, the leg owner was Linda McCartney, and the husband was Paul.
Further on up, Linda had done something strange with the hair on her head, too – think of Rod Stewart in the Faces circa 1970 – long at the sides but short and spikey just at the top – and you have it. The cockatiel mullet. Not a good look. She wasn’t wearing any make-up either.
I don’t have any idea what we talked about that day. I just remember taking in the completely non-babe way Linda was, and then looking at her hubbie, who was nice enough if a bit prickly, and realising he was no looker either (you could think that sort of thing back in those days). Then I got to thinking back to the Albert Hall when I was a teen, there with my dad and Margaret Fox, screaming at The Beatles. Here is one quarter of that phenomenon and he’s got hooded eyes, thin lips, slightly thinning hair, bit of a paunch – what on earth did we all see in him? Ah well. Perhaps he could sing. Perhaps he could write songs. Perhaps he just got lucky. I don’t know.
So by the end of autumn 1973 I was able to cross several members of pop royalty – queens, kings, whatever – from my ‘must meet’ list. Elton John, Cliff Richard, Paul McCartney – pretty good. On 4 December I had my first encounter with a band who were not yet in that league of pop royalty but were obviously hoping to get there, because their name was, indeed, Queen.
I only went along because Tony Brainsby had asked me to go, more or less as a favour. He said he had this group of guys who were very good but hadn’t done as well with their first two singles as had been hoped. ‘There’ll be plenty of refreshment and it will be a laugh I promise you …’.
So I arrived at his SW1 terrace office in the early afternoon and immediately felt as though I had stepped, just like my first moment in the Fab offices but with much less light, into an Alice in Wonderland on speed kind of situation. The house was quite gloomy – Tony’s mood lighting, I guess, or the lightbulbs had all gone – and rich with tobacco-type odours and haze. Fantastic music was blasting around the house from top to toe – and as I stood near the top of the narrow first flight of stairs, a crew of boys – obviously, from the look of them, Queen themselves, bashed their way through the entrance door and we all stood on the stairs, shaking hands, hugging, kissing and, eventually, falling over. They may have come straight from the pub – I know I had.
Tony peered down to see what was going on, realised we had introduced ourselves after a fashion, and just left us to it.
The music turned out to be Queen’s first album. They had released it back in the summer and the lead singer Freddie Mercury, whose OTT behaviour, I finally realised, accounted for at least 75 per cent of the chaos that happened that afternoon, sang along with each track as it came.
‘Come on, Jude, come on – be my backing singer, go on…’.
So I did a few la la las until he got engrossed with his own performance, finally bowing and flourishing as each track came to an end. He put on quite a show and by the end of the afternoon when I staggered away I knew – and this time I wasn’t wrong – that this band would be big no matter what bad start they had had. Freddie had such a beautiful voice and you just couldn’t ignore him. At all.