Brian Epstein died in August. BBC Radio 1 was launched on 30 September. It was a Saturday, but I got up early to listen as Tony Blackburn introduced the first song – The Move, ‘Flowers in the Rain’. The leak above my bed was mended, the drip stopped, but the landlord still hasn’t given me a key to my bedroom door.
Now let’s talk about Doug Perry.
We only had one date.
He asked me out, but instead of doing the sensible thing and just allowing myself to be taken on a date, what did I do?
Yes, of course – I invited him round for a meal at the bedsit. Of course I did.
It did make sense to me in that split second I found myself inviting him so it’s completely useless now to want to scream at my young self, ‘WHAT ON EARTH ARE YOU THINKING OF? DON’T DO IT.’
I’d been in London for three months and was yet to make any female friends in town. Perry was the first person of either sex who had shown any interest in me whatsoever. And I just wanted to be grown up and to be liked and to be cool, and I thought that was what nice grown up cool people did – invite friends round to their pad for a meal.
But there was a problem, the first in quite a long line of problems relating to my liaison with Mr Perry – I couldn’t cook: hell, I could not cook. Years of moving home and family ructions and a mother who spent long spells in various hospitals with depression and other ills had ensured that somehow being taught the rudiments just never happened.
Mother also spent a fair bit of her civilian life with her friend Mrs Hill, whom she’d met in the Ashurst Clinic in Oxford. Mrs Hill had undergone a frontal lobotomy to try to curb her antisocial urges, which included trying to kill cats and other small mammals. For many years, from when I was about 9 to about 17, Mother had a strange fascination for this woman.
‘I Put a Spell on You’. Was that Nina Simone?
By the time I was 11, old enough to show an interest in how food got on the table, we were actually living with Mrs Hill and her three youngest children. And to live successfully as an outsider in the Hill household, you had to a) obey the rules and b) be neither seen nor heard. So activities such as playing music, making a noise or creating mess or disruption to the household of any kind – including cooking – were out.
Later, we left the Hill home in Botley and for two years Mum and Dad tried to make another go of living together. They split up again, Mum and I moved to the caravan, and I still didn’t cook, except for one time when I was nearly 16.
Mum’s tired. She does all these cleaning jobs and then she walks up the steep road to the top of Botley where Mrs Hill lives, then back down again. I think I’ll cook our tea today. It can’t be that hard. She’s bought two small breaded fish fillets and chips.
So I turn on the small gas ring and the grill. I grill the chips and one minute they’re white and pasty, the next minute they’re black. I fry the fillets but I don’t know you have to put fat in the frying pan and they stick to the bottom. She’s sitting there, watching Nationwide, and waiting. So I serve it up. The chips are still not cooked inside. The fish is in small pieces. She smiles, trying hard not to mind about the waste of money, and we have a tin of pilchards instead. And I’m definitely not going to be cooking for her any more, well, not for a long while.
I could not cook, and I didn’t cook. But that didn’t stop me inviting Doug Perry round for dinner. I offered him steak, chips, vegetables, apple pie and custard. I remember telling him the menu when I invited him, standing there in the Fab offices like some demented waiter. I thought men liked steak and I liked apple pie, and it all sounded straightforward enough. Poor sod, he probably thought he’d fill his belly with decent food then have his wicked way with me.
Poor man. What kind of a message was it giving out to him – making him come round to my bedsit on our first date, plying him with plonk, inviting him to sit on the bed (to be fair to myself, there was nowhere else to sit except on the picnic chairs that were set up with the picnic table for our meal in the small empty square between the bed and the TV – good job we were both thin as rakes). I didn’t want to sleep with him, hadn’t even thought of it, but of course he wasn’t to know that.
I didn’t think to try the apartment cooker beforehand, nor did I have enough gumption to borrow a cookbook from somewhere and bone up about cooking steak and the rest of it. In those days you couldn’t just call in a takeaway, there was no such thing. And, anyway, I didn’t have a phone.
But I did shop for the food and a nice bottle of Mateus Rose, buy the picnic table, lay it with my best Habitat cutlery (happily by this time my wages had gone up to £6 a week having, miraculously, passed my three-month trial). I didn’t realise that Habitat was quite trendy – it just happened to be the nearest shop I could find that sold household items.
All I had to do was cook the food. I would actually even now prefer not to recall too much detail of the preparation and mastication of that meal because it still makes me blush today, but it was, basically, Hell’s Kitchen combined with Junior Masterchef, worst of, multiplied by a million. As the awfulness of the food sank into both our stomachs and brains, conversation seemed increasingly superfluous and pointless, and so in profound silence Doug did his best to eat the inedible, then he left. Didn’t even try it on. So at least the meal served a purpose of sorts.
Henceforth when he came in to Fab to do his weekly column we would avoid each other to such a degree that I don’t think I ever saw him again. Turned out he had a steady girlfriend all along anyway. Maybe was even engaged, I recall. So he got his just desserts with that meal in every sense of the word. And it probably helped me to begin understanding that there are certain things you can’t wing without a little bit of knowledge and/or expertise. I should have been taken out for a nice drink and a Wimpy, or a ham omelette at The Golden Egg and then things could have turned out differently. But then I’d never have been free to date Jason Eddie.
The wife only appeared once in six months, my room door key never materialised, and finally the Spaniard tried to rape me.
I wouldn’t let him. Perhaps he was so surprised at just how determined I was that I wouldn’t be raped, that it stopped him in his tracks a bit, but it was lucky that the apartment doorbell rang mid fight, the Spaniard vanished into his own sitting room, I ran to the door and it was Jason Eddie, come to take me out for a drink.
I never told him what he’d interrupted, or why I wanted to get an Evening Standard and find somewhere else to live, RIGHT NOW. He must have wondered why I looked dishevelled and flushed and he did ask what had happened but I couldn’t tell him because, I think, I couldn’t face him and the Spaniard having a fight. I once witnessed my father and my brother fighting, blood pouring down my dad’s face, and I didn’t want a repeat. I never told a soul for years what happened in that bedsit, in fact like with so many of the less groovy things that happened to me in the next few years, I put it right out of my brain. NO need for counselling (not in those days); just get on with life, forget it. You move to London, things like that sometimes happen. They help you change from naïve country bumpkin to wordly wise woman, is the best way I could look at it.
It’s only now that I look back and wonder if the way I behaved (example: the Doug Perry scenario) gave people the wrong impression.
I remember chatting with the Spaniard, being friendly with him, testing my powers of socialising which up until my move to London had been non-existent. I was also beginning to realise that I could, if I tried hard, look quite reasonably attractive, so perhaps I was unconsciously testing my erratic powers of flirtation with the guy who was, I have to say, not fanciable in the slightest – short, fat, garlicky, not my type. On the other hand, how I behaved to him might have had no influence on the outcome at all – he probably would just have pounced on any female around at the time, whatever she did or didn’t do or say.
I never saw him again. The next morning he had disappeared – a curt one-line note was left on the kitchen table to say he had gone to Spain for a holiday and within less than two weeks I was moved out, with the help of Eddie and his old pink-and-yellow convertible and ensconced in Avonmore Road, West Kensington, in a good-sized double bedsit (this time complete with its own tiny kitchen) with a nice Polish landlady, Mrs Filipinski.
One tube stop nearer town, one more lesson learnt – seemed symbolic, progression of a sort.
I had met Jason Eddie at my first Fab party. These parties were legendary at Fleetway House – Unity would invite all the staff, a small selection of readers, her mates from Fleet Street proper (her husband, Owen Summers was a Fleet Street big boy crime writer and they were one of the first glam media couples), and as many pop stars and budding pop stars as she could round up.
Jason had come along with his brother. After a few minutes he swaggered towards me.
‘Hi! I’m Jason Eddie.’ Held out his hand. ‘Who are you?’
‘I’m Judy, Unity’s secretary. I know who you are.’
From that moment he didn’t let me out of his sight, and after a while had me almost believing that I was the most fascinating person in the room – obviously not true. I was flattered. And I had a special interest in this man.
He was nothing special to look at. Medium, stocky build, dark blonde hair, nice smile like his brother, fancied himself as a singer, like his brother. What attracted me to him was his GSOH – and the fact that his brother was the person I had dreamed of day and night from the age of nearly 13, whose face had adorned my bedroom walls since I first saw a photo of him on the front cover of a magazine, whose records I’d nearly worn out playing them on my Dansette, and who still had the power to turn me into a dumbstruck fan every time I met him. Jason’s brother was the legendary ‘UK Elvis’ – Billy Fury.
I’m in the newsagents at the bottom of Botley Hill. I’ve just got off the school bus and I have a shilling and I’m going to buy some sweets. I wait to be served and in front of me is the loveliest face I’ve ever seen. On a magazine called Marilyn. This is it – love at first sight. I don’t know who it is. But I have to buy the magazine and find out.
Billy Fury. He’s a singer. He has a record out. I’m going to save up and buy it, and then a record player. If there is someone this gorgeous in the world, then life might be worth living after all.
What Fury’s voice or music was like wasn’t really going to matter – but as it turned out, I liked that too. And Mum bought me my first LP – Billy Fury – for my 14th birthday.
Jason had left Liverpool a week or two before we met, and arrived in the Smoke to seek his own celebrity in the recording industry. By using his brother, he got an invite to the Fab party and began what I now realise was serious networking. Although I was still only Ed’s Sec, and pretty useless to him really, he wasn’t to know that so he went after me quite determinedly. Perhaps he did fancy me a bit but certainly at the start this would have been a secondary consideration. So there was this wonderful serendipity – we were both madly using each other while pretending not to.
It all worked out rather well for a time – he got to record a single, ‘Heart and Soul’, which was actually played on the radio and wasn’t too bad at all. He did some gigs, became a kind of 1960s Z-list celebrity, and I had plenty of fun off the back of his success.
Riding round town in his Zodiac (or whatever similar car of the day it was; I only ever noted the colour) beat the bus any day, and I also had the kudos of taking Billy Fury’s brother home to visit Mum, who by this time was living with my grandmother back in Buckingham, and who had always been almost as big a fan of Billy Fury as I was.
Because of Jason, I also got to know Billy and his personal manager, Hal Carter, Hal’s wife Sam and his team of helpers and other artistes.
Hal and Sam lived in a small flat in Osbaldestone Road, Stoke Newington. By the time their first baby, Warren, was born, we were quite good friends and I began babysitting for them from time to time; an arrangement which came to an abrupt and understandable end one winter evening a while later. Warren was asleep in the bedroom, being kept warm with a gas stove, and I was in the living room engrossed in TV as usual.
When Hal and Sam returned I could hear her screaming before they even started up the stairs. I hadn’t noticed that the gas stove had somehow gone wrong, the bedroom was filled with smoke and any moment would have been alight. I was still sitting there in front of the TV surrounded by the escaping, choking fumes, and I hadn’t even noticed.
Little Warren was ok, as it turned out, but I was quickly bundled from the apartment and Hal and Sam found themselves a new babysitter.
They were still, charitable people, happy to be friends with me, and I was even invited to baby Warren’s christening in July 1969 – along with my new friend Gordon Coxhill from the New Musical Express, and Billy and his new wife, a woman called, irritatingly, Judith. One of only two photos I have of myself with Fury was taken at this event, outside the church at the top of the Carter’s street. There I stand, just behind Fury and Judith, wearing my Biba velvet floppy hat and a rather stupid faraway expression. The other photo of me with Fury was taken when I was 16 years old, four years earlier.
I’ve just had the best news anyone could give me. Billy Fury is appearing this Christmas in pantomime! He’s going to be Aladdin. BUT guess where? Can you believe – he is going to come here, to our New Theatre at Oxford!! This is just amazing. I can’t really believe it’s true.
Precisely 1.5 miles from where I live, in our caravan at Botley Road Estate, Billy Fury himself is going to come every day for weeks and weeks and weeks, and be Aladdin. Right through until February 1966. Of all the places his manager could have chosen, he chose here. Thank you, God! Thank you Larry Parnes! Thank you world and life.
You’ve made me a very, very, happy person.
So I stand, shaking with nerves, at the stage door sometime early in December as he is due to arrive for rehearsals. This I have discovered because his backing group, The Gamblers, who are also in the show, have rented a houseboat on the Isis for the duration of the gig, from Salter Brothers – whose manager happens to be my brother, Rob! The Gamblers have told him all the dates I need to know …
And the Vanden Plas car arrives and there he is – medium tall, very slim, wearing a trilby with a feather in it – Billy Fury. And there is just one fan waiting … me.
Oh – and my mother, armed with camera. I just manage to speak,
‘Please Billy will you pose for a photo!’
‘Yes of course,’ a low, quiet voice with an almost American accent. So the deed is done, then Billy disappears inside the stage door.
My mother gets the film developed and I am sure the photo of Billy and I will be blurred, or not come out – but it does, and it’s perfect. Except for the stupid expression on my face.
A long time afterwards my mother says he had birdshit on his hat, but I didn’t notice that.
Once or twice Jason and I visited Billy and Judith at her home in North London – usually because Jason, whose real name was Albert, was short of money or wanted Billy to help him further his career.
The first time, we were ushered into the sitting room and after a few minutes Billy appeared, as shy and quiet as ever. Every time we went, I would sit there spellbound to be in the same room, as an acquaintance, with Billy, his girl and his brother.
But after a few months of being, there is no other word for it, pestered, Billy, quite understandably, began to get slightly peeved with his brother. I remember once Jason receiving a letter in the post from Billy, which he showed me, incensed.
I read the note, which gently pointed out that Billy had helped Albert several times and hadn’t a great deal of spare cash at the moment. He suggested Albert return to Liverpool, get a job, save up some more money and return to London another time. And he signed it, love Ron (his real name). I actually found myself near tears when I read that letter, in Billy’s scrawl, as I agreed with every word he said but I couldn’t say so as Albert was there ranting over it and calling his brother every swear word in the book.
‘What’s the matter with him – he’s got plenty of money, what’s the matter.’
In fact, Fury didn’t have a lot of money – his career had nosedived since The Beatles had revolutionised the pop world and he was struggling to earn money by gigging in smallish places, while battling severe ill health and a weak heart. He used to come off stage near collapse.
Not long after, Albert did what Billy had suggested – went back home, and later I found out from Hal that Albert had never officially left his wife, he’d simply been given ‘leave’ to try his luck in London for a while. I was quite shocked as I’d never intended to be ‘the other woman’ and yet so far since moving to London the only male contact I’d had had been with an engaged man, a married man and, of course, a would-be rapist.
Luckily, I didn’t care about Jason enough to be that sad at his departure. It took me about two weeks to realise I was quite glad he’d gone, on several levels.
I realised that he was not appreciative of his brother in the slightest at the time. I believe he was jealous of the Fury success and incredulous that it hadn’t happened for him. I was also mildly annoyed that he’d lied to me (or at best, avoided telling me the truth) about his situation back home.
Did Jason Eddie have talent? Well, he had nowhere near the looks or charisma of his brother. He could sing a bit – but put him in X Factor today and he would probably be lucky to make the live shows.
Because of my acquaintance with Hal and through my own career, which was ever so slightly on the move itself, I met Fury several more times after Jason left.
Yet I never could get over the fan/star thing – once a fan, always a fan – and I don’t recall ever having one sensible conversation with him. I never did interview him for Fab or any other publication because it would have been a disaster. But he was a lovely, lovely man – gentle, nature-loving and very un-starry. He even ended up, before his very early death at 42, living just a few miles from me, down in the Welsh Borders. He had a farm and used to spend his time birdwatching (yes, mother, it probably really was bird poo on his hat) and rounding up sheep. We should have got on really well – pity I just couldn’t make that leap from fan to true friend.