With perfect timing, I arrived at my first job in Denmark Street just as Denmark Street went into terminal decline. Ten years before, it had been the centre of the British music industry, where writers went to sell their songs to publishers, who’d in turn sell them to artists. Then The Beatles and Bob Dylan had come along and changed everything. They didn’t need the help of professional songwriters: it turned out they were professional songwriters. More bands started appearing with a songwriter in their ranks: The Kinks, The Who, The Rolling Stones. It was obvious that was how things were going to be from now on. There was still just about enough work to keep Denmark Street going – not every new band could write their own material and there was still an army of vocalists and easy-listening crooners who sourced their songs the old-fashioned way – but the writing was on the wall.
Even my new job at Mills Music seemed like a throwback to a bygone era. It had nothing to do with pop at all. My duties consisted of parcelling up sheet music for brass bands and taking the packages to the post office opposite the Shaftesbury Theatre. I wasn’t even in the main building: the packing department was round the back. That it couldn’t have been less glamorous was underlined when Chelsea’s star midfielder Terry Venables and a handful of his teammates unexpectedly turned up there one afternoon. They were being pursued by the press – there was a scandal at the time about them going out drinking after a game against the manager’s orders – and had opted to hide out in my new workplace. They knew Mills Music well – they were footballing friends, like my cousin Roy – and had clearly realized that the packing department was literally the last place in London you would look if you were searching for someone famous.
But I had a ball. It was a foot in the door of the music industry. And even if Denmark Street was on its last legs, it still held a magic for me. There was a kind of glamour there, albeit fading glamour. There were guitar shops and recording studios. You would get your lunch at the Gioconda coffee bar or the Lancaster Grill on Charing Cross Road. You wouldn’t see anybody famous in there – they were restaurants for people who couldn’t afford any better – but there was a buzz about them: they were full of hopefuls, would-bes, would-never-bes, people who wanted to be spotted. People, I suppose, like me.
Back in Pinner, my mum, Derf and I had moved out of the rented flat in Croxley Green, with the damp and the peeling wallpaper, into a new place, a few miles away in Northwood Hills, not far from the pub whose window I’d scrambled out of on a regular basis. Frome Court looked like an ordinary detached suburban house from the outside, but inside it was divided up into two-bedroom flats. Ours was 3A. It felt like a home, unlike our previous residence, which had felt like a punishment for Mum and Derf both getting divorced: you’ve done something wrong, so you have to live here. And I was playing the electric piano I’d bought with the proceeds from my pub gig in a new band, started by another ex-member of The Corvettes, Stuart A Brown. Bluesology were much more serious. We had ambition: Stuart was a really good-looking guy, convinced he was going to be a star. We had a saxophone player. We had a set full of obscure blues tracks by Jimmy Witherspoon and J. B. Lenoir that we rehearsed in a Northwood pub called the Gate. We even had a manager, a Soho jeweller called Arnold Tendler: our drummer, Mick Inkpen, worked for him. Arnold was a sweet little man who wanted to get into the music business, and had the terrible misfortune to pick Bluesology as his big investment opportunity after Mick convinced him to come and see a gig. He sank his money into equipment for us and stage outfits – identical polo neck jumpers, trousers and shoes – and got absolutely no return, unless you counted us constantly moaning at him when things went wrong.
We started playing gigs around London, and Arnold paid for us to record a demo at a studio in a prefabricated hut in Rickmansworth. By some miracle, Arnold managed to get the demo to Fontana Records. More miraculous still, they put out a single, a song I’d written – or rather, the only song I’d written – called ‘Come Back Baby’. It did absolutely nothing. It was played a couple of times on the radio, I suspect on the less salubrious pirate stations where they would play anything if the record label bunged them some dosh. There was a rumour it was going to be on Juke Box Jury one week, and we duly crowded round the television. It wasn’t on Juke Box Jury. Then we put out another single, also written by me, called ‘Mr Frantic’. This time, there wasn’t even a rumour it was going to be on Juke Box Jury. It just vanished.
Towards the end of 1965, we got a job with Roy Tempest, an agent who specialized in bringing black American artists over to Britain. He had a fish tank full of piranhas in his office, and his business practices were as sharp as their teeth. If he couldn’t get The Temptations or The Drifters to cross the Atlantic, he would find a handful of unknown black singers in London, put them in suits and book them on a nightclub tour, billed as The Temptin’ Temptations or The Fabulous Drifters. When anyone complained, he would feign ignorance: ‘Of course they’re not The Temptations! They’re The Temptin’ Temptations! Completely different band!’ So Roy Tempest effectively invented the tribute act.
In a sense, Bluesology got off lightly in their dealings with him. At least the artists for whom we were employed as a backing band were the real thing: Major Lance, Patti LaBelle And The Blue Belles, Fontella Bass, Lee Dorsey. And the work meant I could stop parcelling up brass band music for a living and become a professional musician. I didn’t really have a choice. There was no way I could hold down a day job and work to the schedule of gigs that Tempest set up. Unfortunately, the pay was terrible. Bluesology got fifteen quid a week, out of which we had to pay for petrol for the van and food and lodgings: if you played too far away from London to drive home after the gig, you would book into a B&B at five bob a night. I’m sure the stars we were backing weren’t getting much more. The workload was punishing. Up and down the motorway, night after night. We played the big regional clubs: the Oasis in Manchester, the Mojo in Sheffield, the Place in Hanley, Club A Go Go in Newcastle, Clouds in Derby. We played the cool London clubs: Sybilla’s, The Scotch of St James, where The Beatles and the Stones drank whisky and Coke, and the Cromwellian, with its remarkable barman, Harry Heart, a man almost as famous as the pop stars he served. Harry was very camp, talked in Polari and kept a mysterious vase full of clear liquid on the counter. The mystery was solved when you offered to buy him a drink: ‘Gin and tonic, please, and have one for yourself, Harry.’ He’d say, ‘Ooh, thank you, love, bona, bona, just one for the pot, then.’ And he’d pour out a measure of gin, throw it into the vase and drink out of it between serving people. The real mystery was how a man who apparently drank a large vase full of neat gin on a nightly basis remained vertical as the evening wore on.
And we played the most bizarre clubs. There was a place in Harlesden that was basically someone’s front room, and a place in Spitalfields where, for reasons I never quite established, they had a boxing ring instead of a stage. We played a lot of black clubs, which should have been intimidating – a bunch of white kids from the suburbs trying to play black music to a black audience – but somehow never was. For one thing, the audiences just seemed to love the music. And for another, if you’ve spent your teens trying to play ‘Roll Out The Barrel’ while the clientele of a Northwood Hills pub beat the living shit out of each other, you don’t scare that easily.
In fact, the only time I felt uneasy was in Balloch, just outside Glasgow. We arrived at the venue to discover the stage was about nine feet tall. This, it quickly transpired, was a security measure: it stopped the audience trying to climb onstage and kill the musicians. With that particular avenue of pleasure closed off to them, they settled instead for trying to kill each other. When they arrived, they lined up on either side of the club. The opening note of our set was clearly the agreed signal for the evening’s festivities to begin. Suddenly, there were pint glasses flying and punches being thrown. It wasn’t a gig so much as a small riot with accompaniment from an r’n’b band. It made Saturday night in the Northwood Hills look like the State Opening of Parliament.
We played two gigs a night, almost every night – more if we tried to supplement our income by playing our own shows. One Saturday, Roy booked us to play an American services club in Lancaster Gate at 2 p.m. Then we got in the van and drove to Birmingham, and played two shows he had booked us there – at the Ritz and then the Plaza. Then we got back in the van again, drove back to London and played a show he’d booked us at Count Suckle’s Cue club in Paddington. The Cue was a really cutting-edge black club that mixed soul and ska, one of the first places in London to book not just US artists but West Indian ones too. To be honest, my main memory of it isn’t its groundbreaking cocktail of American and Jamaican music, but the fact that it had a food counter that served fantastic Cornish pasties. Even the most obsessive music fan develops a slightly different sense of priorities when it’s six in the morning and they’re starving to death.
Sometimes Roy Tempest got the bookings catastrophically wrong. He brought The Ink Spots over, apparently in the belief that, if they were a black American vocal group, they must be a soul band. But they were a vocal harmony group from a completely different era, pre-rock ‘n’ roll. They’d start singing ‘Whispering Grass’ or ‘Back In Your Own Back Yard’ and the audiences would just dissipate – they were wonderful songs, but not what the kids in the soul clubs wanted to hear. It was heartbreaking – until we got to the Twisted Wheel in Manchester. The audience there were such music lovers, so knowledgeable about black music’s history, that they completely got it. They turned up with their parents’ 78s for The Ink Spots to sign. At the end of the set they literally lifted them off the stage and carried them around the club on their shoulders. People talk about Swinging London in the mid-sixties, but those kids in the Twisted Wheel were so clued-up, so switched-on, so much hipper than anyone else in the country.
In truth, I didn’t care about the money or the workload, or the occasional bad gig. The whole thing was a dream come true for me. I was playing with artists whose records I collected. My favourite was Billy Stewart, an absolutely enormous guy from Washington DC, signed to Chess Records. He was an amazing singer, who had turned his weight problem into a kind of gimmick. His songs kept alluding to it: ‘she said I was her pride and joy, that she was in love with a fat boy’. He had a legendary temper – it was rumoured that when a secretary at Chess took too long to buzz him into the building he had expressed his irritation by pulling a gun and shooting the door handle off – and, we quickly discovered, a legendary bladder. If Billy asked for the van to pull over on the motorway because he needed to pee, you had to cancel whatever plans you had for the rest of the evening. You were there for hours. The noise from the bushes was incredible: it sounded like someone filling a swimming pool with a fire hose.
Playing with these people was terrifying, and not merely because some of them were rumoured to shoot things when they lost their temper. Their sheer talent was scary. It was an incredible education. It wasn’t just the quality of their voices, it was that they were fantastic entertainers. The way they moved, the way they spoke between songs, the way they could manipulate an audience, the way they dressed. They had such style, such panache. Sometimes they displayed some peculiar quirks – for some reason, Patti Labelle insisted on favouring the audience with a version of ‘Danny Boy’ at every gig – but you could learn so much about artistry by watching them onstage for an hour. I couldn’t believe they were just cult figures over here. They’d had big American hits, but in Britain, white pop stars had seized on their songs, covered them and invariably been more successful. Wayne Fontana And The Mindbenders seemed to be the chief offenders: they’d re-recorded Major Lance’s ‘Um Um Um Um Um Um’ and Patti LaBelle’s ‘A Groovy Kind Of Love’ and vastly outsold the originals. Billy Stewart’s ‘Sitting In The Park’ had flopped while Georgie Fame had the hit. You could tell this rankled with them, and understandably so. In fact, I got a good idea just how much it rankled with them when a mod in the audience at the Ricky-Tick club in Windsor made the mistake of shouting out ‘We want Georgie Fame!’ in a sarcastic voice, as Billy Stewart sang ‘Sitting In The Park’. I’ve never seen a man that size move so fast. He jumped offstage, into the crowd, and went after him. The kid literally ran out of the club in fear for his life, as indeed you might if a trigger-happy twenty-four-stone soul singer had taken a sudden dislike to you.
In March 1966, Bluesology went to Hamburg – carrying our instruments on the ferry, then on a train – to play at the Top Ten Club on the Reeperbahn. It was legendary, because it was one of the places The Beatles had played before they were famous. They were living in the club’s attic when they made their first single with Tony Sheridan. The set-up hadn’t changed in the intervening five years. The accommodation for bands was still in the attic. There were still brothels with prostitutes sitting in the windows just down the street, and at the club you were still expected to play five hours a night, alternating with another band: an hour on, an hour off, while the clientele drifted in and out. It was easy to imagine The Beatles living the same life, not least because it looked suspiciously like the bed sheets in the attic hadn’t been changed since John and Paul had slept in them.
We played as Bluesology and we also backed a Scottish singer called Isabel Bond, who’d relocated from Glasgow to Germany. She was hilarious, this sweet-looking dark-haired girl who turned out to be the most foul-mouthed woman I’ve ever met. She’d sing old standards and change the words so they were filthy. She’s the only singer I’ve ever heard who could work the phrase ‘give us a wank’ into ‘Let Me Call You Sweetheart’.
But I was so innocent. I barely drank and I still wasn’t interested in sex, largely because I’d managed to get to the age of nineteen without gaining any real knowledge or understanding of what sex actually was. Aside from my father’s questionable assertion that masturbating made you go blind, nobody had furnished me with any information about what you did or were supposed to do. I had no idea about penetration, no idea what a blow job was. As a result, I’m probably the only British musician of the sixties who went to work on the Reeperbahn and came back still in possession of his virginity. There I was, in one of Europe’s most notorious fleshpots, every conceivable kink and persuasion catered for, and the raciest thing I did was buy a pair of flared trousers from a department store. All I cared about was playing and going to German record shops. I was totally absorbed by music. I was incredibly ambitious.
And, in my heart, I knew Bluesology weren’t going to make it. We weren’t good enough. It was obvious. We’d gone from playing obscure blues to playing the same soul songs that virtually every British r’n’b band played in the mid-sixties – ‘In The Midnight Hour’, ‘Hold On I’m Coming’. You could hear The Alan Bown Set or The Mike Cotton Sound playing them better than us. There were superior vocalists to Stuart out there, and there were certainly far superior organ players to me. I was a pianist, I wanted to hammer the keys like Little Richard, and if you try and do that on an organ, the sound it makes can ruin your whole day. I didn’t have any of the technical knowledge you need to play an organ properly. The worst instrument was the Hammond B-12 that was permanently installed on the stage of the Flamingo club in Wardour Street. It was an enormous wooden thing, like playing a chest of drawers. It was covered in switches and levers, draw bars and pedals. Stevie Winwood or Manfred Mann would deploy all of them to make the Hammond scream and sing and soar. I, on the other hand, didn’t dare touch them because I had literally no idea what any of them did. Even the little Vox Continental I usually played was a technical minefield. One key had a habit of sticking down. It happened midway through a set at The Scotch of St James. One minute I was playing ‘Land Of A Thousand Dances’, the next my organ was making a noise that sounded like the Luftwaffe had turned up over London to give the Blitz another go. The rest of the band gamely continued dancing in the alley with Long Tall Sally and twisting with Lucy doing the Watusi while I attempted to fix the situation by panicking wildly. I was contemplating calling 999 when Eric Burdon, the lead singer of The Animals, got onstage. A man clearly blessed with the complex technical expertise I lacked – The Animals’ keyboard player Alan Price was a genius on the Vox Continental – he thumped the organ with his fist and the key was released.
‘That happens to Alan all the time,’ he nodded, and walked off.
So we weren’t as good as the bands who were doing the same thing as us, and the bands who were doing the same thing as us weren’t as good as the bands who wrote their own material. When Bluesology were booked to play at the Cedar Club in Birmingham, we arrived early and found a rehearsal in progress. It was The Move, a local quintet who were obviously on the verge of big things. They had a wild stage act, a manager with the gift of the gab and a guitarist called Roy Wood who could write songs. We snuck in and watched them. Not only did they sound amazing, Roy Wood’s songs sounded better than the cover versions they played. Only someone who was clinically insane would have said that about the handful of tracks I’d written for Bluesology. To be honest, I’d only written them because I absolutely had to, because we had one of our very infrequent recording sessions coming up and needed at least some material of our own. I wasn’t exactly pouring my heart and soul into them, and you could tell. But I can remember watching The Move and having a kind of revelation. This is it, isn’t it? This is the way forward. This is what I should be doing.
In fact, I might have left Bluesology sooner had Long John Baldry not come into the picture. We got the job with him because we were in the right place at the right time. Bluesology just happened to be performing in the south of France when Long John Baldry found himself without a backing band to play the Papagayo club in St-Tropez. His original idea was to form another band like Steampacket with himself, Stuart Brown, a boy called Alan Walker – who I think got the job because Baldry fancied him – singing, and a girl who had just arrived in London from the US, Marsha Hunt, taking the female vocalist’s role. Bluesology were to be his backing band, at least after he’d revamped the line-up slightly: a couple of musicians he didn’t like got the push and were replaced with ones he thought were better suited. It wasn’t really what I wanted to do. I thought that line-up was a real step down for John. I knew how good Julie Driscoll and Rod were. I’d seen Rod playing with John at the Kenton Conservative Club when the band were still called The Hoochie Coochie Men and I was still at school, and he’d blown me away. And Brian Auger was a real musician’s musician: he didn’t seem like the kind of organist who’d ever require the lead singer of The Animals to climb onstage and offer a helpful thump in the middle of a show.
So I had my reservations. The line-up with Alan Walker and Marsha Hunt didn’t last long anyway: Marsha looked incredible, this gorgeous, tall black girl, but she wasn’t a great singer. Even so, I had to admit that, with Long John Baldry around, things suddenly got a lot more interesting. Indeed, if you ever feel your life is getting a little routine, a bit humdrum, I can wholeheartedly recommend going on tour in the company of a hugely eccentric six-foot-seven gay blues singer with a drink problem. You’ll find things liven up quite considerably.
I just loved John’s company. He’d pick me up outside Frome Court in his van, which came complete with its own record player, alerting me to his arrival by leaning out of the window and screaming ‘REGGIE!’ at the top of his voice. His life seemed packed with incident, often linked to his boozing, which I quickly worked out was self-destructive: the big clue came when we played the Links Pavilion in Cromer and he got so pissed after the show that he fell down a nearby cliff in his white suit. But I didn’t realize that he was gay. I know it seems incredible in retrospect. This was a man who called himself Ada, referred to other men as ‘she’ or ‘her’ and continually gave you in-depth reports on the state of his sex life: ‘I’ve got this new boyfriend called Ozzie – darling, he spins around on my dick.’ But again, I was so naive, I honestly had no real understanding of what being gay meant, and I certainly didn’t know that the term might have applied to me. I’d just sit there thinking, ‘What? He spins around on your dick? How? Why? What on earth are you talking about?’
It was hugely entertaining, but none of it changed the fact that I didn’t want to be an organist, I didn’t want to be a backing musician and I didn’t want to be in Bluesology. Which is why I ended up at Liberty Records’ new offices, just off Piccadilly, prefacing my audition for the label by pouring out my woes: the stasis of Bluesology’s career, the horror of the cabaret circuit, the tape machine and its role in our legendary non-performance of ‘Let The Heartaches Begin’.
On the other side of the desk, Ray Williams nodded sympathetically. He was very blond, very handsome, very well dressed and very young. As it turned out, he was so young that he didn’t have the power to give anyone a contract. The decision lay with his bosses. They might have signed me had I not chosen Jim Reeves’s ‘He’ll Have To Go’ as my audition piece. My logic was that everybody else would sing something like ‘My Girl’ or a Motown track, so I’d do something different and stand out. And I really love ‘He’ll Have To Go’. I felt confident singing it: it used to knock them dead in the Northwood Hills public bar. Had I thought twice, I might have realized that it wasn’t going to muster much enthusiasm among people who were trying to start a progressive rock label. Liberty signed The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, The Groundhogs and The Idle Race, a psychedelic band fronted by Jeff Lynne, who went on to form the Electric Light Orchestra. The last thing they wanted was Pinner’s answer to Jim Reeves.
Then again, maybe singing ‘He’ll Have To Go’ was exactly the right thing to do. If I’d passed the audition, Ray might not have handed me the envelope containing Bernie’s lyrics. And if he hadn’t handed me Bernie’s lyrics, I don’t really know what would have happened, although I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it, because it seems like such an incredible twist of fate. I should point out that Ray’s office was chaos. There were piles of reel-to-reel tapes and hundreds of envelopes everywhere: he hadn’t just been contacted by every aspiring musician and writer in Britain, but by every nutcase who’d seen Liberty’s ‘talent wanted’ advert too. He seemed to pull the envelope out at random, just to give me something to take away, so the meeting didn’t feel like a dead loss – I can’t remember if he’d even opened it or not before he gave it to me. And yet that envelope had my future in it: everything that’s happened to me since happened because of what it contained. You try and figure that out without giving yourself a headache.
Who knows? Maybe I would have found another writing partner, or joined another band, or made my way as a musician without it. But I do know my life and my career would have been very different, most likely substantially worse – it’s hard to see how it could have turned out any better – and I suspect you wouldn’t be reading this now.
Liberty Records weren’t interested in the first songs that Bernie and I wrote together, so Ray offered to sign us to a publishing company he had set up. There was no money in it unless we actually sold some songs, but for the moment that didn’t seem to matter: Ray really believed in me. He even tried to set me up with a couple of other lyricists, but it didn’t work out with them the way it did with Bernie. The others wanted us to work together, writing the music and the lyrics at the same time, and I couldn’t do that. I had to have the words written down in front of me before I could write a song. I needed that kick-start, that inspiration. And there was just a magic that happened when I saw Bernie’s lyrics, which made me want to write music. It happened the moment I first opened the envelope, on the tube train home from Baker Street, and it’s been happening ever since.
The songs were really flowing out of us. They were better than anything I’d written before, which admittedly wasn’t saying much. Actually, only some of them were better than anything I’d written before. We wrote two kinds of songs. The first were things we thought we could sell, to Cilla Black, say, or Engelbert Humperdinck: big weepy ballads, jaunty bubblegum pop. They were awful – sometimes I shuddered at the thought that the weepies weren’t that different from the dreaded ‘Let The Heartaches Begin’ – but that was how you made your money as a songwriting team for hire. Those big middle-of-the-road stars were your target market. It was a target we missed every time. The biggest name we managed to sell a song to was the actor Edward Woodward, who occasionally moonlighted as an easy-listening crooner. His album was called This Man Alone, a title that eerily predicted its audience.
And then there were the songs we wanted to write, influenced by The Beatles, The Moody Blues, Cat Stevens, Leonard Cohen, the kind of stuff we were buying from Musicland, a record shop in Soho that Bernie and I haunted so frequently that the staff would ask me to help out behind the counter when one of them wanted to get some lunch. It was the tail end of the psychedelic era, so we wrote a lot of whimsical stuff with lyrics about dandelions and teddy bears. We were really just trying on other people’s styles and finding none of them quite fitted us, but that’s how the process of discovering your own voice works, and the process was fun. Everything was fun. Bernie had moved to London and our friendship had really bloomed. We got on so well, it felt like he was the brother I’d never had, a state of affairs magnified by the fact that we were, at least temporarily, sleeping in bunk beds in my bedroom at Frome Court. We would spend the days writing – Bernie tapping out lyrics on a typewriter in the bedroom, bringing them to me at the upright piano in the living room, then scurrying back to the bedroom again as I started to set them to music. We couldn’t be in the same room if we were writing, but if we weren’t writing, we spent all our time together, in record shops, at the cinema. At night, we would go to gigs or hang around the musicians’ clubs, watching Harry Heart drink his vase full of gin, chatting to other young hopefuls. There was a funny little guy we knew who – in keeping with the flower-power mood of the times – had changed his name to Hans Christian Anderson. The aura of fairy tale otherworldliness conjured by this pseudonym was slightly punctured when he opened his mouth and a thick Lancashire accent came out. Eventually he changed his first name back to Jon and became the lead singer of Yes.
We recorded both our types of song in a tiny four-track studio in the New Oxford Street offices of Dick James Music, which administrated Ray’s own publishing company: it later became famous because it was where The Troggs were covertly recorded shouting and swearing at each other for eleven minutes while trying to write a song – ‘you’re talking out the back of your fuckin’ arses!’ ‘Fuckin’ drummer – I shit him!’ – a recording that later got released as the notorious Troggs Tape. Caleb Quaye was the in-house engineer, a multi-instrumentalist with a joint permanently smouldering between his fingers. Caleb was very hip and he didn’t let you forget it. He spent half his life guffawing at things Bernie or I had said or done or worn that indicated our desperate lack of cool. But, like Ray, he seemed to believe in what we were doing. When he wasn’t rolling on the floor in hysterics or wiping tears of helpless mirth from his eyes, he was lavishing more time and attention on our songs than he needed to. Strictly against the company rules, we worked on them late into the night, calling in favours from session musicians Caleb knew, trying out arrangements and production ideas in secret, after everyone else from DJM had gone home.
It was thrilling, until we got caught by the company’s office manager. I can’t remember how he found out we were there – I think someone might have driven past and seen a light on and thought the place was being burgled. Caleb thought he was going to lose his job and, possibly out of desperation, played Dick James himself what we’d been doing. Instead of firing Caleb and throwing us out, Dick James offered to publish our songs. He was going to give us a retainer of £25 a week: a tenner for Bernie and fifteen quid for me – I got an extra fiver because I had to play piano and sing on the demos. It meant I could quit Bluesology and concentrate on songwriting, which was exactly what I wanted to do. We walked out of his office in a daze, too dumbfounded to be excited.
The only downside of this new arrangement was that Dick thought our future lay with the ballads and bubblegum pop. He worked with The Beatles, administering their publishing company Northern Songs, but at heart he was an old-fashioned Tin Pan Alley publisher. DJM was a strange set-up. Half the company was like Dick himself: middle-aged, more from that old Jewish showbiz world than rock and roll. The other half was younger and more fashionable, like Caleb, and Dick’s son Stephen, or Tony King.
Tony King worked for a new company called AIR from a desk he rented on the second floor. AIR was an association of independent record producers that George Martin had started after he realized how badly EMI paid him for working on The Beatles’ records, and Tony dealt with their publishing and promotion. To say Tony stood out in the DJM offices was an understatement. Tony would have attracted attention in the middle of a Martian invasion. He wore suits from the hippest tailors in London: orange velvet trousers, things made out of satin. He had strings of love beads around his neck and one or more of his collection of antique silk scarves fluttered behind him. His hair was dyed with blond highlights. He was an obsessive music fan, who’d worked for The Rolling Stones and Roy Orbison. He was friends with The Beatles. Like Long John Baldry, he was openly gay and he couldn’t care less who knew it. He didn’t walk so much as waft through the office: ‘Sorry I’m late, dear, the telephone got tangled up in my necklaces.’ He was hilarious. I was completely fascinated by him. More than that: I wanted to be like him. I wanted to be that stylish and outrageous and exotic.
His dress sense started to influence my own, with some eyebrow-raising results. I grew a moustache. I bought an Afghan coat, but opted for the cheaper kind. The sheepskin wasn’t cured properly and the ensuing stench was so bad my mother wouldn’t let me in the flat if I was wearing it. Unable to stretch to the kind of boutiques Tony shopped at, I bought a length of curtain fabric with drawings of Noddy on it and got a seamstress friend of my mum’s to make me a shirt out of it. For the adverts for my first single, ‘I’ve Been Loving You’, I wore a fake fur coat and a mock-leopardskin trilby hat.
For some reason, the sight of me clad in this striking ensemble failed to galvanize record buyers into the shops when the single was released in March 1968. It was a total flop. I wasn’t surprised. I wasn’t even disappointed. I didn’t particularly want to be a solo artist – I just wanted to write songs – and my record deal had come about more or less by accident. Dick’s son Stephen had been shopping demos of our songs around various labels in the hope that one of their artists would record them, someone at Philips had said they liked my voice and the next thing I knew, I had a deal to put out a few singles. I wasn’t sure at all, but I went along with it because I thought it might be one way of getting some exposure for the songs Bernie and I were writing. We were really improving as songwriters. We had been inspired by The Band’s rootsy Americana, and by a new wave of US singer-songwriters like Leonard Cohen, who we’d discovered in the imports section of Musicland. Something about their influence clicked with our writing. We’d started coming up with stuff that didn’t feel like pastiches of other people’s work. I’d listened to a song we’d written called ‘Skyline Pigeon’ over and over again and, thrillingly, I still couldn’t think of anyone else it sounded like – we’d finally made something that was our own.
But Dick James had picked out ‘I’ve Been Loving You’ as my debut single, apparently after a long but ultimately fruitful search to find the most boring song in my catalogue. He managed to unearth something completely nondescript that Bernie hadn’t even written the lyrics for, one that we’d earmarked for sale to a middle-of-the-road crooner. I suppose it was Dick’s old-fashioned Tin Pan Alley roots showing. I knew it was the wrong choice, but I didn’t feel like arguing. He was the Denmark Street legend who worked with The Beatles, and he’d given us a contract and got me a record deal when he should have thrown Bernie and me out on the street. The adverts claimed it was ‘the greatest performance on a “first” disc’, that I was ‘1968’s great new talent’ and concluded, ‘YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED’. The British public reacted as if they’d been warned every copy was contaminated with raw sewage; 1968’s great new talent went back to the drawing board.
There was one further, unexpected complication in my life at this point. I’d got engaged, to a woman called Linda Woodrow. We’d met in late 1967, at a gig Bluesology played at Sheffield’s Mojo club. Linda was friends with the club’s resident DJ, who was four foot eight and called himself the Mighty Atom. She was tall, blonde and three years older than me. She didn’t have a job. I don’t know where her money came from – I assumed her family were wealthy – but she was a woman of independent means. She was very sweet, interested in what I was doing. A post-gig conversation had turned into a meeting that felt suspiciously like a date, which had turned into another date, which had led to her coming down to visit Frome Court. It was an odd relationship. There wasn’t much in the way of physicality, and we certainly never had sex, which Linda took as evidence of old-fashioned chivalry and romance on my part, rather than a lack of interest or willingness: in 1968 it still wasn’t that unusual for couples not to sleep together before they were married.
But sexual or not, the relationship started to develop a momentum of its own. Linda decided to move to London and find a flat. Linda could afford one, and so we could move in together. Bernie could be our lodger.
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel a sense of unease at all this, not least because Linda had started expressing misgivings about the music I was making. She was a big fan of an American crooner called Buddy Greco, and made it fairly clear she thought I would be better off modelling myself on him. But my unease was surprisingly easy to drown out. I liked the idea of moving out of Frome Court. And I suppose I was doing what I thought I should be doing at twenty – settling down with someone.
And so we ended up in a flat in Furlong Road, Islington: me, Bernie, Linda and her pet Chihuahua, Caspar. She got a job as a secretary, and the conversation increasingly turned to getting engaged. By now, the sound of alarm bells was hard to ignore, because the people closest to me kept ringing them. My mother was dead set against the idea, and you can get a pretty good sense of what Bernie thought from the lyrics of the song he subsequently wrote about that period, ‘Someone Saved My Life Tonight’. It’s hardly a glowing appraisal of Linda’s multitude of good qualities: ‘a dominating queen’, ‘sitting like a princess perched in her electric chair’. Bernie didn’t like her at all. He thought she was going to screw up our music with all this stuff about Buddy Greco. He thought she was bossy – he was furious that, for some reason, she’d made him take down a Simon and Garfunkel poster he’d put up in his room.
A cocktail of stubbornness and my aversion to confrontation enabled me to blot the alarm bells out. We got engaged on my twenty-first birthday – I can’t remember who asked who. A wedding date was set. Arrangements were being made. I started to panic. The obvious course of action was simply to be honest. But the obvious course of action didn’t appeal – actually telling Linda how I felt was beyond me. So I decided to stage a suicide bid instead.
Bernie, who came to my rescue, has never let me forget the exact details of my supposed attempt to end it all by gassing myself. Someone who really wants to kill themselves will commit the act in solitude, so as not to be stopped; they’ll do it at the dead of night, or in a place where they’re alone. I, on the other hand, did it in the middle of the afternoon in a flat full of people: Bernie was in his bedroom, Linda was having a nap. I’d not only put a pillow in the bottom of the oven to rest my head on, I’d taken the precaution of turning the gas to low and opening all the windows in the kitchen. It momentarily seemed quite dramatic when Bernie hauled me out of the oven, but there wasn’t enough carbon monoxide in the room to kill a wasp. I’d expected the reaction to be one of terrible shock, followed by a sudden realization on Linda’s part that my suicidal despair was rooted in unhappiness at our impending marriage. Instead the reaction was mild bemusement. Worse, Linda seemed to think that if I was depressed, it was because of the failure of ‘I’ve Been Loving You’ to light up the charts. Clearly, this would have been an ideal moment to tell her the truth. Instead, I said nothing. The suicide bid was forgotten, and the wedding remained in the diary. We started looking for a flat together in Mill Hill.
It took Long John Baldry to spell out what I already knew. We’d stayed good friends after my departure from Bluesology, and I had asked him to be my best man at the wedding. He seemed quietly entertained by the idea that I was getting married at all, but agreed. We arranged to meet at the Bag O’ Nails club in Soho to talk over the details. Bernie tagged along.
There was something strange about John’s mood from the minute that he arrived. He appeared preoccupied. I had no idea what with. I assumed something was going on in his personal life. Perhaps Ozzie had declined to spin around on his dick, or whatever it was they did in private. It took a few drinks until he told me what the problem was, in no uncertain terms.
‘Oh, fucking hell,’ he erupted. ‘What are you doing living with a fucking woman? Wake up and smell the roses. You’re gay. You love Bernie more than you love her.’
There was an awkward silence. I knew he was right, at least up to a point. I didn’t love Linda, certainly not enough to marry her. I did love Bernie. Not in a sexual way, but he was my best friend in the world. I certainly cared far more about our musical partnership than I did about my fiancée. But gay? I wasn’t sure about that at all, largely because I still wasn’t 100 per cent certain what being gay entailed, although thanks to a few frank conversations with Tony King I was getting a better idea. Maybe I was gay. Maybe that’s why I admired Tony so much – I didn’t just want to emulate his clothes and his sense of urbane sophistication, I saw something of myself in him.
It was a lot to mull over. Instead of doing that, I argued back. John was being ridiculous. He was drunk – yet again – and making a fuss about nothing. I couldn’t possibly cancel the wedding. Everything was arranged. We’d ordered a cake.
But John wouldn’t listen. He kept on at me. I’d ruin my life and Linda’s too if I went through with it. I was a fucking idiot, and a coward to boot. As the conversation got more heated and emotional, it began attracting attention. People from adjoining tables became involved. Because it was the Bag O’ Nails, the people from adjoining tables all happened to be pop stars, which lent everything an increasingly surreal edge. Cindy Birdsong from The Supremes chipped in – I’d known her back in the Bluesology days, when she’d been one of Patti LaBelle’s Blue Belles. Then, somehow, P. J. Proby became embroiled in the conversation. I’d love to be able to tell you what the trouser-splitting, ponytail-wearing enfant terrible of mid-sixties pop had to say regarding my impending wedding, its potential cancellation and, indeed, whether or not I was a homosexual, but by then I was incredibly pissed, and the exact details are a little hazy, although at some point I must have given in and conceded that John was right, at least about the marriage.
In my memory, the rest of the night plays out in fractured images. Walking up the road to the flat as dawn was breaking – arm in arm with Bernie, for moral support – and the pair of us stumbling against cars and knocking dustbins over. A terrible row, during which Linda threatened to kill herself. A slurred conversation held through the locked door of Bernie’s room – he’d made himself very scarce shortly after our arrival – about whether or not we thought Linda was actually going to kill herself. Another conversation through Bernie’s door, asking if he’d mind unlocking it so I could sleep on the floor.
The next morning there was another row, and a desperate phone call to Frome Court. ‘They’re coming in the morning with a truck to take me home,’ Bernie wrote in ‘Someone Saved My Life Tonight’. That was a bit of poetic licence. There was no ‘they’ and no truck: only Derf in his little decorator’s van. But Bernie and I did get taken home. Back to the bunk beds in Frome Court we went. Bernie stuck his Simon and Garfunkel poster on the wall. Neither of us ever saw Linda again.