In theory, Bernie and I were only back in Frome Court temporarily, until we found somewhere of our own. It slowly sank in that, in reality, we were going to be there for the foreseeable future. We wouldn’t be getting anywhere of our own, because we couldn’t afford anywhere of our own. We couldn’t afford anywhere of our own because Britain’s singers continued to prove implacably opposed to recording our songs. Occasionally, word would reach us that an artist’s manager or producer was interested in something we’d written. You would get your hopes up and then … nothing. The rejections piled up. It’s a no from Cliff, I’m afraid. Sorry, Cilla doesn’t think it’s quite right for her. No, Octopus don’t want ‘When I Was Tealby Abbey’. Octopus? Who the hell were Octopus? Literally the only thing I knew about them was that they didn’t like our songs. We were being turned down by people we’d never even heard of.
Nothing was moving. Nothing was happening. It was hard not to get dispirited, although one advantage of living at Frome Court was that my mum was always on hand, armed with her patent method of snapping me out of despair. This involved a straight-faced suggestion that I abandon my songwriting career and go and work in a local shop instead: ‘Well, you’ve got a choice, you know. There’s a job going in the launderette, if you like.’ The launderette, you say? Hmm. Delightful as a career manning the tumble dryers sounds, I think I’ll stick with songwriting for a bit longer.
So instead of moving out, we tried to make a bedroom with bunks in it look like an acceptable place for two grown men to live. I joined a Reader’s Digest book club and gradually filled up the shelves with leather-bound editions of Moby Dick and David Copperfield. We got a stereo and two sets of headphones out of the Littlewoods catalogue – we could afford them because you paid in instalments. We bought a Man Ray poster from Athena in Oxford Street, then went next door to a shop called India Craft and bought some joss sticks. Lying on the floor, with our headphones on, our latest purchase from Musicland on the turntable and the air heady with incense smoke, Bernie and I could momentarily convince ourselves that we were artists living a bohemian existence at the cutting edge of the counterculture. Or at least we could until the spell was broken by my mum knocking on the bedroom door, asking to know what that bleedin’ smell was and, by the way, what did we want for our dinner?
I had a little more money than Bernie, because Tony King had used his connections at AIR Studios and Abbey Road to get me work as a session musician. You got £3 an hour for a three-hour session, paid in cash if you were working at Abbey Road. Better yet, if the session went even a minute over the allotted time, the Musicians’ Union rules meant that you got paid for a session and a half: nearly fifteen quid, the same as I earned in a week at DJM. The final bonus would be if I bumped into Shirley Burns and Carol Weston, the AIR Studios secretaries. They were so fabulous, always ready for a gossip, always happy to suggest my name if they heard of a job going. Something about me apparently brought out the maternal instinct in them, and they would quietly slip me their luncheon vouchers. So that meant a free meal on top of everything else – I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.
But forget the money: the session work was a fantastic experience. A session musician can’t afford to be picky. Whenever work came in, whatever work it was, you accepted it. You had to work quickly and you had to be on point, because your fellow session players were some of the best musicians in the country. Frightening isn’t an adjective you would normally associate with the Mike Sammes Singers, who did backing vocals for everyone – they looked like middle-aged aunties and uncles who’d arrived at the studio direct from a golf club dinner dance. But if you had to sing alongside them, they suddenly struck the fear of God into you, because they were so good at what they did.
And you had to be adaptable, because you were expected to play an incredible variety of music. One day you’d be singing backing vocals for Tom Jones, the next you’d be making a comedy record with The Scaffold, or arranging and playing piano with The Hollies, or trying to come up with a rock version of the theme from Zorba the Greek for The Bread and Beer Band, a project of Tony King’s that never really got off the ground. You constantly met new people and made new contacts: musicians, producers, arrangers, record company staff. One day, I was recording with The Barron Knights when Paul McCartney suddenly walked into the studio. He sat in the control room and listened for a while. Then he went to the piano, announced that this was what he was doing in a studio nearby, and played ‘Hey Jude’ for eight minutes. That certainly threw what The Barron Knights were doing – making a novelty record about Des O’Connor taking part in the Olympic Games – into quite stark relief.
Sometimes a session was great because the music you were playing was incredible, but sometimes a session was great because the music you were playing was so terrible. I did a lot of covers albums for a label called Marble Arch: hastily knocked-out versions of current chart hits, released on compilations with titles like Top of the Pops, Hit Parade and Chartbusters, that were sold cheaply in supermarkets. Whenever my involvement in them comes up, people talk about it as a desperate low point in my career: the poor, undiscovered artist, reduced to anonymously singing other people’s songs in order to earn a crust. I suppose you could look at it like that with the benefit of hindsight, but it certainly didn’t feel that way at the time, because the sessions for the covers albums were screamingly, howlingly funny.
The instructions you would get from the producer Alan Caddy were fantastic – one completely insane request after another. ‘Can you sing “Young, Gifted And Black”?’ Well, that’s not a song that makes an enormous amount of sense sung by a white guy from Pinner, but I’ll give it a go. ‘We’re doing “Back Home” next – we need you to sound like the England World Cup Squad.’ OK, there’s only three singers here and one of us is female, so it’s probably not going to sound indistinguishable from the original, but you’re the boss. On one occasion, I was required to sound like Robin Gibb of The Bee Gees, a great singer but a man possessed of a unique vocal style: a kind of eerie, tremulous, nasal vibrato. I couldn’t do it, unless I physically grabbed hold of my throat and wobbled it around while I was singing. I thought this was a real brainwave, but it caused absolute pandemonium among my fellow musicians. I stood there, wailing away, fingers clasped round my neck, desperately trying not to look across the studio, where the other session singers, David Byron and Dana Gillespie, were clinging on to each other and weeping with laughter.
Here’s how much I enjoyed the sessions for the covers albums, this supposedly lamentable artistic nadir in my professional life: I went back and did one after my solo career took off. I assure you I’m not making this up. ‘Your Song’ was written, the Elton John album was out, I’d been on Top of the Pops, I was about to go to America for my first tour, and I went back into the studio and happily belted out shonky versions of ‘In The Summertime’ and ‘Let’s Work Together’ for some terrible album sold in a supermarket for fourteen and sixpence. It was, as usual, a hoot.
But the session work was far from the most important thing about my friendship with Tony King. He had a great circle of friends, like a little gang, mostly made up of gay men who worked in the music business. They were record producers, men who worked at the BBC, promoters and pluggers, and a Scottish guy called John Reid, who was young, ambitious, very confident and very funny. He was advancing through the music industry at an incredible rate. Eventually he was made the UK label manager for Tamla Motown, dealing with The Supremes, The Temptations and Smokey Robinson, a prestigious appointment that Tony commemorated with suitable gravitas by always referring to John thereafter as Pamela Motown.
Tony’s group weren’t particularly wild or outrageous – they had dinner parties, or went out to restaurants and pubs together, rather than haunting London’s gay clubs – but I just loved their company. They were sophisticated and smart and very, very funny: I adored that camp sense of humour. The more I thought about it, the more I realized there was something odd about how completely at home I felt when I was with them. I’d never been a loner, I’d always had lots of friends – at school, in Bluesology, in Denmark Street – but this was different, more like a sense of belonging. I felt like one of the kids in Mary Poppins, suddenly being exposed to this magical new world. Twelve months after John Baldry had drunkenly announced that I was gay to everyone within earshot at the Bag O’ Nails, I decided he was right.
As if to underline the point, my libido unexpectedly decided to show its face for the first time, like a flustered latecomer to a party that was supposed to have started ten years ago. At twenty-one, I suddenly seemed to be undergoing some kind of belated adolescence. There were suddenly a lot of quiet crushes on men. It clearly wasn’t just his sense of humour and extensive knowledge of American soul that made me find John Reid so captivating, for one. Of course, I never acted on any of them. I wouldn’t have known how. I’d never knowingly chatted anyone up in my life. I’d never been to a gay club. I had no idea how you picked someone up. What was I supposed to say? ‘Do you want to come to the cinema with me and maybe get your knob out later’? That’s the main memory I have of the reality of my sexuality dawning on me. I don’t recall feeling anxious or tormented. I just remember wanting to have sex, having absolutely no idea how to do it and feeling terrified that I might get it wrong. I never even told Tony I was gay.
Besides, I had other things on my mind. One morning, Bernie and I were called into a meeting at DJM with Steve Brown, who’d recently taken over from Caleb as the studio manager. He told us he’d listened to the songs we had been recording and thought we were wasting our time.
‘You need to stop this rubbish. You’re not very good at it. In fact,’ he nodded, clearly warming to this disheartening theme, ‘you’re hopeless. You’re never going to make it as songwriters. You can’t do it at all.’
I sat there reeling. Oh, wonderful. This is it. The Northwood Hills launderette beckons. Maybe not; there was always the session work. But what about Bernie? The poor sod was going to end up back in Owmby-by-Spital, pushing his wheelbarrow full of dead chickens around again, the only evidence that he’d ever had a career in music one flop single he didn’t actually write and a rejection note from Octopus, whoever they were. We hadn’t even paid off the HP on the stereo.
As my mind raced, I became aware that elsewhere in the room, Steve Brown was still talking. He was saying something about ‘Lady What’s Tomorrow’, one of the songs we’d written that we hadn’t even bothered to try and sell. It was influenced by Leonard Cohen, and clearly Cilla Black wasn’t going to be interested. But Steve Brown apparently was.
‘You need to write more songs like that,’ he continued. ‘You need to do what you want to do, not what you think will sell. I’m going to talk to Dick and see if we can make an album.’
Afterwards, Bernie and I sat in the pub, trying to process what had just happened. On the one hand, I didn’t have any great ambitions to be a solo artist. On the other, the opportunity to stop writing the weepies and bubblegum pop was too good to turn down. And we still thought releasing Elton John records was a good way of showcasing the kind of songs we liked. The more exposure our songs got, the more likely it was that another, more famous artist might hear them and decide to record one themselves.
There was one problem. The deal with Philips was for singles: they wanted a follow-up to ‘I’ve Been Loving You’, not an album. So Steve Brown recorded a new song that Bernie and I had written, following his instruction to stop trying to be commercial and do what we liked. It was called ‘Lady Samantha’, and it felt like a breakthrough. Admittedly, at this stage of my career, making a single that I could listen to without emitting an involuntary yell of horror would have constituted a breakthrough, but ‘Lady Samantha’ was a pretty good song. It sounded completely different from ‘I’ve Been Loving You’: it was weightier, hipper, more confident. Released in January 1969, it became what used to be called a ‘turntable hit’, which was a polite way of saying it was a single that got played on the radio a lot but no one actually bought.
In the aftermath of its failure, we discovered Philips weren’t interested in renewing our deal: for some inexplicable reason, they seemed very resistant to financing an album by an artist who’d so far done nothing but lose them money. Dick James vaguely mentioned putting it out himself, setting up a proper label, rather than just licensing recordings out to other record companies, but he seemed more keen on talking about the Eurovision Song Contest. Much to Dick’s delight, one of the attempts at middle-of-the-road songwriting we were supposed to have forgotten about had now been mooted as a potential UK entry. Lulu was going to sing six songs on her TV show and the British public were going to vote for a winner. To say Bernie greeted this news coolly was an understatement. He was appalled. Back then, Eurovision wasn’t quite the orgy of embarrassment it is now, but still, it wasn’t like Pink Floyd and Soft Machine were queuing up to get involved. Worse, he hadn’t actually had anything to do with the song, even though it had his name on the credits. I’d knocked together the lyrics myself. It was ‘I’ve Been Loving You’ all over again. We were suddenly back where we started.
Bernie’s worst fears were confirmed when we sat down in Frome Court to watch the Lulu show. Our song – my song – was completely undistinguished and forgettable, which was more than you could say for the rest of them. Every other songwriter seemed to have come up with an idea so horrendous you couldn’t forget it if you tried. One was like something drunk Germans would slap their knees to in a Bavarian beer hall. Another featured the appalling combination of a big band and a bouzouki. Another was called ‘March’. The title didn’t refer to the month. The song was literally about marching, with an arrangement featuring a military brass band to ram home the point. Steve Brown was right. We really couldn’t do this kind of thing at all, a fact underlined when our song came last in the public vote. The German oompah song won. It was called ‘Boom Bang-A-Bang’.
The next day, we arrived at DJM to discover that the Daily Express had published an article helpfully explaining that our song had lost because it was self-evidently the worst of the lot. Dick wearily conceded that perhaps it might be better if we stopped wasting everybody’s time and made our own album instead. If Philips wouldn’t release it, then he would hire a press and promotions guy and start his own record label after all.
So we were sequestered in the little DJM studio, with Steve Brown producing and Clive Franks operating the tape machine. Clive was the guy who recorded The Troggs Tape; years later, he ended up co-producing some of my albums, and he still works with me today, doing the sound engineering for my live shows. We collectively threw everything we could at the new songs. Psychedelic sound effects, harpsichords, backwards guitar solos courtesy of Caleb, flutes, bongos, stereo panning, improvised jazz interludes, trick endings where the songs faded out then suddenly back in again, the sound of Clive whistling. If you listened carefully, you could hear the kitchen sink being dragged into the studio. We might have been better off had we realized less is sometimes more, but you don’t think like that when you’re making your first album. There’s a faint voice at the back of your mind telling you that you might never make another, so you may as well try everything while you have the chance. But, God, it was so much fun, such an adventure. The album was called Empty Sky. It came out on Dick’s new DJM label on 6 June 1969. I can remember listening back to the title track and thinking it was the greatest thing I’d ever heard in my life.
Empty Sky wasn’t a hit – it only sold a few thousand copies – but I could still sense things were starting to move, very gradually. The reviews were promising rather than great, but they were definitely an improvement on being told by the Daily Express that you couldn’t write a song as good as ‘Boom Bang-A-Bang’. Just as the album was released, we got a phone call to say that Three Dog Night had covered ‘Lady Samantha’ on their new album. Three Dog Night! They were American! An actual American rock band had recorded one of our songs. Not a light entertainer with a Saturday-night variety show on BBC1, not an entrant in the Eurovision Song Contest: a hip, successful American rock band. Bernie and I had a song on an album that was in the US Top Twenty.
And Empty Sky gave me material, which meant I could play live. The first gigs were pretty tentative. They were little pop-up shows; I was playing with any musicians I could find – usually Caleb and his new band Hookfoot – and I was still nervous: the last time I had been onstage, Long John Baldry had his tape recorder out and I was in a kaftan, suffering a complete collapse of the will to live. But the gigs got better the more comfortable I felt, and they really took off when I assembled my own band. I had met Nigel Olsson and Dee Murray lurking around DJM. Nigel was playing with a band called Plastic Penny, who had a big hit single in 1968 and, incredibly, had actually bought one of the songs Bernie and I had been trying to sell the previous year. It somehow seemed symbolic of our luck that they recorded it on an album that was released just as Plastic Penny’s moment in the spotlight passed and their career went down the toilet. Dee, meanwhile, had been in The Mirage, a psychedelic band who released singles for years without getting anywhere. They were fantastic musicians and we clicked straight away. Dee was an incredible bass player. Nigel was a drummer from the Keith Moon and Ginger Baker school, a showman with a kit that took up most of our rehearsal space and had his name emblazoned across his twin bass drums. They could both sing. We didn’t need a guitarist. The sound the three of us made was already huge and raw. Plus, there’s something about performing in a trio that gives you a real freedom to play off the cuff. It didn’t matter that we couldn’t replicate the tricky arrangements of the album: instead we could stretch out and improvise, play solos, turn songs into medleys, suddenly launch into an old Elvis cover or a version of ‘Give Peace A Chance’.
I started to think more about how I looked onstage. I wanted to be a frontman, but I was trapped behind a piano. I couldn’t strut around like Mick Jagger, or smash my instrument up like Jimi Hendrix or Pete Townshend: bitter subsequent experience has taught me that if you get carried away and try and smash up a piano by pushing it offstage, you end up looking less like a lawless rock god and more like a furniture removal man having a bad day. So I thought about the piano players I’d loved as a kid, how they had managed to communicate excitement while stuck behind the old nine-foot plank, as I affectionately called it. I thought of Jerry Lee Lewis kicking his stool away and jumping on the keyboard, how Little Richard stood up and leaned back when he played, even the way Winifred Atwell would turn to the audience and grin. They all influenced my performances. It turned out that playing the piano standing up like Little Richard is bloody hard work when you have arms as short as mine, but I persevered. We didn’t sound like anyone else, and now we didn’t look like anyone else either. Whatever else might have been happening in pop as the sixties turned into the seventies, I was fairly certain there weren’t any other piano-led power trios whose frontman was trying to mix the outrageousness and aggression of early rock and roll with Winifred Atwell’s bonhomie.
As we toured around colleges and hippy venues like the Roundhouse, the gigs got wilder and the music got better, especially when we started playing the latest batch of songs Bernie and I had come up with. I confess, I’m not always the best judge of my own work – I am, after all, the man who loudly announced that ‘Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me’ was such a terrible song that I would never countenance releasing it, of which more later – but even I could tell that our new material was in a different league to anything we’d produced before. They were easy songs to write – Bernie got the lyrics to ‘Your Song’ over breakfast one morning in Frome Court, handed them to me and I wrote the music in fifteen minutes flat – because, in a way, we’d already done all the hard work. The way they sounded was the culmination of the hours we’d previously put in trying to write together, the gigs I’d been playing with Nigel and Dee that had boosted my confidence, the years I’d spent at the Royal Academy much against my will, the nights on the club circuit in Bluesology. Something like ‘Border Song’ or ‘Take Me To The Pilot’ had a sort of funk and soulfulness that I’d picked up backing Patti LaBelle and Major Lance, but they also had a classical influence that seeped in from all those Saturday mornings where I’d been forced to study Chopin and Bartók.
They were also the product of the bedroom at Frome Court. At the time we were writing, two artists were constantly on the Littlewoods stereo. One was the rock/soul duo Delaney and Bonnie. I was completely obsessed with the way their keyboardist, Leon Russell, played. It was like he’d somehow climbed into my head and worked out exactly how I wanted to play piano before I did. He’d managed to synthesize all the music I loved – rock and roll, blues, gospel, country – into one, perfectly natural style.
And the other was The Band. We played their first two albums over and over again. Like Leon Russell’s piano playing, their songs felt like someone switching a torch on and showing us a new path to follow, a way we could do what we wanted to do. ‘Chest Fever’, ‘Tears Of Rage’, ‘The Weight’: this was what we craved to write. Bernie went crazy for the lyrics. Ever since he was a kid, he’d loved gritty stories about old America, and that was what The Band told: ‘Virgil Caine is the name and I served on the Danville train, ‘til Stoneman’s cavalry came and tore the tracks up again’. They were white musicians making soul music without covering ‘In The Midnight Hour’, or doing something that was just a pale imitation of what black artists did. It was a revelation.
When we played Dick the demos of the new songs, he was knocked out. Despite the sales of Empty Sky, he said he wanted another album. What’s more, he was going to give us £6,000 to make it. That was a remarkable leap of faith. It was an incredible amount of money to spend on an album in those days, especially one by an artist who had barely sold any records yet. There’s no doubting the belief Dick had in us, but I think his hand may also have been forced a little. Bernie and I had become friends with Muff Winwood, Stevie’s brother, who worked for Island Records and lived not far from Frome Court – I think we literally bumped into him on a train back to Pinner one day. We would go round to his house a couple of nights a week with a bottle of Mateus Rosé and a box of chocolates for his wife Zena – very sophisticated – play table football or Monopoly and pump Muff for advice about the music business. When he heard the new songs, he was really enthusiastic, and wanted to sign us to Island, a much bigger and cooler label than DJM. Word of a competitor got back to Dick, which might have galvanized him into getting his chequebook out.
Whatever the reason, the money meant we could move out of DJM into a proper studio, Trident in Soho. Steve Brown suggested we should get an outside producer: Gus Dudgeon, who’d produced David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’, a number one single that we all loved the sound of. We could afford strings and an arranger, Paul Buckmaster, who had worked on ‘Space Oddity’ too. Paul arrived looking like D’Artagnan – he had long centre-parted hair, a goatee beard and a big hat. He seemed a bit eccentric, which, as it turned out, was a false first impression. Paul wasn’t a bit eccentric. He was so eccentric as to suggest he might be genuinely nuts. He would stand in front of the orchestra and make noises with his mouth to indicate what he wanted them to do: ‘I don’t know how to describe what I want, but I want you to make a sound like this.’ They got it exactly right. He was a genius.
But then everything about the sessions was weirdly magical. Me, Gus, Steve and Paul had planned everything out in advance – the songs, the sound, the arrangements – and it all just fell into place. I had barely touched a harpsichord before we hired one for ‘I Need You To Turn To’; it was a really hard instrument to play, but I did it. I was petrified about playing live with an orchestra, but I psyched myself up, telling myself that this was it, something was finally coming to fruition. All those crappy clubs with Long John Baldry and his tape recorder, all the session work, Derf carrying his pint pot round for tips at the Northwood Hills Hotel, Bernie and me escaping from Furlong Road and Linda’s dreams of turning me into Buddy Greco: it was all leading up to this. And it worked. The whole album was done in four days.
We knew we’d made something good, something that would push us on to the next level. We were right. When it came out in April 1970 the reviews of Elton John were fantastic; John Peel played it and it crept into the bottom end of the charts. We started getting offers to play in Europe, although every time we went there something bizarre seemed to happen. In Paris, some genius booked us as the support act to Sérgio Mendes and Brasil ’66. An audience expecting an evening of bossa nova showed their delight at having their musical horizons unexpectedly broadened by booing us off. We turned up in Knokke, Belgium to discover we weren’t playing a gig at all: it was a televised song contest. We went to Holland to appear on a TV show and instead of getting us to perform, they insisted on making a film of me in a park, miming ‘Your Song’ into a microphone while surrounded, for some reason, by actors pretending to be paparazzi taking my photograph. They still show it on TV sometimes. I look absolutely furious, like I’m about to punch somebody – a fairly accurate representation of how I felt, but not really the ideal delivery for a tender ballad about blossoming love.
Back at home, though, a buzz was definitely building. In August, we played the Krumlin Festival in Yorkshire, which should have been a disaster. It was in a field in the middle of the moors. It was freezing cold, pouring with rain and completely disorganized. The stage was still being built when the festival was supposed to start, which gave the bands who were supposed to play time to start squabbling over the running order. I couldn’t be bothered getting involved with that, so we just went on, handed out brandy to the crowd and tore the place apart while Atomic Rooster and The Pretty Things were still backstage, arguing about who was the biggest star. I started seeing famous faces in the audiences at our London shows, which meant that word was getting about in the music business that we were worth checking out. A couple of weeks before we played Krumlin, Pete Townshend from The Who and Jeff Beck had turned up to our show at the Speakeasy club, which had taken over from the Cromwellian and the Bag O’ Nails as London’s big music industry hang-out. We got invited on Top of the Pops to play ‘Border Song’: our appearance didn’t do much to help its sales as a single, but Dusty Springfield introduced herself to us in the dressing room and offered to mime backing vocals during our performance. My mouth just hung open. I’d travelled to Harrow to see her live with The Springfields when I was still at school, and hung around outside the stage door afterwards, just to get another glimpse of her: she walked past in a lilac top and mauve skirt, looking incredibly chic. I’d joined her fan club in the early sixties and stuck posters of her on my bedroom wall.
The only obstacle to our progress was Dick, who had got it into his head that we should go to America and play there. He had managed to sell the album to a US label called Uni – a division of MCA – and kept talking about how enthusiastic they were about it, how they wanted us to play some club shows. I couldn’t see the point, and told him so. Something was starting to happen in Britain. The gigs were great, the album was selling OK and Dusty Springfield liked me. Bernie and I were writing song after song – we’d already started working on demos for the next album. Why lose the momentum by leaving now and going to America, where no one knew who I was?
The more I argued, the more adamant Dick became that we should go. But then I was handed a lifeline. After the Speakeasy show, Jeff Beck had invited me along to his rehearsal space in Chalk Farm to jam. Then his agent set up a meeting at DJM. Jeff effectively wanted to use me, Dee and Nigel as his backing band for an American tour. I would get a solo spot during the set, where I could play my own songs. It seemed like an incredible offer. Jeff Beck was one of the greatest guitar players I’d ever seen. His last album, Beck-Ola, had been a huge hit. Admittedly, we were only to get 10 per cent of the nightly earnings, but 10 per cent of Jeff Beck’s earnings was still a lot more than we were making now. And the important thing was the exposure. These would be big audiences, and I’d be playing my songs in front of them – not as a completely unknown artist, but as part of Jeff Beck’s band; not as a support act that everyone could ignore, but in the middle of the main set.
I was ready to ask them where to sign when Dick told Beck’s agent to stuff their 10 per cent. What was he doing? I tried to catch his eye, in order to wordlessly communicate that he should consider the wisdom of shutting up immediately. He didn’t look at me. The agent said the deal was non-negotiable. Dick shrugged.
‘I promise you now,’ he said, ‘that in six months’ time, Elton John will be earning twice what Jeff Beck does.’
What? Dick, you fucking idiot. What did you have to say that for? It sounded remarkably like a statement that was going to follow me around for the rest of my career. I could see myself in five years’ time, still slogging around the clubs, The Guy Who Was Going To Earn Twice What Jeff Beck Does. The agent swiftly disappeared – he was probably in a hurry to inform the rest of the music industry that Dick James had lost his marbles – but Dick was completely unrepentant. I didn’t need Jeff Beck. I should go to America on my own. The songs on Elton John were great. The band was fantastic live. The US record label were behind us all the way. They were going to pull out all the stops to promote us. One day I’d thank him for this.
Back at Frome Court, I talked it over with Bernie. He suggested we should think of it as a holiday. We could visit places we had only seen on TV or in films – 77 Sunset Strip, the Beverly Hillbillies’ mansion. We could go to Disneyland. We could go record shopping. Besides, the US record label were going to pull out all the stops. We’d probably be met at the airport by a limousine. Maybe a Cadillac. A Cadillac!
We stood blinking in the Los Angeles sunshine, a little cluster of us – me and Bernie, Dee and Nigel, Steve Brown and Ray Williams, who DJM had appointed my manager, our roadie Bob and David Larkham, who’d designed the covers for Empty Sky and Elton John. We were befuddled by jet lag and trying to work out why there was a bright red London bus parked outside LAX Airport. A bright red London bus with my name painted on the side of it: ELTON JOHN HAS ARRIVED. A bright red London bus that our excited American publicist, Norman Winter, was currently urging us to get on board. Bernie and I exchanged a dismayed glance: oh, for fuck’s sake, this is our limo, isn’t it?
You have no idea how slowly a London Routemaster bus goes until you’ve travelled on one from LAX to Sunset Boulevard. It took us two and a half hours, partly because the thing had a top speed of about forty miles an hour, and partly because we had to take the scenic route – they wouldn’t allow a double-decker on the freeway. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Bernie gradually sliding down in his seat, until he couldn’t be seen from outside the window, presumably in case Bob Dylan or a member of The Band happened to drive past and laugh at him.
This really wasn’t how I’d expected our arrival in California to pan out. Were it not for the fact that I could see palm trees out of the window and the bus was filled with Americans – the staff of Uni Records – I might as well have been on the 38 to Clapton Pond. It was my first experience of the difference between British record companies and US ones. In Britain, no matter how much your label loves you, no matter how passionate they are about working on your album, it’s always tempered by a certain reserve, a national tendency to understatement and dry humour. That clearly wasn’t the case in America: it was just non-stop enthusiasm, a completely different kind of energy. No one had ever talked to me the way Norman Winter was talking – ‘this is gonna be huge, we’ve done this, we’ve done that, Odetta’s coming to the show, Bread are coming to the show, The Beach Boys are coming to the show, it’s gonna be incredible’. No one had ever talked to me as much as Norman Winter was talking: as far as I could tell, his mouth hadn’t actually stopped moving since he’d introduced himself in the arrivals lounge. It was simultaneously startling and weirdly exhilarating.
And everything he said turned out to be completely true. Norman Winter and his promotions department had done this and done that: got LA record stores to stock the album and display posters, lined up interviews, invited umpteen stars to see the show. Someone had convinced my Uni labelmate Neil Diamond to get onstage and introduce me. I was headlining over David Ackles, which seemed completely ridiculous.
‘But David Ackles is on Elektra,’ protested Bernie weakly, remembering the hours we’d spent in Frome Court listening to his debut album and discussing the incomparable West Coast hipness of the label that had released it: Elektra, run by the great Jac Holzman, home to The Doors and Love, Tim Buckley and Delaney and Bonnie.
It was fantastic work from a passionate and committed team who had used every bit of their expertise in creating hype. They had miraculously turned a show by an unknown artist at a 300-capacity club into an event. And it certainly had a profound knock-on effect on me. Before, I’d been dubious about the idea of playing in America. Now, I was absolutely terrified. When everybody else went on a day trip to Palm Springs, arranged by Ray, I wisely elected to remain at the hotel alone, in order to concentrate on the pressing business of panicking about the gig. The more I panicked, the more furious I got. How dare they all go to Palm Springs and enjoy themselves, when they should have been back at the hotel with me, pointlessly worrying themselves sick? In the absence of anybody to shout at in person, I rang Dick James in London and shouted at him. I was coming back to England. Now. They could stick their gig and their star-studded guest list and their onstage introduction from Neil Diamond up their arses. It took all Dick’s powers of avuncular persuasion to stop me packing my suitcase. I decided to stay, dividing my remaining time before the gig between record shopping and a little light sulking whenever anyone mentioned Palm Springs.
I can remember two things very clearly about the first show we played at the Troubadour. The first is that the applause as I walked onstage had a slightly odd quality to it: it was accompanied by a kind of surprised murmur, as if the audience were expecting someone else. In a way, I suppose they were. The cover of the Elton John album is dark and sombre. The musicians on the back are dressed down and hippyish – I’m wearing a black T-shirt and a crocheted waistcoat. And that’s the guy they assumed they’d see: a brooding, introspective singer-songwriter. But when I’d gone shopping for new clothes a couple of weeks before I left for the States, I’d visited a clothes shop in Chelsea called Mr Freedom, about which there was a real buzz developing: the designer Tommy Roberts was letting his imagination run riot, making clothes that looked like a cartoonist had drawn them. The stuff in the window was so outrageous that I hung around on the pavement outside for ages, trying to pluck up the courage to go in. Once I did, Tommy Roberts was so friendly and enthusiastic that he talked me into buying a selection of clothes not even Tony King would have countenanced wearing in public. Wearing them, I felt different, like I was expressing a side of my personality that I’d kept hidden, a desire to be outrageous and over-the-top. I suppose it all went back to chancing on that photo of Elvis in the barber’s in Pinner when I was a kid: I liked that sense of shock, of seeing a star who made you wonder what the hell was going on. The clothes from Mr Freedom weren’t outrageous because they were sexy or threatening, they were outrageous because they were larger than life, more fun than the world around them. I loved them. Before I went onstage at the Troubadour, I put them all on at once. So instead of an introspective hippy singer-songwriter, the audience were greeted by the sight of a man in bright yellow dungarees, a long-sleeved T-shirt covered in stars and a pair of heavy workman’s boots, also bright yellow, with a large set of blue wings sprouting from them. This was not the way sensitive singer-songwriters in America in 1970 looked. This was not the way anyone of sound mind in America in 1970 looked.
And the second thing I remember very clearly is peering out into the crowd while we were playing and realizing, with a nasty start, that Leon Russell was in the second row. I hadn’t spotted any of the galaxy of stars that were supposed to be there, but you couldn’t miss him. He looked incredible, a vast mane of silver hair and a long beard framing a mean, impassive face. I couldn’t tear my eyes off him, even though looking at him made the bottom fall out of my stomach. The gig had been going well up to that point – Dee and Nigel sounded tight, we’d started to relax and stretch out the songs a little. Now I suddenly felt as nervous as I had at the hotel on the day of the Palm Springs trip. It was like one of those terrible nightmares where you’re back at school, sitting a test, then realize that you’re not wearing any trousers or underpants: you’re playing the most important gig of your career, then see your idol in the audience, glaring at you, stony-faced.
I had to pull myself together. I had to do something to take my mind off the fact that Leon Russell was watching me. I jumped to my feet and kicked my piano stool away. I stood there, knees bent, pounding at the keys like Little Richard. I dropped to the floor, balancing on one hand and playing with the other, my head under the piano. Then I stood up, threw myself forward and did a handstand on the keyboard. Judging by the noise the audience made, they hadn’t expected that either.
Afterwards, I stood, dazed, in the fug of the packed dressing room. It had gone amazingly well. Everyone from Britain was elated. Norman Winter was talking with a speed and intensity that suggested that on the journey from LAX he’d actually been at his most laid-back and laconic. People from Uni Records kept bringing other people over to shake my hand. Journalists. Celebrities. Quincy Jones. Quincy Jones’s wife. Quincy Jones’s children. He seemed to have turned up with his entire family. I couldn’t take anything in.
Then I froze. Somewhere over the shoulder of one of Quincy Jones’s umpteen relatives I could see Leon Russell in the doorway. He started pushing through the crowd towards me. His face was as impassive and mean as it had seemed from the stage: he didn’t look much like a man who’d just enjoyed the night of his life. Shit. I’ve been found out. He’s going to tell everyone what a fraud I am. He’s going to tell me that I can’t play piano.
He shook my hand and asked how I was doing. His voice was a soft Oklahoma drawl. Then he told me I’d just played a great gig, and asked if I wanted to go on tour with him.
The next few days passed like a strange, feverish dream. We played more shows at the Troubadour, all of them packed out, all of them fantastic. More celebrities came. Each night, I rummaged deeper in my bag of Mr Freedom clothes, pulling out stuff that was more and more outrageous, until I found myself facing an audience of rock stars and Los Angeles tastemakers wearing a pair of tight silver hot pants, bare legs and a T-shirt with ROCK AND ROLL emblazoned across it in sequins. Leon Russell appeared backstage again and told me his home-made recipe for a sore throat remedy, as if we were old friends. Uni Records took us all to Disneyland, and I bought armfuls of albums at Tower Records on Sunset Strip. The LA Times published a review by their music editor, Robert Hilburn. ‘Rejoice,’ it opened. ‘Rock music, which has been going through a rather uneventful period recently, has a new star. He’s Elton John, a 23-year-old Englishman, whose debut Tuesday night at the Troubadour was, in almost every way, magnificent.’ Fucking hell. Bob Hilburn was a huge deal: I’d known he was at the gig, but I had no idea he was going to write that. Once it was published, Ray Williams was suddenly deluged with offers from American promoters. It was decided we’d extend our stay and play more shows, in San Francisco and New York. I did interview after interview. The Elton John album was all over FM radio. One station in Pasadena, KPPC, took out a full-page advert in the Los Angeles Free Press literally thanking me for coming to America.
As everyone knows, fame, especially sudden fame, is a hollow, shallow and dangerous thing, its dark, seductive powers no substitute for true love or real friendship. On the other hand, if you’re a terribly shy person, desperately in need of a confidence boost – someone who spent a lot of their childhood trying to be as invisible as possible so you didn’t provoke one of your mum’s moods or your dad’s rage – I can tell you for a fact that being hailed as the future of rock and roll in the LA Times and feted by a succession of your musical heroes will definitely do the trick. As evidence, I present to you the sight of Elton John, a twenty-three-year-old virgin, a man who’s never chatted anyone up in his life, on the night of 31 August 1970. I am in San Francisco, where I’m due to play a gig in a few days’ time. I am spending the evening at the Fillmore, watching the British folk-rock band Fairport Convention – fellow survivors of the sodden hell that was the Krumlin Festival – and meeting the venue’s owner, legendary promoter Bill Graham, who is keen for me to perform at his New York concert hall, the Fillmore East. But I’m not really concentrating on Fairport Convention or Bill Graham. Because I have decided that tonight is the night I’m going to seduce someone. Or allow myself to be seduced. Definitely one or the other; either will do.
I’d discovered that John Reid happened to be in San Francisco at the same time as me, attending Motown Records’ tenth anniversary celebrations. Since meeting him through Tony King, I’d casually dropped in on him at EMI a couple of times. Whatever feeble signals I was attempting to give off – if indeed I actually was attempting to give any signals off – went completely unnoticed. He seemed to think I was only visiting in order to ransack the pile of soul singles in his office, or to give him copies of my own records. But that was then. Emboldened by the events of the last week, I managed to find out where he was staying and rang him up. I breathlessly told him about what had happened in LA, and then, as nonchalantly as possible, suggested we should meet up. I was staying at the Miyako, a nice little Japanese-themed hotel near the Fillmore. Perhaps he could come over for a drink one night?
The gig finished. I went backstage to say hello to Fairport, had a couple of drinks and a quick chat, then made my excuses and went back to the Miyako alone. I hadn’t been in my room long when the phone rang: there’s a Mr Reid to see you in reception. Oh God. This is it.