I had a couple of art student friends called Liz Sherwood and Patricia Ford, quite flamboyant characters: head-turners. Liz was half Italian and her hair was black and kinky like mine, so she had the haircut I wanted: the Julie Driscoll/Vidal Sassoon ‘Greek Goddess’, i.e. spiky on top, feathered and layered around the back and sides. Unisex slightly before the event.
According to Liz, the first time she saw me I was flying out of the door of the Good Food Inn on Deansgate, along with Tommo, Mike Newell, and our belligerent drunk troublemaking pal, the lovely Kenny Burgess Clark.
Back in the days when pubs closed at eleven, we used to go to the Good Food Inn, where if you bought a foot-long hot dog you were entitled to get a drink and hang around indefinitely. It was a way of extending the night while not being outdoors – there was nowhere to go, but you had to go somewhere. On the occasion in question, Kenny, for some reason, after consuming an entire cheeseburger, immediately complained about it and refused to pay. Kenny was always getting us into scrapes: he just wanted it to kick off, he wanted push to come to shove – some people are like that after a couple of sherbets. It wound up with all four of us being physically slung out of the place onto the street, and the block being put on all of us. After-hours hang-out joints were not that common, so consequently this put Kenny in the doghouse for quite some time, although, somehow, he continued to occupy the high moral ground on the subject.
That was Liz’s first recollection of me; she’d spotted my moustache with the Pomade Hongroise and the antique three-piece suit I’d recently had modified at a tailor’s, and which, unusually at the time, I wore with a watch and chain.
Liz and Pat had turned up one night at the MSG with a bunch of students from the art school that Liz hung out with. One of her lecturers at art college had talked them into it, and Tommo, Mike, and I somehow became part of that team.
Liz and I became really close. She was a good friend and an easy companion, very funny, with a distinctive giggle you could hear five miles away and a default facial expression of enthusiastic surprise. She was an immensely gifted painter, but like me she’d got the showbiz bug and her face was made for television.
She looked great, redolent of the young Amanda ‘Carry On Cleo’ Barrie. I don’t quite know how to explain it: she wasn’t conventional leading-lady beautiful, but she was very cute, kooky, with the fashionably angular Sixties physique, all of which I found very endearing.
She dressed very carefully, and always looked fabulous in the outfits she put together. Whatever it took to look right on the money at any time, Liz had it. She made it look easy; she was a great shoplifter – erm, I imagine.
Speaking of shoplifting, we spent a great deal of time in an up-market department store called Kendal Milne, the nearest thing Manchester had to Barkers. It was in a beautiful purpose-built art deco building (now House of Fraser) made out of Portland stone and glass bricks. In a certain light you can’t quite tell what is transparent and what is opaque.
Kendal Milne had a furniture store on the opposite side of the road, which you could reach by way of an underpass, itself lined with little shops: a subterranean street, ingenious! We were mainly interested in The Way In, a trendy new women’s boutique which occupied an entire floor of the building. The Way In was Manchester’s equivalent of Biba, selling the latest fun fashions, shoes, and accessories. It also stocked Biba cosmetics. Liz loved that whole Barbara Hulanicki vibe – plum lipstick, fake eyelashes, statement sunglasses, oversized fedoras in amplified colours, and plastic jewellery. There were floral displays, potted palms, exotic plumes of all kinds, beanbags, scatter cushions, and gonks cast carelessly here and about.
Entire days would be squandered in this place, with Liz trying stuff on, and me helping myself to a free squirt of the latest fragrance from Paris, France. All the while in the background, on a seemingly endless loop, either ‘I Can’t Let Maggie Go’ by Honeybus, ‘Rainbow Valley’ by Love Affair, or ‘Excerpt from a Teenage Opera’ by Keith West.*
If not The Way In, it would be C&A or Chelsea Girl, Marks & Spencer’s ladies’ department, Etam or Van Allen, the last two specialising in the skinny-rib crewneck sweaters I liked to wear. When it came to buying clothes, Liz was the perfect second opinion.
She and I were similar in many ways; I hate to say it, but we both had the same sense of entitlement. She never paid to get in anywhere either. We used to just sail in and out of clubs and gigs and parties and get invited to all sorts of shit. We were a kind of double act in that way – who did we think we were?
We were inseparable, but not actually an item: I never put the move on her. I didn’t even put the mood on her. Liz was right up my street, but when it came to guys, I couldn’t make her out. She had all these boyfriends that I never approved of. I thought they weren’t her type, that they didn’t get it with her at all, that none of them were deserving of her special charms.
I can’t remember her ever getting her heart broken by any of these unsuitable suitors; she always baled out before it got nutty. I never saw her exploited by anybody. She called the shots all the way. Whoever invented women’s lib, it wasn’t on her behalf.
Nobody had a phone, so we’d just run into each other at various haunts. In Cromford Court, the Cavern had become the Jigsaw, and now, in the Summer of Love, after a psychedelic paint job, under the stewardship of Roger Eagle it had been renamed the Magic Village. Liz used to hang out there with her mate Sue Richardson, so I made sporadic visits to the place. I didn’t like it, but I never paid to get in anyway.
The Magic Village was just the same shithole as the Cavern had been, but with hippy self-expression splattered all over the walls, mattresses with Navajo rugs in lieu of seats, and the smell of putrefaction and poor water management now tempered by incense, hashish, and patchouli oil.
Roger Eagle was seeking refuge from the very thing he had pioneered, namely the music policy at the Twisted Wheel. He was now a soul fugitive, and with the exception of Jimi Hendrix, Richie Havens, and the Charles Lloyd Quartet, was playing the entirely white repertoire of the West Coast love crowd: Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus by Spirit, ‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida’ by Iron Butterfly, songs with guitar solos that went on and on and on for the rest of your life and beyond. Even so, there were a couple of tunes that I liked, namely ‘On the Road Again’ by Canned Heat featuring Al ‘Blind Owl’ Wilson on vocals and harmonica, and ‘I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night)’ by The Electric Prunes.
Liz didn’t care too much about the music one way or the other, but an outing to the Magic Village was an excuse to wear bandanas and tie-dyed stuff, plus these floaty garments that she and Sue Richardson didn’t usually have the opportunity to wear in Manchester. (What could be worse than wet chiffon? It just doesn’t do that chiffon thing no more.)
Roger used to go round vox-popping the crowd about any future stateside acts he was about to book. How much they would pay to see Frank Zappa, for instance. He seemed inordinately desperate to hire Country Joe and the Fish, but these hippies were reluctant to cough up anything at all: believing money to be intrinsically evil, they expected musicians to travel from California and play for nothing.
When we weren’t schmying around the city centre, Liz’s main occupation was hanging about with Pat Ford in selected watering holes in order to schmooze with the media types who drank in them, with the hope of furthering their showbiz ambitions. I invited myself along for the same reason. They spent a lot of time in the Grapes, round the corner from Granada Studios, which was always full of TV personnel including Tommy Mann, who had left the grunt-’n’-groan world of Greco-Roman freestyle wrestling to become a fight arranger for Granada. He was also a stuntman and character actor who had played bit parts in The Avengers, Softly, Softly, and Vendetta. Another regular at the Grapes was Ian ‘Star of TV’s Lovejoy’ McShane. I suspect the pub-grub menu was a big attraction. Unusually for a pub of that period, the Grapes served food, and when I say food, I obviously mean a Ploughman’s. But not just any Ploughman’s: this one featured Gorgonzola cheese!
Pat was a would-be socialite, a right climber, but she couldn’t half drink. Pints and pints of beer. The thing about Pat was, she was always pushing people around – don’t do that, do this. She couldn’t help it – she had organisational skills. Impromptu soirées at somebody else’s house were a speciality. If she decided you were having a party, that was all about it. She’d turn up with a shipload of sailors in tow: ‘I’ll show you a good time if it kills you.’ She was very pretty, curvaceous even, and always travelled with a male entourage, an interchangeable chain of fools she led around by the nose, her slightest wish their command. A born leader of men. It didn’t entirely work on me, what with my lack of team spirit, so it was a bit of a relief, frankly, when she got a part in the Glasgow Metropole production of Hair.
Pat organised an audition for Liz, who got a part in the chorus. According to Pat it was money for nothing, although she might be required to disrobe, but only if the vibe was right.
Ten months later, the run ended, and Liz and Pat were back in Manchester, any vestige of stage fright they might have possessed long ago ditched, along with their garments, on the stage of the Glasgow Metropole. We started hanging out in the Stables Theatre Club, a former hostelry for shire horses, now a social club after a billion-dollar makeover by Granada Studios.
The Stables was a louche late-night hang-out for the showbiz crowd: TV newsreaders, anchormen, weathermen, soap-opera personalities, sports reporters, producers, boxers, footballers, and gossip columnists. It stayed open all hours, occasionally featuring some rudimentary cabaret entertainment: someone on piano, a jazz trio, or one of the new breed of sensitive young singer-songwriters after the manner of Ralph McTell or Al Stewart.* The pre-Taggart Alex Norton, for instance, who was quite the handsome ragamuffin young balladeer back then – Aran sweater, finger in the ear, probably didn’t shave on a daily basis, kind of Ewan McGregor before the event. He would do a set involving Woody Guthrie covers and one or two of his own songs, often rambunctious tales of drunken carousing in his native Glasgow.
There was a bit of a buzz going on around me doing poetry at Bernard Manning’s Embassy Club, of all places. Poetry at the Embassy Club? Wow! That’s a first! Pre-The Comedians, to these ponces at the Stables Theatre Club (with the honourable exception of Johnnie Hamp, the Granada TV producer)* the Embassy was the other side of the universe.
The Stables was the perfect venue, so I started doing my thing there in return for free booze plus extravagant public displays of carefully considered adulation: a new experience for me. Most importantly, it helped me establish myself as a poet and professional raconteur in the comparatively new realm of endeavour, commercial television.
The first cab off the rank was ‘Salome’. It had worked on Bernard, and I thought the TV crowd would also appreciate the compressed adjectival imagery. I pitched it just right: one early enthusiast was Ken Farrington, aka Billy Walker in Coronation Street. The show’s creator Tony Warren was also a regular in the audience, as were, I imagine, the writer Jack Rosenthal and his future wife Maureen Lipman.
For good or ill, the thespian world runs on effusive language, and at this point it was running in my favour. One night, I was approached by Alex Norton and a friend of his, a photographer called Kevin Horgan, a man with the saturnine grace of the late Liberal dog-murderer Jeremy Thorpe. Alex explained that they had plans to open their own nightclub, which would become a magnet for Manchester’s burgeoning young radical crowd. They were going to call it the Penny University. Apparently that’s what coffee houses were called in the late seventeenth century, when they were perceived as the very percolator of caffeinated sedition.
As I’ve said, at the time, most clubs had their own song. With that in mind, Alex had composed a Penny University anthem that needed lyrics. That was where I came in. He put a figure on it and played me the tune.
This was a big event: I was being paid to apply my artistic expertise to a project that wasn’t my own. It was my first commission: ten pounds for the work of an afternoon. I was now a ‘commercial’ poet.
I still remember the tune, but I’ve forgotten the words. I’ll have to ask Taggart: I wonder if he’s got any recorded evidence? Surely there’s a dossier somewhere in the files of Scotland Yard, or Strathclyde Police, or wherever he is. I haven’t seen him since those days. He probably lives in a castle near Loch Lomond or something, probably got his own tartan.