Life for me started like many of my generation during the Second World War, on the edge of poverty, but my upbringing was typical of thousands of families. I was born on 14 August 1942 in Hackney, in the East End of London. We had two rooms in a cramped flat and all the ‘Nos’. No car, no money, no inside loo, no garden, no heating, no hot water, no fridge – you get the idea. What my sister and I did have in abundance was masses of love from our parents, Joe and Diana. My mum was the greatest. If you believed her stories about our experiences during the war, at least three V1 rockets landed on our street, and each time she threw her body over mine to protect me, which she obviously must have done, as I am still here.
Three eggs a week was the ration, not per person, but for the whole family, which was only the two of us until 1947. Dad was still fighting the Japanese in Burma, so three eggs wasn’t that bad. These small treasures were kept in what I can only describe as a cold box. It stood on four legs and had a door with a mesh covering on it. It didn’t create ice, as it had no electricity, but it was where you stored milk, if you could get it (the only milk we drank was the powdered kind), margarine in small quantities and, of course, those precious eggs.
What Hitler failed to do in his bombardment of London, this little bugger achieved. A neighbour called my mother downstairs, and while she was gone only a minute or two, on her return she found her son scrambling three broken eggs on a scrappy old linoleum floor. She had queued for hours to obtain those three little gems, and now all that was left were three broken shells and a hell of a mess. I have it on good authority that she crumpled to the floor and cried for over an hour. Not just over the eggs, but the circumstances of her life at that time.
When my dad returned, the bedroom was shared by all four of us: me, my sister, Jan, and Mum and Dad. Nothing particularly unusual about that either. The walls, even in summer, had a smell of wet plaster. In the winter, the walls would freeze and I would watch small rivulets of water meandering their way from ceiling to floor. This, all the doctors believed, was the root cause of the chronic asthma that I suffered throughout my childhood.
Other than bombs raining down night and day, the first five years were pretty uneventful. I have no recollection of ever hearing a bomb, or spending many a night sleeping down in the tube stations. The war ended in Europe and I remember faintly the biggest occasion in all our lives, the VE party held in our grimy little street; the bunting and colour brightening this impoverished place for possibly the first time in its life.
Most of my early memories centre on the things that appeal to all of us in our formative years – Christmas Day, when there was fruit in the bowl and chicken to eat, and Guy Fawkes Night, with guys to be made and pennies to be collected.
After 1947, my old man was back from the war and gainfully employed in an accountancy practice, so our lot started to improve slowly. Within a year or two, he had decided to take his family out of the East End for hopefully a better life.
At the age of seven, I left my primary school in Shacklewell Lane, in Hackney, and moved to the wide-open spaces of Chingford in Essex. My new school in this desirable suburb was called Chase Lane. I mention it for two reasons only, neither of which has affected my life. Many years later, I was to discover that two celebrities were also alumni of this innocuous seat of learning. They were David Beckham, who requires no introduction, and Michael Nyman, now one of England’s greatest classical musicians and composers.
How David Beckham ever learnt to play football at this school is amazing, because to the best of my memory, there were no football fields in Chase Lane, only a tarmac playground. I could be mistaken about this, as it was a long time ago now.
From here, having failed my eleven-plus exam miserably, I was on my way again to another great educational institution, Wellington Avenue Secondary School, where I was to spend the next four years in the junior remove. I can hear you wondering, what is the junior remove? Well, basically, it was a polite title for the group of kids who were backward or with anti-social behaviour, so most of my mates had been locked up in a borstal detention centre, or had lost arms and legs falling off motorcycles, before they were seventeen.
My reason for being there was much simpler. I was a mess. At thirteen years old, I could barely write. Arithmetic was a word with no meaning. My days in class were spent staring into the middle-distance, watching chalk dust floating slowly around the teacher’s blackboard. In one year alone, we had twelve teachers, each one replacing the other, unable to cope with the rabble sat in front of them. I certainly learnt nothing and the other kids probably didn’t either. However, one man thought that this skinny, frightened little kid had something going for him, even if it was well hidden.
At fifteen, I was due to leave with absolutely no qualifications, when Dave Wallace suggested that if I were to stay on an extra year, he would give me special tuition, and I should try to take at least two GCE O levels, so this I did. By some mistake, I ended up with five.
During this period of enlightenment, I achieved two things that possibly gave a clue as to my future as an entrepreneur. Firstly, I discovered that the local fish and chip shop needed newspapers, bundles of them. A bundle was enough newspapers to create a fifteen-inch-high stack, for which they paid me three pence. The funny thing was that I worked at this trade for weeks on end, collecting discarded newspapers from houses up and down the street, then trudging a quarter of a mile to deliver them. Tough as it was, it definitely lit the entrepreneurial flame.
My second business, which I started aged about fifteen and a half, happened after my mum and dad had given me a Christmas present of some plaster of Paris and rubber moulds of various animals. One of the moulds was a panda. It stood about three and a half inches high. I soon set to it and produced a small plaster panda. I painted its ears black, as well as its arms and legs. He was beautiful. A day or two later, one of my mates asked me to show it to his mother, which of course I did.
‘But it’s beautiful,’ she declared, echoing my sentiment. ‘I have to have one of these!’ So she did. The next morning, she was the proud owner of a plaster panda and I was two shillings richer. This definitely beat delivering to the fish and chip shop. Within days I went into full production and a week or two later I had an army of pandas in various states of drying, half-painted and glazed, lined up on the coal bunker in the back garden. With the success of these tiny statues, I decided to expand my line, and so the pandas were joined shortly by a bullfighter and – horror of horrors – three flying ducks. Three mates became my salesmen at a commission of six pence per item. They sold in droves and, without knowing it, I had started my first business.
I became besotted by music at the age of fifteen. I remember sitting in front of a small black-and-white television in early 1957 watching Sunday Night at the London Palladium. There was an American singer on the show by the name of Guy Mitchell, and a light suddenly switched on in my head. His big hit was ‘Singing the Blues’. I felt a surge of excitement for this new music, which I had never heard before. I recall turning to my father and saying to him, ‘That’s what I want to do one day. I want to be in music.’ His response was typical of his generation. ‘Don’t be silly,’ he said. ‘That’s one business it is impossible to get into.’
This feeling was only to be surpassed a few weeks later, when I was sitting high up in the cheap seats at the Dominion Theatre on Tottenham Court Road, watching Bill Haley and his Comets. It was his first UK tour after his smash hit ‘Rock Around the Clock’, and his live show hit me like a steam hammer. When the double bass player threw himself onto his instrument, legs pointing upwards into the air, this was to become my inspiration some six years later. It drove me to persuade Viv Prince, the drummer of my first band, the Pretty Things, to leave his drums during a number and to crawl across the floor, beating a tattoo as he went, and encouraging the bass player onto his knees as well.
This was the first of many hundreds of rock ’n’ roll gigs that I was to attend in the next decade or two. My other musical influences were the artists of the late 1950s, with wonderful records such as ‘Oh Carol’ by Neil Sedaka, and ‘Everyday’ by Buddy Holly, who I could have died for, but before them, of paramount importance, was Al Jolson, who sang songs like ‘Swanee’ and ‘I’m Sitting on Top of the World’. He died in 1950, when I was eight years old, and he was the first and last artist that I ever worshipped. Indeed, on his death, I cried for days and was totally inconsolable.
The other major influence in those days was a gentleman by the name of Mike Todd, who was married to the film star Elizabeth Taylor. He was a great showman and film producer, who made my imagination swoop and swirl. Each new creation, each new production, such as the film Around the World in 80 Days, was achieved by a promoter of consummate ability. Here was a master.
Having left school at sixteen with no academic achievements other than the obligatory O levels, I set out to take on the real world. The first thing I had to do was to earn a crust and it was barely a crust that was forthcoming. I spent that first summer doing nothing but finding and collecting golf balls on a municipal golf course in Chingford, then selling them back to the hapless golfers; or walking hand in hand in the local park with a girl called Nicolette, going home and listening to my pop records. Like any kid, music was the lynchpin of life.
Sadly, a man’s life cannot be all fun and frolics; I needed a proper job, or so my mother told me. I had to become a contributor to the family income, and she decided that London was the place to go. So, one morning we both took the Central line from Loughton to the West End, where we alighted at Bond Street station. She set off down New Bond Street with me trailing behind her, when lo and behold, there was an advertisement in a shop window.
It was for one of the great purveyors of photographic equipment, Wallace Heaton Ltd, and, after a successful interview, they were to become my first employers. However, this is where the glamour stopped. The job of stockroom assistant was simple. I was pinned down in the bowels of the earth, surrounded by a multitude of cardboard boxes, each one containing Rolleiflex, Leica and Pentax cameras, alongside rows of enlargers standing together like a satanic wood, and surrounded by reams of enlarging paper, print paper, bottles of developer and fixer.
On receiving the order from the front desk, or from one of the salesmen two floors above me, I would lug the camera or instruments up to the awaiting customer. Of course, this action also worked in reverse: what goes up, had to come down. When the daily delivery arrived, the goods were taken down to where they were stored, checked and racked. All this, including train fare, for a measly wage of £3.50 a week.
There was a method in my madness; for some reason I was quite taken with the idea of becoming a photographer. Believing there was no way of getting into the music industry, it seemed that I had fallen into a job that had a certain amount of creativity, and all I had to do was go upstairs with the photographers and study their craft (well, it seemed a good idea at the time). Indeed, but for one small incident, this would have been the case. Promotion came quickly and before too long I was up on the third floor in the print drying and glazing room. It was my task to take the wet prints from their vats into the processing room, where they were placed on large, heated, polished silver drums to produce either a plain or glazed print.
At odd times during the day, I was invited downstairs by the ‘big boys’ into the studios, where the whole plate cameras, tripods, backdrops and light meters cluttered the floor in a profusion of polished wood and beautiful craftsmanship. As the spring and summer approached, the pace and my interest quickened. Then one day I was offered the position of assistant photographer.
However, there were certain stipulations and other pieces of knowledge to be acquired before achieving this exalted position. I would have to spend at least six months in the darkroom processing and printing films, and would also need to take the City & Guilds course in photography, but, with a bit of luck, I would be fully fledged within twelve months.
Sure enough, six weeks later, I was told to start the next day in the darkroom. The promotion had found its way to my doorstep. The next morning was a blistering hot summer’s day, followed in sequence by another and yet another. As each day passed, the recurring thought was of the horror of being lost in that darkroom for the rest of that glorious summer. Tempting as the prospect was of becoming a photographer, I handed in my notice and this promising career faded before me like a sepia print left too long in the sun.
So, with only a post office account stamped South Moulton Street and the £50 that I had saved, I took a few months off. The time was spent dreaming of the future. I was nearly seventeen years old and I yearned to do something more creative with my life. How, I wondered, could I turn my love of music into some kind of paid activity?
My other interests were the making of films; art, drawing and sculpture; and acting. I’d been particularly keen to try to get into RADA, but had met with increasing opposition from my parents. At around this time, I noticed that the BBC had put an advert in the papers looking for trainee film cameramen, and this seemed to me to run parallel with my photographic interests. The course was for a year, the wages were an amazing £12 a week, and the potential glamour of the whole thing was unquenchable. It sounded just the kind of thing I needed, so I applied. After all, hadn’t I spent many hours taking still photos, as well as holiday films on a rather antiquated second-hand Bolex cine camera? I had the perfect pedigree.
A week or so later, a very formal letter arrived from the BBC, commanding me to attend an interview at Broadcasting House, time and date supplied. I arrived at the appointed hour and was ushered into a large, airless waiting room, only to find several other persons awaiting their fate.
‘Morrison!’ The word rang round the room.
‘Yes, sir,’ I stuttered, feeling increasingly tense.
‘Follow me,’ he said, with about as much charm as a wet tea towel.
We entered into a huge, wood-panelled boardroom consisting of twelve chairs and a highly polished boardroom table. A large picture hung behind the chairman (I think it was of a past director-general). A dozen pink faces turned towards me as I was seated at the end of the table. I was immediately reminded of that wonderful Victorian painting about the English Civil War, And When Did You Last See Your Father, where a timid little Royalist boy is being grilled by a panel of stern-faced Parliamentarians. At once I sensed disaster was about to unfold, and was quickly proven right. The first question they asked me gave it away.
‘Do you use 35mm or 8mm film?’
‘Oh no,’ I replied, ‘I buy a box of film from the chemists.’
Let me assure the reader that all our annual licence fees were being very well looked after, at this time at least, and these twelve ‘just men and true’ were not about to hand out £12 a week unless you knew exactly what you were talking about and, unfortunately, I didn’t.
‘Thank you, Morrison, we’ll be in touch.’
The letter duly arrived advising me that I was not the stuff of which film cameramen are made. Years later, when I went frequently to the studios of both the BBC and ITV to see their various rock ’n’ roll shows, my eyes would dwell on these cameramen and my thoughts would turn to what might have been. Once again, the hand of fate had thrown the dice. Fortunately, it was a double six.
Meanwhile, there was a more pressing problem that I had to contend with; that of making money. The fifty quid had by now been frittered away.
• • •
Bill Haley and his Comets embarked on their first British tour in February 1957. They arrived at Southampton from New York on the liner Queen Elizabeth and were greeted by about five thousand cheering fans, before travelling by train to Waterloo Station in London, where they were met by thousands more fans, who formed such a crush that the press dubbed it ‘The Second Battle of Waterloo’. It was the first time an American rock ’n’ roll star had ever visited the UK.
The month-long tour opened at the Dominion Theatre in Tottenham Court Road on 6 February and the demand for tickets was so great that the Daily Mirror sponsored a special farewell concert at the Dominion on 10 March, and this is probably the show that Bryan attended, as it came after Guy Mitchell’s appearance on Sunday Night at the London Palladium. Also on the bill were the British singers Dennis Lotis and Alma Cogan, and the Jack Hylton Orchestra. Not exactly rock ’n’ roll!