If you ever get the chance, write a song that gets to number one in the charts and then appear on Top of the Pops. It’s great fun. Writing novelty songs was still something of a novelty for me in those days, but following the success of ‘Thank U Very Much’, the pressure was on for the group to provide a follow-up. At first we toyed with titles like ‘Thanks a Million’ and ‘Ta Ever So’, before deciding on ‘Do you Remember’, a summer-of-love kind of toe-tapper that began:
Do do do do do you remember
Do do do do do you recall
The day we went out into the country
Just to get away from it all
Although they were very much like myself, naïve and sentimental, I still retain a fondness for the lyrics, which prescribed the tempo and almost wrote the music. Mike crooned the verses save one, which I voiced in the manner of a lovelorn poet, and into the middle eight we introduced a soft-shoe shuffle for John to perform on stage, for whenever we made a record it was always with theatre performance in mind, not a sound policy, as it turned out, because although Mike looked like a singer, I could pass for a poet and John was hilarious hoofing about on stage, we weren’t visible on record and ‘Do You Remember’ became only a minor hit. The pressure was on, if we didn’t come up quickly with big seller it would be back to the ladies’ hairdressers for Mike, the circus for John and the classroom for me. Luckily for us all, Lydia E. Pinkham, the inventor of a vegetable compound ‘For relieving hot flashes and certain other symptoms associated with “Change of Life” (Menopause) and cramps and other distress of monthly periods (Menstruation) not due to organic disease. Acts as a uterine sedative’ was to provide the unlikely inspiration. I remember joining in the drunken chorus of ‘Lily the Pink’ on the coach after university cricket matches and in the student bar, but I could never bring myself to sing any of the outrageously rude verses. It was also one of the songs that would lift Scaffold spirits on the way home from a gig in the Black Country, with Hewo at the wheel beeping time on the car horn, while achieving a syncopatic effect using the windscreen wipers.
If I had kept a journal rather than an appointments diary, Friday 21 June 1968 might have read:
Two o’clock this afternoon we’re off to Aintree Motors, to open the new forecourt (providing space for an extra 200 second-hand cars in excellent condition) by singing ‘Thank U Very Much for Aintree Motors’. Pick up cheque and make a run for it. Saturday and Sunday we’re playing Bradford University. We’ll do our two-hour show of sketches and sing maybe three songs (including the new one, ‘Do You Remember?’). Train down to London on Tuesday for production meeting with Norrie Paramor at EMI about our next single, and a fifteen-minute spot in the anti-apartheid concert at the Albert Hall next evening. (Looking forward to meeting Sammy Davis Jr.) Back up to Liverpool for gig in St Helens, then grab poetry hat and head back down to London on Sunday for Late Night Line-Up with Joan Bakewell on BBC 2. Back oop north for cabaret in Southport on Tuesday, followed by The Basil Brush Show at TV Centre in London the following day.
Had I kept a journal in those days, the title ‘Up and Down Like a Blue-arsed Fly’ might have been appropriate, but now I can understand why I never did: I wouldn’t have had the time to fill it in. Sadly, I can’t remember my meeting with Sammy Davis Jr, nor my brush with Basil, but the recollection of my appearance on Late Night Line-Up still brings an apricot tinge to my finely chiselled cheekbones. This rather highbrow, but popular, programme went out live every Sunday evening and consisted of a number of guests discussing the arts and various topics of the day with Joan Bakewell. I was very flattered to be invited, to be admitted to the inner sanctum of cosmopolitan trendsetters. I did worry, though, as I nibbled my BR cheese sandwich on the journey down, if I would be able to hold my own among the intellectuals whose wit and erudition refracted like a diamanté rainbow into our living rooms each week. In a word, would my mots be bons enough? Maybe they’d invited me by mistake, or I imagined an even worse scenario: one of the producers is a poet whose verse has been rejected by Penguin and, seething with hatred, he is having me on the programme so that I can be exposed, live in front of millions, as the talentless, pushy Scouser he wishes me to be. It takes three cans of lager to take away the taste of the sandwich.
I’m sure that Joan Bakewell became irritated hearing herself referred to all the time as ‘The thinking man’s crumpet’ but when Time Out once referred to me as ‘The thinking woman’s David Cassidy’ I was terribly disappointed that the phrase didn’t pass into common parlance. Could it be that she was a beauty with brains, whereas I was no David Cassidy? Possibly. But here she is in the Green Room at TV Centre failing to put me at my ease as she introduces me to Sir Edward Boyle and Yehudi Menuhin, for with a sinking feeling I realise that I have more in common with the half-coated chocolate digestives on the table than with my fellow guests.
‘Wine? No thanks, I’ll have another lager.’
This will be the last one, definitely. Need to go to the toilet, but try and hang on until the last minute, because if you go now, you might want to go again during the programme, and it’s live remember. Five minutes before we’re due on air, I slip away from the throng and head for the gents. I’m just installed, unzipped and, as they say in ceramic circles, pointing percy at the porcelain, when Yehudi rushes in and stands next to me. Suddenly I get writer’s block, as he chats away and micturates melodiously. He is still talking as he puts the finely tuned instrument back into its case and goes to the washbasin. I can’t admit to not having started, so I do what men always do, let out a pretend sigh of relief, shake it all about, and say ‘Oh, that’s better’. Then I follow him first to the washbasin and then into the studio.
At the time I hadn’t seen Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound, nor Alan Bennett’s Forty Years On, nor had I read Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night or Cancer Ward by Solzhenitsyn, and so had nothing to add to the lively discussion that took place during the hour that followed. I have always been a good listener as opposed to a fulsome talker which, although an asset in the confessional box and at a hospital bedside, is a quality that is less appreciated on chat shows. I listened and nodded wisely, I smiled and tutted as conversation, sometimes prestissimo, sometimes rallentando, ranged from Vivaldi to Vietnam from t’ai chi to Tchaikovsky. Seated between Menuhin and Boyle, I was like a spectator at Wimbledon as the two of them lobbed, volleyed and served verbal aces. Not only did my neck ache but I was finding it increasingly difficult to concentrate on anything save the half-gallon of lager fermenting in my bladder. When the recent assassination of Robert Kennedy was referred to, the anguish that seemed to take hold of my body, hands clenched and thrust between my thighs as I rocked to and fro, the pained look on my face, said it all (‘I’m dying for a pee!’). When would they start talking about Everton, I wondered, or Sammy Davis Jr? I could tell some fascinating stories about my meeting up with him backstage at the Albert Hall. Suddenly it was my turn to walk out on to the centre court. On the previous day there had been student riots in Berkeley, California, had I been moved to write a poem? asked Joan.
‘Er, no, but I do have one with me about the assassination of Martin Luther King.’
But time was against us, she was afraid, thanked us all for taking part and bade the viewers goodnight.
Before the credits had finished rolling I was out of the studio, down the corridor and into the gents. And guess who was up there on the rostrum before me, baton in hand, conducting Handel’s Water Music? Yes.
A couple of days later I was on the train down to the recording studios in Abbey Road writing lyrics in a BabyChic appointments diary, a rag-trade giveaway, given away to me by Thelma on New Year’s Day. George Martin was now too tied up with the Beatles to work with us after ‘Thank U Very Much’, so EMI had brought in Norrie Paramor as producer. Norrie Paramor (was that his real name we wondered?) had been a bandleader in the forties and fifties, and as producer, composer and arranger had launched the careers of many singers, including Cliff Richard, Helen Shapiro, Frank Ifield and Ruby Murray. But by the time we landed on his doorstep I had the feeling that he was looking forward to retirement. Always the gentleman, he was easygoing and a pleasure to work with, but, in retrospect, I think that if he’d been more critical of our recording material post ‘Lily the Pink’, he could have saved EMI and ourselves a lot of money.
If Norrie was laid-back, his young assistant, an amazing dreamboat by the name of Tim Rice, was a maelstrom of exuberance. Tim had joined the Paramor organisation having been a management trainee at EMI, and his enthusiasm for pop music would have been infectious had I not been immunised against it by Tommy Steele singles when young and impressionable. At those early meetings in Norrie’s grand apartment in Regent’s Park, Tim would make tea, stick labels on reel-to-reel tapes and refer to obscure songs by American bands we’d never heard of, but as the shyness wore off (ours, not his, he’d been to Lancing College) he became more involved in our various projects, and when we recorded ‘Do You Remember’ in February 1968 Tim was very much part of the team, even joining in the chorus.
It must have seemed to me like a good story, a rock’n’roll myth that I continued to perpetrate down the years, the one of me writing the lyrics to ‘Lily the Pink’ on the train to London, tidying them up in the back of a cab bound for Abbey Road and copying them out in my best handwriting so that we could sing them in the studio. But looking now more closely at the lyrics scribbled on three pages for July in that appointments diary, it’s clear that they had been written at more than one sitting. Some verses are in pencil, while others reveal the use of both ballpoint and fountain pen, so I had obviously worked on them over a period of days, even weeks, before the final revision en route to the studio. Some of the characters who swallowed the medicinal compound and never made it to vinyl included Uncle Leo who had terrible BO, Cousin Eva who suffered hay fever, Jimmy Cagney who had awful acne and Aunty Mary who was very hairy. Sorry, guys.
John, though, who was by no means a Tump, would have typed out his verses about his bony brother Tony and his ‘Aunty Milly who ran willy-nilly’. At the time the Hollies had scored a hit with a song called ‘Jennifer Eccles’, which had inspired one of my verses about a certain Jennifer Eccles who had terrible freckles, and in a stroke of postmodern ironic genius we invited Graham Nash along to sing the verse, which he did so well that I joked that he should quit the Hollies and join the Scaffold. Tempted though he must have been, he decided to stay with music and joined Crosby, Stills and Young in America instead. Jack Bruce played bass on the record and, although he was an intelligent and talented musician, I reckoned he’d be better off staying with Cream and playing to vast audiences all over the world than doing the north of England cabaret circuit, so I didn’t invite him to join us.
‘Lily the Pink’ was released on the Parlophone label on 18 October 1968 but not as the A-side. Following the success of ‘Thank U Very Much’ we had spent more time doing cabaret dates and kiddy TV than we had playing to our student and theatre audiences, and we shared a collective sense of guilt: Are we selling out? Can we be taken seriously as artists if we continue to record silly songs? Do we have to wear white suits all the time? Whatever happened to the poetry? It was Mike rather than me who worried about our public image – I suppose because I had an artistic life outside the group I was less concerned, at least at that time. We had recorded a track called ‘Buttons of Your Mind’ (which I think preceded ‘Windmills of Your Mind’ and ‘Handcarts of Your Mind’, but I can’t be sure), a love song that featured Mike singing and me reciting verse about ‘Not being drawn into the bedroom of your eyes’ and about ‘The buttons of your mind being difficult to find, and my fingers far too clumsy’, lyrics that Rod McKuen would have put down his big white sheep-dog to have written. Although a pleasant enough tune, it was never chart material; however, at Mike’s insistence and with the group’s best interests at heart, the record was released as a double A-side, in the hope that ‘Buttons’ would get an airing on Radio 1 and people would say, ‘Gosh, there’s more than one string to the Scaffold’s bow.’ Within weeks ‘Lily’ was racing up the charts and ‘Buttons’ remained fastened, with the result that people could be heard muttering, ‘Gosh, there’s only one string to the Scaffold’s bow … Whatever that means.’
Having favoured black as our stage outfits in the early days, we wanted to suggest summer and light for ‘Do you Remember’, so we nipped down to Carnaby Street and chose the white suits that were to become our trademark for a few years and which we wore on Top of the Pops while ‘Lily’ was number one in the charts over the Christmas period and into 1969. Twelve months later, however, when we featured on the first TOTP of 1970, we were no longer top of the pile, so we came up with the concept of looking as if we hadn’t worked for a year. We dirtied up some old white suits, frayed the cuffs and pulled off buttons, and John unstitched a sleeve that was to come off during the final chorus. I doubt if many of the audience either at home or in the studio sensed the Dadaesque significance of our performance, but assumed we were acting soft, as usual. BBC top brass, however, were not amused and the show’s producer nailed us in the bar afterwards and accused us of sending up the programme, the jewel in the Corporation’s popular music crown. Not the programme, we countered, but ourselves. But he’d have none of it and our copybook had been well and truly blotted. That Mr Dada has a lot to answer for.
And talking of jewels in crowns, ‘Lily the Pink’ must have been bobbing about in my subconscious, the result of writing this, when I went to see the Queen yesterday at Buckingham Palace. As one does. The date was Tuesday 12 October 2004 and the occasion was to receive my CBE, news of which had prompted a fusillade of apoplectic e-mails through my spam and porn filter: ‘How dare you accept a gong from warmonger Blair?’ … ‘My children used to love your poems, but not any more, since I have burned your books’ … ‘We thought you were one of us, but all the time you were one of them’ … ‘Horny ladies in spam orgy’. I was hardened this time round to these bunches of sour grapes, having had them thrown at me when I was awarded the OBE in 1996, together with letters to the newpapers that tut-tutted about ‘working-class heroes’ selling out and leaping over the barricades to join the ruling classes. I must confess that I hadn’t seen accepting an honour in quite those terms. Even though I can understand those who wish to have nothing to do with an award that has ‘Empire’ in the title, and I admire friends who, without fuss, have turned it down for their own very good reasons, I was surprised and delighted to be nominated, and the hundreds of letters and calls I had from relatives, old school pals, even ex-lovers and poets, confirmed that in my case to have said no thank you would have been arrogance. What happens is that the Secretary for Appointments at 10 Downing Street writes ‘In Confidence’ that the Prime Minister has it in mind to submit your name to the Queen with a view to your receiving the award, and you must complete the enclosed form and send it back by return of post. Unfortunately, when the first letter arrived I was in Bulgaria at the invitation of the British Council, and I wrote this at the time in my journal:
There are very few things in life more grown-up than going into a restaurant on your own, particularly in a country where the only word you know is the unit of currency (in this case, the Leva), but I just love the excitement of pointing to the menu and hoping that you will recognise something on the plate the grim waiter bangs down on the table before you. On the fifth floor of the hotel I find the Panorama and slink in with all the confidence I can muster. After two glasses of red wine and a plate of food (pork stuffed with fish? Vice-versa?), I go up to my room.
The double bed is low and sags alarmingly in the middle, and the pillowcases only half cover the pillows, which are yellow, tired and obviously desperate to escape. It is eleven thirty here and nine thirty in the UK, so I ring home. Isabel is asleep, but Matt is his usual chatty self. Hil comes on and after some lively banter about washing machines and kiddy stuff, teasingly mentions an important-looking letter that had arrived for me this morning, marked ‘Private’, ‘Confidential’, ‘Not to be opened by anyone other than’ etc.
‘So what did it say?’ I asked.
‘Oh, John Major wants to give you an OBE but you’ve got to reply by return of post.’
‘But I won’t be home for a week, Can’t you fill it in for me?’
‘No, it needs your signature. Do it as soon as you get back.’
A week later I did just that, rushed into the house, grabbed the form, put a tick in the box, added my signature and sent it off. Then panicked on my way back from the pillar box, convinced that I’d ticked the box refusing the award, and as there was no way of checking, started to make excuses: ‘I was offered the OBE but I turned it down. Imagine me, a working-class hero, leaping over the barricades to join the ruling classes’ … ‘Accept a medal from the monarchy? I don’t think so.’
But, of course, I had ticked the right box as I did flawlessly when invited seven years later to accept an upgrade to Commander class, necessitating a further visit to Buck House. On the first occasion my expectations of the conversation I would have with the Queen had been ridiculously high. While pinning the medal to my noble breast, would she tell me how important Summer with Monika had been in fanning the flames of royal desire during the love life of herself and Philip, and how much she regretted that my children’s books hadn’t been available when Charles and Anne were toddlers and in need of exciting, yet essentially moral, bedtime stories? How different their lives might have turned out, she would muse sadly. In fact, when I moved the four steps towards her on hearing my cue from the Lord Chamberlain, ‘For services to poetry’, her first words were ‘Congratulations. What do you do?’
Slightly miffed, but with as much grace as I could muster, I made what sounded like an excuse about writing poetry, then mumbled about being published by Penguin and Puffin in the vain hope that her well-known fondness for little creatures would see me through.
Yesterday my expectations were more realistic. As long as her first words weren’t ‘Congratulations. What was it you said you did?’ I would consider myself one of the family. In fact, she referred to the sterling work being done by her Laureate, but not wanting to waste my allotted two minutes chewing the fat about Mr Motion, I panicked and blurted out ‘Lily the Pink’.
She paused. ‘Pardon?’
‘“Lily the Pink”. I wrote the words to “Lily the Pink”.’
As her jaw dropped and her brow furrowed, I just about managed to stop myself from trying to jog her memory by bursting into the chorus. Luckily for me, Her Majesty and the assembled crowd in the Palace Ballroom, the penny dropped and she smiled in recognition. ‘Oh, yes, “Lily the Pink”.’ And as she took my hand, the signal that the audience was at an end, was it only imagination, or did I really sense that there was a special warmth in that handshake? For those royal blue eyes seemed to say thank you, thank you for all the pleasure your song has given us during our reign. And finally, the investiture over, as she walked down the aisle flanked by her Gurkha guards, past row upon row of her loyal subjects, was she singing softly to herself:
Old Ebeneezer thought he was Julius Caesar
So they put him in a ho-o-ome…