It is the summer of 1968. A group of very young Essex girls, only about seven or eight years old, gather outside Steve Marriott’s Beehive Cottage. The girls are keen to get his autograph, all of them except one.
This girl hates Steve Marriott. Despises him. Every weekend her parents have a party that lasts from Saturday night to Sunday night and the record they play over and over again, the one that keeps her awake until the early hours, is ‘Lazy Sunday’.
The girl can’t stand the song, hates it with a passion. By extension, she loathes the man who created it.
One of her friends now urges, ‘Come on, let’s just walk to the door ’n’ see if he’s in.’
‘I ain’t going in,’ she says, her London accent clear in the country air. ‘I’ll hold the bikes. But you better be out here in five minutes. I’ve heard about those pop stars and their drugs. If you’re not out in five minutes I’m calling the police.’
The girls laugh and then head for the cottage. Judy ‘Toni’ Poultney stays and peers through the bushes, watching them walk towards the house, hoping that her friends will be okay, that the man she loathes beyond belief doesn’t get up to anything funny.
Life. Nineteen years on from that sunny day, Toni will fall in love with that very same man and spend the last four years of his life with him.
Their first meeting came together through Toni’s brother, John Poulton. He had organised a couple of Packet Of Three gigs, one in Woking and one in Chelmsford. At the latter gig, he left Toni and his girlfriend downstairs whilst he went to chat with Marriott in the upstairs dressing room. After a while, Toni decided she had had enough of being ignored and marched up the stairs, barged into the dressing room, absolutely fuming.
Her brother introduced her to Marriott – first impressions – she thought, ‘What an obnoxious, foul-mouthed, vile and disgusting bloke.’
He thought, ‘If that bird wasn’t such a miserable-faced bastard she would be very pretty.’
After that, love was inevitable really.
***
In reference to his financial difficulties, Steve had cheekily named his new band, Steve Marriott and the Official Receivers.
Jim Leverton kept his job as bassist, he and Marriott were as close now as Steve and Ronnie had been in the ’60s. ‘Steve had complete and utter admiration for Jim as a musician,’ Toni will unequivocally state. ‘He often said, “He’s one of the finest musicians I have ever worked with.”’
They found a Richard Newman, ex-Joe Brown band, to play drums and then Leverton suggested recruiting Mick Weaver, the Hammond organ player from the ’60’s outfit Wynder K. Frog, to add some different colour to the music.
Marriott prevaricated for a few days on the idea, then agreed.
The Official Receivers were, in a lot of fans’ minds, Steve’s best outfit of the 1980s. The Hammond oriented line-up was a lot nearer the Small Faces’ set up than any of the other later outfits. They even got to support Steve’s hero, Chuck Berry, at London’s Hammersmith Odeon.
Weaver wasn’t the only new face at a Steve Marriott gig. Since their first meeting, Toni was now present at many of them.
‘Everyone I was hanging around with was constantly going to his gigs,’ Toni says. ‘They was all mad about him.’
One night, Marriott told Toni that he had plans to travel to Germany. He had been in touch with his ex, Pam. She had moved there and a reconciliation was on the cards. Toni felt a lump of disappointment appear in her throat but Marriott never made the trip.
Much to Pam’s chagrin, he chose to stay in the UK, chose instead to pursue Toni.
‘She hates me, Pam,’ Toni says laughing, ‘another one! They all bloody well hate me.’
Marriott christened Toni ‘the little hippy’ (‘because I was always stoned’), made his move (they rented a hotel room one night) and soon they were living together in his house in Aythorp Roding. Manon had relocated to a council property which she lived in with Mollie Mae. Toni took her place, bringing along her Irish wolfhound and bags of chutzpah.
‘From there we looked for a nice place to move into,’ she recalls, ‘and later moved to Arkesden, North Essex.’
Jim Leverton approved of the relationship and its effect on Steve.
‘When he first got together with Toni,’ he states, ‘he’d be the most together person in the band. First to bed, with all his next day’s clothes folded on a chair.’
She was a feisty girl, Toni. Loud, determined, not at all meek. She had a daughter by a previous relationship and, before her arrival, had worked on her dad’s fruit stall in Harlow market. She shared a lot of Steve’s characteristics. She loved ribald humour, was fun, took life with a pinch of salt. Soon, she started working with the band, driving the van first before taking on other responsibilities.
When she assumed financial control, she immediately made changes. The band were put onto wages, Steve given a hefty percentage of the takings. As it was his name that was bringing in the crowds, no one had a right to complain.
Steve kept writing away in his little bedroom, sometimes alone, sometimes with Jim Leverton in tow. He still wrote quickly, still occasionally needed a Ronnie Lane-type figure to slow him down, suggest avenues he hadn’t thought of exploring.
‘He was always writing,’ Toni states. ‘There were loads of songs he never finished. He kept a book in the music room and every time he got an idea or any words come into his head he’d just bolt in there and write them down.’
Again, the songs piled up but again the songs would stay unreleased for years and years and years.
***
When they made the move to Arkesden, they lived in a 16th century listed house opposite a pub. The property was used for location shots in the television series Lovejoy. Marriott turned to Toni and said, ‘We’ll have to behave ourselves here, doll.’
Wouldn’t it be nice to get on wiv me neighbours... Arkesden was small, sleepy and very upmarket. Make a noise here and everyone would be on your case.
A week after moving in, they had a huge row. Toni left the house, stormed over to her friend Jim Skinner’s abode. When she finally calmed down, she returned home. As she neared the house she saw what she thought was a huge mound of sand in the front garden. It wasn’t sand. It was all her possessions piled up high and on top of the pile, a handwritten note from Steve.
‘You can fuck off,’ he had written.
Toni went to the front door. Locked. She goes round the back, that door is locked as well. Her Irish wolfhound now bounds up to her. He’s been in the garden all this time. She comforts the large animal, looks up, sees the light on in the back bedroom. It’s raining but the roof is easy to climb onto. She hoists herself up, starts inching her way towards the window.
When she gets to the window, she looks in. Steve Marriott is lying on the bed wearing a dressing gown, holding a large glass of brandy in one hand, a big spliff in the other. Toni knocks on the window.
‘Come on Steve,’ she shouts, ‘Don’t be stupid, this has gone on long enough.’
Marriott gets up, goes to the window and shouts, ‘Take your car, take your dog and fuck off.’
Then he pulls the curtains shut.
At which moment, Toni slides all the way down the roof to the ground, landing on her back. When she stands up she is covered in dirt and moss.
Again, she calls up to Steve, but the curtains stay closed, the doors locked. She hurls a stream of expletives at him, walks round, gets in the car with her dog, slams the car door shut and drives to Steve’s parents’ house in nearby Sawbridgeworth. Kay and Bill take her in, comfort her. Bill says he’ll ring his son, talk him round.
He gets him on the line but Steve is raging, can’t keep his mouth still. The word fuck pours out a hundred times. She can fuck off. I’m not fucking having it. She’s a fucker. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
Finally, the dad says, ‘Come on son, you can’t keep saying fuck off all the time.’
There’s a second’s silence. Then Steve Marriott shouts back, ‘Well, you can fuck off as well’.
***
He liked Arkesden, liked his life there. At first he was a name, a celebrity to the locals, but pretty soon his reckless behaviour killed off any residue of mystery and glamour that might have attached itself to him.
He became well known in the pub, often popped in to buy bottles of brandy or borrow glasses. One time he walked in wearing just his Converse trainers and a dressing gown. You had to laugh. He certainly did. He was pissed.
And of course, drunk or not, he couldn’t resist playing games, winding up those he thought needed it.
A nearby neighbour bought some false sheep for his front garden. Marriott went to the pub, rounded up some local boys and after closing time, crept up the hill in the dead of night and poured bottles of mint sauce all over them.
The landlord of the pub was named Gell. Marriott changed that to ‘Jailboy’. Within a week, much to the man’s obvious displeasure, everyone was calling him by that name.
One Christmas Eve, two in the morning, Marriott put a ladder against the pub wall, climbed up it and, to the tune of ‘Noel, Noel’, sang ‘Jailboy’ through the man’s bedroom window.
Incorrigible! He was nearly forty and the man was still incorrigible.
***
The gigs kept coming, enough to pay the rent, keep him happy. He even attended an audition for the reformed group Bad Company – went and played for them, got drunk, insulted Simon Kirke’s wife, went home. He didn’t get the job and shouldn’t have gone for it in the first place. His personality simply did not fit in. He didn’t have the desire to win.
Then one day there was an unexpected message. EMI in Germany had been in touch, were talking about a £100,000 deal, invited Steve and Jim Leverton to fly out to Cologne, all expenses paid, to start discussions.
‘We met at Stansted airport, the night before the flight,’ the bass player recalls. ‘We stayed in a Holiday Inn so we’d be there on the spot in the morning. We got up early and were walking to the terminal when Steve just stopped in his tracks and said, “Oh fuck this, I don’t wanna go to Germany.” He just turned round and walked away.’
Leverton was furious. He was hours away from the biggest break in his life and now his best friend had scuppered the deal. But what could he do? Marriott’s fear of the music industry was manifest. Major success hadn’t brought him contentment. It had annoyed him, angered him and disgusted him. Happiness for Steve Marriott came from following your heart, going your own way and large record deals would not allow him to do that. So fuck them.
‘He figured,’ Leverton says, ‘that if we signed with them, they’d tell us what songs to record, who to have in the band, what clothes to wear and so on. He may well have been right but you’ve got to play the game a little bit.’
That didn’t stop the bitter envy at his contemporaries rising, although, interestingly, Marriott never seemed to express his contempt or anger in front of his parents, close family or partners. It was as if he was afraid his bitterness might upset them. Toni insists she never heard him bad-mouth the likes of Rod Stewart. Jim Leverton says the same.
‘I don’t think he was jealous of them’ the bass player says, ‘I never heard him tear into anyone’s musical ability. I’ve heard him take the piss out of their appearance, he was always doing that. “Looks like a go-go dancer,” that was Rod. Kenney was Des O’Jones, because Steve thought Kenney had the same coiffured hairstyle as Des O’Connor.’
Marriott seemed to express his ire only to outsiders, the likes of Ken and Hugh and other people he met at gigs. The only thing that separated him from them was their willingness to play the game. These musicians would bow to anyone if it meant furthering themselves. To Marriott, such behaviour was abhorrent. You don’t go cap in hand to any fucker, whoever he may be. Music came first, so did talent. That’s what mattered, that’s what he fervently believed in. Whatever the cost.
‘Once the EMI deal was fucked, the band’s days were numbered,’ Leverton states. ‘There was a lot of resentment over that. It was a real pity because during our short lifetime we were received really well wherever we played. I remember at the Half Moon in Putney one night, Toni his girlfriend said, “He’s gonna knock it on the head for a bit.” I just said, “Great. Best news I’ve heard all day.” To be quite honest I was quite pleased to have a rest from him. He was a very overpowering character, especially at gigs. Away from the stage he was different all together, he was good company, but on the road he’d say things like, “You’re fucking boring, you are,” and all that.
‘Yeah, I was pleased to get a break.’
***
He had seen them a couple of times at his own shows, liked their style. The first time the DTs supported the Official Receivers had been at the Five Bells in Northampton. The band played R&B covers and Marriott enjoyed their set so much that, halfway through, he leapt onstage and sang an impromptu blues ballad with them. Later that year, he turned up at their gig in Leicester’s Princess Charlotte pub and sang a whole set.
Now with the Official Receivers finished, Marriott was in a bit of a quandary. He had to form a band so he could play live, pay the rent. But after the EMI debacle and the years of acting as a leader, he was tired. What he wanted now was to take a backstage role, as he had in the early days of Humble Pie.
The DTs provided the perfect answer. In late ’87, Marriott called the band’s harmonica player, Simon Hickling, talked about the possibility of joining the outfit. Nothing really happened until May the following year.
In the intervening period, Marriott took time out, relaxed. He was forty years old now, had a bit of a paunch, a round full face. No traces of his classic Mod style was discernible in his appearance. Gone were the colourful tops, the creased trousers, the breathtaking shoes. Now he wore tracksuit bottoms with baggy t-shirts whilst, onstage, he had taken to wearing denim dungarees and a mullet haircut. He dressed down, dressed very down.
‘I remember going to see him in the ’80s,’ the filmmaker Paolo Sedazzari recalls, ‘and he was brilliant. Great voice, great guitarist but what I couldn’t get over were the dungarees and the mullet haircut. That was really disappointing.’
One day on the tube into town, a passenger kept looking at Steve out of the side of his eye. After three or four stops had gone by, the man could no longer help himself.
‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘Didn’t you used to be Steve Marriott?’
Funny, but sad also.
At home, Steve listened mainly to old music. Randy Newman, Dr Hook, Willie Nelson, Little Walter, B.B. King, Howlin’ Wolf, Taj Mahal, the blues. He watched a lot of TV. When Channel Four was launched, he would stay up late, watching to the early hours.
Sports-wise, he enjoyed boxing most, especially bouts featuring young and up coming fighters. His knowledge of football wasn’t great which is why he supported West Ham. He cooked a lot but never did a scrap of housework. Never washed up or cleaned around the house. He far preferred going on holidays, going off to sit in the sun, relax, have fun.
He liked reading, much more so in his later years. Stephen King was a favoured author, so was the science fiction writer, Philip K. Dick. Anything on Noel Coward was eagerly devoured as were biographies of actors, film stars. He even had a bookshelf filled with the likes of the Goons in his toilet. His vices were few now. He still drank, still smoked spliffs, still snorted occasional lines of cocaine but nothing compared to what he once consumed. Toni talks about a guy called P.D. coming over, chopping out lines, but to be honest visitors to the Marriott household were a rarity. In his time off, he wanted to stay in, be left alone.
There were even days when he hardly spoke and Toni would try and cajole him out of his silence. ‘Come on you old fart,’ she would cry, ‘liven up.’ But he just shrugged his shoulders, meandered on. They had little social life, letting the gigs act as nights out, nights for drinking, smoking, having a giggle. But even that time was marred by the pains he would feel in his kidney and liver region the very next morning.
Home was the place, therefore, where he went to heal, to repair himself in peace and in quiet.
‘He just used to get up,’ Toni says, describing a run of the mill day from their life together at this point. ‘I’d do the ironing and then he would go upstairs and read. He read a lot. He’d go up in the bedroom and read while I done the downstairs housework and then he’d come downstairs while I done the upstairs. He’d maybe watch a bit of telly, have a little doze, do some more reading and then we’d have dinner and after that he’d just watch telly all night long. We’d go to bed between one or three and four.’
Oh, another fact. Marriott didn’t like electric lighting. He much preferred candles.
He had them all over the bedroom.
After five months of this lifestyle, of holidaying, of inaction, Steve was revitalised and ready to return to work. In May 1988, he started rehearsing with the DTs. Apart from Hickling on vocals and harmonica, the band consisted of Steve Walwyn on lead guitar and vocals, Craig Rhind on bass and Chas Chaplin on drums.
By the time they hit the road, the band had a different name – Steve Marriott and the DTs.
They began playing concerts, England and Germany mostly. Marriott could never rein in his more anarchic side in the latter country. At an aftershow party in a hotel room, Toni recalled Marriott taking a pen to a painting of a German dignitary and turning the man into an Adolf Hitler look-alike.
On another occasion, backstage at a gig, he got into an argument with the promoter, called him ‘a cringing Kraut.’
‘What does cringing mean?’ asked the man.
‘It’s what Hitler did when he got the gas bill,’ Marriott retorted, ‘now piss off.’
In Marriott’s world, no subject was taboo. Everything was up for grabs. Race was as ripe for mickey taking as anything else was. Toni shared his humour, understood it for what it was. She saw this style of humour as a defence mechanism, protection against the horrors of the world.
‘That’s why we was just the same,’ she says, ‘because although I laugh about everything, I don’t think it’s that funny. It’s just a way of dealing with things.’
Other bookings came in, exciting ones. An Icelandic agent saw the band play the Half Moon in Putney and booked them for two nights at a Reykjavik club called Hollywood.
No one in the band had been to Iceland before. They fancied it would be a trip to remember. They met at Heathrow, Marriott smoking endless roll ups, talking non-stop, drowning brandies to cover his nervousness about flying
On their arrival, they were met at the airport by the promoter of the two shows. Marriott’s first words to him were, ‘Have you got any gear?’ Then he nicknamed the man, ‘Guff’, a phrase that relates to the art of flatulence.
As they loaded up the mini van, Guff asked Marriott if ‘Sha La La La Lee’ was in the set list. No way, Marriott replied. ‘All Or Nothing’ was the only song they performed from that time, the rest was strict R&B. At the hotel, the promoter went off to make a phone call.
When they arrived at the club they were met by the owner, a man named ‘Biggy’, who took Marriott aside and demanded he play ‘Sha La La La Lee’ that night.
Again, Marriott refused.
The club opened for business. The crowd poured in, started drinking heavily as they tend to do in cold countries where the sun is rarely seen and the day is grey before it has even begun. Five minutes before going onstage, Biggy again approached Marriott, asked him to play ‘Sha La La La Lee’.
Marriott ignored him and the band walked out onstage, plugged in, started playing. The alcohol soon began to take its effect on the crowd. Half way through the set, a woman in the front row passed out, face down in the ashtray.
Swaying men, emboldened by drink, started approaching the stage, shouting for ‘Sha La La La Lee’.
‘Sorry mate,’ Steve announced between songs, ‘we don’t do it.’
For one man in particular, Marriott’s explanation simply wasn’t good enough. He kept returning to the stage, demanding that Marriott tell him why he wouldn’t play the song.
‘Cause we don’t fucking do it, you knobheaded Eskimo,’ Marriott shouted back and that was that.
The band went into ‘All Or Nothing,’ the set’s closer. Afterwards, in the van back to the hotel, Biggy curtly told Marriott that as he wasn’t going to play the Small Faces material he requested, he was cutting the next night’s set down to 45 minutes. Marriott said, good, fine by me.
The next night when they arrived at the club, a long queue of people reached all the way down the street.
Inside the club, a beaming Biggy greeted Marriott.
‘Everyone in Reykjavik tells me I am a great man to bring R&B to this club, it is a big big success. Tonight, you must play for 90 minutes.’
‘Tough shit,’ came Marriott’s reply. ‘You wanted 45 minutes last night and that’s what you’re getting.’
Which is precisely what happened. The band played forty five minutes, hotfooted it back to the hotel, drank their mini bars dry, went out on their room balconies, toasted the revellers below, Marriott made a speech to the crowd which had his band in stitches and they all went to bed at six in the morning, shitfaced and happy.
And Iceland never heard ‘Sha La La La Lee’.
***
The gigs continued, one after the other. In Liverpool, he was given an escort back to his hotel by a bunch of scooterboys. The act was an old Mod tradition, granted only to special acts such as Prince Buster.
In June 1988, he topped the bill at the Wimbledon Town Hall. Supporting him were three new groups, the Boys, the Clique and Boys Wonder. The Boys’ guitarist was one Steve Cradock, later to find fame himself with Ocean Colour Scene.
‘It was the first time I was made aware of reefers,’ Cradock recalls, ‘because Marriott was chugging on one.’
Two months later, Cradock again played support, got into a longer conversation with the man. He recalls Marriott complaining about his liver and kidneys, telling the young guitarist, ‘I ain’t got long for this world.’
As he made this solemn announcement, he was downing vast quantities of brandy and marijuana, which he also offered to Cradock. Throughout his life, Marriott remained a generous man both with his possessions and his time. Giles Twigg, the engineer for ‘Baker Street’ songwriter Gerry Rafferty, was just starting out with his first band, Iago, when he met Steve.
‘We were supporting him at the Woolwich Tramshed,’ he recalls. ‘We arrived there as the rest of his band was doing a soundcheck. He literally told his band to fuck off the stage and give the other guys, meaning us, a chance, which was really nice of him. It was our first major gig and he ensured we had a long time to sort our sound out, which was amazing as most people coming to the gig that night were there to see him. Anyway, while we were playing, he sat out in front and watched us run through our set, giving instructions to the house engineer to get the right sound for us. Later in the evening, just before we were due to go on stage, he walked into our dressing room with a huge carrier bag of dubious substances which he thought we might want to smoke before we went on. The thing was, we were really well oiled so we didn’t imbibe at the time, but that was a really nice thing for him to do for us.’
Top boxing trainer and fan Dean Powell recalls going to see Marriott at the Thomas A Becket boxing pub on London’s famed Old Kent Road. ‘I went upstairs and Marriott was in a boxing ring pissed and out of his head,’ he recalls. ‘He kept jumping into the ropes and throwing himself across the ring. He was gone. Yet when he took the stage he didn’t put a foot wrong. You would never have known.’
For his agent Mick Eve, the Wimbledon tennis season was always the worst time. Steve’s name and reputation had even seeped into that sporting arena, attracting the attention of hipper players such as Pat Cash or Vitas Gerulatis.
‘These guys would hook up with him,’ Eve says. ‘Steve would be at Wimbledon every afternoon for strawberries and cream and whatever. It certainly wasn’t for the tennis. Then, instead of turning up at a soundcheck at six, it would be more like nine. It was a nightmare. One Sunday at the Cricketers pub near the Oval cricket ground, he turned up in muddy Wellington boots, telling his adoring fans he had been gardening all day. A likely story!’
***
He went to see Manon and Mollie but the visit ended in tears, a raging argument. He came home furious, told Toni he would no longer keep contact with Mollie. ‘I’m not gonna dance to somebody’s tune just so that I can see a kid,’ he shouted. ‘Fuck it, I’m doing her a favour walking away.’ Then he locked himself in Toni’s car with a big bottle of brandy. Steve Marriott couldn’t handle kids, wasn’t built for them. Didn’t have the time, the patience, most of all the necessary sense of responsibility. ‘He said to me,’ Toni recalls, ‘“one day, when she’s old enough, she can come and find me and then I’ll have my own relationship with her.” That’s what he was really waiting for.’
***
His name might not be in the papers anymore but some still remembered. A call came in from an advertising company. They wanted Steve Marriott to sing a song called ‘Law Of The Jungle’, for a TV ad promoting Puma trainers. Good money, as well. Marriott duly obliged.
Another unexpected phone call. This time a film composer, name of Steve Parsons, wanted him to sing the title track for a film entitled, unpromisingly, Food Of The Gods 2.
Easy money. Marriott duly obliged.
At the subsequent recording session, Marriott and Steve Parsons got on well. Then a small company, name of Trax Records, got in touch, wanted Steve to make an album with Parsons producing. They offered him ten grand.
Perfect. For months now, Marriott had set his eyes on acquiring a boat, a long narrow boat that cost ten grand. He went in to the Alexandra Palace studios in North London, laid down his vocals, two takes at the most. Then he went home where he disparagingly referred to the project as ‘the narrow boat album.’
He recorded one new tune, the Marriott-Leverton song ‘Phone Call Away’ (although it was only credited to Marriott), the rest were covers of other folk’s songs, including himself. ‘All Or Nothing’ was played at a slower tempo and there were cracks at Marvin Gaye’s ‘One More Heartache’, Major Lance’s ‘The Um Um Um Um Um Song’, Terry Reid’s ‘Superlungs’, Bob Marley’s ‘Get Up Stand Up’, Talking Heads’ ‘Life During Wartime’ (undoubtedly he would have adored the Staple Singers cover of the same band’s song ‘Slippery People’), a cover of Johnny Kidd’s ‘Shakin’ All Over’ (also placed on the soundtrack for the film Food Of The Gods 2), ‘Rascal You’, a 1930s song covered by Louis Armstrong, Curtis Mayfield’s ‘Gyspy Woman’ and a duet with P.P. Arnold, one of his all time fave singers, on Shirley Ellis’s ‘The Clapping Song’.
Despite his blase attitude, all the ingredients were in place to make a striking album. Steve Marriott, the doyen of blue-eyed soul, the man who carried a torch all his life for R&B, singing such a list of fine songs should have produced a musical storm but technology defeated him.
The album should have been recorded live in the room with a tight sweaty band. Instead, he is surrounded by synths and synth drums, modern noises to produce a mechanical work of unwonder.
Listen to the opening song, John Fogerty’s ‘Knocking On Your Door’. Now play Tina Turner’s ‘Simply The Best’.
The records might as well be twins.
Yet, vocally, he is on absolute top form. His phrasing is great, his reach impressive. He knew that as well, told Tone that, out of all his records, ‘Thirty Seconds to Midnite’ contained some of his best ever singing.
The man was not wrong. Still, at least he got to sit on his boat.
***
Another surprise call. Would Steve be interested in singing a new version of the Ike Turner song, ‘Black Coffee’, for a Nescafe coffee advert? Course he would. The session took place at the Sony studios in Whitfield Street. By coincidence, the producer for the day also booked Marriott’s old Humble Pie partner, Clem Clempson, unaware of the two men’s past.
‘Steve arrived late,’ Clempson recalls, ‘after the backing track had been recorded. He went straight into the studio and once the engineer had sorted the sound he only needed one shot at it. His involvement in the session lasted about fifteen minutes.’
Which meant that Steve Marriott had just earned a grand a minute. After laying down his vocal, he stuck around, shot the breeze with Clempson. Then he headed home.
Clempson was still at the studio when Marriott called back on the phone, asked if he would consider joining a new band he was planning. Clempson answered in the affirmative, although Marriott did make the proviso that he wasn’t keen on undertaking lengthy tours.
Clempson said that was fine by him. The men said their goodbyes, promised to keep in touch.
***
On July 14th, 1989, after two years of living together, Steve and Toni were married at Epping registry office. Afterwards, a party at their home, then a honeymoon in Bali. Marriott loved visiting other places, never tired of it. He was a nervous flyer but by this time a seasoned traveller. Bali was a ball.
***
In London first, and then in clubs up and down the land, the young swallowed Ecstasy pills, danced to House music, lost all inhibitions socially and sexually. New music, new drugs, new fashions. Acid House, the most important youth cult since punk, had arrived.
Marriott would not have liked, or indeed understood, the scene but he would have approved. Pills that make you go ummm. Nice!
Meanwhile, he kept to the pubs, the clubs, playing the blues.
One night, after driving through the Blackwall Tunnel, Jim Leverton came across a sign outside the Mitre Club that read ‘Tonight – Steve Marriott and the DTs.’ He immediately put on the brakes.
‘I hadn’t seen him for about eighteen months,’ he recalled, ‘so I just pulled in and watched the gig. They did ‘Five Long Years’ and it was superb. I said hello, of course, told him I was just passing and no hard feelings and all that. Two weeks later, I got the phone call. ‘Gotta put the band back together,’ and that was Steve Marriott’s Next Band.’
The original line up featured Steve and Jim with Simon Hickling from the DTs on harmonica, Richard Newman from the Official Receivers on drums. Newman didn’t last. Marriott had a falling out with the drummer early in the band’s life and he was replaced by Kofi Baker, Ginger Baker’s son. Like father, like son apparently.
‘He was quite amazing,’ Leverton says of Kofi’s skills, ‘and we worked the same circuit as before and toured Europe. But I found the line up confusing with the lead vocals shared by Steve, Simon and myself. Kofi ended up making the same mistake as Fallon Williams had a few years earlier. He was giving interviews and saying things like, “I’m a jazz drummer, just filling in to help Steve out.” Not a good thing to say if you want to last. Well, that was the end of him.’
The band recruited the DTs’ old drummer, Alan ‘Sticky’ Wickett. Not long after, Simon Hickling quit over money.
‘Simon was only on a wage,’ Leverton states. ‘It was a smaller amount than the other guys in the band and when he asked for the same as them he was ousted. Steve offered him a hundred per cent of fuck all. That was the end of that.’
Noting that they were now a trio, Steve killed the band’s title and re-christened them the Packet Of Three.
‘From a booking point of view,’ his agent Mick Eve states, ‘it didn’t matter what the current line up was, as long as he had competent musicians onstage with him, that was enough. Steve’s audiences were always about eighty per cent male and therefore bar takings were always high. Steve always told me he was happy playing at this level and never wanted anything bigger, but it’s my belief he could have ended up on the festival circuit, pretty much how Joe Cocker has.’
***
In her time as Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher created many controversial policies. Her most famous was the 1990 Poll Tax Bill which brought thousands out onto the street, instigating a major riot that would signal the beginning of the end of her reign.
At the same time, the American band, the Georgia Satellites, who Marriott had befriended in Atlanta, began a tour of England. Their most notable gig was at the Mayfair club in Newcastle. During one particular song, the band started improvising on a blues riff, before singing “Ain’t gonna pay no poll tax no more”. The whole audience immediately sang along with it, showering the band with applause for their stance.
A couple of days later Steve hooked up with Satellites manager Kevin Jennings, and Satellites drummer Barrymore Barlow, and took them to his local, the Axe and Compass in Arkesden.
Over drinks, the band invited him down to a little 8-track-studio called Carnoustie at Henley-On-Thames, to participate in the recording of their new single, ‘Poll Tax Blues’, written by the band’s guitarist Dickey Lee, who would later change his name by deed poll to Keith Richards.
Steve agreed but only if he could sing under the alias of Matt Vinyl. Steve had taken to using aliases of late. They offered him further protection from stardom.
John Hellier recalls attending Steve Marriott gigs where he saw Marriott play under the various monikers ‘Hunt, Lunt and Cunningham’, ‘Book Em And Riskett’, and ‘The Tubby Has Been Trio’.
The Satellites agreed to Steve’s request. Two days later, Marriott appeared at the studio along with Jim Leverton and Simon Hickling. They and the Satellites cut the track in an hour. The single was rush released under the name of the Poll Cats.
As they only had time to cut the one number, the same track was used on both sides of the record.
It failed to reach number one.
***
The world of adverts again came knocking. Kleenex toilet paper wanted to use ‘Itchycoo Park’ for a TV advert. Marriott’s manager, Laurie O’Leary, agreed but asked that they allow Steve to record a new version.
That way, his client would get paid, not just the song’s publishers. Kleenex agreed and paid for a day at The PRT studios in London’s Bryanston Road. Steve arrived on time, spent the day there re-working the famous song.
‘It was a great new version,’ Mick Eve, his agent, recalls, ‘and everyone was delighted. But due to some technicality Kleenex had to use the original version after all. On the strength of this, Steve put ‘Itchycoo Park’ back in the Packet Of Three’s set after saying he’d never do that song again.’
Steve’s version has never been released.
After a gig in the Half Moon, Putney, an unexpected guest shows up in the crowded dressing room. The band’s ex-drummer Kofi Baker needs a favour. The son of one of his friends is in a coma. The boy is a huge Marriott fan. Would Steve record a message that they could play to him in the hope it might bring him round?
Marriott instantly went shy, backed away. Using his fame to bring people back to life? This was voodoo to him.
‘I ain’t no good at anything like that,’ he brusquely told Kofi. But Kofi knew him a bit by now, so he persisted. No good. Steve stuck to his guns.
Kofi then turned to the other people in the room who took his side, started to encourage Steve to say something.
‘Well, what happened,’ Toni recalls, ‘was that Steve finally said, “Oh, all right, then”. And Kofi’s turned on the tape recorder and Steve looked into the tape recorder and went, “ WAKE UP YOU CUNT!” really loud, and then he said, “that’ll do, won’t it, mate”? And everyone just fuckin’ set about laughing. It was really embarrassing, the guy’s mum and dad were in the room. But it wasn’t that he was hard, he just had an incredibly forward attitude.’
Their son made a full recovery and carries that tape around with him wherever he goes.
***
Having earned enough money, Steve and Toni now cancelled all gigs, headed out for a three-month holiday in Barbados. During their time there, they were joined by Steve’s parents, Kay and Bill. True to form, an argument erupted between the four of them, a vicious terrible argument. The parents flew home, Steve angrily swore he would never talk to them again.
When Steve and Toni finally got home, a significant change had taken place. Steve Marriott was starting to tire of the work. He had been playing up to 200 gigs a year and the demands it made, the energy it exacted, was getting to be too much. Schlepping around in a van from town to town, pub to pub, just to pay the rent and nothing else, he simply couldn’t face it anymore.
He had just spent three months in the sun and now it was back to the same old thing, the same old venues, the same old road. He wanted comfort now, wanted money because money allowed you to be free.
They played a few more shows. At one, the Borderline in London, Marriott gave a radio interview to John Wilson of the BBC. Wilson was putting together a documentary on Mod and wanted Marriott’s input. They met at the club, Marriott in the middle of soundchecking when Wilson arrived. After the band finished, the two men retreat to the dressing room.
‘You’ve got five minutes,’ Marriott briskly tells Wilson.
Wilson starts by asking what music had influenced the Small Faces. Stax and Motown came the reply. Was Marriott aware that a lot of bands were now using the same influences as the Small Faces. Marriott said he wasn’t but of late had heard a lot of music with a Hammond organ in it.
‘Which is great,’ he continued, ‘because that was a big part of that marvellous sound. I used to go and watch Georgie Fame at the Flamingo, when I was about fifteen, and that was one of the first English Hammond sounds. It was fantastic. It would send you out of the door. It was fabulous.’
Wilson moves onto street fashion, how a much smarter Mod look was now returning.
‘Nothing wrong with that,’ Marriott says. ‘When you think about what we have been through fashion-wise in the last fifteen years, I would never have believed it myself, it’s something out of a horror comic.’
Wilson reminds Marriott that he was once an ‘ace face’, a style icon. Marriott tells him that he’s flattered but was unaware of such praise.
‘I’m glad I don’t know about it otherwise I might turn my collar up and start wearing shades,’ he joked. ‘But thank you, whoever it is. I’m glad we had a bit of style that people could look at.’
Were you not conscious of it at the time, though? Wilson asks.
‘Sure, yeah,’ Marriott says. ‘We were Mods, we were kids off the street who dressed that way, and suddenly we had enough money to get the same cuts made but in better materials. Very aware of it then but not now. I’m forty-four years old. When I was eighteen it was another world for me, a world I personally wouldn’t want to cling onto except for the music, which will always be with you, no matter what. But if other kids take that and dress like that, nothing wrong with that, it’s a very nice way to present yourselves.’
Marriott expounds further on Mod, says that everything went hand in hand. If you liked that music then you dressed in a certain way to give clues to the world about your stance in life.
Wilson tells Marriott that the musician currently carrying the flame for Mod is Paul Weller. Had Marriott heard of him?
He had. Weller had sent Marriott a couple of letters, some records.
‘Very nice,’ Marriott stated. ‘Nice look, nice music, full applause, very good [a little laugh]. Again, it’s his version of his roots. It’s very good, I admire it to the hilt but it’s not my particular sort of music. I can admire it but I wouldn’t want to play it. Mine’s a bit more spikey, his is a bit more smooth.’
Wilson tries some contemporary band names on Marriott. The Charlatans, the Inspiral Carpets, the James Taylor Quartet, do these names mean anything?
‘Sure,’ Marriott says, ‘but unfortunately a lot of it conjures to mind lazy buggers who can’t play. Some of it is very good. But some of it is a sham but that’s always been the way.’
Are these retro sounding bands relevant, Wilson wonders out loud.
‘Of course they are’ Marriott quickly states, ‘they are today. And God bless them for it. But in today’s music you will find that the cream will always rise to the top and the shit will sink.’
Both men laugh, the tape is switched off.
His last ever radio interview is finished.
***
Pete Frampton flew into town, hunted down his old colleague in Arkesden. He had a proposition for him.
‘I was at home going through some old tapes,’ the ex-Humble Pie man recalled, ‘and I realised Steve Marriott was the man I wanted to work with again.’
The offer to reform Humble Pie for the fourth time around could not have come at a better time. Marriott had had enough of being skint, broke, out of pocket. It was too tiring, too soul sapping. He was getting older, wanted security now, and comfort.
As a declaration of his intention to help out, Marriott invited Frampton to his show at the Half Moon in Putney, brought him onstage at the end to play a version of Pie’s ‘Natural Born Bugie’.
Frampton stayed on in England, writing with Steve at his house, putting together new material. Marriott’s studio was small, cramped. They decided it would be better to relocate to Frampton’s studio in Los Angeles, carry on writing and recording there.
Marriott first had to complete a short tour of Germany before flying out to Los Angeles and Frampton, in mid February. He determined to make this new musical alliance work, but Toni was full of doubts about the project.
‘When Peter’s people got in touch with Steve and asked him if he’d be interested in doing a one-off album and tour reunion with Peter,’ Toni recalls, ‘they promised they wouldn’t call it Humble Pie. They promised that, and he’d get three million quid. And he said, “I want to secure our future and I want you to have what all the others have had”, and I said, “I don’t want that. I don’t want three million fucking quid. I don’t want anything like that. I’m happy doing what we’re doing and why don’t you just stay here and get a deal for what you’re doing and just do it as you”. I don’t know, for some reason he just wanted to go for it and there was no stopping him.’
Prior to his departure, Marriott told Jim Leverton that he was off to work with Frampton. Leverton, his closest ally for years felt badly betrayed again.
‘It had been on the boil for a while,’ he recalls, ‘and then he told me that Frampton had been in touch with him and he wanted him to go to America to make a record. I thought, “Here we go again.” He had me doing all the hard graft with the constant gigging and now he wants to make a record with a guy that all he’d ever done was bad mouth.
‘He’d always tell me that Frampton was a big Jessie who couldn’t play rock’n’roll if it bit him on the arse. And contrary to what he had previously said, he told me, “I gotta get back in the big time, mate. Then I can start to help people.” It was a complete turnaround. I think his wife Toni had a lot of sway. She’d never been to America and she had no idea of what Marriott was going to be like over there. I did tell her before they went, “Watch out, he turns over there, he’s a different person.” Everything is so accessible, the coke and everything...’
Jim’s stark warnings were to prove true. For Toni, the next three months would prove to be hellish beyond belief. The first sign of trouble occurred when Frampton told Steve that he didn’t want any women in the studio, including partners.
‘And that’s when Steve went on the turn,’ Toni states. ‘See if there was no one to temper him, he’d just go on the piss and he’d get out of control. I’m not saying that I controlled him or anything, but he needed a mate. And I did tell that to Peter. I told him, “You ain’t gonna cope with him.” Not many people could cope with him, that’s what it was. It wasn’t a matter of ruling him, it was a matter of whether or not you could cope.’
As Steve started to derail, some record company interest in their project was made known. But preliminary meetings with various executives only served to push Marriott further off track.
‘They told Steve,’ Toni states, ‘that he had to go to meetings and prove that he wasn’t the Steve Marriott of old. The other thing was that he said that he didn’t want to front the band, he wanted it to be more Pete’s thing and he would just come back and play. But when he got over there everyone was for him, you know what I mean? He was so shot through with all that. I mean, the man nearly died doing all that and he was so scared of getting into all that again.
‘He was on his own, and he didn’t like doing things on his own. He liked to have a sidekick, you know what I mean? And one that understood him and one that said “Oh, fuck ’em,” like he would, and all that. I could see him losing the plot, he was just going off his nut ’cause he was away from everything that he was accustomed to, you know.
‘If I was there with him constantly he would have been alright, and I’m not saying that he needed me and all that, but someone had to deal with him when you see him losing it. You had to know how to deal with him. Otherwise he’d just hit the bottle and that would be it, and then he’d get progressively worse and worse and nastier and nastier until he’d be told, “we ain’t taking a risk on it”.’
Marriott had begun resenting his situation, began resenting himself. He wanted out but, fearful of confrontation, fell back into his old habits. One night, after days of heavy consumption, it happened – Melvin came roaring back to life. It was the first time in their relationship that Toni had been exposed to Melvin, the first time she had witnessed Marriott’s schizophrenic behaviour brought on by his heavy alcohol and drug abuse.
‘He was a raving lunatic,’ Toni calmly says of her husband in this period. ‘Pissed out of his head all the time. Yeah. Violent, abusive, everything. It was dreadful. Dreadful it was. At first, it weren’t so bad but when the pressure started piling on him and I weren’t there to alleviate for him, he just went to pieces. You know, he just lost the plot.’
Toni had no idea that Melvin was not a new creation, but someone who had lived within Steve Marriott’s body for the past 16 years. For her, Melvin was, ‘violent, vicious, spiteful, a totally different man to the one that I had married,’ and now she was scared out of her mind.
***
The arguing that would rage between them for weeks on end had been sparked by the tragedy that had just scarred Eric Clapton’s life forever. In New York, the guitarist’s three-year-old baby son, Conor, had walked out unattended onto a balcony, fallen to his death from their high rise flat. The news shook Marriott, badly, made him take a step back, reassess. Now he looked towards his own children, Toby, Tonya and Mollie, started imagining how he would feel if a child of his should be taken away so suddenly, so brutally.
He knew he had not been a great father but he also knew that time was still on his side. He could make amends, he could reach out to all of them now, try and be the father he had never truly been.
Toni fully understood his motives. After all, she was a mother herself.
Yet Marriott’s vow served to set her alarm bells ringing.
If you looked at Steve’s marriages or long term relationships, a definite pattern emerged.
When he married Jenny Rylance, he did so at a time when he needed protection from the madness of Small Faces stardom, the hectic lifestyle. With her, he was able to retreat to the country, live quietly. Yet after a couple of years he had grown bored of the quiet life, started feeling the urge for something more exciting. Exit Jenny, enter Pam.
Now follow six, seven years of the high life, of party time. Then the switch occurs, the need to calm down, experience something more sedate.
Exit Pam, enter Manon.
He settles down, curbs his excesses. But this mindset can’t last.
Exit Manon, enter Toni.
They had been together four years now. She couldn’t help herself. Was it now her turn to be jettisoned? Was her husband bored of her, hankering for the quiet life that she couldn’t provide, maybe thinking of using Mollie Mae to return to Manon and a more simple life?
And Melvin. Had Melvin now appeared to scare her away? Was he the sign that she was about to lose the man she loved above everything else, the man she was convinced was her absolute and true destiny?
No wonder she was so frightened. Not only of Melvin but worse, a future with no Steve in it.
***
They wrote and recorded three songs at Frampton’s recording studio. They were called, ‘The Bigger They Come The Harder They Fall’, ‘I Won’t Let You Down’ and ‘Out Of The Blue’. The songs had potential but the money men were unhappy with Steve and his wayward behaviour. It was the ’90s now, different times. The record company men were in control. They held the cheque books, they held the power. To them, Marriott’s ways were a throwback to the bad old days when musicians did what they wanted, when they wanted. Not anymore they didn’t.
Meetings were held, pressure applied to Toni to clean up her man. It was fruitless. Marriott was getting more and more agitated, more and more reckless. If at first he admired Frampton’s playing, the sessions between them had now revealed that Steve was now on a par with him.
Jim Leverton recalls getting phone calls from Toni and Steve, insulting the ex-Herd and Humble Pie guitarist behind his back.
‘They’d ring in the middle of the night and just be putting the guy down, telling me what a prat Frampton was.’
***
From the latter part of his stay in Los Angeles come two reports. One is from Peter Stringfellow, the other a fan, Darren Hitchcott.
Club runner Stringfellow was in town to oversee the opening of his new venue. On hearing of the Humble Pie reunion, he got in touch, invited both Marriott and Frampton to lunch. He states now that Marriott seemed to have a grip on himself, that he looked great, had lost weight, wasn’t drinking, seemed to be clean and was good company to be in.
‘He wasn’t pissed, he wasn’t drugged,’ Stringfellow says. ‘He was raving about the songs he had done with Frampton, it was, like, great man, I was so pleased for him. We arranged to meet back in London.’
Marriott, clean and serene.
Yet Darren remembers Steve differently. In early April, 1991, he and a friend met Steve at the Rainbow bar on Sunset Boulevard. By sheer coincidence, the two friends were actually discussing Marriott’s vocals on the Rockin’ The Fillmore album when Marriott and Toni walked in. They couldn’t believe their eyes. They went straight over, introduced themselves.
Marriott enjoyed their company and, after a few drinks, told them he had a limo outside, rented courtesy of Frampton. The group left the club, headed up to Stringfellows, drinking copious amounts of whiskey from the limo’s bar.
At the club they are unable to contact Peter Stringfellow and gain admission. Instead, they pile back in the car, head for the house on the beach that had been rented for Steve and Toni.
More drinks and then Steve starts playing Charlie and Inez Foxx records to the boys, starts raving about them, just as he had done all his life. Toni meanwhile looks for a cassette player so that the guests can hear Steve’s new songs.
‘She really seemed like Steve’s biggest fan,’ Darren says, ‘she kept telling us how great Steve’s new stuff was and how much we had to listen to it.’
Toni has a problem. The only machine she can find is a small Walkman. Toni pushes the tape into the machine, hits play. Nothing happens. She shakes the machine, hits buttons furiously, tries and tries to get it to play. No joy.
‘So we’re all standing there in our drunken state looking at this bloody Walkman,’ Darren says, ‘and then Steve’s wife grabs the Walkman, holds it really close to her face and says to the Walkman, “WORK YOU CUNT, WORK.”
‘Steve turns to me and says, “Met the wife have you?”’
They stayed up until 4.30am, playing guitars, singing Humble Pie songs, heading out for more booze, at one point, Steve even ringing Darren’s home and singing the first verse of Pie’s ‘Thirty Days In A Hole’ into his answer machine.
‘I still listen to that answer machine cassette tape with Steve singing,’ he says, ‘and I think that could have been the last time that he ever sang “Thirty Days In The Hole”, and that the last time he played the song “79th And Sunset” was with me playing guitar.’
***
After two and a half months, Marriott had decided enough was enough. Fuck the money, the three million quid. He just wasn’t suited to this bullshit. Far better to go back to what he knew best, the pubs, the clubs, where he could do what he wanted, play what he wanted.
‘They tried to make him stay,’ Toni reveals, ‘but I told them he don’t want to do it. It’s not what you told him it’d be and he don’t like it, he’s unhappy and he wants to go home and so do I. And that was it, really.
‘There wasn’t any real nastiness, know what I mean? I thought, well, as soon as we get back to England, everything will be alright. Once he started working properly again and playing and all that, yeah, he’d be all right ’cause that’s how he got frustrated when he didn’t do live gigs. And he loved the pubs and clubs, the gigs.’
Jim Leverton recalls Steve ringing him to invite him back into his future.
‘Steve was on the phone saying, “We’ll get the band back together, mate. Go back on the circuit.” I said, “No.” It was the first time I had ever said, no. I said, “Let’s make a fucking record then we don’t have to do all the dives. Perhaps we can do places like Hammersmith Odeon with two thousand people a night. I’m not looking for places like Earls Court or anything, but by playing to two thousand people you don’t have to work so hard. You’re playing to more people at one time.”
‘To my amazement he said he was gonna go for it. In the past when I said I wanted to make a record he’d just say, “Well, fuck off and make one then.” Now he was up for it. He even suggested using a mobile at his home in Arkesden, North Essex. We had some great new songs and it would have been smashing to get them down on record.’
That record was never made.
It is also worth pointing out that Darren’s answer machine tape could well be the last recording Steve Marriott ever made. Given his passion for music, that mystic force that consumed him, that defined him, that shaped him, and bearing in mind his huge distaste for the business of music, if that fact is true then in many ways, justice on Steve Marriott’s life has been beautifully served.