ANDREW AND I could never have formed a band by ourselves. Two sixteen-year-olds with few resources and not much resourcefulness, we needed help. By then we were properly equipped instrumentally. Andrew had a drum kit purchased by his parents, bit by bit, as Christmas and birthday presents, and I had a new guitar, acquired through a posthumous intervention by my mother.
As I bemoaned my stolen Vox, Linda revealed that Lily had somehow squirrelled away £40 in a Post Office savings account as a bequest to her children. When my sister discovered the account after Lily’s death, she had decided to save it and give it all to me on my eighteenth birthday. Just before her wedding, and our parting of the ways, she told me of this legacy and gave me the option of having it now, two years earlier than she’d planned, to buy a new guitar.
It was an act of providence, as if Lily had reached from beyond the grave to bestow on me the thing I wanted most in life. Wandering around Soho I’d seen it in the window of a musical instrument shop in Wardour Street – my dream guitar: a cherry-red Höfner Verithin with Venetian double cutaways, mother-of-pearl inlay on the head and neck, a black scratchboard and a Bigsby tremolo unit.
It was called a Verithin because it was, well, very thin – about an inch and a quarter, about as slim as a semi-acoustic guitar could be. It was second hand (they’d stopped making them in the early sixties), but that was what I wanted: a guitar that had seen active service. The price was £35, including a red, cheese-wedge-shaped case.
The only guitar I might have swapped it for was a Fender Telecaster, but I didn’t see one of those for sale and besides, they were not as beautiful as the Verithin. My guitar hero Jeff Beck had been playing a Fender Telecaster when Andrew and I saw him at the Marquee Club early in 1967, just after he launched the Jeff Beck Group. I remember, as we discussed the band’s brilliant, gravel-voiced singer, Rod Stewart, well known in Soho as Rod the Mod, a guy next to us commenting that he had missed his chance of the big time and would always be confined to the club circuit.
By then the Area had been born. Its architect had arrived on the scene in the summer of 1966 in the shape of Danny Curtis. Danny was the boyfriend of Carole Cox, Tony Cox’s sister, who had been a friend of Linda’s at Bevington School, and lived opposite the Cox family in Lancaster Road in North Kensington. He had been going steady with Carole for some years – not strictly speaking the boy next door, but the boy across the road.
One evening, Danny had come over to Pitt House with a serious proposition. He badly wanted to be a singer in a band and suggested that and Andrew and I join him as the core of a five-piece outfit. He would place an advert in Melody Maker to recruit a bass and a lead guitar. He would be the manager – our Andrew Loog Oldham as well as our Mick Jagger. He would also get the bookings, drive us around in his battered Bedford van, arrange rehearsals and distribute the money we earned.
Danny Curtis was a proper grown-up, pushing twenty, and as streetwise as anybody we’d ever met. Stick-thin, fashionably slightly built and with a mop of straight blond hair, he might not have been blessed with any great musical talent, but he certainly had the gift of the gab. He could talk his way into (and out of) anything. His voice was passable, and what he lacked in vocal dexterity he more than made up for with his sheer stage presence.
The idea was quickly sold. Danny’s energy was infectious and his dedication to the project total and sincere. The three of us decided on a name. I’m pretty sure the Area was my suggestion, in homage to the basement domains of the crumbling houses in Southam Street that were known as ‘areas’.
As it happened, I was about to become a neighbour of Danny’s. When Linda returned the keys of our flat to the council to begin her married life, I was going to have to leave Battersea. With all attempts to persuade me to move to Watford having failed, she reluctantly acquiesced to an approach being made to Mrs Cox, at whose home I’d been billeted in the final days of Lily’s life when Linda was almost permanently resident at Hammersmith Hospital.
So I returned to my manor, back to the familiar territory of Bramley Road, Ladbroke Grove and the Portobello market. To a household of affection and generosity, of proper cooked breakfasts and warm, paraffin-heated rooms. The Coxes’ home in Lancaster Road was round the corner from Latimer Road tube station and I was reunited with the Metropolitan Line and the tube network that was so sadly lacking south of the Thames. Andrew was once again within walking distance and the manager and lead singer of our new band conveniently just over the road.
On the surface, not much had changed in North Kensington in the two years I’d been away. Southam Street had emptied and a few more slum houses had vanished. But there was an unease in the air. The children of the first wave of immigrants, who had grown up witnessing the way their parents had been treated by some of their neighbours and by the police, were determined not to tolerate such treatment themselves. But while racism and tension remained rife, steps were also being taken to bring the community together.
The first event that would evolve into the Notting Hill carnival, a street party for local children designed to encourage cultural unity, had taken place that summer, metamorphosing into a carnival procession when a steel band decided to take their music around the neighbourhood. Snatches of calypso and reggae could now be heard on the streets, elements of Caribbean style were making their mark on the Mod movement, the groundwork for a mutual understanding was being laid and the seeds of new influences on British music were being sown. The capability of music to help unite people was beginning to have an effect.
Pat and Albert Cox rented two floors of a house from a private landlord. Along with practically every family in the vicinity, they were waiting for the offer of a council house where their children could all have their own room. Mrs Cox managed to squeeze an extra bed into the room shared by her two sons, Tony and Paul. Although it was a long while since Tony and I had been the inseparable duo of our primary-school days, we had a perfectly amicable relationship and I often rode around on the back of his Lambretta. Paul, who was the youngest by some distance, was just reaching secondary-school age and was understandably miffed at having a third person imposed on him in a bedroom barely big enough for two. At the time, though, his antipathy hardly registered with me. He was a little kid who wasn’t going to stop me settling into the familial bliss of my new home.
Carole, as the only girl, had the luxury of her own room, but with no bathroom, she had to use the kitchen sink to wash like the rest of us. The mornings were very regimented, with everyone off to work or school, but fortunately we boys didn’t need quite as long at the sink as Carole did.
By the time I was back in North Kensington, towards the end of that unforgettable summer of 1966, the Area was up and running. The Melody Maker advert had come up trumps, and by October two guys in their late teens, Tony Kearns and Ian Clark, had expanded us from a trio into a quintet. Tony had recently moved down from Chester with his exotic Futurama guitar, determined to make it as a musician. Ian was a cerebral Scot who was studying music at a university somewhere in London. He played bass guitar for the Area but was a gifted musician capable of playing many instruments.
Danny found a base for us at the Fourth Feathers youth club close to the Edgware Road. It was there that we practised, stored our equipment and performed in public for the first time. Before long we were playing gigs all over west London and spending most of our Sunday mornings at the Fourth Feathers rehearsing new material. At lunchtime we’d take a break and head round to a local pub, a novel experience for me and Andrew. Licensing laws, like the age restrictions at the Hammersmith Palais, weren’t as vigorously applied then and we were never challenged, despite being well under age. We took the precaution of not drawing attention to ourselves: Danny, Tony or Ian always ordered the drinks.
What we didn’t appreciate at the time was that we were experiencing the last days of the traditional London boozer. My father would have felt at home in that pub off Praed Street. There was a honky-tonk piano which, to our amazement, Ian took to playing, reeling off popular songs from the forties and fifties. There were no fruit machines or television screens, or any other distractions, save for a dartboard in the public bar and a shove ha’penny game available on request.
There was smoke and noise and great gales of laughter from toothless men and women nursing glasses of Mackeson or light and bitter. They could have walked straight off the set of one of those black-and-white films made during the war where jolly Cockneys rolled out the barrel in defiance of Hitler’s bombs. Since this was, of course, only twenty years after the war had ended, many of those who packed the pub on those Sunday lunchtimes may well have been drinking there during the Blitz.
They probably looked upon us as decadent representatives of a mollycoddled generation but we were treated with affectionate good humour, especially after Ian became the impromptu pianist. I remember one gaggle of old dears insisting that my pale baby face must be ‘rouged’, a suspicion no doubt arising from the firm belief that anyone playing in a ‘beat group’ must be of questionable sexuality. We would return to our rehearsals after these raucous sessions re-energised, if a little worse for wear.
I learned so much from Ian and Tony about chord progression, keys and harmony. For Andrew and me, the step up from playing as a duo in his bedroom to being part of a proper band, performing on stage to live audiences, was like experiencing the joys of cycling after years of being confined to an indoor exercise bike.
The Area was never anything but a pop group churning out the hits of the time. Our playlist embraced ‘Working in the Coal Mine’ and ‘Time Is on My Side’, ‘Satisfaction’ and ‘Hang on Sloopy’, ‘Hold Tight’ and ‘Semi-Detached Suburban Mr James’. We never needed to buy sheet music because Ian could always be relied upon to work out the chords. Danny would be on lead vocals for most songs, although I’d take centre stage for the Small Faces’ number ‘All or Nothing’ and the Yardbirds’ ‘For Your Love’. Danny would tap a tambourine during these intervals, taking a rest from his usual frantic stage performances. He always wore a purple satin shirt with tight white trousers that made him look like an aubergine balanced on a couple of pipe-cleaners.
By early 1967 we felt that we’d established ourselves. The Area had a regular midweek booking at the Pavilion pub in North Pole Road, opposite Wormwood Scrubs, and Danny had the diary filled with Saturday engagements. Our going rate was £7 a booking, which was shared equally, £1 8s each. Even though Danny did all the extra work – not just drumming up the bookings, but transporting the gear, setting it up and dealing with any electrical mishaps – he insisted on everyone being paid the same.
By now I’d left Tesco, having sworn at the manager and marched out in high dudgeon just before Christmas 1966. We’d argued about the state of the warehouse I’d been left to manage on my own after Ronnie Handley left to become a sales rep for Smith’s Crisps in October. The resentment I’d been nursing about being given greater responsibility with no pay rise had boiled over when the store manager ordered me to sweep the warehouse just as I was going for my scheduled lunch break. If the case had ever gone to a tribunal, I would have said they had sacked me while Tesco would have claimed I’d resigned. We would both have been right.
As it was, I was out of work for less than a week. Ronnie Handley came to the Coxes’ house to tell me that there was a vacancy at a much smaller supermarket, Anthony Jackson’s on the Upper Richmond Road in East Sheen. It had a manager and three staff – Kath, Sandra and, from the following Monday morning, me.
As I earned only £10 a week, two gigs with the Area increased my wages by about a third. But money was irrelevant to the pure joy of being in a band. I would have paid for the privilege.
As well as raiding the hit parade for material, Ian and Tony had begun to write their own songs and we’d introduced two of them, ‘Hard Life’ and ‘Control of My Soul’, into our playlist. I’d been writing songs myself since I was eight years old, inspired by Lonnie Donegan and the country and western music I heard on the wireless. By now I was writing folksy stuff that didn’t lend itself to electrification, apart from a Cat Stevens-type ditty called ‘I Have Seen’ that we’d also started to include in the set.
Danny was convinced that Ian and Tony had produced a potential chart-topper in ‘Hard Life’ that would secure our fame and fortune. My song was seen as a half-decent ‘B’ side. He insisted that we got the songs copyrighted and set about looking for a recording studio where we could cut a demo disc.
What we never expected was that he’d opt for one of the most famous recording studios in the country. Regent Sound was in Denmark Street, famously also known as London’s Tin Pan Alley. Like its New York counterpart, this street was the hub of the British music industry, the place where music publishers clustered with their composers, arrangers and musicians. It was where new songs had been rehearsed and acetates recorded going back to the 1920s.
The Regent Sound studio was where the Stones had recorded their debut album, where Jimi Hendrix, the Kinks, the Who, the Troggs, the Yardbirds, Amen Corner, the Bee Gees, and now the Area, committed their genius to vinyl.
I suppose there weren’t that many studios for hire in 1967 but there must have been cheaper places than Regent Sound. Danny was a delivery driver earning very little, yet he booked these top-grade facilities entirely at his own expense. We would have one hour, including the time it took to set up our gear and dismantle it afterwards. He may have negotiated a discount, I don’t know – Danny certainly knew how to cut a deal. He had already blagged an old Marshall amp from Don Arden, the manager of the Small Faces, a band that also practised occasionally at the Fourth Feathers.
We entered that revered and sacred studio on a cold February night in 1967 and got cracking. ‘Hard Life’ is a jaunty little song with a call-and-response chorus (‘Now it’s a hard (hard), hard (hard) life/It would be hard (hard), hard (hard), harder without you …’). Tony and I sang the ‘hard’ response to Danny’s call, leading into a two- and then three-part harmony. ‘Listen to my song’ (Danny on his own); ‘Yesterday has gone’ (Danny and me); ‘Life goes on and oooooon’ (Danny, me and Tony).
We did a couple of takes, overlaid the harmonies and then sat in the control room as the engineer played back the finished version. Oh, the thrill of that moment. It wasn’t a great song, to be honest, but it was solid pop, with a hook, performed with energy and enthusiasm. What made hearing it that night so amazing was the state-of-the-art sound system.
All the recorded music we’d ever heard up to that moment had poured out of tiny (and tinny) speakers built into the front of record-players, or from radios, fading in and out of frequency in the case of Radio Luxembourg and the pirate stations. Even when the discs we liked made it on to the BBC, what was relayed was an imperfect reproduction accompanied by persistent crackling. We weren’t among the minority of more prosperous record collectors who could indulge in ‘hi-fi’ equipment and it would be years before headphones were widely available.
And so the sound that emerged from the high-quality speakers in that soundproofed studio had an extraordinary purity that was brand new to us. It made our music sound better than it was.
Having taken so much care over ‘Hard Life’, we were left with barely five minutes to record ‘I Have Seen’: no time for a run-through, or to overdub the splendid harmonies we’d rehearsed. We had to do it in one take. Danny’s voice came in off-key and Ian’s bass was plonky, but it would have to do. We were quickly shepherded out of the studio to make way for the next session. It’s a poor rendition of ‘I Have Seen’ but at least it demonstrates Andrew’s proficiency. His drumming is easily the best thing about it.
We were handed the reel-to-reel tape of the recording and a few weeks later Danny collected the ten vinyl discs of ‘Hard Life/I Have Seen’ that we’d had pressed. He then set about trying to get the record companies to listen to our work of art. While I stacked shelves at Anthony Jackson’s, Andrew butchered at Tesco, Tony toiled away at his clerical job and Ian studied, Danny arranged meetings with Pye, Philips and a new record label called Deram. I think he also sent one of those precious discs to EMI. Another couple were posted to pirate radio stations but never played.
No deals were done, no contracts signed and our demo disc would be the only record we ever made. Top of the Pops would never be troubled by the Area, but we carried on in anticipation of our big chance, having a whale of a time in the process. We played in pubs, church halls, working-men’s clubs and youth clubs, at wedding receptions and birthday parties. The previous December, before I left Tesco, we’d performed at their staff Christmas do. In March we played at a dance in Shepherd’s Bush on the very evening that QPR, the team most of the guests supported and which I revered, won the League Cup at Wembley. In May we were onstage in front of a thousand people at Aylesbury College as the support band for Fifth Dynasty. Danny told us that Don Arden had mentioned the possibility of us going on tour with the Small Faces. We were sure that it was only a matter of time before the breakthrough came.
Unfortunately, what came wasn’t a breakthrough but a break-in. In the autumn of 1967 somebody smashed the locks on the room at the Fourth Feathers where we stored our equipment. They stole everything that was there: Andrew’s drum kit, Ian’s bass, all our microphones, amplifiers and speakers, plus my newly acquired fuzz-box (a pedal that basically fattened the sound of the note, as in Keith Richards’ opening riff on ‘Satisfaction’).
Thankfully, I’d taken my precious Höfner Verithin in its cheese-wedge case back to the Coxes’, so at least that didn’t fall into the hands of the thieves, though my newly purchased Marshall amp did. The amp Mike had made me wasn’t good enough for live performances with the Area and, as I wasn’t old enough to sign a hire-purchase agreement, my boss at Anthony Jackson had acted as guarantor to enable me to buy a bigger one. It was uninsured, so I was left with two years of substantial monthly payments for a piece of equipment I’d never see again.
It was like a bereavement. Andrew was devastated. He’d lost about five years’ worth of Christmas and birthday presents. We’d sit mournfully in the Tower Coffee Bar in Hammersmith, where we often met, trying to break the world-record time for making a single cup of coffee last. ‘At least you’ve got your guitar,’ he’d observe glumly. ‘I’ve got nothing.’
I refused to accept that it was the end of our dream. Even while playing with the Area, Andrew and I had been surreptitiously pursuing other music opportunities, reading the small ads in the Melody Maker assiduously every week. Andrew once applied to be drummer for the Mindbenders, a band notable for the rare feat of going on to greater success once they’d unshackled their name from that of their front man, Wayne Fontana. Their first single after the split, ‘Groovy Kind of Love’, had been a huge hit around the world, reaching Number 2 in the US. Andrew was shortlisted for the vacancy, which seemed an achievement in itself, but lost out at the final audition.
Shortly afterwards I’d spotted an advertisement for a rhythm guitarist/backing singer for Peter Jay and the Jaywalkers. Although the highest chart position any of their singles ever reached was 31, the band was very well known. Indeed, I had grown up listening to them singing the hits of other artists on our Bakelite radio. They had also once supported the Beatles on tour and had appeared on Ready, Steady, Go!
The band were still performing on the Light Programme lunchtime shows. Not only was the ‘needle time’ agreement still in force, but the BBC retained its British broadcasting monopoly: it was still take your pick between Light, Home and Third. There weren’t even any local BBC stations, which would have at least allowed the Corporation to compete with itself.
I applied for the job with the Jaywalkers. I was still only sixteen, but artists such as Stevie Winwood and Peter Frampton had achieved rock success in their early teens and I saw no reason why I couldn’t do the same. I felt I had the pretty-boy looks of Frampton, I could write songs and, while I acknowledged to myself that I’d never be a lead guitarist or lead singer, I knew my chords and had enough of a voice to harmonise sweetly.
I was delighted to be invited to audition. So it was that one windy day, my Höfner Verithin and I headed off from Latimer Road station to a rehearsal space in a nightclub near Leicester Square. I was wearing a thin, light, double-breasted cotton jacket with wide lapels and a faint black stripe, teamed with tight black trousers and Chelsea boots. The soft blue shirt that completed my ensemble had cost me a week’s wages. I was convinced I looked the part.
I walked into a room furnished with tiered red velvet seats but no stage. The existing Jaywalkers were ready with all their equipment on a flat, dimly lit bit of the floor. I expected to find myself in a queue of other hopefuls but, to my surprise, I was immediately ushered on to the set.
Peter Jay himself had vacated the drumkit, from where he usually led the band. His place was taken by another drummer so that he could sit four or five rows back in the red velvet seats with an entourage of men in suits. All I had to do was plug my guitar into the equipment provided and take lead vocal and rhythm guitar on the Beatles song ‘This Boy’.
The song was the ‘B’ side of ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’. I’d never played it before. It wasn’t on the Area’s playlist. Neither were any other Beatles songs, for that matter. They seemed too sacred to imitate and the rest of the band were more into the Stones. But I knew the track well enough.
‘This Boy’ has a lovely, mellow, melodic three-part harmony. The lead vocal only really becomes a lead on the rasping middle eight, where it departs from the two harmonising accompanists. Like many early Beatles songs, its apparent simplicity is deceptive. The chords were set out on the sheet music on a stand in front of me and I immediately spotted a tricky D major seventh chord I’d rarely encountered before.
The audition was set up to replicate how the band had to work, often with little rehearsal time before going on air. We played the song straight through twice and then did the middle eight once on its own, at Peter’s request.
I was confident I’d done enough to get the job and Peter Jay seemed pleased as he chatted to me amicably afterwards, even mentioning that I’d need to join the Musicians’ Union if I was recruited.
I thought my days of shelf-stacking were over. The band’s manager had my address, and the phone number of Anthony Jackson’s, and every day I expected a letter or a call. But none came.
I wasn’t destined to join the band. But as things turned out, it was probably for the best, because the writing was finally on the wall for the band’s main source of income, those lunchtime BBC music programmes. Perhaps Peter Jay had seen it, as they broke up not long after my audition. In the late 1970s, he diversified into another branch of the entertainment industry: he bought Great Yarmouth Hippodrome, where Max Miller and Houdini once performed, and Lloyd George held political rallies. Peter Jay is still staging concerts, water spectaculars and circus acts there today, no doubt regretting his failure to make me a Jaywalker.
I’m not sure if anyone in North Kensington realised they were living through the Summer of Love. The media reported hippy happenings around the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, and Scott McKenzie’s dirge about going there and meeting some gentle people was Number 1 in the UK in September 1967, but I never saw anybody wearing flowers in their hair round our way.
Another slice of Bohemian nonsense dominated the charts that summer. Procol Harum’s ‘Whiter Shade of Pale’ went on and on, literally as well as metaphorically. The band came from Southend and the lyrics reeked of pot. Not that I had any experience of marijuana. I smoked Kensitas (or Du Maurier, if there was a girl to impress). But I knew a good lyric when I heard one, and Procol Harum’s ‘light fandango’ left me cold.
Pink Floyd had headlined the 14-Hour Technicolor Dream Concert at the Ally Pally in north London in the spring, and bands like Soft Machine, Traffic and the Crazy World of Arthur Brown were busy being psychedelic, but the musical event of the year, nationally and internationally, was the release of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which out-psyched them all.
Part of the joy and excitement of following the Beatles in real time lay in the anticipation of each new album. The band’s rhapsodic phase had begun with Rubber Soul. Its successor, Revolver, bore the first fruit of their decision to abandon the stage for the studio. Sergeant Pepper saw this phase reach its zenith.
There had been a tantalising taste of what we might expect with the release of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ as a single in February during what I suppose could be described as the Winter of Love. From its opening descending chords, played on a Mellotron, to its closing train-like codicil, this hallucinogenic exploration of Lennon’s childhood was extraordinary.
If ‘Love Me Do’ was the amoeba of the Beatles’ canon, ‘Strawberry Fields’ represented its advanced civilisation. Resonating with the sounds of instruments we’d never heard of, complex key changes and bursts of cello and brass over a foundation of contrasting rhythms, the single was supposedly the result of fifty-five hours in the studio, released at about the time that the Area had been rushing through our sixty minutes at Regent Sound.
‘Strawberry Fields’ certainly wouldn’t have appeared on our playlist. It was far too complex to be reproduced on stage by them, let alone us, although we did have a crack at the ‘B’ side, ‘Penny Lane’, which didn’t survive rehearsals.
I wasn’t alone in wondering if ‘Strawberry Fields’ would appear on their eagerly awaited next album, but it didn’t. The band stuck to their principle that, with few exceptions, when their fans shelled out good money for a Beatles record, they would be acquiring new music rather than songs they’d already bought as singles. So ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ proved to be an hors-d’oeuvre to the main course.
By the time Sergeant Pepper was released in June the Beatles had already begun to dismantle the barriers of snobbery and elitism that had previously denied pop music any critical acclaim. The Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Ned Rorem declared that ‘She’s Leaving Home’ was equal to anything Schubert ever wrote; Leonard Bernstein compared their work with Schumann’s and the music critic William Mann described Lennon and McCartney as ‘outstanding composers’, praising their pandiatonic clusters and Aeolian cadences.
Now the music critic of The Times, no less, reviewed Sergeant Pepper as if it were a classical work. For me and millions of others, it was a classic, if not classical. It was wonderful that the Beatles were being appreciated by a wider, older audience; by those who talked of symphonies and opuses and pandiatonic clusters. But they came from the same background as we did, they had grown with us through the sixties, had astounded us, inspired us, enchanted us. The Beatles belonged to us, not them.
Between my audition for Peter Jay and the Jaywalkers and the Grand Theft of the Area’s equipment there was a momentous occasion in the history of popular music that sounded the death knell for the pirate radio stations. The British government finally closed the loophole that allowed them to broadcast from international waters and forced them off the air.
Their huge audience was, as far as anyone was able to analyse it, a new demographic of mainly young people who weren’t interested in what the BBC had to offer. A response from the BBC was long overdue. The new Marine Offences Act and negotiated adjustments to the ‘needle time’ agreement with the Musicians’ Union allowed them to completely overhaul their service. Three radio stations became four, with the old Light Programme splitting into two, Radio 1 for the kids and Radio 2 for their mums and dads. The generation gap in music really was that stark in the late sixties.
Rock ’n’ roll was still so young that it had few adherents over the age of twenty-five. There was no such thing as an ageing rocker in 1967. This musical divide spawned the inter-generational tension that pervaded the sixties and was reflected in its songs. The Rolling Stones sang about what a drag it was to get old while the Who hoped they’d die before they did. I suspect that ‘Mother’s Little Helper’, the Stones’ song that paints such a bleak picture of ageing, may have vanished from their playlist now that Mick Jagger is well into his seventies.
In August 1967 I mourned the passing of Radio London, which had been constantly on in the background at Anthony Jackson’s supermarket. The station perished magnificently, going off-air to the Beatles’ ‘Day in the Life’, which had been banned by the Beeb because of its supposed references to LSD (dear old ‘Auntie’ failed to detect any such reference on ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ from the same Sergeant Pepper LP). Radio London staff arriving back at Liverpool Street station from Harwich were greeted like returning heroes by crowds of young supporters.
I made sure I was present and correct for the launch of Radio 1 at 7am on the morning of Saturday, 30 September 1967. I rose at 6.30 to an unusually quiet kitchen at Lancaster Road. Today none of the Coxes had to be up for work or school, whereas it was a normal working day for us supermarket workers. On weekdays this was a place of noise and bustle as Mr Cox cooked breakfast. I’d never tasted fried tomatoes before living with the Coxes. Albert cultivated them in large quantities on his allotment and, as the breakfast chef, served them up daily with bacon, toast and the occasional egg. The bowl of cornflakes in front of me now was a poor substitute, but I was glad to have the place to myself as the sacred hour approached. I checked that the Coxes’ radio was tuned to 247 metres on the medium wave and waited.
There was a Radio 1 theme tune to be endured before the magic moment when Tony Blackburn – like most of the new station’s DJs a former ‘pirate’ (they were the only ones with the experience) – uttered the first words to be heard on the Beeb’s revolutionary new flagship radio station. As ‘Flowers in the Rain’ by the Move faded and Tony Blackburn reeled off his silly jokes (‘Would all motorists taking the M1 to Birmingham kindly bring it back’), I felt the joy of abundance. Having been musically malnourished all my life, forced to scavenge for my daily bread, I was now to have a feast laid on for me every day. Pop music would be as available on the BBC as classical music had always been, free of charge and with no advertising breaks.
The BBC disc jockeys assumed a new prestige, often being considered as cool as the music they played. Some of the old stagers survived – Jimmy Young, for instance, and Pete Murray – but it was the young ones who achieved the cult status. I suppose it was these DJs who seemed to their listeners to be the providers of wall-to-wall pop music rather than a fusty public corporation. My particular favourites were Tony Blackburn, Dave Cash, Kenny Everett and the transatlantic tones of Emperor Rosko.
Radio 1 was not universally popular with its target audience. Some complained that it did not cater adequately for the market the pirates had created, as had been promised; others that it was just another ‘establishment’ institution. But to me it felt like a monumental advance for young people; as if the state had been forced to acknowledge our existence. Still, more than fifty years on, I think of that day as one of the milestones in my life.
During our bleak coffee shop deliberations after the theft, I tried to impress upon Andrew the likelihood that, with pop music so ubiquitous following the launch of Radio 1, there would be more bands and greater demand for fabulous, good-looking musicians like us. Soon after that conversation Andrew met Ann, a relative of the Coxes, who would be the love of his life. Playing the drums suddenly ceased to be his first priority.
The enforced break-up of the Area more or less coincided with the end of my time with the Coxes. Pat and Albert had at long last reached the top of the council waiting list and had been offered a house on a leafy Roehampton estate in south-west London. It was the turn of the building in Lancaster Road in which they had made the happiest of homes for twenty years to face the wrecking ball that had already demolished the slums of Southam Street, along with much of the area, to make way for the Westway, the elevated section of the A40, which was to lift the traffic going in and out of London up and over North Kensington. Some of the replacement housing to be completed in the next decade would stretch skywards. While Southam Street made way for the Trellick Tower, our end of Lancaster Road would be supplanted by a twenty-four-storey block of flats called Grenfell Tower.
My sojourn at 318 Lancaster Road had always been a temporary arrangement and I was grateful to the Coxes for welcoming me into their already overcrowded accommodation for as long as they did. A few months past my seventeenth birthday, I started looking for somewhere else to live. I was not earning very much as a supermarket shelf-stacker and budding pop sensation but a trawl of local papers soon produced a room in the spacious flat of Mrs Kenny, an Irish widow who lived with her grown-up son in Hamlet Gardens, off King Street in Hammersmith, close to where I’d worked for Tesco.
I had to come up with a month’s rent in advance. My sister, by now raising her first child, forwarded a loan – not before making another attempt to lure me to Watford, but I was, if anything, even more determined to stay in London, the only place to be if you were waiting for the opportunity to join another band.
I didn’t have long to wait. A band called the In-Betweens were looking for a guitarist and Danny had pointed them in my direction. This was a much more professional outfit than the Area. It was managed by an Asian businessman, Arif Ali, and was multi-racial, highly unusual in 1967. Sham Hassan, the bass guitarist, was from Jamaica, ‘Mike’ Bakridon, the drummer, was Indian, the lead guitarist was Indo-Italian and there was a Guyanese guy on electric organ, who was sometimes available and sometimes not.
The In-Betweens were also highly unusual for having a female lead singer, the stunning Carmen, who was undoubtedly their greatest asset.
It wasn’t unknown for a woman to be in a pop group, but it was rare. The Honeycombs, one-hit wonders with ‘Have I the Right?’ in 1964, had a female drummer, Honey Lantree, and Megan Davies played bass in the Birmingham band the Applejacks, who’d had a huge success the same year with ‘Tell Me When’. But these were the exceptions that proved the rule. There were, of course, plenty of female solo singers (Cilla, Dusty, Sandie et al), but women fronting bands, even on the amateur circuit, were few and far between.
Carmen’s mother was Indian and her father German. She was nineteen, with long legs emphasised by a very short skirt, and from the moment I saw her I was captivated. I would have joined the band just to be near her. With or without Carmen, this was a great opportunity. As Arif Ali had invested money in the band’s equipment, the fact that I had a guitar with no amplifier wasn’t a problem. I happily plugged my Höfner into the Marshall amp provided and hitched my star to this wonderful melting pot of a group without even being asked to audition.
The In-Betweens were a band with soul pretensions, although neither Carmen’s voice nor mine, as backing vocalist and occasional lead, sounded that soulful. Having said that, as a smoker and frequent sufferer of coughs and colds, I thought my voice bore a faint resemblance to Wilson Pickett’s when it was croaking out of a sore throat.
In fact Pickett’s ‘Midnight Hour’ was on our playlist (but only when the organist turned up), together with some more obscure rhythm and blues stuff, which I had to learn, and pop songs like Cat Stevens’ ‘The First Cut Is the Deepest’, a hit that year for P. P. Arnold, and the Bee Gees’ ‘To Love Somebody’. I had three solo numbers where I took centre stage, fulfilling my overwhelming desire to show off.
I’d sung ‘All or Nothing’ with the Area, all knees together and fringe flopping, à la Stevie Marriott, as I tore into the climax, ‘For me, for me, FOR ME,’ even throwing in the odd ‘keep on keeping on’ and ‘let me tell you, children’. The second one was ‘Ticket to Ride’, admittedly inspired more by the Vanilla Fudge version, which was slower and more soulful, than the Beatles original.
My pièce de résistance – and, though I say it myself, one of the highlights of our set – was The Troggs’ ‘Wild Thing’. For this I stood mid-stage with Carmen not just dancing round me but, in the slow bits (‘I wanna know for sure …’), actually entwined round me, an elegant, short-skirted thigh across my legs, perfumed arms around my neck, beautiful, soft brown eyes staring into mine, hot breath on my cheek.
Carmen and I were born to duet on that song, destined to be together in the centre of that stage. It should have forged the deepest, most volcanic passion since Cathy met Heathcliff. There was only one problem. Carmen was totally and absolutely uninterested in me. She was completely immune to what I was convinced was a magnetic and irresistible charm. As I found out soon enough, she had already fallen for Mike Bakridon. The bloody drummer. In all the annals of pop history, girls have never fallen for the guy on the drums. But Carmen broke the mould in more ways than one, and she and Mike went on to spend the rest of their lives together.
Wild thing, indeed.
Boxing Day 1967. I’m at Linda’s for Christmas. Tonight we’ll watch the film the Beatles have made for TV, Magical Mystery Tour. It contains six new songs, which have been available since before Christmas on an EP for under a pound.
From ‘Strawberry Fields’ in February, through the release of the Sergeant Pepper album and the single ‘All You Need Is Love’, it has been an incredible year for Beatles fans. I saw their debut performance of ‘All You Need Is Love’ on 25 June, sitting in the Coxes’ lounge with Mr and Mrs Cox, Danny and Carole, Tony and Paul – the seven of us strewn across settees, armchairs and the floor awaiting what had been billed as the ‘greatest event in television history’.
We were part of an estimated global audience of between 400 and 700 million to witness the first live international satellite television production, Our World, in which artists representing nineteen different countries contributed to a huge shared experience lasting over two hours. Those participating included Maria Callas, the Vienna Boys Choir, Pablo Picasso and Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian master of media theory responsible for the concept that ‘the medium is the message’.
I’d had to wait until the very end for Britain’s contribution, when the cameras took us live to the Abbey Road studios, where the Fab Four were recording their new single as the world looked on. John, Paul, George and Ringo, accompanied by an orchestra, were perched on high stools above a gathering of guests, many of them sitting cross-legged on the parquet floor like infant schoolchildren at morning assembly, looking up at the Beatles as if to pay homage to the undisputed masters of their musical genre. It included such rock luminaries as Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton and Graham Nash.
Now they are rounding off a triumphant year with a new three minutes of pure, uncomplicated pop. ‘Hello, Goodbye’ is the Christmas Number 1 and Magical Mystery Tour is being offered to TV viewers as the highlight of the festive programming.
I am settled in with Linda and Mike in their snug front room in Watford. Six-month-old Renay is asleep upstairs. We crack a few walnuts while waiting for we know not what. There have been no previews beyond the music. Unfortunately, those six tracks are the best thing about the Beatles’ film. The improvised comedy drama is self-indulgent rubbish and will be rightly panned by the critics, two of whom are sitting beside me. Linda and Mike have never been huge Beatles fans, but we all expected better than this.
Still, I am not too disappointed. It has been a glorious year for their music, and that is what the Beatles are about. I seek solace in a sandwich, concluding that I’d rather eat a turkey than watch one.
On 30 December, I was back at Linda’s again for her New Year’s Eve party, held that year, like most people’s celebrations, on the Saturday night. There was no New Year’s Day bank holiday then so it gave everyone the Sunday to get their breath back before work on Monday.
It had been touch and go whether I would make it. The In-Betweens were playing at our home venue, a pub called the Pied Bull in Islington where we stored our gear and performed in front of our most devoted fans. The landlord had booked us well in advance for his busiest night of the festive season and it was a commitment we couldn’t break. Not that I wanted to. I had only agreed to go to Watford so as not to upset my sister.
The In-Betweens were on top form that night, with my ‘Ticket to Ride’ going down a storm. We came offstage at 11pm and I managed to get to Linda’s house by about half-past midnight, catching the last train from Euston to Watford. The front room, back room and kitchen were packed with people I didn’t know: neighbours, friends and assorted waifs and strays. Linda whispered something to me concerning a girl named Cox, but I couldn’t hear her properly above all the merriment and thought she was talking about one of Pat and Albert’s family.
Linda was in fact pointing out her friend Judy Cox, with whom she’d done her nursery nurse training at Brixton College, and reminding me that I’d met her once when a gang of Linda’s friends had come to Pitt House. Judy was dark and attractive with a Cilla Black hairstyle and a dazzling smile. That night she and I stayed up talking after the other guests had left and my sister and brother-in-law had gone to bed. We sat in Linda’s back room, with the radio turned down low so as not to disturb the two little girls who slept upstairs: Renay, my baby niece, and Natalie, Judy’s fourteen-month-old daughter.
On the final day of a golden year that overflowed with unforgettable music – and one which included the thrill of having my own reproduced on vinyl – the record played most regularly through those wee small hours was ‘Nights in White Satin’ by the Moody Blues. If I close my eyes I can hear it now as I drift back to that house in Watford, where my younger self was smoking, drinking, talking and falling in love with Judy, the woman who was to become my wife.