7. One Step Beyond
It’s often assumed that where George led, I followed. That might have been the way of things by the time we came to recording Make It Big in 1984, but not throughout our formative days together. There might have been little doubt in his mind that music was where his destiny lay, but he didn’t yet have the self-belief to bring it about. And while chart success for The Executive seemed a million miles away, his confidence in his own talent, as the band wrote more and more songs, was growing.
I had no such doubts about my own abilities. While in years to come Yog’s gifts meant I was always going to struggle creatively in comparison, at the time, in terms of sheer, unwavering confidence, I was light years ahead. What was clear right from the very beginning, though, was that the two of us worked very well together and I was utterly convinced we would do something, go somewhere. My focus wasn’t on fame, success or money, though. I longed for nothing more than a record label or manager having enough faith in us and our music to offer us a deal. The same dream was shared by millions of kids the world over. But not, it seemed, by Jack Panayiotou.
Even though I’d left Bushey Meads, Jack felt I was still distracting Yog from what he thought should be his son’s true path. He wanted George’s education to finish with a university degree, and on the rare occasions I saw him, I sensed he thought I was leading his son astray. But the relationship between father and son could be pretty fractious too, and Yog was fearful that pursuing his musical ambitions might strain it further. Hoping for his approval, Yog eventually summoned up the courage to play his dad a cassette of songs by The Executive. They were rudimentary recordings, but carried enough melody to suggest there was potential beyond the confines of a makeshift studio in a suburban living room. Yog pushed the tape into the car stereo.
‘What’s this?’ asked Jack, suspiciously.
‘It’s our band, Dad. It’s what we’ve been working on for the past few months.’
Jack was unimpressed. ‘This is going nowhere!’ he snorted. ‘Come on, all seventeen-year-olds want to be pop stars, don’t they?’
Yog snapped, ‘No, all twelve-year-olds want to be pop stars!’
His frustration at Jack’s lack of support was becoming palpable.
The 18th Bushey and Oxhey Scout Hut and the venue for The Executive’s very first gig.
And some of our first solo band pics.
Not that it was affecting our progress. The Executive had arranged their first ever gig – a big moment for our band – at the 18th Bushey and Oxhey Scout Hut. Green paint flaked from the walls and a musty, damp odour clung to the furniture and curtains but to us it felt like Wembley.
We put up posters at school and college and word spread quickly. We pestered friends to join us, and took a more serious approach to rehearsals. Somehow the prospect of our first gig only increased the tetchiness within the band, though. If Paul’s expansive approach to drumming was getting on my nerves, it was driving Yog up the wall. But despite early evidence of ‘musical differences’ inside The Executive, we stuck with it.
The set list for the show picked itself. We’d only written about a dozen songs and we augmented those with a couple of covers. We’d open with a rabble-rousing ska reworking of Beethoven’s ‘Für Elise’, follow up with ‘Rude Boy’ and the rest of our homespun tracks, including our version of Andy Williams’s ‘I Can’t Get Used To Losing You’.
We were all cash-strapped teenagers back then. None of us could afford the look we wanted: the distinctive rude boy get-up as worn by the ska scene’s flag-bearers and defined by the label 2 Tone Records. Its logo was a mod dressed in a black suit, white shirt and black loafers. Everybody had seen the same clothes on Top of the Pops and copied them accordingly, but we were stuck with looking like a mismatched teenage gang.
To ready myself, I’d visited the Sue Ryder charity shop for a stage outfit, this time picking up a bottle-green leather jacket, chequerboard scarf and a pair of billowing, baggy trousers. Our audience was in high spirits as we took to the stage, having warmed up at local pubs, and couldn’t have cared less whether or not we looked like the real thing.
‘Für Elise’ got us started, but because of our excitement it was played at a far greater speed than usual. I bounced up and down behind my keyboard while Yog cut loose with dance moves inspired by Chas Smash from Madness. A hundred or so kids were packed into the hut and they seemed to pulsate ahead of us, as audiences had at gigs I’d seen with Yog in London. And after we’d exhausted our set list and been called back for a series of encores, I felt as if The Executive were on the verge of conquering the world. At least until we had to clear up afterwards and pack all the gear into our long-suffering parents’ cars to be driven home. That hardly took the shine off things, though.
Our first gig had been a hit.
I was now more convinced than ever that recognition was just around the corner. Even better, following our first gig Yog was feeling exactly the same way – he’d loved it. And a tantalising glimpse of what might be was soon to follow. Through a friend of a friend, The Executive were introduced to an A & R man called Mike Burdett, a young bloke who had been taken on as a talent scout by a small music publishing company called Sparta Florida Music Group. Mike was keen to make a name for himself and came along to see us rehearse. He seemed impressed with our songs, but reckoned we were a bit rough around the edges. Nevertheless, he saw something in the relationship between me and Yog, and seemed to like the presence we shared onstage.
Mike certainly seemed keen and continued to drop in to rehearsals, fuelling a sense that The Executive were gathering serious momentum. Feeling that things were falling into place, we pooled our resources to book a studio near St Albans to record a demo. We each chipped in a tenner and even recruited a local saxophonist to add to the line-up for the session.
We decided to record ‘Rude Boy’ first. Yog and I gathered around the microphone in a proper studio for the first time. In a move we’d later echo on the intro to ‘Club Tropicana’, we recreated a party vibe at the end of the song by inviting our bandmates into the vocal booth to capture the sounds of a party. We recorded ‘Für Elise’ using the same spiky ska energy we’d played it with at our first gig, then topped it all off with our reworked version of ‘I Can’t Get Used To Losing You’.
To help the chances of landing a record deal, we organised our first photo shoot. Yog dressed in a crumpled cream suit, which was overshadowed by a less than successful attempt at growing a Barry Gibb-style beard. Inexplicably, I wore my baggies, plus a style of hooped T-shirt I could have borrowed from Marcel Marceau. The photos probably didn’t add to the chances of The Executive one day gracing the pages of Sounds or Melody Maker. Nor, as it turned out, did our demo. Mike’s bosses at Sparta Florida were unimpressed with our efforts and chose not to take things any further. The news was a big let-down. Our hopes had been raised and then dashed. The disappointment was softened a little by a recognition that we were attempting to sprint before we could even crawl. It had been too good to be true, but our brush with the possibility of a record deal fuelled our determination and kept our hopes alive.
This was soon rewarded when our efforts to get ourselves on the bill at various live gigs paid off. We pulled off a real coup and managed to persuade the students’ union at Harrow College of Higher Education to put us on as support for The Vibrators, a punk band who’d themselves once appeared on Top of the Pops. But while we were over the moon at the chance to play with a well-known band, we were concerned about how we’d go down with a room full of punks. Amazingly, after ten songs and an encore, we’d won them over and escaped without being gobbed at. More importantly, we’d caught the eye of a local journalist, who typed up our first review.
‘There would have to be a very good reason for not dancing to the music of The Executive,’ he wrote. ‘Even two broken legs may not be excuse enough.’ We were later interviewed and I remember moaning about the fact we hadn’t already been signed. ‘We’re still quite naïve about how the music industry works,’ I said, explaining that we’d forked out around £30 in expenses to play the gig and the venue had only paid us in beer. In reality, I’d have happily paid the Harrow College students’ union to put us on! Later, Mum proudly stuck the cutting into a scrapbook.
The fact it had named The Executive’s two singers as Yog Ranos and Andrew Rodgeley didn’t bother anyone in the slightest.