Raymond Douglas fell silent and moved over to the control panel by the studio console. As he stood up, I could see under that large overcoat that he was still in good physical shape for his age and larger in stature than he sounded on record. He flicked a switch and the television came onto one of the monitors that were set in the wall. R.D. watched the television, absorbed in a gangster film. He looked over at me, saw that I too was watching, interested, and immediately turned off the video.
‘I’m tired now, son, so do me a favour and bugger off.’
I tried my luck one more time. I needed to know about his early career. This time I seemed to have caught his attention, and he picked up again.
‘My brother Dave had started his own group with an old school friend called Pete Quaife. David Russell Gordon Davies had transformed himself into a totally cool-looking fourteen-year-old with a thin, wire-like body. He was always an agile little hard nut, but a bright kid at school. His exploits with the girls from the local convent school were turning him into a local legend and, on top of all this, his guitar playing had improved beyond my wildest expectations. My playing had developed into a slow, soulful and slightly contrived style handed down to me by the blues-playing jazzers, whereas Dave had what can only be described as a jack-in-the-box technique, full of crazy staccato phrases which perfectly mirrored his more aggressive speech pattern. I decided to leave Dave Hunt’s Blues Band to join up with Dave and Pete. My last gig with Hunt was at the Richmond Jazz Club. It had originally been the Rolling Stones’ regular gig but they had signed a record contract and were on their way to success. We had inherited some of their regular audience, and so the gig was well attended. During the break between our two sets, somebody asked me if their friend could borrow my guitar. I said I had no objection, provided this person could actually play. What followed was an exhibition of such complete blues-guitar technique that it left me almost in tears. The ‘fill in’ guitarist was Davey Graham, who was already a legend to all blues fans, both for his playing and his gypsy lifestyle. He, apart from Broonzy, was the greatest blues guitarist I ever saw, and he turned my imitation Gretsch guitar, which was still being paid for on the hire-purchase, into a tool of absolute beauty. He made sounds that are impossible to explain. It was deeper than soul music, and left my nerves numb with envy. After he finished playing, he thanked me and disappeared into the bar, and I swear that I felt the strings of my guitar still ringing with the sounds he made with it.
After our second set, I told Dave Hunt that I was leaving his band. He started to show desperation rather than rage, and said that the band needed me and everybody liked me and that there were some prestige gigs coming up. That he might be able to pay more money, that the band needed somebody young. He didn’t seem to understand that this was exactly why I was leaving: I was young and wanted to make my own music. That last gig taught me two things. The first was that I would never be the greatest blues player in Britain because that was Davey Graham. The second was that if you want to go, don’t just threaten to – go. I did. I walked out of the club and, as Dave Hunt’s band played ‘Night Train’, I was gone.
Pete Quaife and Dave had formed a group with John Start, a gangling blond drummer who went to their school. We rehearsed in John’s father’s garage, and played several local youth clubs and school dances. Another group doing the rounds at the same time was the Moontrekkers. This band had some heavy investment from one of the band’s parents, who was in the motor trade. Their lead singer was another former pupil of the William Grimshaw School, Rod Stewart. Rod, who was without doubt the Elvis Presley of Muswell Hill, played the Saturday-night spot at the local youth club, and Dave and Pete’s group played the Thursday-night spot. I came into Dave and Pete’s group as more experienced and accomplished at playing to a slightly older and sophisticated club audience, but Dave’s abrasive guitar playing had improved so much that he had assumed the mantle of lead guitarist. Although he hadn’t played in a band, he had toured the clubs as a punter along with a clarinet-jazz fanatic called Lew Lewis. Lew, whose dad ran the Victoria Arms pub in Highgate, was a big jazz fan and allowed us to rehearse in the pub’s cellar, as long as we did at least one jazz standard. This was no problem because at nearly every gig we had ever played there had been requests for the obligatory ‘Twelfth Street Rag’ or ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’. These songs passed as jazz at wedding receptions and gigs at old people’s homes. Kenny Ball and his Jazzmen had already topped the charts in Britain and America and Acker Bilk’s success in the charts meant that no proper cover group was worth its salt unless it could bash out ‘Petit Fleur’ and ‘Midnight in Moscow’ on request.
Art school was beginning to frustrate me more, especially as my work, which was generally up to standard, was being assessed for a new diploma which had been brought in to replace the old Fine Art syllabus. The new word for the new age was graphics. Commercial artists were to be encouraged more than out-and-out painters who, according to the Middlesex Education Authority, would end up starving in an attic somewhere and living on the dole. The new attitude in all art colleges was directed at earning a living and making money. This did not include people like myself who saw art as a form of self-expression.
The swinging sixties had arrived. Outside my narrow, self-centred world, there was a style revolution in progress, and it seemed that all the smart students at the college were rushing headlong into it. People were talking about a place called Carnaby Street, where a young designer called John Steven was re-dressing the fashion-conscious. Tab collars and Chelsea boots were in and beatniks, who had been until now the hippest of the hip, were starting to put their long pullovers into mothballs or giving them back to their grandads. A few years earlier John Osborne had written Look Back in Anger, and the ‘angry young men’ who had already started a revolution in the theatre were starting to emerge as standard-bearers of a new wave of British cinema. Alan Sillitoe had written Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and Dave bought the book and lent it to me. David Bailey was taking photographs of Jean Shrimpton, and Mary Quant had become the world’s trendiest designer. Christine Keeler embarrassed and disgraced an entire government and, in doing so, showed ordinary people that the so-called ruling classes could be as morally vulnerable as the rest of us. People with northern accents were suddenly appearing on television and radio and they were being taken seriously. Overnight it was fashionable to be working class and at art college. I remember an aristocratic debutante rushing into the cafeteria to announce triumphantly that she had discovered that a distant relative had actually been a labourer on a building site in Croydon. None of this was affecting me, because I felt that I had always been what all these silly, confused trendies were trying to become. I was already working class, and therefore not required to change. Pete Quaife’s girlfriend Nicola confirmed this on the way to a rehearsal as she explained why she thought that the group would succeed.
‘It’s because you all look and sound like … now,’ she said.
Without thinking about image and style, we four musically confused youths from Muswell Hill found ourselves, through no fault of our own, to be in fashion.
Meanwhile my sketchbook was full of drawings of the M1 motorway tearing through the little rows of streets and playing fields of north London. In the pictures a sad, anonymous figure always appeared somewhere in the distance as proof that some living form was defiant enough to exist. I was that lonely figure standing by the motorway. I had drawn myself into my own work and it was becoming so personal that I stopped showing it to my teachers. My real world had become confused with the images in my head. It was obvious that I needed to work or at least communicate with other people to stop myself going completely over the edge. What I demanded from my drawing was too complicated for me to understand, and the people who were supposed to teach me were either unprepared, unwilling or, as it was not part of the syllabus, uncaring. It was all too deep and too horrifying to confront, and yet the images revealed the truth to me with such undeniable clarity. In order that I would not become that faceless ‘no man’ I drew in my pictures, I would have to define my own rules, invent my own method of communication. In fact, totally re-invent myself. A dark cloud appeared as I fell into a deep empty cavern where people with dead souls sat on street corners. I saw corpses driving cars. Decaying bodies standing around in pubs ordering pints of bitter. I started to live inside myself once more.
My on-and-off art-school career was going from bad to worse. Paul O’Dell and I formed a college film society. I eventually plucked up the courage to confront the college principal and suggest that, as the whole school syllabus was being revised, the education authority should set up a full-time film department. The principal promptly showed me the door, after pointing out to me that I had only got into the college on the strength of my talent, and talent alone would not be sufficient to survive under the new regime. I took this to be a subtle enough hint that I would soon have my grant taken away and would be out on my ear. This served only to whet my appetite for music even more, and after a brief spell in the theatre department at Croydon Art School, I found myself looking for a future playing in a group.
Pete Quaife had found us a new drummer called Mickey Willet, because John Start’s father had decided that John should go into the family jewellery business. Mr Start had kindly financed the purchase of some matching pullovers and shirts for us to use as stage wear. We had bought the clothes from Marks and Spencer in Wood Green. Mr Start, being a good businessman, kept a strict tally of how much he had invested in the group. Just before his son departed, Mr Start appeared on my mother’s doorstep like a tallyman collecting the weekly subs. Somehow Mum paid him off, but not before a considerable amount of haggling took place. This was not the first time we had received a visit from somebody demanding payment for hire-purchase or overdue rent, and Mum had this sort of situation down to a fine art. She simply raised her voice to such a level that passers-by would stop and listen to the argument, embarrassing the tallyman to such an extent that they would have to leave. On this occasion it got to the stage where it seemed as if it were Mr Start who owed my mother the money. Finally he took some money on account and escaped.
Mickey Willet was quite a bit older than the rest of us. Although he was a smooth-looking character, Pete’s girlfriend Nicola said that he spoiled the look of the group. We were all rough and far from ready for stardom. Mickey Willet looked and sounded as though he had seen it all.
Then something came up that sounded like a wonderful opportunity for us to earn some extra money; perhaps to invest in some new equipment and stage clothes. Willet and Pete had met a couple of society types in a pub. Their names were Grenville Collins and Robert Wace and they were looking for some young musicians to serve as a backing group for Wace, who was to be managed by Grenville. Some lucrative society dances were on offer, as well as several debutante balls. The button-up casual sweaters from Marks and Spencer, courtesy of Mr Start, were wearing a little thin at the elbows and beginning to smell somewhat, and, as Mr Start was still demanding the remainder of the money he had advanced to purchase them, we decided to give them all back to him rather than start our careers carrying a bad debt and smelly sweaters. Grenville advanced us some money and we went to Carnaby Street and bought pink tab-collar shirts and dark blue corduroy trousers from John Steven.
The only difficulty I had with the new set-up was that, apart from being upper-class public schoolboys, both Robert and Grenville were both at least six feet five inches tall. We could dig it, the society debs would dig it, but would the kids at the local youth club be turned on by a six-foot five-inch stockbroker in a pinstripe suit singing ‘I Like It’ by Gerry and the Pacemakers and ‘Rave On’ by Buddy Holly? Would they understand him when he sang ‘Twist and Shout’ with a plum in his mouth? Grenville was certain Robert’s singing would be well received and, as he was in the managerial role, we assumed everything would be in order.
Suddenly our rehearsals were attended by society toffs from Belgravia, drinking champagne and cheering with delight every time Robert took a vocal. He finished each song to rapturous applause from his friends. We were amazed at how well Robert was going down, and this was only the rehearsal. Grenville convinced us that when we finally appeared in public, Robert would have the showbusiness world at his feet and the top agents and record companies would be banging down the door in order to sign us.
Grenville did not lie about the gigs, the first of which was at the Guildhall in the City. Others followed, at the Dorchester and at a large country mansion in Sussex. The society gigs themselves were a triumph for Robert and Grenville. Bobby had visited the showbiz tailor Dougie Millings and had a blue serge suit made for the engagements. He had also had his two front teeth capped especially for his debut. The champagne flowed, the caviare was eaten and Bobby Wace was the toast of Belgravia. It was also remarked that the ‘scruffy little backing group’, which was being fed in the kitchens while Bobby and Grenville cruised the ballroom, was also quite enjoyable. It seems that we had arrived. In Sloane Square at least.
The trail of triumph continued throughout the debutante season of 1963, and while the world of politics was being shaken to the core in the aftermath of the Profumo affair, Robert Wace’s singing career was blossoming. Grenville had taken to the role of manager with such confidence that he decided to accept an engagement at a working-class youth club in the East End of London.
At the beginning of our set the audience danced and applauded as we thumped through our own versions of Bo Diddley and Slim Harpo numbers. Then, as Robert strolled on to the stage, grabbed the microphone and started to sing, the audience gradually went into a coma. Their jaws dropped. They watched in stunned silence as Robert went through the same motions as he had at the Guildhall or Casanova Club. After a while, a little Cockney mod girl in the audience started to snigger. This spread to her friends until the whole front row started to laugh and sing along and we thought that Robert had won the audience over. If Robert had been a clown or a bandmaster at community singing, this would have been considered a success, but after two or three songs it became obvious to all that Robert should not have been up there in the first place. His confidence shaken, he faltered. His charm had carried him through at the deb dances and society parties where he had been with his peers, but it didn’t work in east London. Robert, a gentleman to the last, accepted the mistake with good grace, left the stage, allowing Dave and our road manager Jonah to finish singing the remaining songs.
This experience must have given Robert stage fright because at a subsequent performance at a club in Mayfair he hesitated in front of his friends, on what was his home turf. He must have had too much champagne before the show, because he started singing so horribly out of tune that Grenville was seen sitting at one of the tables with his head in his hands crying out to himself, ‘Sing no more, Robert, sing no more!’ Robert bowed to his audience, and, after pausing to ponder a career that might have been, smiled gallantly at his few loyal admirers, then did precisely as Grenville suggested. Robert left the stage and sang no more.
It was obvious to Robert and Grenville that their scruffy little back-up group had something going for it, in that it could hold an audience. It was therefore decided that Robert and Grenville would form a management company called Boscobel Productions, a name taken from Boscobel Place, where Robert’s father lived, and from then on they would be our managers.
According to Nicola, Mickey Willet was a fantastic drummer but still didn’t look right, and after a few disagreements with the management, he decided to leave the group. He could not see the humour in Grenville’s superior manner and Robert’s extravagant behaviour in the way the rest of us could. On one occasion Robert’s Mini was stuck in a traffic jam in Clapham on the way to a gig. Grenville stood on top of the car directing traffic while the rest of us huddled in the back. When confronted by a policeman Grenville explained that Robert was on his way to Buckingham Palace, but he had inadvertently taken a wrong turn. The confused policeman looked at Robert, who silently exuded aristocratic calm in the driver’s seat. In a matter of moments a path through the traffic had been cleared. Not content with this, we asked for the policeman’s name and address so that Robert could recommend the Queen to give the constable an award for gallantry. Mickey Willet, being a responsible adult, might probably have been offended by this, but the rest of us thought that Robert was suitably rebellious. Our replacement drummer was a northerner called Johnny Green. He was very handsome, and resembled a 1950s film matinée idol; but Nicola didn’t like the way he parted his hair.
At this time we had started making a film with John Cowan, a prominent fashion photographer. The group (minus Green) assembled at Cowan’s studio near Hyde Park every Saturday morning and embarked on a day’s shooting around London. It was all fairly silly stuff, mainly inspired by Richard Lester’s work with the Beatles. Cowan used to dream up bizarre antics for us to act out while he pointed the camera. One such antic required us to drive through a car wash in an open-top Land Rover. Robert and Grenville looked on while the rest of us froze and caught colds. The only thing that made it bearable was that John Cowan was always accompanied by his attractive girlfriend, a model called Jill Kennington. The way she swaggered around in his oversized sweaters showed that they must have been very much in love, but even so she gave the impression that there was at least a spiritual involvement with us. When we froze she gave us hot tea, and that was certainly worth shivering for. She had a habit of wrapping her hands around the mug of tea before she gave it to you which turned the act of drinking tea into a sensuous forbidden affair. Poor John Cowan. On this occasion, his camera was pointed in the wrong direction. The real movie was happening when he had his back turned.
It helped us to see the rushes of ourselves, because we could see our natural habits and develop them further. Dave developed a silly walk. I developed a pompous pout. Quaife acquired cigarette etiquette which I christened the Mayfair Droop: a lit cigarette was held between the first and second finger, the elbow rested on the other arm, which was wrapped around the chest; the wrist of the hand holding the cigarette was then relaxed and extended downward, enabling the cigarette to be waved around with contempt in faces of non-smokers. It also helped if the shoulders were hunched slightly, to show conclusively that the Mayfair Droop had no regard whatsoever for environment, personal health or body posture.
For some reason the film never got finished and John Cowan went away on a photographic assignment. Unfortunately, he took Jill Kennington with him. All I had was that personal little ‘inner’ movie which my eyes shot between Jill Kennington and myself. Shot in extreme close-up on a very long lens.
By now, we were building up quite a following around some of the youth clubs in Muswell Hill. On 23 November 1963 we were booked to play at the Moravian Hall in Muswell Hill. The day before, I was visiting my sister Gwen in her cottage near my parents’ house. We were sitting in the kitchen having tea when a news flash came on the television that President Kennedy had been killed while visiting Dallas, Texas. As I walked the three miles up to Highgate where Rosie lived, I wondered what sort of country could allow such a thing to happen. All of my recent musical influences had come from that far-off place and yet this news had made me feel that I would never want to go there. By the time I reached Rosie and Arthur’s house, I had picked up the news that somebody had been arrested for shooting the president. I was convinced that there was going to be a World War and that atomic bombs would start dropping on north London at any moment and annihilate us all. To my relief Muswell Hill and the rest of the world was still there when we played the Moravian Hall the following night, but the taste of violence and the black-and-white television images from Dallas would not leave me.
Robert and Grenville were anxious that we should sign a long-term contract with them; they felt that we had a genuine chance of becoming successful. My parents had to countersign on our behalf because Dave and I were still underage. Even though my parents liked Robert and Grenville, they were concerned about our signing anything. Mum and Dad had recently signed numerous hire-purchase agreements in order for us to buy some guitars and, as a rule, they had an aversion to documents of any kind. But after being told that her boys might be on the London Palladium by the following Christmas, my mother countersigned the Boscobel contract. That is the one time in my life I wish I had seen a lawyer, because then all the legal implications would have been pointed out to me.
The first big break came when we were engaged to play at a Chinese restaurant, called the China Garden, on the Edgware Road. It was at a New Year’s Eve party and there was an agent called Arthur Howes there. He was responsible for booking all the major package tours at the time and would be a valuable contact for us. Howes sat back in his booth, attired in traditional Chinese regalia, surrounded by other agents and hangers-on in business-suits. Howes declared that he loved the band. He immediately asked Robert and Grenville to meet him in his Soho office later that week to discuss terms. So, now we had managers and we had an agent. We had even been offered a spot on the Dave Clark Five tour later that spring. All we needed now was to get a recording contract, so that we could have a single to coincide with the tour.
Meanwhile, Johnny Green had decided that being in a pop group was not what he had in mind for himself, and he left. Boscobel Productions immediately put an advertisement in Melody Maker and booked the upstairs room at the Camden Head pub for auditions. Grenville assembled us and spoke like a commander giving his subordinates the day’s battle-plan:
‘His name is Mick Avory and he comes from East Molesey in Surrey. He has played in skiffle groups and learned to play the drums while in the boy scouts. He says he played in a group with Mick Jagger before he joined the Rolling Stones. He has a day job delivering pink paraffin.’
Avory spoke in a deep south London accent as he struggled into the room carrying his own drums. Dave and Pete, who were standing on the little rehearsal platform in the corner of the room, were both dressed in plastic capes, tight black trousers and Cuban heels. Quaife, who had by now been groomed by some of the more camp hairdressers in Carnaby Street, quietly suggested that Avory looked like ‘a beautiful butch beast’. Unfortunately, Avory both heard this and took it seriously.
‘I’ve got a girlfriend,’ Avory said in his deep, flat drone. Quaife continued the wind-up. ‘So’ve I, love. Don’t mean to say that we all don’t bend from time to time.’
Dave joined in and started laughing and coughing in a high-pitched, feminine voice. I jumped in: ‘Put your drums down there, dear, and don’t mark the floor, I’ve been on my knees scrubbing it all afternoon!’
Avory did not see any humour in the situation. We introduced ourselves to him in a limp-wristed way and continued to camp it up until we started playing. Then it was all heavy blues and rock and roll. Nicola nodded her head up and down to the rhythm. After two or three songs we were all smiles, and a team. Nicola took the rest of us to one side and said that Avory looked right, even if he bit his tongue and hardly moved his body while he played. She also thought that he resembled Rock Hudson and would attract some girl fans.
When the rehearsal was over, Dave, Pete and I all reverted to talking in high-pitched voices. Avory thought he was on safer ground by directing his conversation towards Robert and Grenville. He was concerned about being in a group who wore plastic capes and leather caps and asked if we were sexual deviants. I was never clear whether he considered this to be a good or a bad thing.
‘Tell me, will I have to dress up like them?’ Avory inquired.
‘Undoubtedly so,’ replied Grenville, as he cocked his eyebrow and put on a stern face to accompany the Mayfair Droop.
Robert joined in as if Avory wasn’t there. ‘He’ll also have to grow his hair, what?’
Avory mumbled half to himself as he started to pack up his drum kit, ‘I’ll ‘ave to think about it and ask my girlfriend if it’s all right. I’ll let you know in a few days.’ He stopped at the door as he left. ‘I enjoyed playing with you. The music, I mean.’
‘The feeling’s mutual, love,’ Quaife pouted back and held out his hand as if he expected Avory to kiss it. Avory groaned and, after shaking hands with all of us, slowly backed out of the room.
After he had left, Grenville told us that Avory had been to have his hair cut short before the audition so that he would impress everyone. When he turned up and discovered that we all had hair down to our shoulders, he thought he wouldn’t get the gig.
As I watched Avory pack his drums away into his little pink-paraffin delivery van, I thought how sad he looked, and hoped that he would join the group because in many ways he was a little like I was before I had joined a band: all lost and looking for some friends to play with.
Within a few days Avory had become a member of the group. This time we were convinced that we had found someone who would be there on a permanent basis.
Robert and Grenville were impressed by the success of the Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein, but they didn’t have his experience in record shops, and in many ways they were out of their depth when it came to doing business with ordinary people. They could deal with high-powered upper-class hustlers, but they had some difficulty making the kind of social adjustments necessary to deal with ordinary plebs. Robert and Grenville had knocked on nearly every door in Denmark Street’s Tin Pan Alley and had promptly been shown the door by all the publishers and record companies.
But finally they managed to persuade Brian Epstein to come down to the Camden Head pub to watch us rehearse. We were astonished to find ourselves performing in front of the manager of the Beatles. As we went through our tiny repertoire of blues and cover songs, Epstein looked at us all individually, like a man trying to spot a quality racehorse at an auction. The audition came to an end. Epstein displayed a keen interest but said that he would have to consider the political ramifications of having yet another four-piece group on his roster. We took this to be a pass but we were thrilled that he had actually expressed some interest in us in the first place. Pete asked Epstein if he would like to go down to the pub for a pint of lager but Epstein looked at his watch and asked Robert to give him a lift into the West End, where he suddenly remembered he had an urgent meeting. Robert and Grenville grasped the opportunity of taking the Beatles’ manager home and rushed off downstairs with him, leaving us to pack our gear away. Five minutes later Grenville reappeared at the top of the stairs. His face red and sweating with humiliation, he rushed over to the window to look down into the street.
‘Good God, this is so embarrassing. Robert’s mini won’t start and we can’t get a taxi. You’ve all got to come down and help.’
We peered out the window to see Epstein the showbiz supremo as he slipped in the mud trying to give Robert’s car a push. Robert was trying to rev up the engine and leaned out of the car as he called back to Epstein, ‘Just a little harder, old boy, I think the engine started to tick over just then.’
It was a cold winter’s night, but Epstein was sweating underneath his cashmere overcoat.
Eventually we all gave a hand and Robert’s car started. As we watched Robert drive away in his minivan with Grenville and Brian Epstein huddled in the back, we assumed that even if there had been a slight possibility that the Beatles’ manager was interested in us, the chance had been blown by the fact that he had been seen in such humiliating circumstances. We observed our manager looking out of the window as he sped off. There was a faint smile on his face, but it failed to cover up the fact that he had ruined Epstein’s cashmere overcoat, dented his ego and probably ruined Robert and Grenville’s chance of signing us to Epstein’s empire.
Next it was decided that we should meet another contact, called Larry Page, who had advised Robert and Grenville on how to go about putting all the necessary pieces into place in order to obtain a record contract. Page had been a singer in the early days of British pop, along with Tommy Steele and Cliff Richard and the Shadows. Larry also had connections with a publisher called Eddie Kassner, and all these connections would, according to Grenville, help secure us a deal with a record company.
Page was tall, but not quite as tall as Wace and Collins. He had fair to blond hair and his face was framed by a pair of thick black-rimmed spectacles, which gave him the look of a cartoon character. He had been known as ‘the teenage rage’ when he’d been a singer (and was renowned for having dyed his hair blue on occasions!). He spoke in a west London accent that had been softened by a showbiz transatlantic twang. Larry Page had seen quite a few songwriters come and go during his time in the music business. He had been a singer at the Two Eyes Café in the 1950s, and, although he was not a musician himself, he had an instinct for anything that sounded vaguely commercial. He sensed that I could write songs and encouraged me to do so. Despite the fact that he was older than we were, he came from a similar background; once we got past his self-protective showbiz veneer, he was a down-to-earth guy, and we felt we could trust him. But it was obvious that Robert and Grenville had nothing in common with Larry Page, nor he with them. They were simply a means to an end for each other, and that was that. But what end and by whose means? Larry had the wheeler-dealer, street-wise expertise to find his way into meetings with record companies, and Robert and Grenville had the society contacts to get that person into any club in Mayfair. Our music made everybody associated with the group feel classless, but that feeling disappeared as soon as the music stopped. Robert and Grenville regarded Larry as a necessary evil, he was no better or worse than anybody else they’d met in the music business. If they could have retained the camaraderie they all had whenever the group was playing, they could have conquered the world together.
Larry knew an American record producer with the unlikely name of Shel Talmy and, as I had already expressed my admiration for American producers such as Phil Spector, Larry thought Shel would fit the bill. It was arranged for us to meet in a pub next to the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square. Shel and I talked about songs and sounds and other groups and overall we made a good impression on one another. It was decided that Shel would take us for auditions at record companies with the view to getting us a record contract.
Soon we were up for an audition at Decca records, but after hearing us play three or four cover songs, they showed us the door. Back at Larry Page’s office in Denmark Street, an emergency meeting was held. Larry was not bothered unduly that Dick Rowe at Decca had turned the group down: Dick Rowe had also turned the Beatles down, ‘So what did he know?’ But Larry was concerned about music-biz insiders’ perception of Robert and Grenville. In Larry’s opinion ‘There was no way that any self-respecting record-company executive would put his balls on the line for a group managed by an upper-class double act like Robert and Grenville.’ According to Larry, they had started at one end of Denmark Street and worked their way down until somebody took some interest.
Robert and Grenville visited me at Rosie’s house. They suggested that Page should be brought in as part of the ‘team’, in order to help secure a recording contract for the group. Yet Grenville and Robert talked about Page as if he were a faceless soldier on the front line of battle, one who was ultimately expendable. That was their manner, the way they were brought up; I, on the other hand, felt more ambivalent. In the group when there was a disagreement we either talked about it or fought about it, but we always directly confronted one another. Perhaps it was different with businessmen?’
R.D. stopped talking. His head dipped down. This was a bad sign. An ominous cloak of self-pity started to engulf him like an overwhelming drug. The atmosphere was dark and full of doom, and it was obvious that his downward spiral was in full flow. Then, without warning, his head snapped back and he shouted, ‘I suppose you think I’m a useless, self-centred soul?’
‘Not at all,’ I lied unconvincingly.
‘I’ll let you into a secret as well. Nobody knows this.’ R. D. got up and slowly made his way under the control desk. His old bones creaked and he struggled for breath as he reached underneath to the patchbay. He cursed as he stretched deep behind the filth. The years of neglect were all too apparent. Eventually he dragged out a pile of old exercise books tied up with some string and brown paper. R. D. pushed them towards me.
‘Read ’em and tell me what you think. I’ve never asked anybody else before.’
I suppose I should have appeared more grateful. Perhaps he should have been less magnanimous. My predicament was an awkward one. Suddenly this crazy old guy, renowned for his secrecy and maniacal sense of privacy, was giving me the personal memoirs of his life wrapped in dusty brown paper.
‘It’s all there. Most of it. The dreams and the disappointments. The achievements and the failures.’
I unwrapped the brown paper, and discovered an assortment of exercise books, smart leather diaries and scraps of paper. They resembled him in many ways: some expensively bound, others cheap and cherished, old and dusty.
‘There seems to be no order to it. How can I possibly unravel this?’ I pleaded.
He did not answer, and even though I could not see his face I could sense that he was smiling.
‘Then put it in order for me. Edit it together, like an LP. No, more like a long song.’
As I opened the first exercise book, I heard him press a rewind button and the master tape went into reverse. We were both entering another time and space. I was surprised to see that the old diary was quite concise – it almost had some style. I handed it over to R.D. who began to read out loud.