‘Back in Muswell Hill, Dave’s girlfriend gave the new version of ‘You Really Got Me’ her seal of approval, which indicated to me that her knickers must have undoubtedly ‘dropped’ as soon as Dave played it for her on her Dansette record player. The whole band was pleased with the result, as was the management team.
Robert Wace had met a certain Lady Cowley, an ex-model who had married into high society and ‘Tiger’, as she was known, often turned up at concerts in some of the seediest clubs, dressed to the nines and acting like an eccentric member of the royal family. These were heady times for Robert, who had at last found a friend with a suitable pedigree with whom to share his slightly buffoonish playboy lifestyle. When he wasn’t turning up on my mother’s doorstep at two in the morning, demanding slices of bread and dripping for himself and Tiger, he was party-hopping in Belgravia. But from the moment we finished making the record, everybody in our little operation started moving with a new purpose. It was not that we were just pleased with ourselves, we genuinely thought that we had produced something that sounded different from anything else that was around, and yet was commercial at the same time. It was like the world was waiting for it to come out, even if no one had heard it yet.
We played a few more dates up north and by now the M1 motorway had almost joined the M6, making it possible to reach Manchester in a little over three hours. This time I stayed on to visit a girlfriend in Rawtenstall, an old mill town outside of Burnley. While there was no heavy romantic attachment there, I was fascinated by her elegant, tall figure and incredible hair dyed pale blue and piled on top of her head, forming an amazingly large beehive. I had met her at our concert the night before and wanted to know if she would wear her outrageous hair-style to work at the mill the next day. We went back to her little terraced house by a stream that ran past the bottom of the garden. There I was treated with the finest northern hospitality, and I reciprocated by staying on my best southern behaviour. She didn’t go to work the next day, but instead travelled with me on the bus to Manchester. It was a sunny day and so we walked around the streets and parks surrounding the Manchester bus-station while I waited for the coach to London. We lay on a grass verge and she told me about all the things she wanted. Nothing vastly mind-boggling or different, but they were hers. I was trying my best to listen, but my eyes were still focused on that outrageous beehive as it sat on top of her head, adding a ridiculous touch to what was otherwise a very romantic and sensitive moment. She told me her dreams and then kissed me with a kiss that tasted a little like tin. I put this down to the fresh spring water she drank in Rawtenstall, and pondered for a moment that it may have been the water that turned her hair blue. She asked me to stay; I said I would come back; but although I did play Manchester again, I never saw the elegant Lancashire lass with the amazing blue beehive.
During the next few weeks, I went to visit as many old friends as I could find. I even tracked down a few old flames from college, including Margie, my art-school friend from Croydon. I was not sure why I was doing all this, but I knew that I was uneasy about many things. Margie and I had always had a turbulent relationship, and she was not averse to slapping me for no reason, or making mind-boggling comments during a mundane conversation. I sat on a park bench with Margie and spoke romantically. I told her that I felt something was happening inside me which I did not understand, like a flower that was beginning to grow in my stomach. It had already taken root and it felt as though buds were beginning to form on the ends of thin branches, gradually spreading up to my chest. Margie looked over at me with a sad look on her face and told me that I probably had cancer.
After this disappointment I found myself back with Anita. Her new relationship was not going as planned and so I stayed with her in her flat in Chalk Farm. One night I went to sleep but woke to find Anita looking out the window. She called me names and said that I could never love anyone. She soon started to put conditions on our relationship, conditions I neither understood nor cared about. We were so happy as we were, why change that? She stood at the window and cried, I have never understood why. The band had made a fabulous record and, whatever happened next, we all knew that it would give us our best shot. So why was she crying? I knew that she had been seeing other boys, and so it wasn’t that she would be lonely. Her sobbing was starting to make me feel guilty and I told her to stop. I understand people crying together, then they can both understand what the grief is, but there was something so desperately lonely about her that night, and could not understand how I could be contributing to her sorrow. Perhaps she did not understand it herself. Earlier in our relationship Anita had taken purple hearts and other mild forms of speed to keep herself going. She had fallen for some musician and a long-term relationship was beckoning, and so she was desperately trying to get her life together and clean up her act. I realize now that she may have been going through mild depression.
She accused me of being self-centred and selfish. In her opinion I was only happy as long as my record sounded like a hit. I couldn’t understand this uncharacteristic outburst. Anita was usually so in control, more mature and streetwise than I was, and yet she was sobbing like a rejected child. This was all so different from the confident person who had taught me so much about myself only months earlier. She had always known what I wanted, but now she despised me for taking the opportunity once it was within my grasp.
That night I watched her sleep. I stayed awake while the morning light sculpted shadows around her cheekbones. I kissed her gently as she slept. She half woke up and snuggled against me, but as soon as she was alert enough to realize who I was she pushed me aside.
Once again Arthur Howes had used his influence to get us booked to play on two highly prestigious Beatles shows, the first of which was at the Bournemouth Winter Garden. The Kinks were to go on in the second half of the show, in the most unenviable position, just before the Beatles. To get us on the show, Arthur had probably thrown down the gauntlet to Brian Epstein, saying that the Kinks were the only group brazen enough to play the spot.
Our single was to be released later that week and there was already quite a buzz going around about it. We also had our own little following of fans who we knew would travel to support us. In the circumstances we needed all the support we could get, as Beatles’ audiences were renowned for screaming for the Fab Four while other groups tried to perform. The only way for these groups to attract attention was to play a Beatles song and, as most groups had at least one in their repertoire, all the groups in the opening half of the show seemed to oblige, much to the delight of the Beatles’ fanatics.
During the interval we were putting the final pieces of our stage gear into place as a photographer set up lights at the side of the stage so that he could take a quick snap of John, Paul, Ringo and George as they breezed into the backstage entrance. The stage manager had just given us the two-minute warning to start our set when we heard screams from the direction of the stage door. Some of the crew and other hangers-on rushed across the stage and nearly knocked me over as I tried to tune up my guitar. A flash bulb popped where the photographer had been standing, then there was the sound of raised northern accents and slow, deep, drawling voices getting laughter from obvious, banal comments – the sign of true celebrity. A nervous electricity immediately went through the building. The Beatles had arrived on the premises.
The stage manager delayed the start of the second half while the Beatles finished the photo shoot, then, when it was over, the audience screamed as the house lights dimmed for the start of the second half. We waited nervously behind the curtain as the master of ceremonies went out to warm up the crowd. We were hoping that there might be a slight warm-up for the Kinks, but instead the audience was informed by the MC that the Beatles had arrived and would be on stage very soon. Just to make us feel completely at ease, we then saw John Lennon and Paul McCartney (or ‘Pull My Cock Off’, as Avory had rechristened him) standing in the wings watching us tune up. They were already dressed in their famous collarless Beatle suits, ready to go on, and I was amazed at how similar they looked to their wax replicas which had recently been added to the collection at Madame Tussaud’s. Lennon walked up to me and stared over at my guitar, on its stand next to my amplifier. He put his hand up to his cheek and looked over the instrument as if it were a rare antique. Without asking permission, he touched the tone control, while I looked on in astonishment. I suppose that I should have felt privileged to have one of the Beatles take the trouble to make a comment about us or our instruments, but in the circumstances I felt as though I had been violated.
‘Is this yours?’
‘Once my mum has paid off the hire-purchase.’ I thought that this working-class comment would impress him, but he was unmoved.
Then, as Lennon’s arm raised to brush a little bit of dandruff from the shoulder of my red hunting jacket, he paused to take a peep at the audience through the curtains.
‘Excuse me,’ I said nervously. ‘It’s our turn. You’re on after us.’
Lennon gave a stern look down his magnificent long nose, while his mouth broke into a broad grin.
‘With the Beatles, laddie, nobody gets a turn. You’re just there to keep the crowd occupied until we go on.’
As he left the stage he threw out a parting comment: ‘Well, lads, if you get stuck and run out of songs to play, we’ll lend you some of ours.’
I wanted to shout that we didn’t know any of theirs, but the lights had dimmed and the curtain had started to open. An imaginary bell sounded for round one. We were on.
For the first few minutes the predictable happened: the audience were chanting for ‘John, Paul, George, Ringo.’ The sound of their voices was like swift punches to the head and every time the blow connected, there was a flash of white light. I remembered back to when I was at school and had fought Ronnie Brooks, the schoolboy boxing champion of Great Britain. Every time he had hit me, a white light had flashed before me. The trainer in my corner had told me to go down as soon as I was hurt. I had been hurt but had refused to obey. Later that year I beat him in the hundred-yard dash, and he told me that even when he punched me out of the ring, he thought that there was something about me that was a winner. It had to do with stubbornness, and willingness to get hurt in the cause of victory.
Well, as the Kinks played their opening song, the sound of ‘We want the Beatles’ hit me harder than any of Ronnie’s punches. This time though, the referee would not stop the fight. We were supposed to play Slim Harpo’s ‘Got Love if You Want It’ next but instead I shouted to the others to play ‘You Really Got Me’. Dave turned up his amplifier, which caused it to feed back slightly, and the high-pitched frequency cut right through the screams of the Beatles’ fans. For a moment the audience was silent. As soon as Dave played the opening chords, they were with us. It was as if we had taken the first round off the Beatles. As John Lennon and Brian Epstein watched from the wings, I felt like shouting in my best Liverpudlian accent, ‘This is not one of yours. It’s one of ours!’
Later I watched the Beatles play from the wings and actually heard some fans screaming ‘We want the Kinks.’ John Lennon shouted something back down the microphone before the next song, just to show that he was still in charge out there. Ringo played with superb, soulful aggression, which made me realize why – apart from their catalogue of songs and their world fame – they had such a hard core of followers. Also, it was easier to assess their true capabilities from the side of the stage, without the benefit of conventional, ‘front on’ television-camera angles. From this angle it was obvious that they had once been a fine rock group. It was not their fault they were having to live out the roles the public had cast them in. I could also see the slight disagreements and ‘niggles’ appearing among them. The crowd was screaming so loudly between the songs that I couldn’t catch the remarks the group were shouting to each other, but it was clear that while the world was shouting their praises, these particularly public moments were the only time the Fab Four could actually communicate with each other. Interviewers could not hear, managers could not intervene, the stage was the only place where they could be brutally honest with one another. The Beatles were at their peak, but the rifts between them were clearly discernible.
For the second Beatles show the following week, Epstein decided that to give the show a better overall balance, somebody else should go on before the Fab Four. The Kinks were to close the first half. Word was already out that we had stolen so much of the limelight the week before that it had been decided that a ‘less aggressive’ group take our spot. The group chosen to fill this thankless role was a band from Shepherd’s Bush called the High Numbers. The unfortunate Brian Epstein could not know that he had replaced one set of upstarts with another. The High Numbers were later to change their name to the Who.
At the time, the Kinks were opening their act with a Bo Diddley song called ‘Cadillac’. As the curtains opened the rest of the Kinks played a frantic rhythm, and then I rushed on from the wings. As I prepared for my dramatic entrance, Paul McCartney, who was hiding behind a curtain, suddenly emerged and grabbed hold of me, preventing me from making my entrance and leaving the rest of the Kinks playing with no lead singer.
‘I suppose you are the star,’ he shouted.
‘I suppose I am,’ I replied.
Then he let me go and I ran on to the stage. It was obvious that the Kinks were beginning to find their audience and had earned a little respect from the greatest pop group in the world.
Thank Your Lucky Stars was a popular television show which had a review segment where three members of the public would be asked to vote on the week’s new releases. One girl, Janice, had become a regular, and her catch phrase, ‘I’ll give it five’ (the highest mark), had been picked up as a slogan by almost the entire nation. The sound of ‘I’ll give it five’ spoken in a thick Birmingham accent was an indication that something was destined for success.
Brian Matthew, the host of the show, had been the first person to mention the name the Kinks on television, and he was therefore regarded by us as a supporter of the band. Really he had only given us a casual mention. He was commenting on some of the strange names being chosen for groups at the time and in his opinion the Kinks was the strangest sounding. (Patrick Doncaster, the Daily Mirror’s pop critic, had also written about us somewhat negatively, saying that while the Kinks was probably a name that grabbed the attention, the group might find it hard to live with later on. We were in no position to worry about the effect the name would have on us, we were only concerned that people noticed us at all.)
The three records chosen for the panel to review included the latest release by the Dave Clark Five, and while we expected a fair reaction, we never dreamed that the record of the week would be anything other than Dave Clark’s follow-up to ‘Bits and Pieces’. The records were played and the panel made their comments. It was Janice ‘Oil geeve it foive’ who really raved about ‘You Really Got Me’. And then the Kinks record was voted record of the week. This was unimaginable success.
Now the rest of my family was starting to take more interest in the group’s progress; my mother had started to get inquiries from distant relatives. Cousins started to emerge from all parts of the country, and Dad often found himself inundated with free drinks from his cronies at the pub.
The record came out the following week, and we had been rebooked on Ready Steady Go! The appearance would more or less guarantee some sort of chart action, even though we were not expecting a high entry. Tuesday was chart day and the buzz of expectancy went around the house every time the telephone rang. Finally Grenville telephoned and I was summoned to speak to him. I was informed that we had gone straight into the Top 30, and we were to go on Ready Steady Go! again the following week to play two songs live. This was a sure sign that the record was going to be Top 5. A few weeks earlier the Animals had been recalled in the same way, and ‘House of the Rising Sun’ had immediately gone to Number I in the charts. We didn’t even give a thought to the fact that though we had become quite an exciting live act, we were generally unpredictable, and therefore a bad risk on live television. We had had a BBC radio audition earlier that year and failed it. The fact that our record was being played on the BBC pop radio shows was an indication that they now might consider us less of a risk. So we felt more confident in ourselves, especially as the daily record sales came in.
The small venues we were playing around the country were all beginning to sell out and extra bouncers were having to be called in by the promoters to hold back the growing legion of screaming girls. I discovered that even a slight glance at a girl in the front row would cause her to roll her eyes and scream with ecstasy. We found ourselves having to find secret entrances to the village halls and ballrooms we were playing to prevent ourselves being mobbed by fans. My brother-in-law Brian had difficulty coping with the newly added role of road manager-cum-security man. A few weeks before Dave and I had been two young in-laws who played in a group and were prone to fighting in the back of the van. Now it was like we were being pursued by the entire population, and treated like items of rare china, wrapped in cotton wool after every performance in case we might break before the next showing.
On the few nights a week when we were not working, we found it difficult to leave the house without being pursued through the streets by adoring followers. We began to develop a series of new rules to life, centring on knowing secret departures, recognizing prearranged knocks on the door and coded messages of arrival. In a matter of days, we had been transformed into celebrities. Our moves were monitored by our admirers and all of our needs catered for by our management and other interested parties. The imaginary hump on my back, which had been with me since my childhood, started to disappear from my consciousness. Even though the shyness that had always accompanied me never quite went away, it was replaced by a strange, naïve over-confidence that only naturally shy people who have been thrust into similar situations can relate to. In short, I was emotionally totally out of my depth. Our success increased every day and I felt like a long jumper who woke up every morning to break his own world record. Everywhere we went, ‘You Really Got Me’ was being played on the radio.
The group and our assorted managers assembled in Arthur Howes’ office to hear the news that Pye Records wanted us to record an LP. Jimmy O’Day, who worked in Arthur Howes’ office, came over to congratulate Shel Talmy and asked me how many songs I would be contributing to the album. I surprised everyone by saying that I expected to have only five or six songs ready. This was unusual simply because since the Beatles’ Please, Please Me album, every group that wrote was expected to write everything on each album. But Shel said that he had already started looking for songs for us to cover. Pye wanted the album as soon as possible and the first session was booked for the following week. As Shel walked me through Soho from Howes’ office in Frith Street, he said, ‘Enjoy walking down the street anonymously, because pretty soon you’ll be recognized everywhere you go.’
Just over six months earlier, we had appeared on Ready Steady Go! as newcomers with not much hope of making more than the bottom regions of the charts. Now we were headlining the show and I even felt confident enough to go on television exposing the gap between my two front teeth. I had developed a technique of singing with my top lip stiffened in order to expose ‘the gap’ as little as possible. We decided to play Slim Harpo’s ‘Got Love If You Want It’ first, with ‘You Really Got Me’ as our second song. The show was no more than a blur, partly due to the fact that I had downed a couple of stiff whisky-macs to fend off pre-show nerves. Directly afterwards we were driven to a concert in south London, and then, to finish a triumphant day, Robert’s girlfriend Tiger threw a party in our honour at her house in Mayfair.
During the concert I recognized Margie, my college friend, and asked her along to the party. All through the show she stared at me in that strangely hypnotic way that suggested she may have been taken all the publicity surrounding the Kinks a little too seriously. But I had forgotten how unpredictable she could be. At the party she started talking to Avory and calmly announced that she wanted to rescue me from my own devices so that the world would not deprive me of my true destiny. At art school it was common for people to live and speak in metaphors and communicate by means of their own invention (such conversations often followed a long pub crawl). Avory, however, was a solid chap from East Molesey, which is situated firmly on planet Earth, and he immediately wrote Margie off as a nutter. ‘Come down from up there, Mick Avory,’ Margie said in an ethereal whisper. Avory just sighed and looked over in the direction of two dollybirds. Afterwards, Margie followed me back to Grenville’s flat in Lennox Gardens, where we all consumed even more brandy and champagne. By now Margie was telling everybody to ‘come down from up there’, particularly me, but I was already ‘up there’, and so drunk that I was in no condition to argue with her.
She begged Grenville not to change me as a person, and Grenville raised an eyebrow and promised on his word as a gentleman. Then he disappeared into another room and Margie became slightly deranged. This resulted in a scuffle during which I found myself flat on my back in a helpless drunken state. Margie was on top of me with her legs pinning down my arms, her hands pressed firmly around my throat. At first I tried to laugh it off, but I soon realized that Margie was in fact trying to throttle me. She was only a tiny creature but had found sufficient strength to overcome me. The last thing I remember before passing out was Grenville shouting at Margie to let go of me, while Margie’s eyes glared into mine with a look of the possessed.
I awoke the following morning on the same spot on the floor. Grenville was already up and about. I tried to speak but could only croak: a combination of over-indulgence followed by what some might call strangulation. When I looked in the mirror I saw that Margie’s fingers had left two large red marks on my neck.
‘Where’s Margie?’ I asked. I was concerned for her.
Grenville strutted across the room looking polished, with his morning ablutions already completed, while I shuffled around trying to avoid the smell of my own breath. Grenville was so immaculate with his pin-striped suit and smartly slicked-back public-school hair that I imagined that instead of getting undressed for bed like other mortals, he simply got into the wardrobe and dangled from a coat-hanger all night.
‘Oh, the girl.’ He casually mused. ‘What do you expect me to say? What else could I possibly do in the circumstances?’
I walked over to the window and felt both hung-over and ashamed. I saw Margie sitting in the gutter outside with her head down. All the time I had known her she had been a virgin, and if what Grenville had just said was true, he must have taken that away from her. Perhaps in her own bizarre way Margie was doing her best to ensure that I would cling to whatever innocence I had left. It was as though she was trying to prevent the world taking away my moral virginity. As it turned out, she was too late. I felt as though I had already become a whore.
Grenville called a doctor and it was decided that I should not sing for a few days. As I left the flat Margie was still sitting on the steps outside, but I didn’t speak to her as I walked past. I was ashamed that I had not fulfilled the wishes she had for us both. And I think I disliked myself a little more.
A few months earlier I had met a girl in Sheffield, where the Kinks were playing. Rasa, the daughter of Lithuanian refugees, had skipped off from her convent school in Bradford and hitched to Sheffield to see us play at the Esquire Club. She was pretty, blonde, and had fine Slavic features. Her almond-shaped eyes gave her face almost an Asian quality, and her green eyes darted about busily as she took in the performance. After the show she arranged a meeting with us through Hal Carter.
As we talked, she found that some of the things I said unlocked a little of the restlessness in her. She was also an understanding listener. We gave her a lift to the railway station and, as she got out of the van, I kissed her hand in a gallant gesture. The others whistled and made insulting noises, but Rasa curtsied politely and left. We had exchanged addresses and a few days later I received a letter from her about arriving back at her parents’ house in the early morning light, listening to the dawn chorus. Very innocent stuff.
A week after the party at Tiger’s I had fully recovered from Margie’s throttling. We played on a television show in Bristol and I met a singer from Bradford named Kiki Dee. Kiki knew Rasa who happened to be in London at that time. I telephoned a number given to me by Kiki and arranged to meet Rasa at Tottenham Court Road tube station. Although the station was packed with Thursday-night shoppers, I saw Rasa’s long blonde hair through the crowds of commuters that packed the entrance to the underground. She had her back to the crowds as she pretended to study a map of the London underground system on the wall. I walked up behind her and paused for a moment before letting her know I was there. Her hair, which was almost white in places, hung down her back over her three-quarter-length brown suede coat. I seemed to know everything I needed to know about her at that moment and actually considered walking away. It was almost as if this could have been the beginning and end right there, which would result in a perfect relationship full of thoughts of what might have been. As I hesitated, she turned around and saw me, as if she had eyes in the back of her head.
We walked around Soho and, after a meal at Leon’s Chinese restaurant in Wardour Street, we walked down to the Thames Embankment, then crossed the river to sit by Waterloo Bridge. She told me that she had come down to stay in Willesden with her sister, but that she was going back to Bradford soon. I took her home to her sister and everything felt fine inside me. It was not just that I had started to like myself a little more. The flower that I had felt growing inside my chest was not the cancer Margie had diagnosed but the beginning of something not as deadly but frightening just the same.’
Suddenly R.D. hesitated, then stopped. He clenched his fist and thumped it against his chest.
‘The obsession starts. That’s bad. Margie was wrong about the cancer, but in some respects she could have been right. Love like that is something beautiful, but, like cancer, it’s almost better to have it cut out before it can do any damage. Love spreads to the entire body. It eventually takes over your entire soul. You make wrong decisions. Do senseless things. Become irrational. I saw other girls walking down the street; in parks; fans even; and yet somehow they all looked like Rasa. Damn stupid fool. Yeah, You Really Got Me now. Let’s watch a movie. Hey, how about Charlie Varrick?’
R.D. was trying to get away from the subject of his first wife. He put on the Charlie Varrick video but I kept pumping him for answers.
‘Was Rasa the Girl?’
R.D. pretended not to hear while he watched Joe Don Baker, playing a character working for the Mob, beat up Varrick’s sidekick, played by Andy Robinson.
‘I love this scene. Sheer force. God, that punk really got what was coming to him. No! I often thought about it, but Rasa was not the Girl.’
R.D. switched videos as quickly as he changed the subject. After Joe Don Baker had dispatched the unfortunate Andy Robinson, R.D. stuck in a video of The Third Man starring Orson Welles, the familiar scene where Welles walks from the shadows and makes his first appearance as the haunting Harry Lime theme starts to play.
‘Maybe it was the music from this movie that made me fall in love with Rasa. It reminded me of refugees; post-war deprivation and all that. The chick in this movie is also a complete goddess. Almond eyes, long flowing hair and that accent. Man!
‘Rasa was like her. She was born in Germany as her family fled Lithuania, and then she spent the first few years of her life in a displaced-persons camp in Hull. Finally they moved to Bradford. I suppose I fell for the whole refugee story like a complete sap, but even so, she seemed a great kid. I had never met anyone quite like her.’
‘How would you rate her?’ I asked.
‘Rate?’ R.D. bellowed. ‘A five. A definite five out of five.’
I found myself becoming gradually engrossed by the wonderful old black-and-white movie. R.D. saw that I was interested in something other than him and decided that it was time to go on with his story.