‘Alan Klein, an accountant, and Marty Machat, his attorney, were already well known for their abilities to extricate artists from ‘unsatisfactory contractual arrangements’. Accompanying us on the flight to New York to meet them were Robert Ransom, our accountant, and Peter Grant, the overweight concert promoter from north London who was acting as the ‘facilitator’ and Robert and Grenville’s contact man to Klein. ‘The man who knew a man.’ Grant, who would later earn a reputation for himself as creator and manager of the band Led Zeppelin, was so big that he could barely fit in the economy seat of the DC 10.
We were picked up from the airport by a limousine, much to Grenville’s delight, and deposited at the Edison Hotel, which was not greeted with the same enthusiasm by my managers and accountant. The Edison was at the time considered to be a hang-out for hookers and low-life businessmen. My only concern was that the television in my room worked, so I could watch Captain Kangaroo and the Today show, which I had become addicted to on my previous trips, but Grenville protested bitterly on the telephone to Klein’s office about the ‘squalid’ quarters at the Edison. In my opinion it was palatial compared to some of the hotels we had stayed in. Half an hour later the limousine arrived again and this time deposited us at the more fashionable Warwick Hotel, where the hookers and low-life businessmen restricted their hanging-out to the hotel bar. Mick and Dave were also there, but only as what politicians call, ‘official observers’.
Klein had been ‘re-negotiating’ the Rolling Stones’ contract with Decca Records, and there was a rumour that he had them sailing around Manhattan Island on a yacht while he closed the deal. That way nobody but Klein could get to them. Perfect tactics orchestrated by a couple of real professionals. Machat and Klein were the ideal combination of calm, calculating assessment full of business acumen and the pit-bull-terrier killer instinct needed to deal in a cut-throat industry. Machat went in as the quiet counsellor, while Alan interjected sharp bursts of aggressive outrage. Unsuspecting record executives were at times rendered defenceless in their presence. At first sight Avory said they looked like the comedy duo of Abbott and Costello. Machat, the taller, had a cigar-smoking intellectual image, apart from an occasional air of shiftiness, probably developed as a result of hanging around unscrupulous businessmen. Klein, a short, stocky, former accountant who had probably worked for too many so-called respectable businessmen, seemed to have decided that the only way to knock down the barrier of respectability was to steamroller his way through. Alan Klein talked as if his jaw was continually clenched; his eyes wide open.
‘What do you want?’ he snapped at me.
‘I want my money and a better record deal. What do you want?’ I replied.
Klein didn’t hesitate: ‘The Beatles, of course. Who doesn’t?’
After introducing themselves to the rest of my entourage, ending with Robert Ransom, Klein sniggered as if he had weighed up the whole situation in an instant: ‘Ransom. Great name for an accountant.’
‘I think that’s what this case is all about, don’t you, Alan?’ Machat said, as he puffed on his cigar.
Alan sat himself down in a swivel chair behind an oversized desk that had the effect of making him look even smaller. Machat cruised the room slowly, pausing occasionally to make a legal point, while Klein dictated the conversation.
‘You got talent?’ he shouted across to me. I remained silent.
‘Oh, come on, let’s cut this phoney humble act. You got frigging talent, or what? Of course you’ve got frigging talent. So much so that you’re making Reprise Records and Louis Benjamin at Pye a goddam fortune.’ The room remained silent.
Grenville raised an eyebrow as he crossed his legs, took a swift but nervous puff of his cigarette and pronounced in his best, over-exaggerated English accent, ‘That’s why we’re here, Alan. To put the situation right.’
A piece of ash fell on Grenville’s perfectly tailored suit, betraying his inner nervousness. Klein sat back in his chair, clenched his teeth, waved his head from side to side as if thinking out loud, and looked up at the ceiling.
‘Wrong, right, right, wrong.’ He remained in this position while Machat ran through the legal issues involved and compared them to other cases that he had dealt with.
At the end of Machat’s knowledgeable, if drawn out, assessment, Klein shouted, ‘To hell with it, I’ll get you your money. Do you know how?’ The room remained silent as he picked up some legal papers relating to the Kinks.
‘Infancy,’ Marty muttered under his breath.
Alan’s eyes opened so wide with rage and his teeth were so clenched so tight it looked as if he was about to have a fit. ‘Too fucking right, infancy!’ he shouted.
Ransom coughed, as if to try and interject some decorum into the proceedings.
Klein ranted on: ‘Did you get advice from a lawyer – sorry, solicitor – when you signed this contract? Doesn’t matter! Do you know your first record came out on two labels in America? I think I owned one of them!’ Klein laughed.
Machat had circled the room and now positioned himself behind Klein. He picked up the conversation where Klein left off.
‘We’ll have to start this with an injunction. It seems to me that Pye did not have your best interest in mind when they signed you to Reprise Records. I doubt if you were even consulted. I’ll call Mike Maitland at Warners and tell him he no longer has the Kinks. That’ll start the ball rolling.’
Grenville raised his eyebrow and pouted his lips. Robert guffawed in a schoolboyish manner, exposing his capped front teeth. Klein sat back and contemplated the outcome. Now his voice was more restrained, but it still retained its New York gruffness.
‘And then Maitland will get pissed at Pye. We’ll say to Benjamin he doesn’t have a deal.’
‘The Donovan case,’ Marty whispered confidently.
‘Exactly. We’ll use the same tactics as we did on the Donovan case. Then we’ll re-sign with the same labels for a better deal. They’ll still have their act. The band will be on a better royalty and Mr Humble here will have his money.’
Klein laughed as he finished the speech. Grenville and Robert enthused. Ransom breathed a sigh of relief at the apparent simplicity of it all.
‘And Kassner?’ inquired Grenville.
‘I think his case is in the toilet,’ shrugged Klein.
Ransom looked distinctly uncomfortable and checked to see if his briefcase was beside him.
Machat began to expound with finesse, like a man speaking at the pinnacle of his knowledge. ‘It’s a simple matter. Kassner assumes he has a long-term relationship with Raymond when all he has, in fact, is a song-by-song assignment. At the very most he can only lay claim to the copyrights already assigned, which he will either lose, or pay the writer a good royalty.’
Grenville sighed and stubbed out his cigarette. ‘We’ll get the copyrights back.’
For the first time Klein acknowledged somebody other than Machat. ‘Goddam right. We’ll take it all back. Kassner will go apeshit.’
I asked Klein what I should do in the meantime. Klein leaned over his desk in a very slow way, to make sure it sank in: ‘Go … home. Write songs. Play your concerts and we’ll take care of it.’
Klein flicked through some other papers on his desk. ‘And this other business with the immigration people? Marty here deals with this sort of thing all the time. Mr Ransom can go back to his office and look after his accounts.’ He suddenly became serious. ‘I will succeed because I believe that all men are born evil. That is how I stay in business and that is why we will win. So don’t worry.’ That night we felt so relieved that we met up with Mort Shuman, then went out and got plastered.
When we returned to England I told Rasa that the business trip had gone well. Then the next day the Kinks flew to Majorca to do a concert in a bull ring. The dressing-rooms were improvised in the pens where the bulls were usually kept before they went in to be slaughtered by the matadors. When I was a child my father told me that in the Second World War he had killed a bull for food and, after disembowelling it, he cut the poor creature into pieces and hung up its parts to dry in the sun. My father said that he kept the knives as a memento. In the bull pen in Majorca there was the same smell of death that I had imagined as a terrified child. Of all the tales my father had told me – swimming the Irish Sea as a teenager to impress a pretty Welsh girl; capturing single-handed the crew of a German bomber which had crashed in Kent; playing the banjo in the music-halls, or soccer for the Arsenal reserves – of all the yarns my father had spun, the story of the knives was the one that had stayed with me.
As I walked into the arena to do the concert, I imagined for a moment that I was a grand matador, entering to the applause of an adoring crowd. Then I thought back to the meeting in New York a few days earlier and quickly assumed the role of a bull going to its ritual slaughter at the hands of the matador.
The next day we flew to Scotland to do a concert. ‘Sunny Afternoon’ knocked ‘Paperback Writer’ off the Number 1 spot after it had been there for just one week. Nobody had ever killed a Beatles record off that quickly before. And, despite all the negativity in the business side of our lives, the group was once more achieving chart success. When I returned to England the world soccer cup was in progress and England were favourites to win – and on English soil. It was as though crowds were cheering the length and breadth of the country. Meanwhile in the Boscobel̵Denmark case, statements were being read and writs were being prepared as the law began to take its course.
The one thing that set John Dalton apart from Quaife was that he was, like Dave and myself, a soccer fanatic, and we took every opportunity to follow the progress of the English side. While I had been in the States meeting Klein and Machat, England had drawn 0–0 with Uruguay, then had beaten Argentina and progressed to the semi-finals. ‘Sunny Afternoon’ was still in the English charts and we all somehow felt that we were on a winning streak. This included the England soccer team. The day England played Germany in the final, the Kinks were due to appear at an open-air festival in Exeter, but at three o’clock on that famous Saturday afternoon, we were all assembled around the television in my living room, and we were not going to leave until we knew the result. We had just started to get in the car as England were leading 2-1, when Jackie Charlton gave away a free-kick just outside the English penalty area. John Dalton, or Nobby as he had been renamed by Avory, dragged us back into the living room as Germany equalized. This meant extra-time: another half an hour. In those days before the motorway, it was impossible to get to Exeter in three hours, and we would not be on stage at the scheduled time if we didn’t leave right away. But we were determined not to go until the final whistle. By now Stan Whitley had been promoted to driver, as his performance as equipment-boy in Spain had meant either instant dismissal or job relocation. In the tradition of Brian Longstaff and Hal Carter, Stan made us laugh, and so he didn’t get the sack. But the thought of another half-hour delay made him pace nervously up and down the shingle drive outside of my semi, like a father-to-be waiting for his wife to give birth. History tells us that Geoff Hurst scored two goals for England, but even when the BBC commentator Kenneth Wolstenholme uttered the immortal words as Hurst ran and scored in the final seconds: ‘Some people are on the pitch … they think it’s all over … It is now!’ The Kinks insisted on staying to watch the victory parade, and cheered the other Nobby, whose last name was Stiles, as he danced around the pitch at Wembley with the World Cup balanced on his head. I looked over at our Nobby. He had tears in his eyes. Patriotism had never been so strong. We were all war babies, we had all seen Hungary beat England 6–3 at Wembley when we were at primary school. In the early sixties we had heard Harold Macmillan say to the country, ‘You’ve never had it so good’, while I watched my father walk to the Employment Exchange. On the soccer pitch Bobby Charlton buried his head in his hands as he fell to his knees and wept on the English turf. In an emotional moment I felt like millions of others watching on television: I wanted to be next to him to help him to his feet. England had won the World Cup and the Kinks were Number 1 in the charts. I wished that I had a machine-gun, so that I could kill us all and everything would stop there – but we had to get to Exeter for the concert.
The faster we tried to drive, the longer it took. The more Stan panicked, the more wrong turnings he went down. Stan was born and bred in north London, and it was clear that he should never have been allowed to venture beyond the bounds of N10. The M1 motorway which had recently been completed was simple to negotiate: all Stan had to do was point the car in the direction of north and in a matter of hours we would be in Birmingham. Exeter, on the other hand, was to the west, through an assortment of antiquated A and B roads, that were completely beyond Stan’s capabilities as expedition leader. The situation was not helped by the streets being full of jubilant soccer fans. It took us nearly two hours to get past Wembley itself. When we eventually arrived in Exeter, five and a half hours later, the large crowd which had assembled to see us play was about to go home. We rushed out of the car and grabbed our instruments, leaving Stan sitting in the driver’s seat, an emotional wreck.
Some of the crowd was booing and as we went on stage the promoter tried to stop us performing, in order that he could sue us for breach of contract after not turning up on time but I pointed out to him that as long as we played before midnight we would not break our agreement. I think we actually went on stage at 11.45, much to the annoyance of the promoter’s staff. We completed as much as we could of our set before the promoter, who by now was more conciliatory towards us but looked like a man ruined, with dark rings around his unblinking eyes, walked from the side of the stage with the mains plug connecting the electricity to our amplifiers in his hand. For a moment I thought he was going to commit suicide in front of us all. He stood in front of me and said, ‘I’m sorry, lads, I’ve got to do it. It’s a curfew, they’ll never let me promote again. Forgive me.’ As he uttered the final words he pulled the plug out of its socket. There was a little puff of smoke before the lights went out. This came as a relief to us all, as even though the audience had stayed to get their money’s worth, they had taken pleasure in throwing empty beer bottles at us during the performance. ‘Fuck off!’ Dave shouted from the stage. ‘We turned up, didn’t we?’ An empty bottle of Newcastle Brown smashed against his guitar.
We made a hasty exit from the stage and ran towards our car, to find Stan besieged by angry fans who looked as though they wanted to drag him from his seat in order to have him tarred and feathered. Eventually we made our getaway, and Stan finally reached the roundabout and with a sigh of relief passed an arrow pointing to London. We had driven for nearly two hours before we realized we had almost reached the Welsh coast. Stan had continued on the roundabout and taken us in the opposite direction to home. It was dawn before we finally drove past Wembley stadium again on our way back to Muswell Hill. Stan looked a broken man twitching in the driver’s seat. Near exhaustion, he offered his resignation as we arrived outside my house. But none of us responded. We were too busy trying to contain our laughter.
But the mystical fairyland of ‘Sunny Afternoon’ and the World Cup was soon to become overcast by the gloomy onset of writs and summonses. In the meantime Rasa and I took a little boat on a holiday around the Norfolk broads. Alan Klein and Michael Simkins were going about their work. Wace and Collins were taking advantage of their regained success and formed their own publishing company with Freddie Beinstock. They were signing several new artists, one of whom had the unlikely name of the Marquess of Kensington. There was a rumour that Wace, still the frustrated singer, had recorded the song with himself as vocalist and dragged in the first good-looking stud he saw off Carnaby Street to create a new superstar. Kassner was presumably still fuming with rage over the fact that his ‘boy’ had abandoned him and had given another publisher a Number 1 song. However, according to my diary, Rasa’s fairytale world was still intact. She knew about Klein, Machat, Kassner and Page, but she imagined that a good fairy would come along and blow the bad fairies away.
My father came up to Norfolk to join me and Rasa for a couple of days’ fishing, and after only one night on the Broads netted a large bagful of eels. Rasa awoke in the middle of the night as she felt a slippery sensation around her feet. I lit the small gas lamp at the end of the bed to discover that the little cabin where we slept was completely engulfed by black eels, escaped from my father’s keep-net. I felt that this was a warning that all was not well. As I struggled to catch them and throw them out of the boat, I realized there were too many to cope with. Rasa and I abandoned the boat and left it to the eels. The next morning my father arrived and with an impish smile cut off the heads of the remaining eels and gutted them and cast their entrails back into the dark waters. I wished that he could do the same to the managers, publishers, businessmen and accountants. But this was not to be. My father had many knives, but they were not sharp enough to cut off the heads of all the slippery creatures.
As Rasa and I reclaimed the boat after Dad went back to London, we turned on the transistor radio. By now ‘Sunny Afternoon’ was no longer in the Top 10, and we heard a new record called ‘Wild Thing’ by a group called the Troggs. At first I experienced the same feeling I had the first time I heard the Who’s ‘I Can’t Explain’ – mixture of being both flattered and enraged because somebody had apparently been inspired by our group’s sound. But any fears of the Kinks being deposed were dismissed as soon as an ocarina solo appeared in place of a raving Dave Davies guitar sound. Shel Talmy had done it with the Who, and at the end of ‘Wild Thing’ the radio announced that the producer of the Troggs was none other than Larry Page. In many ways the records Larry produced with the Troggs were as entertaining and authentic as anything else around. I hoped that if the Troggs’ record reached Number 1, Larry might be distracted and forget about us. But this was not to be.
On my return from holiday I was confronted by a list of one-night stands up and down the country combined with a list of meetings with solicitors and legal counsel. Two things were uppermost in my mind. First, perhaps Larry and Kassner had been so delighted by the success of the Troggs that they had decided to drop all actions against me, which would allow the courts to release my royalties; second, that Stan Whitley had taken the advice Mick had given him after our trip to Exeter and bought and studied a map of England. I was delighted when Stan proudly pulled up outside the Locarno in Burnley without so much as one wrong turning on the way, but disappointed to find that Kassner and Page were pursuing their claims with relentless gusto.’
Raymond Douglas ranted on about the legal saga, as if all the bitter memories had returned to haunt him.
‘I knew it was all going on around me. I felt that something bad was happening. All the legal activity, combined with the wheeling and dealing, was gradually muddling my thinking so much that it seemed to me a simple situation was turning into a complicated, twisted affair. I felt I was being slowly poisoned by it all. I had shut down emotionally after “Dedicated Follower”, but when I wrote “Sunny Afternoon” it was like emerging from a black tunnel. That whole sixties thing was beginning to get to me. Things were supposed to be swinging in London. But looking back and reading between the lines it was obvious that some weird stuff was going on. Pop art had become the new opium of the people, while the politicians continued to screw everyone up. Maybe I was just pissed off that I was successful, but married, with a child and responsibilities, and there were all those supposedly fantastic girls out there in miniskirts and I couldn’t get near it all without some reporter up my arse with a camera. It wasn’t just sex, it was just the fact that the whole fucking world knew that I was married because I was famous, and any old girlfriends I did meet had to be in dark clubs or the back of taxi-cabs. Simple innocent reunions were turned into tawdry assignations. My feelings for Rasa were the same as ever, but something in the back of my mind said I should have waited a bit longer before I married. I remember something Larry Page said just before my wedding. It was a flippant remark but it had an element of truth in it. He said that I was the type of guy that needed security or responsibility, because guys like me usually let what’s hanging between their legs dictate their lives. Perhaps it wasn’t the subtlest way of putting it, but perhaps I would have got carried away with all the success, with hangers-on catering to my every whim, that I would have ended up dead after six months’ with a needle in my arm and a chic sucking my dick which was still hard even though I was dead. Way to go, man!’
Raymond Douglas paused. Then he apologized for speaking in such a way. I looked at him closely and he was shaking, as if he was remembering a traumatic moment in his life. Suddenly he grabbed me and held me close to him, without seeming to know or care who I was, just as long as he was not alone. The totally desperate way he held me somehow brought out protective feelings in me. He spoke slowly, in a whisper.
‘Will you hold me for a second? I feel afraid. I don’t want to be intimate or have sex with you, all I want you to do is show some affection and forget about what’s good and what’s bad. Right and wrong and obscene in this life. Everything is reduced to what’s physical in the end, because it’s the filth inside people’s minds that creates all the evil. What is a body, anyway? I suppose you’ve got to abuse your body to understand it. If you’re not prepared to humiliate yourself in order to give somebody else a moment’s pleasure, I don’t believe that you’ve actually lived. It’s impossible not to debase yourself occasionally in this world, but the secret is not to lose your self-esteem at the same time, in order to make yourself pure again without guilt or conscience. I know many so-called happily married people who have never tasted that emotional freedom. It’s like juice. Love fuel. So many people stay together until they die and yet even on their deathbeds they never knew total love because they were too proud to taste the filth as well as the sweetness. People are so goddam respectable, they never do or say what they really feel. Insecurity, I guess that’s what drives people to do that. Remember, I am not a queer and I do not want your body.’
Then R.D. closed his eyes and kissed me gently on the lips. He whispered a name under his breath as he drew away from me – Julie Finkle.
As a human being I was a little sickened, but as a journalist my appetite for a story was getting the better of me. I was getting closer to what I had come for. When he whispered ‘Julie Finkle’ to me it had sounded like a clue. A lead. Or possibly a cry for help. We both remained silent for several minutes. Then I said that he shouldn’t feel bad and that I understood, but deep down I knew I was dealing with a troubled person, who was haunted by something in his past. So much so that it had driven him into almost total seclusion. Maybe he needed medical help. Maybe just a good woman. He was old, but not past it sexually. Perhaps it was the girl. That girl he’d wanted but couldn’t have. All these years she’d been locked away in a tiny corner of his mind. I thought about the newspaper stories of his sexual ambiguity. Maybe they were true after all. He had been born at a time when homosexuality was still illegal. Although not gay in my opinion, he had lived through the era of the closet queen, and his songs were some of the first to sing openly about those poor tortured souls. I thought of what he had said the first time I met him. Raymond Douglas began talking again. But now he completely changed the subject. He had become a completely different person.
‘Don’t you think Harold Wilson had a weird smile? They say that Hitler was a product of the twentieth century. I mean, I know he was evil, but he had to exist. He, or should I say It, had to happen. Like Marilyn Monroe, Vera Lynn, Lee Harvey Oswald, Charles Manson, Stalin, Lenin and Charlie Chaplin. They all had to exist. But old Harold Wilson, bless him, our Premier and guiding light for most of the sixties, reminded me of so many of those promoters up north who came to us after a show and expected us to thank them for giving us work. It’s unbelievable that Harold Wilson was part of the ‘swinging’ sixties, but I think the sixties were a con: the establishment still ruled the country. Grenville didn’t know too much about managing a rock group, but he knew about the establishment. The sixties were like a carrot held up to youth to distract us so that we would not rebel against the ruling classes and all the backhanders and corruption that were actually present in politics. The countryside was being eroded and trees pulled up in order to build motorways, factories were being closed, coal mines were being ear-marked for the chop. I suppose there’s some Welsh in me – probably a lot of Welsh in me – basically I’m a mongrel, and being a mongrel I was becoming aware of the thousands of people who were given the shit end of the stick in the sixties. They were the people who would be left behind without work when the party was over, without a place in society. My job lasted from record to record. The sick thing was, that I was heralded as a standard-bearer for that deceitful time. I was writing songs and the country was gradually being sold out. Cheated.
‘Maybe that’s why I didn’t go down the King’s Road with the others. They thought that I was uncool, unhip. Some even called me a snob. Maybe that’s also why I married somebody who was not only classless, but stateless. It was her total homelessness that appealed. I wanted to take her and find a home for her. I never wanted to live anywhere permanently, because to tell you the truth being a house owner is a terrific responsibility. My friend Barry Fantoni, who had become a TV celebrity on a teenage talk show, received an urgent phone call from me while he was at the BBC studios. We were supposed to go out and meet at a club somewhere, but it was a cold night and I thought that if I left the house my pipes would freeze. I had heard from other homeowners that the worst thing that can happen is for a pipe to burst. So that night Barry Fantoni, one-time art-school teacher and “Face of 1966”, kept me company during my vigil in my darkened attic, waiting for the pipes to thaw out. His friendship was tested to the limit.’
Raymond Douglas started singing like a drunk in a public house.
‘There’s a crack up in the ceiling and the kitchen sink is leaking.
Out of work and got no money
A Sunday joint of bread and honey …
People are living on Dead-end Street.’
Then the old rock and roller started mooching around the room like a vaudeville comedian. Posing at the end of each line.
‘… And it stretches from the King’s Road to Threadneedle Street
… Yeah.
From John O’Groats to Land’s End … Yeah.
The pipes were freezing everywhere
But everybody was being too swinging, man,
To worry about what’s going to happen when the pipes burst …
Yeah yeah.’
The Preacher was back on the soap box. R.D. was swinging. He put on an American accent that reminded me of Groucho Marx.
‘And when Harold Wilson smiled like a north-country promoter, devalued sterling and passed laws behind our backs, a man’s only right when he owned his own house was that he could do whatever he wanted in that house. Copulate, masturbate, flagellate and perpetrate all manner of sins in every room if he so wished, provided the neighbours didn’t see, and only if that house was freehold. But no one told you that 150 civil servants had the right to enter that house without a warrant.
‘Dead-end Street … yeah … Dead-end Street.’
The little variety show was over and Raymond Douglas fell exhausted back into his chair. He was out of breath but he still went on. He reverted to his maudlin Cockney drone.
‘It’s really scary owning a house and living under a microscope. Do you know what I mean? The responsibility is awesome.’
R.D. made me want to laugh, but the old boy was serious. ‘I think so,’ I replied cautiously. I thought that Raymond Douglas was cracking up. No wonder some journalists and disc jockeys had considered him to be an unpredictable crank. I let him continue. Then he completely changed the subject and started talking in a calm, coherent way.
‘After the car accident Quaife totally wigged out. He had some injuries to his foot, but I think he did something to his brain as well. Or maybe it’s like I was saying, it was chicks. When chicks get involved with a band, it’s all over. Poor old Pete, he only wanted to be loved, like anyone else, but Pete never did anything by halves. While we were going through all that turmoil on our first visit to Copenhagen, Pete had met Annette, the daughter of a rich hotel owner. He decided that he didn’t want to be part of the Kinks anymore and while we were in Copenhagen playing a gig Pete signed an official letter of resignation. I remember we were at this large, almost palatial house, where Annette’s parents lived. I got the impression that Pete thought that Annette was where the real money was at. I’m not suggesting that Pete saw his relationship with this girl as some sort of leapfrog to prestige and high status, I think he was genuinely in love, but I definitely felt that he had lost all his love for the band, and that hurt me. I remembered how when we were at school together and Pete lived in a council house on the Coldfall Estate near Muswell Hill we were such good friends. Or were we? You know, I have this notion that perhaps I have never had a real friend in my entire life. It was almost as if Pete just wanted to be rid of us, like he was ashamed to be in the group. Perhaps he had just wanted to make one hit record and then give up. Perhaps he wasn’t seduced like I was into going on and on. It wasn’t until Pete signed that resignation letter that I realized that I had never know him at all.
I also felt that he had been freaked out by all the legal actions that were being started in the name of or against the Kinks, and he was terrified at the thought of being tangled up with the likes of Alan Klein. At first Pete had been the most show-business-conscious member of the band, but as time wore on I had taken more and more of the limelight away from him. Dave and Mick couldn’t give a damn. Pete really acted as if he thought he had found a new life where he could make a clean start, in a country which considered him a superstar and also classless. Maybe that’s what he thought. Maybe he just settled for marrying a millionaire’s daughter. Whatever his reasons, on 30 September 1966 he signed a paper which said: ‘I, Peter Alexandar Greenlaw [Where the fuck did the Greenlaw come from?] Quaife, hereby resign from Kinks Productions and cease all activities … blah blah blah, etc., etc.’ Grenville was fluttering around the room like a diplomat at the signing of a peace treaty, while Annette’s father looked on dispassionately. When it came to witnessing the document Grenville dragged in Stan Whitley, who dutifully added his signature to the document. A sad piece of paper, which gave one man the right to go his own way in Denmark, witnessed by a man who couldn’t find his way to Exeter.
Pete was married shortly afterwards. I don’t think we even got an invite.’
R.D. appeared to still be hurt about the departure of Peter Quaife. He told me that Pete had been one of his best friends at school, and so the end of the relationship was like a divorce. R.D. was full of self-pity. I felt like telling him that he wasn’t the first bandleader to have a musician walk out on him. Quaife probably had good reasons of his own. In all probability, he had seen the changes in R.D. and did not want to see his old pal hoodwinked into being somebody he wasn’t. I could have said a lot of things. But I just watched R.D: sitting there despising himself. This was not part of the scenario R.D. had planned for his life. R.D. was beginning to treat me like a friend and had begun to confide in me.
And round the corner was looming the big battle with Boscobel and Kassner.
‘I always thought friends would be there forever. I had known Pete since school. We had grown up together and were always there to help each other. Now I needed all the help I could get because around the corner was looming the big battle with Boscobel and Kassner.
The Michael Simkins organization had expanded from the two rooms it had previously occupied in Davies Street, and it had taken into its employ one Colin Wadie, a solicitor who specialized in litigation. Colin had gone to Highgate Public School and had lived down Highgate West Hill by Hampstead Ponds on the Holly Lodge Estate. He later told me that he had actually known Judy, one of my girlfriends from art college. Even though Colin spoke and acted in a public-school manner, our north London connections made it possible for me to trust him more than the many other legal eagles who were surrounding me at this time. Although at first he gave the impression of being plain, stalwart, fastidious and at times pedantic to the point of being almost uninteresting, he showed genuine concern for my situation, and in return I trusted him more than anybody I had known since leaving school and entering the music business. He once took me to dinner at Musto’s Bistro in Belsize Village, then to his somewhat sad little bachelor flat nearby, where he showed me his prized possession, a collection of imperfect wine glasses. Whereas other people would have thrown them away, Colin had taken these distorted objects in and given them a place in a glass cabinet, as if to provide them with refuge. As he muttered something about the fact that they were flawed made one appreciate the art of glass-blowing, I contemplated the fact that Colin may have considered me to be like one of the oddities in his collection. The impressive part about Colin was that he was not afraid to show that he was human. He genuinely cared for people. Mick Avory observed that Colin held his chin up in such a manner when he entered the room that it made it seem as if he suspected that either he or somebody else had trodden in a dog turd. I did not consider this to be a fault. On the contrary, it gave him added character, and this, along with his meticulous note-taking, made him look as if he had walked straight out of a Dickens novel.
Colin was a bachelor, and as soon as it became apparent that he was going to figure prominently in the world of the Kinks, at least until the law-suit was over, Grenville and Robert decided to take him under their collective care in order to find him a suitable wife. Bridge parties, weekends in the country, dinners in Pimlico (where Grenville was now living with the stately-looking Sue Sutherland, whose family apparently owned half of Scotland). Sue not only spoke like the Queen, she looked like the Queen. All that was missing were the corgi dogs.
Colin knew that I was terrified about the up-coming lawsuit, and while some advisers involved brushed it off as a ‘circus’, Colin made me feel that he would do his utmost on my behalf. I had to travel to New York without the band, accompanied by Colin, to give a pre-trial deposition. It was to take place in the offices of Kassner’s attorney. Klein had secured the services of Barry Fredricks, a smart young attorney who interjected when the opposing attorney’s questions got out of line. At first the tone of the proceedings was very formal, considering that we were not in a courtroom, but then my inquisitor got very abrasive and loud, which was probably meant to intimidate me. One question led to another. Minor details of seemingly little consequence. Major pronouncements of no relevance. When I said that, in my opinion, I was being screwed by the record companies and the publisher, the man on the other side of the desk leapt to his feet and declared in no uncertain terms that he would tolerate no outbursts that would lead to any such false accusation. To which Fredricks replied, ‘Does this mean that my esteemed colleague wishes to reserve all such rights for himself?’ The atmosphere was calmed down by Colin with true British diplomacy, and the deposition continued for another two days.
Colin and I were staying at the Warwick Hotel, where Klein had a suite of offices. My solicitor was wonderful company, and eased the obvious panic that was continually inside me. ‘Enjoy life, Ray!’ he said as he ordered a bottle of Löwenbräu from the waiter behind the bar. ‘For the most part, litigation of this sort is rather a game of posturing in order to gain some tactical advantage. It’s a serious business, but try not to take it too seriously.’
We drank our Löwenbräus, and although I wanted to tell him that I considered him to be a personal friend and that, he looked like my nephew Terry I thought better of it for some reason. He was my professional adviser, after all.
During that week, Colin and I were driven out to Alan Klein’s house in Queens, where there was to be a small gathering of friends for Klein’s anniversary. The limousine pulled up outside a typically ostentatious American detached house, which was much grander than the other houses on the smart suburban street. Inside we were greeted by Klein and his pretty wife, who proudly showed me around the recently decorated house. One thing which confused me was that all the furniture and carpets had plastic coverings on them. When I inquired as to its purpose, Klein informed me that it was all newly decorated, and he did not want a crowd of people to soil it in any way. The party was small because Klein preferred it that way. In some strange way I felt privileged to be invited, partly because I had begun to like Klein, who had been described as not an obviously likeable person.
Suddenly there was a toast of congratulations to the Kleins, and after glasses clinked and we sipped our Californian champagne, a piano chord was heard and the lights suddenly dimmed. A spotlight went on as Bobby Vinton walked into the room singing ‘Blue Velvet’. Klein had been involved in Vinton’s career, and, for all I knew, may have been the publisher of the song. As Vinton sang his hit and gestured towards the anniversary couple, Klein grabbed his wife around the waist and they started to do a slow foxtrot. The assorted guests applauded as the Kleins took centre-stage. It was a moment of true Americana, teetering between sentimentality and heart-felt emotion. It was also tacky as hell. Whatever. It meant a lot to the Kleins.
Colin and I soon returned to England because more concerts were waiting to be played in the wake of the success of ‘Sunny Afternoon’.
One notable gig was in Rutland, the smallest county in England. Bill Collins, a likeable Welshman with grey wavy hair, was standing in as road manager and was driving us around. (Bill’s son Lewis had been the bass player in the Mojos.) The gig was in a marquee which had been erected specially for the concert in a village called Oakham, and a local major (retired), David Watts, was the promoter. After the initial introductions, Major Watts explained somewhat apologetically that there were no proper dressing-room facilities, and offered to let us change in his house. Even though we were playing a summer’s fair, Major Watts thought that the late-night air would be damp when we came offstage, and that it would be sensible for us to change in more comfortable quarters.
David Watts looked the part of a major, and dressed in a manner which became an ex-member of the Queen’s Own Hussars. Except that he was wearing white socks. It was unusual in those days even for rock ’n’ rollers to wear white socks. White socks and polo-necked sweaters were to anyone aware at the time an outward sign that you were either gay or at least prepared to venture over to the other side when the occasion demanded. This meant, in the language of Avory, ‘versatile’. I thought this to be most unlikely, especially as the Major’s voice was deep and masculine. Mick disagreed and shook his head.
The Kinks dashed offstage after the show and headed straight for David Watts’ cottage. In the midst of changing our sweaty undies, David Watts arrived with crateloads of Rutland beer and opened a refrigerator full of pink champagne. Mick seized the opportunity to prove a point and dropped his trousers in front of the Major, then proceeded to prance around like a tart. I asked the Major if he fancied Mick. He said, ‘Oh God, no, not that slut. I’m more interested in that little whore,’ and pointed to Dave, who was dancing with Mick. Then various members of the regional constabulary and other local dignitaries arrived to join in the impromptu festivities which, by some strange coincidence, were without women, in drag or otherwise. After downing half a bottle of Pinkers, I decided that positive action should be taken. I seized the moment and started negotiations with the Major for my brother’s hand, thinking that he would be outraged at this suggestion and have us thrown out. Was he actually interested? Or was he just playing along? Here was an opportunity of finally unloading my little brother. While Mick and Dave danced tantalizingly cheek to cheek, I tried to put together a deal whereby the Major would leave Dave his entire estate, brewery included, if the two should ever break up. Mick thought I was making a deal which included himself as part of the package, and he was disappointed to hear that it was to be Dave who would be the sole beneficiary of this potential liaison. I did not think it necessary to inform Dave of the transaction.
The party went on till the early hours, and everyone was dancing with everyone else until Bill Collins sensibly suggested that it was time to leave as there was a long drive home. By this time David Watts was in full flow, romancing Dave on a swing in the back garden, and he was in a very emotional state when we dragged Dave away. David Watts realized by now that Dave was indeed a slut, and a disloyal one at that. Avory took the distraught major to one side and explained that Dave was renowned as a heart-breaker. After the tears had been mopped up and all emotions were in order, David Watts declared his fondness for the whole group and announced that the Kinks would be welcome in his house whenever we felt like dropping by. We promised to see him again the next time we performed in the area. What had seemed a heady and potentially dangerous romance, turned out to be a fond friendship. I had made a complete mistake. Some men prefer the company of other men. It does not necessarily mean they are gay. In a way, I looked up to David Watts.
We did subsequently visit him at his country manor house, and enjoyed a lunch of sausage and mash with him before travelling to a gig in Peterborough. Visiting David became a welcome relief from the touring and the litigation surrounding us, and our friendship grew because we knew just where we stood with one another. His affection, the totally genuine emotion felt by an older man who saw his own youth embodied in a young boy, was still there, but a romantic liaison was never discussed again. For us the visits to the Major’s house also made a pleasant change from the usual roadside cafes that existed up and down the A and B roads of Britain before the countryside was carved into motorways where Trusthouse Forte, Granada and Happy Eaters sold food for the masses. A typical stopover was an establishment just outside Bristol on the A4 called Flies. Flies was so named because there were flies as big as sparrows around the food, which was left open on the counter. Mick pointed out that the proprietor resembled Charles de Gaulle: he was 6 feet 6 inches tall and had a huge nose which hung from between his eyes right down to his bottom lip. The only consolation for this unfortunate man was that his male member assumed proportions of an equally substantial nature. This information was once again supplied by Mick, who had been privileged to observe the colossus when sharing the same urinal as ‘Monsieur le President’. The group usually reached Flies by three or four in the morning, where we found other bands enjoying, or suffering from, the President’s greasy-spoon food – except the drummer from a jazz group called Mike Cotton Sound, Jimmy Garforth, who travelled around with a gas stove and cooking utensils in his suitcase. (Jimmy later found his niche in life when he opened a cafe in the West Country when his touring days were over.)
There were other assorted characters around the band who could have really only existed in the sixties. One such was the Widow O’Brian. We had first met him in the Ready Steady Go! studios at Kingsway when waiting to promote ‘All Day and All of the Night’. He appeared in our dressing room while the group was getting changed. ‘The Widow’ used to work in a boutique in Carnaby Street, and he had fallen in love with Mick at first sight when we went to have some clothes made. He used to invite Mick and his friends to the flat in Notting Hill that he shared with his mother, and he used to offer a selection of drinks that came laced with what Mick described as aphrodisiacs. The Widow always entertained lots of other friends, usually people in showbiz, with some dockers from the East End just to add a bit of rough trade. Eventually the party guests would leave, and the next morning Mick would wake up in the Widow’s boudoir alongside with another of Mick’s friends, a scrap-metal merchant from East Molesey, Colin the Scrap.
One night Mick dragged me along and, after succumbing to the aphrodisiac lager, we were ushered into the blue-movie room. I asked for a cup of coffee, because I felt drowsy, and then slumped back on to what I thought was a hairy cushion, only to discover that it was a naked man. I jumped up in shock, the boiling hot coffee spilled over his hairy chest and he ran screaming out of the room.
The Widow O’Brian’s mother rarely made an appearance, except when Colin the Scrap took a local ladies’ football team from East Molesey to have their team photograph taken by old Brian. The Widow was obviously more interested in the boyfriends and husbands that the team players had brought with them, and quickly filled their glasses with aphrodisiac lager, but the team left before the lager had had the desired effect on their unsuspecting husbands. We can only assume that they all had sex of the most erotic nature once they had returned to East Molesey.
Mick also used to frequent the Cromwellian Club in the Cromwell Road, where lots of bands and singers hung out to observe the almost endless supply of dolly girls parading in their mini skirts. Mick professed to be a bum man, but he was not averse to a bit of tit. One night he was drinking there with some of his mates and a girl singer, a delightful maiden with more than generous knockers. Somebody suggested that they should all leave the club and swim across the Serpentine for a bet. She dragged Mick and his friend Terry Collis out of the club and all three set off to swim the Serpentine naked. After reaching the other side, Mick and Terry were scaling the bank when the police arrived and put them under arrest for indecent exposure. It was only when the girl emerged from the waters like a goddess, displaying her enormous breasts, that the police relented and let them off with a caution.
On another occasion Mick found himself with the same girl, who was accompanied by an attractive male DJ. After visits to various clubs, Avory got to first base and, just as he mounted the blonde Wagnerian goddess, he felt a thrusting pain in his rear end. He screamed and turned to see that the D J had thrust four fingers up Avory’s back entrance. Avory never revealed the rest of the story, but the three of them were later seen at the Widow’s house, where the D J no doubt discovered that heaven can often be attained after a pint of lager.
Anyway, let’s get back to the music. It was the recording of ‘Dead End Street’ that really put the final nail in the coffin of Shel Talmy as the Kinks’ producer. Bill Collins was still our temporary tour manager, and an accomplished musician himself. Bill had been employed as a caretaker instead of Stan Whitley, even though Stan had regained some dignity and by now could recite every road to Exeter by heart. Madrid had made an indelible impression on him, but it was decided that he should assume the role of ‘equipment boy’ until he could navigate the highways and byways of the UK with more assurance.
John Dalton still had the appalling Dan electric bass guitar inherited from Pete Quaife. On the session it was decided that John would play the normal Fender bass while Dave played an identical pattern an octave higher on the Dan electric. Nicky Hopkins, who had played piano on ‘Sunny Afternoon’, was not available, and so I played piano. A few years earlier Mort Shuman had seen me play the piano, and even though it was obvious I could hack it chordally, I was no virtuoso when it came to the old joanna. Mort had made the point that I had the thumping rhythmic pattern to my style that somehow drove the rest of the band. When we had recorded ‘Sunny Afternoon’ Shel had asked Nicky Hopkins to watch me play the song once and then copy my technique. Nicky must have been a musical masochist as well as a gentleman, because he dutifully sat down and reproduced that pounding sound which was associated with so many of our records at that time. Avory had more than earned his keep by playing on ‘Sunny Afternoon’, and it had been decided that he would play drums on every recording from now on. In any event, the song had a good-time traditional jazz feel to it, perfect for Mick who, from his days in the boy scouts, had been a jazz fan.
The first version of ‘Dead End Street’ we put down with Shel had an organ part put on by Bill Collins. While it gave it a whirlygig fairground effect, it was not bleak enough for my taste. Shel heard the playback and wrote the song off as a hit almost dismissively. He threw his overcoat on and left through the swing doors of Pye Studio number 2. I sat in the corner of the studio and willed Shel to allow us to record the track again. At that moment the sleeve of Shel’s coat became entangled in the swing door, and the force of it pulled his left arm out of its socket. He cried out in pain as he saw his hand dangling somewhere by his left foot. Fortunately he had a friend with him who managed to lie him down on the floor and force his arm back into its socket. But it was obvious that he needed medical attention, and so he was taken to hospital to check that everything was in order.
After Shel had left I asked Grenville if I could have another crack at recording the song. We discussed this briefly with the rest of the band and it was decided to re-record the song from scratch. I had got what I wanted. The original Shel Talmy version had used a classical French horn player by the name of Albert Hall at the end fade-out section. But the horn combined with Bill Collins’ fairground organ made the song sound too joyous. This time, at my insistence, the song was recorded slower and bleaker. Stan Whitley was dragged in to help out with back-up vocals, but a horn of some description was still needed to play on the fade-out. Grenville disappeared to the Mason’s Arms pub just round the corner from Pye studios and returned with an unsuspecting trombone player who Grenville had discovered just as the pub was beginning to close. He had been doing another session nearby and although he was clearly in an inebriated state, I considered this to be a perfect condition for my purpose. The trombonist heard the fade-out once and said, ‘Let’s go for it. I can still get another pint before they shut.’ He recorded a perfect solo in one take and in ten minutes was back in the Mason’s Arms better off by a session fee gratefully paid in cash by Grenville.
The following morning I played Shel the new version of ‘Dead End Street’ which had been recorded without his knowledge. Talmy said in no uncertain terms that the recording was perfect and that there was no way he was going to allow the Kinks to re-do it. He did not know that he’d been listening to the version which had been recorded after he had left the studio. Nothing more was said about the matter, even though it was obvious that the two versions were totally different. Shel had said on a prior occasion that he was not interested in the glory, he was just interested in the money. In this instance he received both as the first pressings of ‘Dead End Street’ went out with Shel Talmy credited as producer.’
R.D. had obviously taken great pleasure in divulging this story to me. ‘Dead End Street’ definitely had a bleak sound to it, and the famous trombone fade-out provided a perfect ending.
I was just noting down what R.D. had said when I heard his voice in my ear. He had got up from his chair and moved right behind me. The level of his voice was reduced to a whisper. As he spoke I stared ahead at the flickering TV screen above the control desk. Raymond Douglas was in a freaky mood. His voice was deep and sinister.
‘Have you ever seen the past, present and future all at the same time? I mean, you’re always talking about my past. That’s OK. But there are moments in life that are so vivid they stay in your present even though at the time they seemed irrelevant. An experience I had with ‘Dead End Street’ summed up so much about life for me. It put the true meaning of time and space completely in perspective. I want you to imagine it’s happening to you now.
It is 1967. We are at the BBC television studios recording Top of the Pops. A large, gangling Lancastrian gentleman puts his head round the dressing-room door. He smiles a smile which exposes his nicotine-stained teeth, with several gaps where some have fallen out. His hair is long on top but cropped short at the ears, which makes him resemble George Orwell. He speaks like a vaudeville comedian. It is Harry Goodwin, the official BBC photographer at Top of the Pops. Harry also keeps a book on the side, laying odds on which records will make the charts. He speaks in a broad Coronation Street accent.
‘Laying six to four that you’ll be Top 10 in two weeks. Won’t go to Number 1 though, being it’s Christmas and all. Should’ve put sleigh bells on end, ‘stead o’ bloody trombone. Can I have a quick happy snap of band before you go on?’
His voice diminishes to a whisper. ‘And there are a couple of models down the corridor dying to meet you. They’ve been wetting their knickers all afternoon ’cos I told them you’d be here. They fancy you dead rotten. After we done the snaps I’ll send them in.’
In the corridor outside the dressing room we pose for Harry as he takes his happy snaps and he talks constantly while he is taking the pictures.
‘Head up, Dave … Mick, don’t look such a miserable bleeder … And new bloke at back, sorry, what’s your name, oh, Nobby, yeah right … Ray, come to the front lad.’
A flash bulb pops off and Harry shouts his catchphrase, ‘That’s it, lads, shot of a lifetime.’
The two models are waiting outside the dressing-room door. Harry may be a gambler, but he is certainly not a liar.
‘What did I tell ya, the blonde, it could be Brigitte Bardot, but the other one’s really dirty. Lay two to one each way you’ll have ’em both before dress rehearsal.’
I hand my guitar to Stan Whitley and make eye contact with Brigitte Bardot and her accomplice. Dialogue is unnecessary. The situation has been accurately sized up. I feel that familiar bulge in my tight corduroys as Brigitte Bardot and friend check their lipstick in the mirror. I know that anything I wish will be their command. All three of us understand the situation. As I stroll towards the two girls I pass a television monitor which is showing a newsreel of Donald Campbell, who that day has been making an attempt to break the world water-speed record at Lake Coniston. The garbled sound of Campbell’s voice is barely audible above the roaring of his speedboat. Then there is a moment when the whole world becomes a still photograph. The two girls waiting at the end of the corridor. Other musicians waiting to go on to perform their hit. A group of studio technicians staring at the newsreel. Donald Campbell’s voice makes a final croaking noise, almost as if he had seen his destiny appear from the lake like a giant serpent. Campbell sees himself face to face. At that moment the powerful speedboat lifts from the water and takes off into the sky, like a giant bird. Suddenly a moment of almost exquisite irony as the world is frozen, then abruptly jerked into fast-forward as Campbell’s boat turns a somersault and crashes into tiny pieces on the lake. His body shattered into atoms. I walk up to the would-be Brigitte Bardot and kiss her on her perfectly formed lips. Her tongue slips delicately into my mouth, then shoots back in order to lick her lips and keep the red gloss shiny. The thought of what might be achieved with the would-be Bardot has just been eclipsed by the extravagance of Donald Campbell’s tragic but heroic departure from this world. I walk back into my dressing room and close the door behind me. I leave the two girls outside. Nothing they can do could compare to that moment on the lake. It was just like Harry Goodwin always used to say when he got what he thought was the ultimate picture: ‘a shot of a lifetime’.
Raymond Douglas had walked back to his customary seat by the desk and was reaching out for the diary as he spoke.
‘You see what I mean, my young friend. One minute you’re there, the next you have disappeared from the planet. So fast that it’s slow and it don’t go away. A child is conceived just as an entire universe explodes and the rest is all in between.’
R.D. paused.
Hearing the expression ‘shot of a lifetime’ made me remember that my book would have to contain photographs, but I had not raised the subject with R.D. I had needed to gain his confidence before asking for access to his personal library of snapshots. Now I boldly asked the question which, needless to say, didn’t go down too well: I needed some personal photographs.
‘Photographs? Happy snaps? Don’t mean nothing. The camera is supposed to tell the truth, that’s what they say. But I tell you I would rather carry the images in my head than see a machine’s interpretation of my reality. Perhaps it is the old Navajo logic again. Pictures take away some of your soul. I’ve hated having my picture taken ever since I was a kid, so you can imagine how I felt when I entered a business where I had to have my picture taken on a regular basis. That’s why I look so goddam miserable in pictures. Did you ever hear my song, “People Take Pictures of Each Other”? Well, that lyric sums up the way I feel about the world of photographic images.
‘People take pictures of the summer
Just in case someone thought they had missed it
And to prove that it really existed.
Fathers take pictures of the mothers
And the sisters take pictures of brothers,
Just to show that they loved one another.
You can’t picture love, that you took from me
When we were young and the world was free,
Pictures of things as they used to be.
Don’t show me no more please.
‘See what I mean? I think that pictures only encourage nostalgia. I like to remember people the way they were. Pictures just show the world how much a person has aged, whereas memory renders a person ageless. No, the camera is cruel. You can’t have any access to any photographs. I would rather you saw a painting of me than a picture. The great painters knew how to see truth and put it on the canvas for better or worse. Artists put in all the experience; all the inner thoughts that the camera can only touch the surface of.
‘Snapshot memories cannot be acquired. The camera may not lie, but it is not entirely honest. It shows only a small slice, a narrow perspective. One split second of a lifetime of such small moments. It makes events which should be ambiguous turn into absolutes, and it disallows personal interpretation. Why reduce life to a series of images that shows a bias towards the objective when a person has spent his entire lifetime creating subjective, ambiguous images? For example, the only argument I have had against rock videos is that they imposed images on to the audience instead of allowing listeners to conjure up their own ideas of what the songs are about. What would have been the point of making a video out of “Waterloo Sunset” or “Celluloid Heroes”? Some things are best left to the imagination. I enjoy making my own videos because, for better or worse, I still have control over the images I want to project to the audience.
When I was a kid I saw The Jack Jackson Show on TV. The Jack Jackson Show was in a way the first video show, in that there were people miming to songs which were in the Hit Parade. There were two performers, Glen Mason and Libby Morris, who mimed to the records, and dancers like Una Stubbs and Dougie Squires who danced their own interpretations of some other songs. I remember having a crush on one lady dancer in particular called Mavis Trail. I have no idea why I fancied her; it was just the way she moved. The good thing about The Jack Jackson Show, or Cool for Cats as it was later to be known, was that the performers allowed the artist on the record to retain a certain amount of distance from the audience, thereby retaining some glamour and mystique.
‘Later there was a television show called Oh Boy, where British groups covered hits from America. The producer of the show, Jack Good, created a programme which became a Saturday-night institution with singers like Marty Wilde, Adam Faith, Joe Brown, Wee Willie Harris, Bert Weedon, Cherry Wainer and Don Storer, who played Anglicized versions of hits by Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis and Duane Eddy. Sometimes the original artists came over to perform themselves. The greatest of all was Eddie Cochran. Without a doubt Eddie Cochran was the finest rock guitarist and singer ever to hit Britain. According to folklore he sat on the drums and told his English back-up drummer how to play the drum patterns. Then he did the same to the bass player, until he got the sounds he wanted. Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly were having hits, but Eddie, along with Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps, were the first of the American bands to make a real impact on British television. But, you know, seeing him live was one thing. Seeing pictures of how he dressed and posed was another. Pictures just gave you a look at the style. To go inside his mind by judging what you see in a photograph is a totally different proposition. The music itself is the only way to do that. Because half of the reason you are attracted to the music is because it triggers something off in your imagination. It exists in your head.
‘No. No photographs. This was meant to be a book about me and the worlds inside me and the dreams I carry along with me. Photos can only diminish that.’
R.D. stayed silent and stubborn. I was flabbergasted by his very thought-out argument, and a little concerned: his outburst had taken a visible toll on him.
I didn’t have the courage to tell him that my contract with the Corporation required that photographs should be included. R.D. had given me a very strong argument: the Kinks had been one of the great unseen and unrecognized bands – so why shouldn’t R.D. retain that privacy? I told him that I agreed, and would hand in my manuscript only if the Corporation accepted that there would be no pictures. I said this knowing that I was lying. I had no authority to make such decisions for the Corporation. But the more I thought about it, the more I began to side with R.D. He was giving me access to his dream world – the very centre of his soul – and it was like the Corporation wanted some smart-assed illustrator to come in and draw R.D.’s dreams. Show the dumb unsympathetic world what his ‘Waterloo Sunset’ looked like. It would be easy to print pictures of the group and the man. But how would you photograph his soul? The Corporation was beginning to seem more and more sinister in its intentions.
I went home and looked at my contract. They didn’t just want his earthly life and how he wrote and lived; they wanted his dreams: the most precious thing a man possesses. It’s all very well for a man to share his dreams. Artists can do that. The Corporation on the other hand wanted to own them, so that they could have them interpreted, or misinterpreted, and possibly destroy them, the way they had done with mine. I decided they might have control over my dreams, but they would never get to R.D.