My Pop Life #257 : Bird On The Wire – Leonard Cohen

Bird On The Wire – Leonard Cohen

This post relates to the previous post My Pop Life #256 Mother

*

A few weeks after I’d posted that letter I received a postcard from Mum. I can’t remember what was on the cover, but I’ve still got it, somewhere, in storage. On the back of it she’d written

Dear Ralph, Listen to Bird On A Wire by Leonard Cohen love Mum

So I did. I didn’t know the song because I’ve always had a prejudice against Cohen, who knows where it started, but it was confirmed when the twerp who directed my screenplay feature film New Year’s Day in 1999 (see My Pop Life #226 Exit Music (For A Film)) announced one day that Leonard Cohen was the greatest musical artist ever. “Oh well”, I thought. “Never mind”.

I sought out the song, found it on Youtube, put on the headphones and listened. Jesus H. Christ.

Like a bird on the wire
Like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free
Like a worm on a hook
Like a knight from some old fashioned book
I have saved all my ribbons for thee
If I, if I have been unkind
I hope that you can just let it go by
If I, if I have been untrue
I hope you know it was never to you
Like a baby, stillborn
Like a beast with his horn
I have torn everyone who reached out for me
But I swear by this song
And by all that I have done wrong
I will make it all up to thee
I saw a beggar leaning on his wooden crutch
He said to me, “You must not ask for so much.”
And a pretty woman leaning in her darkened door
She cried to me, “Hey, why not ask for more?”

It was so devastatingly on the nose I couldn’t believe it. It was astoundingly eloquent and painful, honest and real. It chimed with me in this way too – that my Mum had chosen to reply to the most honest and painful letter I’d ever written to her with a song. Her Pop Life. I wrote about Mum a few times in here, but My Pop Life #147 Days is probably the most positive. I printed it out and posted it to her about four months ago. Perhaps My Pop Life #112 The Night is the least positive. I didn’t post that to her. Yin & Yang.

I find it almost as difficult writing about my relationship with my mother as it is having that relationship. But not quite. Because here I am.

I remember good motherly moments. In Selmeston I was filling a hot water bottle from the kettle and poured boiling water over my hand, dropped the hottie and rubbed the hand in a classic schoolboy mistake. I was still at primary school. All the skin came off and boy did that hurt. Raw. I remember getting a lot of love that evening from mum – no details in my memory like calendula cream but the hand was certainly bandaged and cocoa was made.

Paul, Andrew & Wendy at the Sand Pit c1967

The entry called Days (see above) concerns positive afternoons at The Sand Pit watching butterflies with Mum, Paul and Andrew, sometimes cousin Wendy was visiting from Portsmouth. An oasis of peace and good memories.

When I decided aged 11 that I no longer wished to attend Sunday School at The Vicarage she accepted it immediately and made no fuss of any kind. Grateful for that !

And more than grateful for the Sunday early evening ritual of Pick Of The Pops on Radio One with Alan Freeman. Without fail. The weekly chart countdown, from 30 to the Number One. We would play along, sing along, cheer for our favourites, sulk through the bad songs. Embedded in my pysche. A love for Pop Music.

Summer 1964, Mum Dad Ralph Paul & Andrew. I’m in the middle.

And then there’s the not-so-motherly moments. These commenced early in 1965 when Mum had a Nervous Breakdown and was admitted to hospital to recover. Her Mum, our Nan, came up from Portsmouth to the East Sussex village to help Dad look after me, seven, and Paul aged five while Andrew, just under one year old, went in the opposite direction to be cared for by Aunty Valerie, Mum’s sister in Pompey. Mum was in Hellingly Hospital for nine months. Mainly blotted out of my memory – but pieces of it remain in My Pop Life #55 Help!

I started to build the walls around my heart that year. After Mum came home it seemed as if normal had vanished forever. Dad was kicked out by Mum, they got divorced when I was eight years old. About eighteen months later (?) Mum had remarried to John Daignault. (Pronounced like the French, ie Dag-Noh his parents were French-Canadian). They fought regularly but also seemed to love each other.

But once we moved away from the village in 1970 (see My Pop Life #84 All Along The Watchtower) things changed. We were all separated for nine months in different families in different locations. When we eventually got rehoused in Hailsham (without John Daignault – Mum would say “Dag-Know-Nothing” lol) things would get seriously weird. By now Mum had been diagnosed as a manic depressive AND a paranoid schizophrenic and any other words that were in vogue at the time, and had been prescribed in-vogue and experimental drugs to match all eventualities. As discussed in Help! she was one of many women who were used as guinea pigs by the medical profession in the 60s & 70s, as depression and its variants were slowly acknowledged. They were in the top cupboard in the kitchen, behind my chair. She would ask for one or another of these tablets regularly – Melleril, Librium, Stellazine – and others, prescribed to see what they would do, all different colours, upper or downers who knew. There would be violent episodes as we grew bigger and mouthier. Second husband John Daignault appeared (again), then disappeared after a fight with Paul and I and another when Mum was pregnant with Rebecca. Her episodes got more and more random, surreal and dangerous. Often I would be ordered to walk to the phone box 500 yards away and call the doctor. I was fourteen years old, and had to grow up fast: “My mother needs some different medication/treatment/hospitalisation” I cannot remember any of the conversations but I do remember it was the thing I wanted to do the least. I dreaded those walks to the phone box. At some point in the 1970s we had a telephone installed in the house. A trim phone. But the violence lurked, the threats, the sobbing fits, the midnight crawls around the carpet, the fights with the swinging arm often containing the poker though it rarely connected. It’s all blurred now. We all adapted in different ways, inside our own heads and our own lives. Paul and I shared a bedroom being two years apart in age, so there was some solidarity there. Andrew had his own bedroom and some privacy but must have been lonely and isolated. Rebecca was just a child.

By the time I got to the sixth form I was spending more and more time away at the Ryle‘s house in Kingston where I played in a band with Conrad . I had four or five surrogate families over this period of school – the Korners also took me in more than once (My Pop Life #64 Fresh Garbage) so did the Lester family in Chiddingly (My Pop Life #245 Double Barrel) and Sheila Smurthwaite took me in twice, once in Ringmer and once in Lewes (Watchtower). I relished all these weeks away from my mother and from Hailsham, I got to spend time with what appeared to be happy people, actual families who functioned relatively normally and spoke to each other with love and affection and support. I am so grateful to all of these families for literally saving my humanity. By then I had built the castle wall around my heart and become a survivor replicant, but Rosemary Ryle, Shirley Korner, Sheila Smurthwaite, and Mrs Lester all managed to find a way behind that wall, and so did their children – all my age – Conrad Ryle, Simon Korner, Pete Smurthwaite who died two years ago sadly, and Simon Lester. We all remained close friends. They stopped me from becoming bitter. From being a criminal. As did my other friends whose houses I did not crash in, but who nevertheless were there for me : Andy Holmes, Andrew Taylor, Shirine Pezeshghi, Pam Norris, Julie Furth.

Did Paul and Andrew have these support families too? Paul often stayed with Gilda in the village in the early days, but once Hailsham happened he fell in with Vince and some other Hailsham people – Richard and others. Andrew was at primary school through most of the 1970s and I’m ashamed to report that I cannot remember whether he developed these emotional supports, these escape families like I did. In this sense, I abandoned him much like Mum and Dad did. And Rebecca. God knows how she made it through with such a great sense of humour, because she is as funny as fuck and a real tonic whatever is going on. Neither of us are really talking to Mum any more because it is still abuse that we receive on the whole. It has taken its toll.

The abuse started when I found these escapes.

When I got home I’d get it from Mum. “Spending time with those people, going to parties, leaving me here” kind of stuff. Guilt tripping me, just being nasty. She did come to see me in a school play when I was 16, and Dad came too, they sat together, they were probably proud as punch. I don’t want to paint a false picture of misery and mental illness. It isn’t that simple. None of us went into care at any point. None of us ended up in prison, or overdosed on heroin. We adapted. We survived.

Things didn’t get any better as I left home and went to work in Laughton Lodge, a hospital “For The Mentally Subnormal” (oh those 1970s). I was a good nurse. Saved some money and went away to America with Simon Korner for five months in the summer of 1976. An amazing trip (see, for example My Pop Life #235 You’ve Got A Friend), then came back and immediately went up to London for my first year at LSE. I’d successfully escaped. Paul had been kicked out by then and was working in the Tax Office in Eastbourne, living in Pevensey Bay. Andrew was at Hailsham School. Rebecca was at Primary School.

Mumtaz was my girlfriend through college and we would go down to Hailsham to see everyone, sometimes at Christmas. There were always dogs and cats around. I’m not a huge fan of Christmas.

Happy Days : Christmas with Mumtaz, Becky, Andrew with Pusspuss, Me, Paul & Mum with Snoopy.

One Easter we went down and Mum was having a serious breakdown, waking us up in the middle of the night crying, cursing us both for “going to parties and having a good time” and then crawling around on the floor gasping for breath and cursing the doctors. It was an extraordinarily horrible weekend and I don’t think Mumtaz went down again after that. Mum was racist anyway. ( I wrote it as my first play in 1986 and called it Drive Away The Darkness, kind of my version of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Got a reading at The National Theatre and that was that.)

But Paul and I made the error once we’d both returned from our Mexico adventure (see My Pop Life #31 Enough Is Enough) and went down for Christmas. Mum had bought a VCR which will probably date it, and bought a video for us to watch – The Belstone Fox. She then decided that we would be watching it at 10pm on Christmas Day. This clashed with King Of Comedy on C4 (will also help date it if I could be bothered to look it up – the 80s anyway {1984}) which all of us wanted to watch. No. We tried to explain that the VCR meant we could watch The Belstone Fox any time we wanted to, kind of the whole point, but No. We were watching it at 10pm Christmas Day. Voices were raised, drinks were knocked back, things may have been thrown. Paul and I ended up down the pub in the High Street nursing our wounds and Mum went across the green to a neighbour. We never went down on Christmas Day again, and started to hold “Christmas” in mid-December then all do our own thing on the 25th December. What a relief.

Was this the infamous Belstone Fox Christmas? Paul & Mum

The dysfunction continued. I left Mumtaz and started to date Rita Wolf. Mum regularly delivered nasty phone calls mixed with calls where she would talk at me in a stream of consciousness rant for an hour – barely room for an MmnHm then she’d hang up and I’d say to the now dead phone “How are you Ralph?” I suppose it depended on what drugs she was taking, or not. Whenever the four of us would get together (once Becky was old enough to travel independently) – I’m remembering parties in Archway Road N6 where we would try to make sense of it together in a tight group and no one else could get a word in, what did they know of Heather our mother? It became an open therapy session where we would get the latest from Becky and talk about a phone conversation or the new third husband Alan. Alan is a decent man – he treated Becky as his daughter, and still does to this day. Bless him. Andrew went to college and Mum & Becky moved to Polegate into Alan’s house and the story continued. Sometimes it felt good around this period – we all hooked up for birthdays and Alan’s son Mark would be there, we’d talk about hip hop which we were all fans of and by now I was with Jenny and she was witnessing all the nonsense first hand.

Debbie, Mark, Andrew, Becky and 1st husband Peter, Paul and Colin. Mark’s birthday December 1991

Was Mum a victim or a Perp? Had her life conspired in such a way as to give her nervous breakdowns? I always felt dutiful towards Mum even though I didn’t like going home. Always felt sorry for her and used to blame my dad as I said in the letter. But slowly I began to separate the mental illness from the person. She could be remarkably unkind. But took me years to do this separation in my mind because it was excruciatingly difficult, while slowly stitching my relationship with my father back together thanks to his patience & kindness and my own understanding that I liked having a relationship with him, and I didn’t need to stay angry. The middle years I suppose. I was in therapy for a while, I’ve been on anti-depressants for a while, I diagnosed myself as Bipolar, Paul did the same, Andrew reckoned he was Borderline Personality Disorder – confirmed by professionals – the words change but the feelings are what they are. Dysfunctional family alert. Unpredictable behaviour. Individual may need drugs, therapy, love, support and to think before speaking.

Mum and Alan, Mark just offscreen

Without nailing down the dates, Mum divorced Alan just after the time when Jenny and I bought a house in Brighton. She left the Polegate house and found a small cottage in Willingdon, just outside Eastbourne. She lived there with her two dogs – Trish & Jason – and used to walk to the shops and up to the beautiful South Downs once a day and now and again take a bus into town. Becky was in Strood by now with John Coleman 2nd husband and father to Mollie, Ellie and William. Andrew was with Katie in Bournemouth and they had a son – Alexander. I remember these as happy times. I used to drive over from Brighton to Willingdon – a lovely drive along the A27 across the Ouse and Cuckmere valleys – or along the coast through Seaford to Jevington and turn left. The dogs would bark at me, then approach gingerly, then show affection eventually. A bit like Mum. Suspicious and untrustworthy but happy to see me. We would drink tea and smoke cigarettes and listen to music. Sit in the garden. Jenny had had one insult too many though and never accompanied me on these trips. No need. One day Mum had read a newspaper piece on me talking about Withnail & I – my youth in Lewes smoking weed with the hippies and bikerboys & my mates. She was furious (on the phone to Jenny) telling her I’d let the image of Lewes down with my drug-taking stories. I won’t indulge in the grand ironies present here but Jenny simply said she didn’t agree and it was the truth and Heather hung up on her. Jenny called her straight back and told her never to do that again. Mum apologised, they’ve hardly spoken since – Becky’s birthday maybe.

The South Downs from Wilmington nr the A27.

These were my years as number one son. Paul was abroad and Andrew was in Bournemouth. Perhaps they were getting the abuse then – their turn. Probably though it was Rebecca. We were never all in favour at the same time. And I would go mainly for guilt reasons because she was my mum. What did I get back? Some affection, some love maybe, more interest in my cats than in my wife. It is extraordinary that when I try to remember the bad times they hover just out of reach and I feel like I am betraying my own mother even writing this down. I’m not. I’m being true to myself.

There was a narrow staircase going up to the bathroom and two tiny bedrooms – it was like half a cottage really. The rural poor. As her legs and lungs started to get weaker, the stairs became an issue. I know that she would sit down and go up backwards on her bum. The knees couldn’t manage. The walks ‘up the Downs’ had finished. Someone organised a health worker to visit and Mum would be using a commode and sleeping downstairs. Watching TV eating chocolates pottering around. Eventually – and this took forever – she accepted a move to a bungalow – no stairs, accessible bathroom – on an estate in Hailsham. Town Farm where we’d lived in the 1970s. The painted ponies go up and down.

Becky finished her marriage to John and moved down to Hailsham around this time too. Mum became noticeably grumpier too. Perhaps the medications changed. It was never as relaxing or pleasant visiting her in the bungalow. But what am I actually saying? I feel like I can resurrect some kind of timeline without really tapping into the truth here. So frustrating, so opaque and confused.

In general it has been impossible to share my true feelings because – well, they are unacceptable in polite society. For example, I remember I was writing a screenplay for producer Robert Jones in 2002 and we had a meeting in his Soho office chatting away when I said something like “actually I don’t like my mum” and he was so shocked I don’t think he looked at me the same way again. (we did a TV show in 2014 called Babylon which I acted in later on though.) Society and most people rightly place their mothers at the very top of the tree of respect. She bore you in her womb. She birthed you, breast-fed you, taught you to speak and walk and fed and watered you. I get it. And she did all that. But then something happened.

I think Mum is a vulnerable bully. A phrase I created in my 30s. Accurate. Weakness and power. She is a powerful woman, no question about it, she has powers too. But always presented in this wobbly weak-voiced way until the switch. Then vicious, merciless, darkness.

Becky’s 40th. Andrew taking a picture while I do the same. Mum not looking well.

Although I whinge & whine about the treatment I got, Becky my sister had it far worse than any of the brothers. She is the closest to her mum, and moved down to Sussex from Kent to be closer to her and got years of aggro & abuse as thanks which became physical eventually. Becky stopped talking to Mum in 2017 and we protected her by filling in, phoning and visiting. Then one day Bex had an argument with her man and walked out of the house into her car and drove round to Mum’s. She still doesn’t know to this day why she did it but as she drew up in the nearest parking space there was smoke pouring out of an open window and she ran into the back door where Mum was sitting. The kitchen was on fire. She somehow dragged Mum outside into the garden under protest and called her friend Jan and the Fire Brigade who were both on the scene within minutes. A neighbour took the dog and Mum was taken to hospital, and eventually into sheltered accommodation since it was felt she could no longer look after herself. What are the chances of that? We all have powers, unacknowledged, unused. Three months later she was back in the bungalow, until it became clear after another fall that she wasn’t physically strong enough to walk herself around the place, even with a zimmer frame. Now she is permanently in a nursing home in Polegate and has lost her independence at the age of 85.

It isn’t going to all fit into one blog and neither should it. I cannot recall the early 2000s when we were in Brighton & LA, and Mum would write stink letters to me, and sometimes I’d reply. It was always feast or famine, you’re not good enough as a son, you should be ashamed of yourself travelling around the world while I live here. She was always sick to the back teeth of someone or other, a doctor, a neighbour, a husband, a daughter. Eventually in 2009 I wrote the letter to Mum which appears in My Pop Life #255 Mother – and I sent or emailed copies to Paul, Andrew and Becky too. They all supported me. I was grateful. Then I got the postcard reply.

I was gobsmacked to be honest. There is something indestructible about my Mum. There was some renewed respect. But it was also a cowardly response, not to write anything meaningful, apologetic or honest. Just “listen to Bird On The Wire“. No, not good enough. And we wouldn’t become close again because I didn’t really trust her anymore. That had started to disappear when I was eight years old I think, but confirmed in those teenage years in Hailsham when twice a year or more Mum would pack a small bag – I would help her often – and call a taxi to go to Amberstone Hospital for a break – a rest. Another mental breakdown. An episode. Call it whatever you like. And the doctors would approve and the social workers would allow me to look after the family and pay the coalman/milkman and other bills and I wouldn’t even miss a day of school. We all had keys. That was when I stopped trusting my Mum. And she’s not stupid by any means, she has some truly sagacious qualities and sees through people before they’ve had a chance to settle. Finds their weakness or vulnerability. And then pokes them with her insight – it is never kind, always cruel. She did it with Amanda Ooms our friend from Sweden who came with me one day to see her. In a way Mum is an empath but not a particularly kind one. She hurts she feels pain, and she wants everyone else to as well. She always feels sorry for old people struggling, for the homeless or the hungry or the gypsies. So I’m amazed at how she falls back on racism time and time again though because three of my four great love affairs have been with people who suffer from racism because of their skin colour and culture. And I don’t forgive that in particular. The reason I stopped speaking to Mum two years ago was when she said – in a phone call from New York to East Sussex, after Jenny’s sister Dee had died at the age of 59 after an operation and we were struggling with the grief –

“You love Jenny and all those black people more than me don’t you?”

The cruelty and the unkindness felt instinctive and also calculated. The mental illness feels like a disability. They’re entangled like a load of useless wire behind the television, but when the picture goes you have to sit down and untangle it all. I have spent my entire adult life untangling those wires. And I decided after the last attempt to to insult me and push me away that I would stay insulted and stay away. Fuck the wires. We haven’t spoken a word since.

What is also tragic though is that she understands all of this, she has both intellectual and emotional intelligence – more than most in fact. And her choice of song reveals that.

“I have torn everyone who reached out to me”

And thus she remains unforgiven.

She has often talked about wanting to live in a cave, not wash, not see anyone except her dog and the birds and insects. I’m not going to help her with that.

She is like a shadow over all of our lives. And an absence too.

*

I saw Leonard Cohen in Brighton in 2013 when he was 79 years old. He did three encores, and 28 songs in all, putting the kids to shame. Bird On A Wire, perhaps his most revered and famous song was number three on the setlist. It pricked me like a sea urchin, shivered my timbers and brought water to my eyes. Also present : Dance Me To The End Of Time, Famous Blue Raincoat, Hallelujah & Chelsea Hotel #2. He did not sing Joni Mitchell’s A Case Of You, supposedly about their affair in the early 1960s, two Canadians in Greenwich Village singing songs and writing poetry to use as lyrics. He was elegant and wise, generous and inspiring. He died in 2016 three years later.

Bird On The Wire is a stunning piece of songwriting. I have tried in my way to be free. Yes we can all relate to that. I have saved all my ribbons for thee. Well no you haven’t. And is that appropriate? I’m your son, not your lover. Quite oppressive if you dig a little deeper, quite possessive. Quite fucking weird. If I have been unkind, I hope you can just let it go by. Well yes I can. I have. I’ve let it all go by. Thank God. If I have ever been untrue I hope you know it was never to you. Simply not true. Abandoned too many times for that to be even half true. Also slightly oppressively incestuous. I have torn everyone who reached out to me. No doubt. No doubt. It’s the most honest line in the song. It’s an appeal for forgiveness – is it? It certainly isn’t an apology. I will make it all up to thee. Way too late for that. In 2009 I was 52. Childhood gone. Romantic. Delusional. And didn’t.

I saw a beggar leaning on his wooden crutch
He said to me, “You must not ask for so much.”
And a pretty woman leaning in her darkened door
She cried to me, “Hey, why not ask for more?”

Amazing lines. The crucible of life’s contradictions. The balance. Do I feel good about myself? Didn’t I do enough? What’s it all about Ralphie ?

I’m out of gas on this topic. Time to publish and be damned. I still don’t like my mum. Forgive me.

Mum always did have good musical taste. So, from Cohen’s Anthem :

Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack in everything

That’s how the light gets in

*

changed lyrics in this live version from 1979 :

My Pop Life #254 : California – Joni Mitchell

California – Joni Mitchell

Sitting in a park in Paris, France
Reading the news and it sure looks bad
They won’t give peace a chance
It was just a dream some of us had

*

Joni always starts her songs with an arresting first few lines that suck you right into her world and her story. This song is about her travels in Europe, the old world, and her wish to return to California. Like a genius she quotes John Lennon and acknowledges the end of the sixties in two simple phrases quite brilliantly.

*

This blog will appear in my forthcoming book ‘Camberwell Carrot Juice’. Check back for details!

RB

My Pop Life #245 : Double Barrel – Dave & Ansel Collins

Double Barrel – Dave & Ansel Collins

I am the magnificent  W   O   O   O

*

This blog is stretching my memory to breaking point.  A few weeks ago (September 2020) I was trying to recall one of the surrogate family experiences I had as a teenager, sheltering at a friend’s house while mum had a rest, or became homeless, or in this particular case, had a termination.  I’d spent a few weeks – maybe just a week I can’t remember – with Simon Lester’s family in Chiddingly in deepest Sussex in this instance and had vivid memories of learning to drive a battered car in the field behind the house.

I contacted Simon to see how much he remembered, in particular about when it occurred.  I sent him a blurry Polaroid of him at school in the hope that it would jog his memory.

Simon Lester at Lewes Priory with Jenny Yewlett – but when?

I also sent the picture to Simon Korner because he has specialised in his writing in remembering this intense period of our schooldays.  Controversy ensued.  I thought it was around 1973, last year of Middle School because of the fence.  (Wrong – Middle School was 3rd & 4th years) Simon K. thought that the fence was where we smoked in Upper School – 5th, 6th forms.  And Jenny T. didn’t arrive at the school until the 5th year apparently.  So why were we smoking in Middle school?  It went on.  Simon Lester and I have another mutual friend, John Hawkins who was imaginatively nicknamed Billy at school and who was a regular at the Goldstone Ground on Saturdays along with Sherlock, Crod, Simon Lester and I.  It was a football ground in Hove where Brighton & Hove Albion played.   Last time I saw John was at an away game at Bolton Wanderers when we had some pints and watched legend Bobby Zamora’s first game for us for 12 years.  It was 2-2 final score.   John lives up that way, in Lancashire, and I was working in Liverpool.  Turns out that John has a better memory than all of us and confirmed that it was indeed the Middle School fence.  See the picture below of me on the same day

This doesn’t show the tunnel in the background that ran from Middle School to Upper School past the Chapel.  But you can just see Mountfield Road behind that.  All very fascinating I’m sure if you’re not from Lewes Priory in the 1970s.  So the photo appeared to be from 1973 – I was right about the date.  Maybe the School Festival.  But but but.  I asked my sister Rebecca what she could tell me about this mysterious sanctuary moment of mine – and why did I do that? She would have been one year old at the time.  But amazingly enough, she remembers a conversation that she’d had with Mum (whom I wasn’t talking to this summer otherwise I might have asked her) when Mum said that yes, a year before Becky was born she’d had a termination.  We did the sums.  Becky was born in April 1972 so my moment driving around the field with Simon Lester was perhaps spring 1971.  That did seem very early.  I’d be thirteen years old.

Meanwhile Simon Lester was asking his sisters Katie and Gill if they could remember anything, and blow me down, Katie remembers their mum picking me up from Hailsham and finding the house really hard to find.  We had just been rehoused on this new-build council estate on the freshly-dug outskirts of Hailsham after spending nine months apart, discussed in various posts such as My Pop Life #84 All Along The Watchtower.  I was 13 years old, Paul was eleven, Andrew six.  We’d all been in different locations for most of 1970, and moved into Salternes Drive, later called Town Farm Estate, and known as Sin City to all the locals in the early weeks of 1971.  I cannot be more precise than that because I suspect time fogs the memory, and trauma sometimes wipes it completely.  At some point in the spring of 1971 I’d taken a record into my Music class – discussed in My Pop Life #141 Jig-A-Jig which takes place largely in the pre-fab classroom just behind that fence.

And at some other indiscernible point that spring, Simon Lester’s mum had somehow found her way to our new house and picked me up with my schoolbag and some spare clothes and taken me back to Chiddingly.

532 Salternes Drive, Hailsham in 1973

Simon Lester’s sister Katie reckoned it was 1971, before their father left.  Simon’s version of this detail would mean that he would drive to work in Hove every morning where he was a dentist, and drop Simon and I off in Lewes High Street to walk to school.  Before the bypass was built.  Sounds about right.  Simon’s mother was very kind to me – that I do remember very clearly.  She asked me what I wanted to eat one day and I said “a peanut butter sandwich please” because that was my favourite, and she then asked me how I would like the peanut butter on the bread, separated alongside the butter or all mushed together, an extraordinary detail which has stuck with me to this day.  How shall I make your sandwich.  I don’t think anyone had asked me that before or indeed since.  Very special lady.  When she showed me “my” bedroom and I thanked her she then said that if she found any of my clothes on the floor while I was at school, she would wash them, so if I didn’t want something washed not to leave it on the floor.  It was the only rule I can remember, also because I hadn’t come across it before !!  A kind way of encouraging tidyness.

The Lester’s house in Chiddingly

I had my own bedroom which was amazing because I shared with Paul at home.  Incidentally I do not remember where Paul or Andrew went during this period, it is one of the shadier corners of our family history, by which I mean “not remembered” rather than shameful.  Abortion shouldn’t be shameful at all, it is part of the human story.  But it was whispered about at the time as I recall, and discussed as termination, the word I’ve used in this blog.  This episode as a teenager was the closest I’ve ever been to an abortion, as far as I know, none of my girlfriends or friends ever talked to me about it, if indeed any of them experienced it.  I’d imagine some of them did.   But there’s no moral high ground in bringing unwanted children onto this planet.  I certainly knew the reason why I was at Simon Lester’s house at the time, although he didn’t.  It all felt reasonably normal to be honest.  I vaguely remember watching TV with the family, 1971 style, it would have been It’s A Knockout!, The Golden Shot, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Blue Peter and Banana Splits.  Grandstand on Saturday.  The Big Match on Sunday.  Simon and I would have kicked a ball around his garden too because we both played football for the school team – Simon had a better touch than me, a more cultured right foot I should say, more accurate, capable of stroking the ball wherever he wanted it to go.  Football is where we’d bonded, and it was in 1971 that I went to my first Brighton & Hove Albion game, but I cannot recall the opposition I’m afraid.  Maybe Bury?  I remember the Brighton team which included brothers John & Kit Napier, John Templeman, Eddie Spearrit, Alan Duffy, Norman Gall, Peter O’Sullivan, Willie Irvine, Nobby Lawton, because after that first visit I was hooked.  We used to go after we’d played on a Saturday morning, you could just pay on the turnstile and then stand behind the goal in the North Stand Shoreham Road, singing songs, strolling down the Shoreham Roooooaad… to see Pat Saward’s Aces, bouncing up and down on the stone terraces, waves of bodies plunging forward during moments of excitement then heaving back to more or less your original spot as the moment passed.  Extraordinarily exciting.  Cameraderie.  Togetherness.  Family.  Playing at home.  I was an instant convert to Saturday afternoon football, and am still addicted now some fifty years later.  The anticipation, the scarf tied around your wrist, in later years the replica shirt, the pub, the singing, the laughing, the fear of opposition fans, the hatred of the referee, the wit, the profound primal eruption of triumph when the ball hits the back of the net, the staggering gutless mortification as we concede.  Football has taught me many things – loyalty, defeat, acumen, singing pour encourager les autres, grace in victory.  Thirteen was a good age to start finding some of that.

We played Reading and Aston Villa on successive days at home over Easter – extraordinary really – in front of sell-out crowds of 35,000 – in the Third Division !  Our PE teacher Tony Alexander (whom we all loved) was a Villa fan, and managed the school football team. We ragged each other but happily both teams went up that season and my lifelong love of Brighton & Hove Albion was sealed: win, lose or draw, sunshine or rain, in sickness and in health, til death us do part. The other lads at football were essentially the ones from the school team – Conrad Ryle (Crod), Andy Holmes (Sherlock), Martin Cooper (Coops), plus John Hawkins (Billy) and Simon Lester who never had a nickname plus me snap.  We’d lose each other in the mayhem of the North Stand and rediscover each other amid the bouncing bodies.

Knock Knock  –  Who’s there?

Ivor

Ivor Who?

I’ve a knock kneed chicken and a bow-legged hen

We ain’t lost a fight since we don’t know when

We don’t give a widdle and we don’t give a wank

WE ARE THE BRIGHTON 

NORTH STAND

Lalalalalalalalala Lalalalalalala lalalalalalalaaaa

WE ARE THE BRIGHTON

NORTH STAND

I can’t pin down the date exactly and photos from this era seem non-existent but was it around this time when I flirted with the skinhead look?  It was certainly fashionable by then thanks to the rude boy culture imported from Jamaica – the ska beat, pork-pie hats, sta-prest trousers, button-down collars, braces and boots.  Short hair obviously, but not shaved.  More Suedehead to be honest, the name of a book which was passed round too.   Kind of sex and violence and fashion YA stuff.  I saved up for my first Ben Sherman shirt, precious status symbol of the early 70s.  White socks were cheaper.  Braces too.  Didn’t own a Fred Perry til I was in my 20s.  It was about being smart rather than scruffy and grew out of mod culture, Tamla Motown, bluebeat.  A year or so later I was wearing make-up and blouses as glam rock took over, proving that for me it was another uniform, I was a pop tart, a dedicated follower of whatever took my fancy that year.

A truly awful song called Johnny Reggae pins the era down to 1971 – that was a Jonathon King cash-in turd, but at the other end of the scale was the real deal – Jamaican ska and reggae.  Reggae was a new word (Do The Reggay by The Maytals was released in 1968).  The music had slowed down from the choppy ska beat by the late sixties when rocksteady ruled the Jamaican charts and made an impression on the UK.  Desmond Dekker had charted in 1967 with 007 (Shanty Town) then made number one with Israelites (See My Pop Life #102) in 1969 when the Kingston sounds really tickled the UK charts with some classic stuff : The Liquidator, Long Shot Kick De Bucket, Return of Django and yes Skinhead Moonstomp the latter from a local act Symarip (Pyramids backwards!! almost!!!).  And being the UK, it was the fashion as much as the sounds – totally against the hippie look as the 1960s spun to their disillusioned finish with Altamont, Vietnam and the student uprisings forming a TV backdrop to heroin, cynicism about selling out and the break-up of The Beatles.  1970 brought us Young Gifted & Black (written by Nina Simone) by Bob & Marcia who would also hit with Pied Piper and The Maytals released Pressure Drop. Then in 1971 the Year of Our Lord brought us, and me, the mighty Double Barrel by Dave & Ansel Collins.

I. Am the magnificent.  I’m beg for the sheck of a so bose, most turmeric, story, sound of soul!

Thus begins the mightiest number one hit of 1971….

I am W O O O.  And I’m certain here again. OW!

Good god.  Too much I like it!  Huh? 

I still have no idea what the lyrics are.  The mystery of it is powerful to be honest, like a mantra chanted for secret power.  Where did I hear it?  On the radio of course, it reached number one in March 1971 and Radio One played it regularly.  It was a revelation.  It still sounds immense.  Dave did the vocals, with Ansel (spelled Ansil on the single) on the keyboards. After one LP and another hit single called Monkey Spanner (the heavy heavy monster sound!) they split up.

Oh yes, and the car in the field.  The highlight of this era perhaps (although the football and the reggae are gonna run it close).  There it was in the field behind the house in Chiddingly – a battered old motor car.  Simon, perhaps 14 by now (I was young for my school year) had the key, and he would drive round in circles mainly – big circles I mean – around the field.  Then he taught me how to do it.  How to turn the key, depress the clutch, rev the engine, release the handbrake and whoooosh power speed thrills.  We devised a kind of Escape From Alcatraz scene which involved us running to the car which had two open doors then jumpin in and each having two jobs, Simon turned the key and did the clutch, I released the handbrake and maybe pulled the choke out, so we could achieve lift-off in seconds flat.

The house is bang centre behind the white tree, the field is the great swoop of green to the right

I didn’t stay at the Lester’s house for very long but that became a vivid memory burned through me.  A few years later Simon left school and started work, and on weekends would go to the Arlington Speedway track near Hailsham and drive in Stock Car Races with his souped up and painted old banger.  Not sure if it was the same car.  Stock Car racing is like racing around a dirt track 30 laps (?) with no rules. Simon would skid and drive his Stock Car around the track, bashing into the other drivers, backending them, sideswiping them, skidding through the dirt and exhaust smoke in his reinforced old banger.  I went a couple of times to watch, and it was of course completely thrilling.  Cars deliberately driving into each other to gain an advantage in a race.  Yup.  I should stress this is completely separate from NASCAR or any American style car racing.  This was more down and dirty for one.  More local.  There’s some footage of this fabulous phenomenon here:

We lost touch after I moved to London, but we would see each other now and again at Brighton games, and we have kept the lines of communication open.  I was back in England in late summer 2019 to fix up the house, and went to see the Albion twice, meeting friends in The Swan in Falmer – Crod, Sherlock and Simon Lester along with my sister and her boyfriend Lee another huge Albion fan.  Now old geezers reminiscing about the days gone by, survivors of cancer and other scares, still friends drinking Harvey’s finest on the way to the game.

Andy Holmes, Simon Lester, Ralph Brown, Conrad Ryle 2019 The Swan

I wasn’t very reflexive at 13 – I didn’t think about what kind of person Simon Lester was for example, he was just there, a companion, easy-going, enjoyed a chuckle.  In retrospect now I see him as shy, gentle, bright and very kind with none of the edge that I imagine I had.  But back in those days I was still growing, as was he.   I’m hugely grateful for his help in piecing this memory together.  

So from the age of ten to 18 I had at least six surrogate Parenting experiences that I can recall.   Philip and Mya in Brighton aged 10, Sheila Smurthwaite in Ringmer aged 11, then again in Lewes aged 13, Mrs Lester in Chiddingly aged 13, Mrs Korner in Lewes aged 14/15, Mrs Ryle in Kingston ages 16/17/18.   Then I was grown up and found my own way, went back many times to the Ryles and the Korners over the years.   All have now sadly passed.  I’m forever grateful to all of these generous beautiful big-hearted people for if not for thee and thine, I would certainly have spent some years in foster care or worse.  They made my physical and psychic survival possible.  The rest was up to me. 

the original single:

The Top of The Pops appearance with Dave extemporising because he is the magnificent

My Pop Life #201 : The Banner Man – Blue Mink

The Banner Man – Blue Mink

…and the Banner Man held the banner high he was ten feet tall and he touched the sky and I wish that I could be a banner man…

 This was, I can finally reveal, the first single I ever bought with my own money.  I suspect this money was from doing a paper round, or helping the farmer baling straw, or selling eels to Mr Catchlove, or maybe – just maybe – my mum gave me some pocket money and I saved it up.  The Regal Zonophone label, red and silver 45rpm single in a square piece of paper with a circle in the centre so you could see the label.

This would then be placed in the singles rack at home alongside the record player.  It would join my mum’s singles – Simon Dupree & The Big Sound, Joe South, The Casuals, Guy Darrell (see My Pop Life #181) until I bought a record player of my own for the bedroom, but even then I wonder if I didn’t leave it downstairs in the pop section.  The bedroom singles were religious artefacts for the shrine of Jimi Hendrix – 45rpm singles on Track records, Gypsy Eyes, Long Hot Summer Night, Burning of The Midnight Lamp, Voodoo Chile (Slight Return).  What was Blue Mink doing with these inspirational songs?  It was like a throwback to my childhood  and I still can’t really explain it.  Taste changes fast when you’re 14.

It was May 1971 when the single first charted.  It reached Number 3 on the 20th June, two days after my 14th birthday.  This therefore becomes a fairly accurate indication of how cool I was as a teenager.  No older brother or sister to look up to, take taste from.  A mum who had her own particular taste, from Dionne Warwick singing a cover of The Rascals (My Pop Life #17) to The Kinks (My Pop Life #147).        I liked all of the above, and when I look at the charts of 1971 I think that mum must’ve bought Your Song by Elton John and Double Barrel by Dave & Ansel Collins for there they were in the singles rack.  Gosh the Proustian rush is too much, and  I’m in too deep now to walk back – or as Macbeth would say :

“I am in blood stepped in so far that should I wade no more, Returning were as tedious as go o’er”

which means that, since 1971 is my year of sentience, I have to dive right in and indulge in that vivid musical touchstone of my life.  So with no further apology,  Here Is the Top 30 on my 14th birthday :

1.    Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep          –     Middle Of The Road
2.    Knock Three Times                         –     Dawn
3.    I Did What I Did For Maria           –      Tony Christie
4.    Banner Man                                     –      Blue Mink
5.    I’m Gonna Run Away From You   –     Tami Lynn
6.    Lady Rose                                          –     Mungo Jerry
7.    He’s Gonna Step On You Again     –     John Kongos
8.    Heaven Must Have Sent You         –     The Elgins
9.    I Am…I Said                                       –     Neil Diamond
10.    Indiana Wants Me                           –     R. Dean Taylor
11.    My Brother Jake                               –     Free
12.    Rags To Riches                                  –     Elvis Presley
13.    Oh You Pretty Thing                        –     Peter Noone
14.    Malt & Barley Blues                         –     McGuinness Flint
15.    I Think Of You                                   –     Perry Como
16.    Brown Sugar                                     –     The Rolling Stones
17.    Just My Imagination                        –     The Temptations
18.    Don’t Let It Die                                  –     Hurricane Smith
19.    Co-Co                                                   –     The Sweet
20.    Mozart Symphony Number 40       –     Waldo De Los Rios
21.    Jig-A-Jig                                               –      East Of Eden
22.    I Don’t Blame You At All                  –      Smokey Robinson & The Miracles
23.    Lazy Bones                                         –      Jonathan King
24.    Hey Willy                                            –      The Hollies
25.    Rain                                                      –      Bruce Ruffin
26.    Joy To The World                               –      Three Dog Night
27.    Pied Piper                                            –      Bob & Marcia
28.    Un Banc, Un Arbre, Un Rue             –      Severine
29.    It’s A Sin To Tell A Lie                       –      Gerry Monroe
30.    Double Barrel                                     –      Dave & Ansel Collins

It was, even to my clearly biased ears, a fairly fecund picture : plenty of irritating bubblegum at the top end, a decent smattering of pop reggae (Greyhound‘s Black & White was about to rise into the Top 30), some genuine originals in John Kongos, Hurricane Smith and East of Eden (written about in My Pop Life #141), some great Motown including the immaculate Smokey Robinson (My Pop Life #3), some lovely bluesy stuff and a few songs for grandma.  For me the whole of 1971 imprinted itself on my ears, for it was when I learned what I liked, and what I didn’t like, and maybe even what the difference was and why.   Now, aged 60 as I write, I can find merit in all of these songs, yes, even the number one, which grated on us all at the time with its defiance of any kind of grooviness.   I bought Banner Man and brought it home, and now I’m wondering if I bought Jig-A-Jig at the same time, because it was a big song in our house and there it is travelling down the charts from a high point of number 7.

Blue Mink in 1971

Banner Man is terribly catchy, a genuine earworm.  Simple lyrically, a song about a marching band…

So we waved our hands as we marched along
And the people smiled as we sang our song
And the world was saved as they listened to the band

who march up to the top of the hill,

So we reached the square, on the top of the hill
And the music stopped and we stood quite still
And a few were saved and the people said
Amen

I also note that the the Banner Man had “an Allelujah in his eye” and that the chorus goes full gospel :

Glory, glory, glory
Listen to the band
Sing the same old story
Ain’t it something grand?
To be good as you can
Like a Banner-Man

It’s a brass band song, a kind of 2-step oompah rhythm, and the trombone does that cheesy slide down (glissando!) on “grand” and “can” .   I spell it all out like this because it is something of a mystery to me even now – what was I listening to?  What did I hear?  It is like a child’s nursery rhyme (rather like a fair section of that top 30), but I was 14.   There is something endearing in the fact that both Blue Mink and East of Eden (Jig-A-Jig) were crossing musical genres and spinning pop gold out of old forms, but I knew nothing of this at the time, I just liked the tunes I think.  Maybe something primal in that brass band sound though that gets under the skin – the New Orleans funeral march, the Second Line, the celebration of life after the body is interred.  The sound of something ancient, churchy but celebratory, harking back to “I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside” a popular song from 1907 :

I do like to stroll
Upon the Prom, Prom, Prom,
Where the brass bands play
Tiddly-om-pom-pom!

and “76 Trombones” from 1957 which echoed through my childhood.   The Beatles of course made use of the brass during their psychedelic period, from Yellow Submarine through Sgt Pepper to Martha My Dear on The White Album.  Other brass band songs that made hit records include Peter Skellern‘s sublime You’re A Lady from 1973 and Mike Nesmith’s Listen To The Band for The Monkees from 1969.  And really that’s it, aside from The Brighouse & Rastrick Brass Band‘s single The Floral Dance in 1977.  The number of pop brass band songs can be counted on one hand pretty much.

Madeline Bell & Roger Cook

I remembered Blue Mink from their first single in 1969 “Melting Pot” with its call for racial harmony mixed up in racist language :

Take a pinch of White man
Wrap it up in Black skin
Add a touch of blue blood
And a little bitty-bit of Red Indian boy

Curly Latin Kinkies,  mixed with yellow Chinkees
If you lump it all together
Well, you’ve got a recipe for a get-along scene
Oh what a beautiful dream
If it could only come true you know, you know
What we need is a great big melting pot
Big enough to take the world and all it’s got
Keep it stirring for a hundred years or more
And turn out coffee-coloured people by the score

This song with Madeline Bell, a black American and Roger Cook, a white Englishman taking alternate verses reached number one and was part of a brief English soul boom in the late sixties which included mixed-race groups such as The Equals, The Foundations, Geno Washington’s RamJam Band and Hot Chocolate.

The Equals

Geno Washington

Hot Chocolate

The Foundations

clockwise :  The Equals, The Foundations, Hot Chocolate, Geno Washington

But Blue Mink were different.  Formed by a group of session musicians, they were professional players working for a day-rate on other people’s music, like the famous Wrecking Crew out of Los Angeles who played on everything from Frank Sinatra to The Beach Boys, the Funk Brothers who played on every hit record from Motown or another mixed-race group Booker T & The MGs, the house band at Stax records, on all of Otis Redding, Eddie Floyd and Sam & Dave’s records.

Herbie Flowers, Roger Cook, Maddy Bell, Barry Morgan, Roger Coulam, Alan Parker

*

Roger Coulam on keyboards hooked up with bass player Herbie Flowers, guitarist Alan Parker, drummer Barry Morgan and vocalists Madeline Bell and Roger Cook in 1969.   Bell, an American from New Jersey, had come to England with a gospel show in 1962 and stayed, met Dusty Springfield and had some hits herself.

By 1969 she already released three solo albums including her debut Bell’s A Poppin’ (1967) which had Dusty Springfield on backing vocals repaying her friend’s debt after Bell had backed many of Dusty’s blue-eyed soul hits.  Roger Cook had a successful songwriting partnership with Roger Greenaway established after they’d written You’ve Got Your Troubles for The Fortunes, and continued later with I’d Like To Teach The World To Sing (and sell Coke), and Softly Whispering I Love You among many many others.  He now lives in Nashville.

Disc Jockey Tony Blackburn takes the place of Alan Parker in this shot

After the success of Melting Pot, the band stuck together for five more years 4 LPs and released a handful of decent, musical hit singles, including the vibrant Good Morning Freedom (1970).   They all continued working as session musicians in-between Blue Mink gigs and appearances on Top of the Pops, notably on Elton John‘s first LP.  Most of Blue Mink were also in C.C.S. (Collective Consciousness Society) another band which charted in 1971 with Tap Turn On The Water, and a cover of Led Zeppelin’s Whole Lotta Love which became the Top of the Pops theme music for years to come.  Flowers played on Lou Reed’s Transformer and Bowie’s Space Oddity, Labi Siffre’s It Must Be Love and was later a Womble and on David Live!  He now lives in Ditchling.  Bell sings on Rolling Stones & Dusty singles, and with Tom Jones, Elton John, Joe Cocker and Scott Walker.  Parker plays the riff on Rebel Rebel, Hurdy Gurdy Man and No Regrets among countless others, and now writes theme music for film and television.   Drummer Morgan played with Elton, Tom Jones, Nilsson and many others while Coulam played on iconic Serge Gainsbourg single Je T’Aime and the Jesus Christ Superstar soundtrack and died in 2005.

It was in 2012 that I started work on a documentary project about session musicians.  I felt drawn to them as if they could help me to understand my own strange career as a character actor, a self-styled Lee Van Cleef, the hired gun, forever getting on my horse & leaving town clutching my fee after helping to kill the bad guys.  I called the putative film Red Light Fever and we worked for a good solid week, interviewing a group of players from the Brighton/M25 area – legend Chris Spedding, who sat in the guitar section of the GAK (Guitar & Keyboard) shop for his interview, Barbara Moore – voice of The Saint and Bedazzled and arranger of The Sign Of The Swinging Cymbal – Alan Freeman’s chart countdown music, Alan Parker and Herbie Flowers from Blue Mink, legendary drummer Clem Cattini (Telstar, much of The Kinks early stuff, Hurdy Gurdy Man, hundreds of others) and bass player Les Hurdle (Foundations, Donna Summer) who we talked to in Fatboy Slim’s shoreline studio (thanks generous Norm!).

Before we started shooting, one of my first interviews, with guitarist Big Jim Sullivan, was abruptly cancelled after he passed away.  I attended his funeral outside Worthing and saw many of the old session faces there, (including Chas Hodges RIP).  There was a sense of time slipping away, an urgency to complete the project before it was too late.  I wanted to record a new piece of music which Barbara Moore would write and, using all the old faces from the 60s and 70s London sessions, record it at Maida Vale Number One Studio, filming the whole get-together.  Maybe even a gig too like that great film Standing In The Shadows Of Motown.  It was like a detective story piecing it all together, great fun and a proper buzz.  Sample joke : when I asked who played the trumpet on It’s Not Unusual about 50 musicians claim to have been in the studio that day, record-keeping was poor, and royalties are like gold-dust.   We shot enough for a decent trailer – here it is :

Red Light Fever Promo

you’ll need the password which is :  rlflatest

That is because my buddy David Cuff was working at Latest TV in Brighton in 2012 and the boss of that young channel Bill Smith liked the idea and generously agreed to front £500 to pay for the promo.  It all went on the camera crew.

I cut the promo at home on Final Cut and took it to Luke Cresswell’s brother Addison and he hawked it around the industry (see My Pop Life #183 for the full terrible story).   I didn’t have much money at the end of 2012 but I thought something might break for us, and the trailer was decent (despite all the Super-8 footage being out of focus so that we couldn’t use it).  I was still working on the interviews.  Just before Christmas Madeline Bell finally relented to meet and chat while she was visiting from Spain.  Jenny and I had lunch with her at The Delauney on the Aldwych.  She was great company, very funny and warm.  She promised to grant us an interview if we got over to Spain with our camera and we parted on very positive terms.  The film would not be finished though due to tragic circumstances already described in the above link to Elton John’s Rocket Man.

If I find a spare 10 grand I will finish that film in my own time.  The musicians deserve the accolade after all these unsung years, just as the Funk Brothers did with their film.  If I don’t, I have faith that someone will carry that torch.

Meanwhile 1971 will forever glow in the dark like a lighthouse to my soul.  My friend Martin Steel (father of Paul who opened this blog (My Pop Life #1) has been trying to link me up with an audio version of writer and broadcaster David Hepworth’s book Never A Dull Moment : 1971 – Rock’s Golden Year.  It feels like it was written for me and I look forward to disagreeing with its contents while saluting its general premise. (I strongly suspect that it is rockist i.e.) Perhaps he values album statements over 45rpm pop singles too, which will be seen in years to come as an historic mistake.  The pop single is the late 20th century’s highest form of popular culture as any fule kno.  I know Simon Price is with me on that one.  They are also, in particular, spangly dayglo markers for our emerging personalities.  Every one of us has this sentient musical moment, and commonly it will be our early teens, probably coinciding with puberty.  Awakening. The chrysalis unfurls and there we are in all our contradictions.

Trust me : make a playlist up from your year of musical sentience, say the moment you turned from 13 to 14 and then listen to it in pure joy as the waves of discovery once more wash through your soul, and you rediscover that you know every lick, every drumbeat, every intake of breath for they are forever imprinted upon you like rhythmic & melodic DNA.  Almost as if, as you grew into your body and the cells expanded, the music you heard then got into the cracks and became part of you.

I wonder if I liked Blue Mink because of Madeline Bell ?   I married a black British woman some years later and we created our own mixed-race band, me, Jenny, two different breeds of cat.  Very open-minded, inclusive.   But the mystery at the heart of this blog though is why that song?  One’s first single purchase is supposed to be an indicator of something. Some tribal moment, some groove, something that will not be denied.  Perhaps all this is blurred by my mum’s pop purchases, after all she was only 34 at the time, and our musical tastes crossed over considerably.  It wasn’t just me – thousands of people bought the single and it reached number 4 eventually.  Maybe we all wanted a bit of Glory Hallelujah dressed up as pop music – Oh Happy Day with a brass band, or a hippie Salvation Army?  Or… maybe… when I was a wee child in Portsmouth, Mum had taken my brother Paul and I in the pram down to Southsea where the funfair was, where you could see the Isle of Wight and the giant ships coming in and out of Portsmouth Harbour, where H.M.S. Victory stands in dry dock, where a bandstand hosts the occasional concert.   A very early childhood memory.   Did we like to walk along the prom prom prom to hear the brass band play tiddly om pom pom?

Well I’ve been reluctant to press the “Publish” button on this post for over 24 hours now.  Something beyond a mystery.  Looking back at My Pop Life #84 which is set in 1970 and which precedes this by a profound 9-month period of my life, it is starting to become clear that my memory is unreliable.  The Hendrix era had been the previous year, and surely I had bought those singles already.  Why this song always pops into my head as “first single” I do not know, but it cannot be.  It doesn’t matter.  I definitely bought it, and Jig-A-Jig, and All Along The Watchtower.  I’m glad I did.

My Pop Life #186 : Praise You – Fatboy Slim

Praise You   –   Fatboy Slim

We’ve come a long, long way together – through the hard times and the good

       I need to celebrate you baby I need to praise you like I should…….

*

March 1971 was my first visit to The Goldstone Ground in Hove, to see Alan Duffy, Brian Powney in goal, John and Kit Napier, Peter O’Sullivan, John Templeman, Norman Gall.   Amazing that I can remember pretty much the whole team.  Tattooed on the brain. Went with a group of kids from the Lewes Priory football team : Martin Cooper,  Conrad Ryle, Simon Lester – we played on Saturday morning then went into Brighton in the afternoon for a Division Three game v Port Vale.  We stood in the North Stand with the hooligans, scarves wrapped around our wrists.  Jumped up and down singing Knees Up Mother Brown and the Banana Splits Song.  A year later, we were the hooligans, marching through the cold wet streets of Watford and Luton singing our songs of Albion and war.  Andrew Holmes joined the gang.  John Hawkins.  Paul my brother.  Conrad’s older brother Martin was a regular too but he stood in the Chicken Run – the East Stand which was a stone terrace with a few metal railings to lean on (prized positions).  That season we played Aston Villa on Good Friday and Reading on Easter Monday – maybe it was the season after, standing in a crowd of 36,000 people.  As a slightly dysfunctional teenager with a tenuous and insecure family life, the idea of playing at home was powerful.  For an atheist to stand with my fellow man and woman and sing in our thousands replaced any religious feelings I may have had left by the age of fourteen.  In other words, I was hooked.

The legendary Brian Clough came down to manage us with his assistant Peter Taylor. The most memorable game from that tenure was an 8-2 home defeat to Bristol Rovers, still a club record failure, and a 0-4 defeat in the FA Cup to Walton & Hersham, a part-time club.   Clough would go on to two European Cup wins with Nottingham Forest and was the best manager that England never appointed.  Taylor stayed and signed Peter Ward who became club legend goalscorer, but was replaced with ex-Tottenham & England man Alan Mullery – he became a club legend manager himself and took us to promotion in 1979 away at Newcastle United.  By now I was a student at the LSE.  I would come down for games on a Saturday, and my Glaswegian friend Lewis McLeod would come along too, despite being a Rangers fan.  By now we were standing in the Chicken Run.  The team swept all before them and rose to the elite with a 3-1 win at St James’ Park.  I travelled up alone on the train, even bravely venturing into a Newcastle public house on my own before joining the huddled masses in the Away end, celebrating a legendary victory and travelling back on the train with the blue & white family and endless cans of beer and joy.

Manager Alan Mullery with the team 1980

The following season we went to some exciting away games – Manchester City, Aston Villa, Tottenham Hotspur.  I got punched at Tottenham after the game.  Martin Ryle told a mounted policeman about it and pointed out who’d hit me and we saw the kid getting sandwiched between two police horses just down the High Road.  Enjoyed that.  Four seasons in the top flight.  On Match Of The Day now and again.  Nobby Horton in midfield, Steve Foster playing centre-half, with a headband.  Mike Robinson, Gordon Smith, Jimmy Case.  Beating Liverpool in the Cup two seasons running, playing Sheffield Wednesday in the semi-final at Highbury literally a few hundred yards from where I lived with Mumtaz in Finsbury Park in 1983, Winning 2-1.  Sitting on my stoop with my scarf on watching the fans streaming away from the game.  Magic.  Failing to get Cup Final tickets, watching on TV as Jimmy Melia’s team drew with Manchester United 2-2 and almost winning in the final minute.  And Smith Must Score…ohhhhh.  But Robinson should have scored in retrospect.  We lost the replay 4-0 and were relegated in the same season.

Things declined after that, gradually.  At some point in the 1980s I started to collect grounds – and picked up places like Sheffield Wednesday, Ipswich Town, Fulham, Leicester City and Rochdale. The chairman Mike Bamber who’d brought in Mullery lost control and this fuckwit called Bill Archer took over.  Greg Stanley was his stooge on the board.  And David Bellotti, failed Lib Dem candidate for Eastbourne was his gofer.  Between them they nearly took the club to extinction.  By now I was sitting in the West Stand when I came down for games – I’d now watched the team from 3 sides of the Goldstone Ground.   Just as I moved back to Sussex and had a season ticket for the first time in my life, things went downhill rapidly.

Albion walk out for their last home game at the Goldstone, 1997

I made friends with Ian Hart, Worthing undertaker who ran a fanzine called Gull’s Eye with Peter Kennard and I wrote a few columns for them about the resistance movement.  We became aware that Archer was planning to sell the ground “to pay debts”.  A huge campaign got underway to resist this asset-stripping.  We picketed the ground one day and tried to stop fans from going in.  Thousands stayed outside, then broke through the flimsy gate of the Chicken Run at half time and got onto the pitch and up into the director’s box, mingled with the away fans too, all of whom were aware of our plight and supported us.

There was a Fans United match at the Goldstone (which I couldn’t make) when we played Hartlepool, and Doncaster Rovers in particular had helped to organise fans from every club come down and publicise what was happening to the Albion.  Bellotti was barracked at every game and had police protection – although he never came to any harm, often he would be asked to leave by the police.

Then the York City game at the end of the ’96/97 season when the pitch invasion after 15 minutes left a broken crossbar and a huge sit-in with match abandoned.  2 Points deducted but now everyone knew what was afoot, too late to change the outcome.

 Dick Knight took over but the sale was done.  The last game at The Goldstone, our home, was against Doncaster Rovers.  It was like a funeral.  I sat in the South Stand for the first and last time, and had watched my team from all four sides of the Goldstone.  We ran onto the pitch after the match and people started take the place apart for keepsakes.  Seats.  Signs.  Anything.  I got a large chunk of the pitch which I kept in a flowerpot in the garden, trimmed with scissors and sporting a subbuteo goal. Meanwhile after being 13 points adrift at the foot of the table we finally need a point in the last game,  away to Hereford United which meant the losers were out of the League.  I couldn’t face the implications or the game and chose to go to the Dome for a Mahler concert on a Saturday afternoon, swerving the tension and feelings of sickness, coming out at 5pm and asking the nearest bystander the result.  Pre-internet of course. We drew 1-1, Robbie Reinelt scoring the all important goal – Hereford were down and out, we’d survived.  This period of the Albion’s history – the guerrilla warfare, the back-stabbing, the surge of fan’s anger and magnificent commitment to their club is recorded by Steve North and Paul Hodson in the memorable book Build A Bonfire.

Albion legend, another saviour : Dick Knight

But the ground had been sold for £7 million and we were homeless.  Debts were paid but one year later the Goldstone was re-sold : this time for £28 million.  It turned out that Bill Archer had sold the ground to himself and then made a £21 million profit out of our homelessness – the worst kind of scum.  Albion played at Gillingham for two seasons, 75 miles away, to meagre crowds and an impoverished atmosphere.  I usually drove there, and we’d congregate in the pub, defiant, phlegmatic.  The spirit of the fans and our indomitable sense of humour is illustrated beautifully with a small anecdote from Colchester United FC where I’d gone with Martin Ryle and his son Jude for a League game.   Fans being cruel the Colchester massive taunted us with “Where’s The Goldstone gone, where’s the Goldstone gone?” to the tune of Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep.  Came the immediate response from the Albion faithful : “It’s a Toys R Us, it’s a Toys R Us“.   We have the best songs – out of necessity.  When we hear “Town full of queers” (Guantanamera) or “Does Your Boyfriend know you’re here?” (Bread of Heaven) we traditionally sing “You’re too ugly to be gay“.  I’m proud to be a Brighton fan, not afraid to sing about being gay.   Came home with relief to the Withdean Stadium in 1999, an athletics track converted with temporary stands and a two-bob portakabin atmosphere.  Micky Adams arrived and bought young striker Bobby Zamora and suddenly we were on the up again, winning two promotions in successive seasons.  I met him once at a Club do, just as it had been announced he was leaving for Leicester.  I think he’d been getting stick all night because when I thanked him for everything and wished him all the best for his future he was genuinely pleased and thanked me in return.  But it was all two steps forward, one step back, what we needed more than anything else was a proper ground.  The campaign for Falmer Stadium was long and bitter and took in various local heroes like Paul Samrah, Paul Whelch (RIP another LSE graduate), Norman Cook (Fatboy Slim) and Skint Records, Paul Camillin, Dick Knight of course and John Baine – Attila The Stockbroker – with whom I’d made a protest single – ‘We Want Falmer‘ b/w ‘Sussex By The Sea‘ which got to number 17 in the charts (see My Pop Life #51).   One of my more memorable days was the protest outside the Labour Party Conference on Brighton Seafront when one fan appeared with a sign reading : Prescott :  Mother Cooked Socks In Hull.

Skint Records and Norman were having a moment or three in the sun.  Based in Middle Street in The Lanes, with co-owner & Arsenal fan Damian Harris as Midfield General (I would later appear on one of his records) and Norman as Fatboy Slim they adopted the Seagulls in 1999 and provided shirt sponsorship during this critical 9-year period.  My favourite Albion shirt has their name on it.

The logo was pertinent and a frank admission of status – we were broke.   Rumour had it that Norman was paying Bobby Zamora’s wages in exchange for a car-park space : the many ramifications of playing at Withdean included a no-parking zone around the stadium.  I used to park and walk like many other fans – sometimes I’d take the bus from the bottom of Trafalgar Street after a few pints of Harveys.

Norman – and his wife Zoe Ball (now separated) – are integrated members of the Brighton & Hove community, around and about at openings, screenings, football matches, club nights and very supportive of the local scene – like their local successful brothers Stomp –  in many and diverse ways.  They were at the premiere of The Murmuration (see My Pop Life #87 ) at The Booth Museum in Dyke Road.  Norm was an usher at Patrick Sullivan‘s wedding in Rottingdean when we all went to the pub both before and after the service.  I once watched a Liverpool v Chelsea European Cup game round his house with Jim and Pat which was faintly awkward – I was the only one supporting Liverpool… then I called Norman once to ask about vintage recording equipment as texture for my abandoned Session Musician documentary Red Light Fever (see My Pop Life #116) and others) and he very kindly offered me some interesting space to shoot an interview with bass player Les Hurdle (who’d recorded with Giorgio Moroder and The Foundations among others).  We’ve seen Norman DJ at two World Cups – in Cape Town and Rio de Janeiro parties, playing records for football fans.   He is a proper decent bloke, and very good at his job needless to say.  The records that Skint put out at the end of the 20th & beginning of the 21st Century helped to define Brighton as the number one party city in Europe – Rockefeller Skank, Right Here, Right Now, Praise You, Weapon of Choice, Gangster Trippin’ and many remix remake remodels too.  We all celebrated the big beat culture which started on Brighton seafront and conquered the world, peaking in July 2002 when 250,000 flocked and danced to Big Beat Boutique 2 where the Skint DJs partied all day and all night between the piers.

Big Beach Boutique II, July 2002, Brighton Beach 

Planning permission for Falmer Stadium was finally granted after a long struggle.  Nobody wanted the football fans on their doorstep.  Every version of the plan for a stadium was met with objection.  But it happened.  We’d fought an imaginative campaign and got the nod – Martin Perry was instrumental in achieving the result and building the actual finished stadium, alongside every single Brighton fan from that time, including my friend Ian Andrews who’d worked at the club since the 90s being brought in by Dick Knight, and running the accounts through the Withdean years.  I would sit with Ian, David Cuff, Adrian Simons, Julian Benkel and Mark Griffin – and indeed with actor Mark Williams during this period – or we would meet in the Lord Nelson on Trafalgar Street, famous Albion pub.  All good friends still.

All the trials and tribulations have brought the club closer to the city of Brighton. We are now a true community club.  After all the noise, litter and scare stories about the middle class enclave of Withdean being invaded by football hooligans, the last game there was rather emotional.

As promotion to the Championship beckoned, Julian and myself went on a few last away trips to places where I didn’t think the team would be playing again (with respect to those clubs of course) : Hartlepool United, Northampton Town, Dagenham & Redbridge.  Ian gave me a hard hat and showed me around the Falmer foundations one memorable afternoon in 2009 :

Myself and Ian Andrews, Falmer Stadium 1st December 2009

The Amex today – photograph ©Peter Whitcomb

The first game at the new stadium was a friendly against Tottenham Hotspur – my wife’s team and all of her family.  We had season tickets to the new ground, David Cuff had been among the first to gain access and we were 12 rows back from the front, bang central, near the dugouts where the managers, trainers and substitutes sat and alongside the press box.  When the music of Sussex By The Sea started up across this magnificent sparkling brand new arena filled with fans, and the two teams walked out onto the sacred green sward, a tear rolled down my cheek and my chest was full of emotion.  Home.  Our Home.   And the first League game was against… Doncaster Rovers.  By then the chairman was Tony Bloom who been on the board for many years but slowly acquired a greater percentage of control.  Dick Knight was made President for Life, and Tony funded the stadium and, later, the brand new state-of-the art training ground at Lancing near Shoreham Airport.  A Brighton fan all of his life, two of his uncles were on previous Boards of the club.  Bloom made his money in online gambling and has now invested over £250 million into Brighton & Hove Albion.  That is a local hero.

We still can’t match the budgets of our main rivals – this season Newcastle United, Aston Villa and Norwich.  But life isn’t all about money.  There is something about trying to win games of football which is a mystical alchemical process – a team event at which all have to be present, an undefined nebulous concept called confidence, determination, spirit, something a manager worth his salt can produce in players, week in, week out.  Gus Poyet managed it with a legendary season in the final year at Withdean ( final away game at Walsall pictured below) when we were promoted once again.

Andy Holmes (for it is he), Julian Benkel, David Cuff at Walsall

We opened Falmer Stadium – now called The Amex in the Championship.  At the end of that magnificent 2nd season in the new arena, we stumbled at the final hurdle in a terrible match at home to Crystal Palace in the play-offs as Poyet reportedly had resigned to the players in the dressing room before the game.  Or was he pushed?  His relationship with the club had deteriorated to an alarming degree over those final months, but it was a fatal flaw in a great footballing brain.   I met Gus on the tube once in London and he was sincerely enthusiastic and charming talking about The Seagulls.  Oscar Garcia and Sami Hyypia came and went and then Chris Hughton, ex Spurs defender and living legend arrived and took us to the play-offs once again last season – the third time in four years.  Over the disappointment of last summer – 2016 – he kept the same group of players together and added a spine – Duffy, Murray, Norwood, Sidwell.  Anthony Knockaert was our enlightenment, Bruno Salter our soul, Lewis Dunk our local hero along with Hailsham boy Solly March, Dale Stephens our midfield maestro along with Beram Kayal, David Stockdale our rock between the sticks, Glen Murray our shark goalscorer, Tomer Hemed our spearhead.    Chris Hughton our football genius.  Tony Bloom our saviour.

Tony Bloom celebrates Promotion 2017

Since moving to New York in 2014 I’ve let my season ticket lapse.  I’ve watched two games per season basically.  Last season I wandered in to two more grounds – Bolton Wanderers and Wolverhampton Wanderers.  I saw two games this season, both at home, against Huddersfield and Leeds : both tough games, both wins.  We’ve been in the top two all season, have now been promoted to the Premiership and are one win away from the title – first place – and the Championship Trophy which will represent the finest achievement of this football club in it’s 116-year history.  A new chapter awaits.

Anthony Knockaert celebrates at the Amex.  The Premiership beckons

I’ve been watching games on my computer where I can.  Following on Twitter.  I’ve had a lifetime of watching the Albion, ups and downs.  I miss the pints and the cameraderie, the team sheet and the songs.  The moaning about the ref.  The irritating opposition player.  The pies.  But at least now I get to watch the team on TV – for here in America, all the Premiership games are screened live.  You can record them.   And doubtless I’ll be in England to watch one or two.

We have come a long long way together.  I need to celebrate you baby.  Yesterday, 17th April 2017, my beloved Brighton & Hove Albion were promoted to the Premier League.

My Pop Life #183 : Rocket Man – Elton John

Rocket Man   –   Elton John

She packed my bags last night pre-flight
Zero hour nine AM
And I’m gonna be high as a kite by then
I miss the earth so much I miss my wife
It’s lonely out in space
On such a timeless flight

And I think it’s gonna be a long long time
‘Till touch down brings me round again to find
I’m not the man they think I am at home
Oh no no no I’m a rocket man
Rocket man burning out his fuse up here alone

*

You’re not supposed to post the lyrics of a song in their entirety on the internet because copyright but if that’s the case why are there all those lyrics sites, all with the same mistake ?  As I gently age, with spurts of buckling and recovery, I find my mind grows dim, for things seem more mysterious to me now than they were forty five years ago when I was fourteen years old and grooving to Elton John in my bedroom, in particular this classic and the B-side which was, brilliantly enough, two songs :  Goodbye, and Holiday Inn.  Swoon.  The magic year of 1971, when my ears suddenly opened further, deeper, stronger and every tune held different mysterious beauty, had just passed and now we were in the spring of 1972 and I was on a musical jam roll.

We were in Hailsham.  I had a record player in my bedroom.  It was a luxury, like the view over the fields, and the broom-handle thumps on the kitchen ceiling reminded me of this privilege from time to time.  Rocket Man of course was a masterpiece, a song so perfect that I couldn’t stop burbling about it to my Nan, up visiting from Portsmouth, playing it to her downstairs on the record player while she looked at me with a mixture of suspicion and curiosity.  She’d looked at me before like that, an old-fashioned look perhaps it’s called, but this time I noticed and felt my power.  I was fourteen after all, bursting out all over the place.

“Listen to this bit Nan –

‘ and all this science I don’t understand, it’s just my job five days a week…’

and of course by then I had done two and a half years of fucking science at school and found it baffling, like the smoke signal from the Vatican.  Talk about mysterious.  Perhaps it was the teachers, but perhaps MORE it was me.  Science ?  Nah.

Not for me.  Not my bag.  Not clever enough to understand it and perhaps it was never explained to me properly.  It is the basis of our civilisation after all – engineers and builders, along with medicine and war.    And in the song, when he sings all this science I don’t understand, the music goes all weird and synthesised and jagged suddenly with a staccato chord on the piano to punctuate the oddness.  Like science that you don’t understand, I explained to my Nan.  She looked at me.

Now I understand that it’s the producer’s job to do that sort of thing.  Like the two lines before that :

“Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids,

in fact it’s cold as hell” 

when the song empties out (like Mars, he added unnecessarily) and it’s just Elton and the piano – no drums  – then one slide guitar note on cold as hell to emphasise the emptiness.  It’s completely brilliant, very simple, like brushstrokes on canvas, the effect is concise and emotional.  Modern art is thus made.  And Gus Dudgeon, who produced this song was a genius in the studio, whatever he touched turned to gold around this time : John Kongos’  He’s Gonna Step On You Again, Audience’s House On The Hill, much of the Bonzos output, but he was known best for his work with Elton John, which started with Your Song.

And on the B-side was this stunning song Goodbye which haunted me then and still haunts me now.   Elton of course is a genius, his singing voice is quite superb and his music is exquisite, especially in the 1970s.   I’ve always loved piano pop more than any other kind of music, so Elton is on the high end of a list which includes Fats Domino, Ben Folds, Paul McCartney, Todd Rundgren, Marvin Gaye, Gilbert O’Sullivan, Dr John, Ray Charles, Billy Joel, Brian Wilson, Fats Waller, Little Richard, Randy Newman, Georgie Fame, Alan Price, Harry Nillsson, Rufus Wainwright and so on and so forth.  But it’s the lyrics on this one folks.  I’m not a big on lyrics kind of guy.  Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen.  I’m a music kind of guy.  Chord changes and harmonies.  Some people are both, I know.  Maybe I am both, but I’m mainly musical, not lyrical.

But Bernie Taupin though.  What a lyricist.  Check this –

And if you want a drink, just squeeze my hand and wine will flow into my land and feed my lambs

He’s gone all William Blake there.  He’s young, they both are, they’re trying stuff. What’s he on about ?  Post-nuclear holocaust ?  Jesus Christ on the cross ?

And now it’s all over the birds can nest again

But by the end of the song, a mere one minute 40 seconds after it started, Elton’s singing I’ll Waste Away over and over again.  Meaning ?  Who knows ?  Allow it to be mysterious.  Not everything is to be named numbered and explained. Categorized. Collected.  Scored.  Understood. Filed, Forgotten.  I am the poem that doesn’t rhyme.

Sorry I took your time.

The innate drama of the lyrics appealed to me greatly as a 14-year old glam-rock softy.  Sometime I wish I was back in 1972 with my poor Mum banging around the house either with or without her 2nd husband John Daignault, listening to records up in my bedroom. (My and Paul’s bedroom I should say.  We would turn out the light and talk for about an hour every night, both lying down talking at the ceiling.  About everything.  Precious moments.  Healing hours.  We’d play football outside, watch TinTin and Blue Peter, Crackerjack and Morecambe and Wise.  Top of The Pops.  Match of the Day.  The Big Match on Sundays with Brian Moore.  Chart countdown  with Alan Freeman at 4pm.  Took the bus to Polegate every morning, then the train to Lewes for school.  No important exams.  Just lessons, football, girls, friends. Simple.

Oh well.

Rocket Man though jeez what a song.  It’s the twin brother of Space Oddity of course with the lead astronaut figure singing the song, both songs about loneliness in the end and space, too much space.   Both songs produced by Gus Dudgeon, a few years apart .  Fantastic melody, and fade out :

And I think it’s gonna be a long long time

Many many years later – let’s say 2009 when I was living off Mulholland Drive with my brer Eamonn Walker, a stupid big view of Warner Brothers, Universal and Studio City and the San Fernando Valley (The Valley) stretching down to the ocean beyond.  A local member of the wide Beach Boys family circle aka Adam Marsland announced that he was hosting an Elton John night on Lincoln Boulevard in Venice Beach with his band.  Did anyone want to sing a song?  I jumped down his throat and picked Rocket Man and was lucky enough to get the nod.  I sang it at home a couple of times then drove down there.  No rehearsal as I recall or maybe there was a run-through?  The rather fantastic Evie Sands was in the band on guitar.    Other mates turned up : Stevie Kalinich (see My Pop Life 169), Alan Boyd,  Tracy Landecker and some people I recognised a bit.  I delivered the song as straight as I could, just down the line, no interpretation, as Elton as possible.  People clapped.  It was an honour.

Then in 2005 Jenny had been performing in Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues in the West End and on tour with Sharon Osbourne & Lisa Riley.  She had a laugh with them, and Sharon liked her and thus we got invited to the Osbourne’s Christmas Party that year, somewhere behind Harrods.  Ozzie was shuffling around being rude to people and at one point I passed Elton John on the staircase.   I was so utterly nervous/selfconscious and tongue-tied that I completely ignored him, and as I walked up I could hear him going “Well, Really !” as if he was used to people going ahhhh I love you.  Which is pretty much what I should have done. <sigh>  Later on, upstairs I hooked up with David Walliams again (see My Pop Life #7) after many years, but never got to speak with Elton John.  My loss.  Jenny had met him earlier that evening before I arrived and had a nice chat…

Elton at Hove Cricket Ground

We saw him live a couple of times – Wembley in the 90s and Hove Cricket Ground in the noughties.  Brilliant both times.  The real deal.  Such a roster of great great songs.  He wheels them out time after time, knowing that we want to hear Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and Bennie & The Jets.  I often think about success and what it means.  For an actor it means no privacy in public, but plenty of choices in work, new stuff all the time.  For a musician there is also no privacy but the work is essentially playing those 20 songs every night, with a few new ones.  When we saw Elton in Hove after about an hour he announced that he was playing a handful of new songs and that to pre-empt the inevitable rush for the toilets he actually suggested that we could all get up and go to the toilet or get a drink – and literally hundreds of people did just that.  “Sorry” said Elton, “We have to play some new stuff otherwise we’d all go completely mad“.   He had two of The Family Stone (as in Sly & The) as his backing singers – Lisa and Rose Stone.  They covered the high notes on the rearranged hits.  It was a fantastic show.

Late September 2012 a small crew – me, Jono Smith (who shot Sus) and Chris Williams with Diane Frangi on stills are shooting a promo for my documentary idea ‘Unsung Heroes’ about the session musicians of the UK Hit Factory 1963 – 1975, inspired by the film Standing In The Shadows Of Motown.  Probably emotionally echoing my own feelings as a character actor, out of the limelight, yet integral to the production I felt like I wanted to lift some of these musicians into a visible place, if only for 90 minutes.  One of the characters I’d lined up was Ray Cooper, legendary percussionist with Elton and others, and one of the producers on Withnail & I at Handmade Films. Spoken to Ray on the phone about it – he was out of the country for the promo dates.  Anyway.  By the time we’d shot five or six days worth of stuff the film was called Red Light Fever, after the nerves which afflicted those musicians who couldn’t take the stress of studio work, being handed sheet music and told to play a solo over bar 36 and so on.  None of the living legends of the studio I interviewed – drummer Clem Cattini, bass player Herbie Flowers, guitarist Chris Spedding, guitarist Alan Parker, singer and arranger Barbara Moore – suffered from Red Light Fever, but it was still a good title.  I wanted to get these interviews before they all died – James Jamerson the Motown bass player is not in the Motown film for example.

Barbara Moore in 2012

Barbara Moore lives in Bognor Regis, just down the road from us in Brighton and we ended up filming her twice because the fellas fell in love with her.  She’ll appear in another post but for now, the story she tells me that first afternoon in her beautiful conservatory is of meeting Elton John in Olympic Studios in Barnes in the late 1960s.  She’d walked past an open door and heard this beautiful piano and vocal coming out – and there was this scruffy fella playing something.  She popped her head in the door and said “That sounds nice” or something similar.  Reg said thanks (for it was he) and said that he was going in to try and sell some of his songs to a producer and get a deal.  “Good luck”  she said. At lunchtime that day in the local pub she asked him how it had gone – he wasn’t too confident, but she then asked if he could join her choir for the afternoon because she was a voice short, someone had let her down.  He said OK, because that’s how he was earning money in those days.

1972

 It was probably two years later that her phone rang.  “Is this Barbara?” said the voice.  “I need some help with a song, would you come down to the studio tomorrow?”   She agreed, and then arranged and led the choir on Border Song which appeared on Elton John’s 2nd LP, entitled simply ‘Elton John‘.  A standout track which Aretha Franklin covered – adding (Holy Moses) to the title – to greater success than the original, although it is now seen as an Elton classic.  The backing singers were Madeline Bell, Tony Burrows and Roger Cook, all of whom were slated to be interviewed for Red Light Fever  – Jenny and I met Madeline Bell for lunch the following Christmas in London (she lives in Spain).  She had been co-lead singer with Roger Cook of Blue Mink, a band created by session musicians including Alan Parker and Herbie Flowers ! with hit singles – Melting Pot, Banner Man, Good Morning Freedom.  Roger Cook was the songwriter behind I’d Like To Teach The World To Sing and many others – some of which Tony Burrows sang on – the session voice of Edison Lighthouse, White Plains, The Pipkins, The Flowerpot Men and The Ivy League and who infamously got banned from Top Of The Pops for appearing three times in one show with three different bands.  “People will think it’s a fix” said the BBC.  But he was the singer on all three songs!  As you can see already, it was a very tight, very small world, and a film exploring it all would be such fun.

Addison Cresswell

What eventually happened after editing the footage forever on my laptop was that Luke Cresswell’s brother Addison Cresswell took my five minute promo, (paid for by Latest TV, a new venture in Brighton run by Bill Smith) and made various people in TV Land watch it.  Addison I knew through Luke and we’d met a number of times, in pubs, at Luke & Jo’s Boxing Day parties, New Year’s Eve parties and he’d invited me to his office one day for a meeting to discuss this doc.  Addison had immense power in UK TV world because he managed all of the main comedians in the UK, including Jack Dee, Lee Evans, Michael McIntyre, Jonathan Ross and Kevin Bridges and had the ear of all the producers.  His style was all swagger and front, larger than life, a Rocket Man indeed and he was very good at his job.  Only BBC4 came back with an offer of £10k, all in for the show once it was complete – they’d buy it, but they wouldn’t fund it.  I couldn’t possibly make it for no money, so we waited for other responses over Christmas 2013, still planning and lining up interviews such as Madeline Bell and Ray Cooper.   Then Addison died at home of a heart attack on December 23rd, a death which shocked me to my bones, causing devastation to his family and shock throughout Brighton, his friends and colleagues, his clients and the TV industry as a whole.  He was 53 years old.   So so sad.  The Boxing Day social was cancelled and a giant hole filled the landscape where Addison had stood.  He was an extremely warm and generous man underneath his bark and laddish flex.  Something that perhaps I appreciate having had a few laddish years myself in my youth.  Addison’s love of his brother Luke, my friend, was also visible and echoed my own feelings for Paul and was the reason why he gave me so much of his time.  He is hugely missed.

And now that it’s all over
The birds can nest again
I’ll only snow when the sun comes out
I’ll shine only when it starts to rain

And if you want a drink
Just squeeze my hand
And wine will flow into the land
And feed my lambs

For I am a mirror
I can reflect the moon
I will write songs for you
I’ll be your silver spoon

I’m sorry I took your time
I am the poem that doesn’t rhyme
Just turn back a page
I’ll waste away, I’ll waste away
I’ll waste away, I’ll waste away
I’ll waste away, I’ll waste away

Video directed by Majid Adin, with Elton John’s blessing :

B-side : Goodbye

My Pop Life #141 : Jig A Jig – East Of Eden

Jig A Jig   –   East Of Eden

1971 – my magical musical year of sentience.  13 going on 14 (baby it’s time to think; better beware, be canny and careful, baby you’re on the brink).  Actually that quote is ’16 going on 17′ and is about a girl and is from The Sound Of Music but hey – that’s the kind of thing I accepted universally up until the age of around 12/13.  Then I started my baby steps of discernment.  It is a precious age, because we are still unformed and big changes are afoot.  Baby you’re on the brink.  And Wouldn’t It Be Nice if never was heard a discouraging word ?  But – life is not like that.  The übersensitivity of the teen can lead to major mistakes in taste, music, fashion, hairstyles, choice of friends and piercings, drugs, drinks.  Maybe some of these are already pre-destined, but my point is that a missed cue, dropped word, or sniffy remark goes a long way when you’re thirteen.

East of Eden’s 1970 LP – Snafu

We all know that we enjoy the lessons when we like the teachers.  The subject is a very distant 2nd.  Thus in 1971, I loved English, History, Geography and Art, liked French, Chemistry, Biology, PE and Maths.  I did not like Physics or Music.

I’ll repeat that : I did not like Music.  What a missed opportunity…

Mr Richards taught music to unenthusiastic oiks in the 3rd form of Lewes Priory Middle School and he may have even been my form teacher.  I was in 3R I think.  He was a florid-faced balding man who wore tweedy jackets and had a distant distracted manner.  It was much much later that I realised (or was informed by John Hawkins who did Music A-level) that he was an alcoholic.  The Latin teacher Dai Jones was also a drinker, and was drunk pretty much 100% of the time, but in his case it was bleeding obvious.  Richards kept his sinful excess under manners. Anyway his class was all minims and breves, crotchets and quavers, sharps and flats.  There was no joy in this class.  Until he asked us to bring in a piece of music for the class to hear !  WOW.  This unlikely spasm of musical democracy was true excitement.  I had a number of choices – all singles which I’d bought recently with my pocket money, all discerning 13-year-old choices.

Let’s see.

John Kongos – He’s Gonna Step On You Again,  magnificent chaos

Dave & Ansel Collins – Double Barrel, a recent Number One (!)  immense

George Harrison – My Sweet Lord,   eternal and glowing

R. Dean Taylor – Indiana Wants Me.    this is the police. give yourself up!

Mum had also bought singles, Mum always bought singles:

The Kinks –  Apeman – was that a faux-west-indian accent?  I didn’t notice

Elton John –  Your Song – absolute stone-cold classic. We knew it even then.

Melanie – Look What They Done To My Song Ma – honky tonk angel americana

I think they’re all better than East Of Eden’s Jig-A-Jig which is the 45rpm single on Deram Records that I took into school.  But maybe that’s unfair.  It’s a legitimate snapshot of my 13 and three-quarter-year-old musical taste in spring 1971.  Perhaps I instinctively knew that Richards would look down his bulbous nose and spit venom on any actual pop music.  Jig-A-Jig I knew had elements of Irish music, albeit rocked up.  I didn’t know it then – and neither did he clearly – but the song is composed of three traditional reels glued together in the fairly normal way of Celtic music, namely “The Ashplant Reel“, “Drowsy Maggie” and “Jenny’s Chicken“.  All well-known to traditional Irish musicians, and recorded many times over by different groups and players, but never troubling the UK Pop Charts before this moment, as far as I knew.

East Of Eden were a progressive jazz-rock outfit who had emerged from the post-hippy era along with bands like Colosseum, The Nice, Soft Machine and Caravan and they had appeared at the First Paris Music Festival alongside all of those bands with Pink Floyd, Captain Beefheart, Yes and Frank Zappa in 1969.

Subsequently signed to Deram Records they released the LP Snafu in 1970, then the single Jig-A Jig.  It wouldn’t chart in the UK until the following year, and eventually reached number 7.  There was nothing like it around at the time, and certainly hasn’t been since I would venture. Certainly it is nothing like the rest of their output which is experimental prog fusion.  The band’s image wavered in that between-era 1971 way with cashmere kaftans, tank tops, beards and fedoras, caught between the hippy dream, the prog indulgence and the glam pop escape.  They almost fitted into a fashion box with McGuinness Flint, Atomic Rooster, Curved Air and The Moody Blues.  1971 would deliver further riches from unexpected sources.

Jig A Jig opens with the fiddle playing of Dave Arbus.   But soon it becomes a rock song with the electric guitar joining the violin and drums.  Within 30 seconds the freakout has begun and soon we are at a free festival at dawn with the sun rising through the mist over the trees, hundreds of swaying raggle taggle gypsies and nodding heads, bonkers percussion, heavy rock and guitar solos joining the merry fiddler as he dances us into a frenzy.  Before we go completely bananas on bad acid we get the hoe-down finish with hand-claps and we’re out.

Mr Richards hated it.  He sneered as the orange and white Deram logo span on the turntable.  He muttered something unintelligible and ungenerous as he handed the 7-inch single back to me.  I’ve erased the quote.  Music lessons and I were finished.  I didn’t even do it at O-Level.

Listening to it now I think it’s quite mental.  Bold, true to its time, and an unlikely chart hit to be sure.  But a snapshot of the charts in Spring 71 will show a huge variety of music, from Motown to glam, rock to classical mash-ups, ballads and one-man bands, early funk, solo Beatles, bubblegum, ska and hippy pop.

Music For Pleasure Spring 1971

 In those days session musicians would get a gig covering recent chart hits which would then be compiled as Music For Pleasure compilations – rather like That’s What I Call Music except they weren’t the originals.  Famously Reg Dwight played on a few of these LPs in the 1960s before he became Elton John.   So some session player had to recapture the fiddle playing on this track.

East Of Eden still exist in some form and make the occasional record.  The violin player Dave Arbus would go on to play with The Who on the opening track of their great album Who’s Next known as Teenage Wasteland, credited as ‘Baba O’Riley’.  Later he would be a founder member of Fiddler’s Dram, but left before their unusual chart hit Day Trip To Bangor in 1979. He then left music and became a cabinet maker, now he is a painter and lives in Eastern Long Island.

I have never learned to read music “off the page” in particular I have difficulty with rhythm – 4/4 is easy, 3/4 is waltz time, but 7/8 or 2/4 get me confused, as do dots after crotchets.  It’s just maths but the block is still there.  As a result I play by ear.  I hear it, I play it.  Nevertheless, when performing with The Brighton Beach Boys I would always be handed a chart by Stephen Wrigley to read on the alto sax, and it was a useful aide memoir, and often in a live situation I would find myself reading along.  Of course I already know the music so it is not the same as playing something from scratch.  Particularly difficult to play in our repertoire is the song I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day by Roy Wood and Wizzard.  The brass part is unforgiving and relentless, and I found that I couldn’t play it from memory and actually needed the sheet music to guide me through the mountain ranges of that incredible song.

If I’d become a professional musician I would of course have gone back to school or evening class and learned the whole thing properly.   Or would I ??

The single :

and um, Actually a rather incredible and disturbing TOTP play-out clip from 1971 :

My Pop Life #132 : Imagine – John Lennon

Imagine   –    John Lennon

..I wonder if you can…

In the early spring of 1971, after nine achingly long months apart, my family was finally offered a new-build Council House on the edge of Hailsham, an East Sussex market town between Eastbourne and Uckfield.    I was 14.  Paul 12.  Andrew was 8.  Mum was mid-30s.  Paul and I shared a bedroom which overlooked fields and faraway trees, and in the distance, Herstmonceux Observatory. Andrew had the smaller single bedroom.  Ralph, Paul…..and Andrew.  That’s just how it was.

Mum’s ‘new’ husband, John Daignault, had not moved back in with us.  We were secretly glad, because he was just an extra person in the house.  He took our Mum’s attention and they usually ended up arguing, shouting and screaming or actually fighting.  It was a drag.  So we were pretty relieved when we found out that they’d fought again, and Mum had no intention of inviting him to stay in the new house.  But then she changed her mind and one day, there he was.  Short, dark-haired, slightly nervous.  He was always nice to us, but he was only about ten years older than me and I was decidedly cool with him.  I was a twatty teenage boy who was primarily concerned with increasingly important decisions about grooviness, my own burgeoning sex life and the expanding musical landscape, not whether my mum’s 2nd husband was worthy of consideration.  He was just there.  He tried though.  Back in the village his record collection had included The White Album, The Beatles double-LP from 1968 which was a compendium of musical styles and grooves, from country to heavy rock, weird experimentia to 1930s pop.  JD, as we called him, had a few cool points logged.

Lennon, Ono & Grapefruit at Cannes, May 1971

Christmas 1971.  Beneath the tree an LP-shaped present for me.  Intrigued, I had to wait for the entire ritual to unfold, starting with the stockings filled with brazil nuts, small plastic toys, a satsuma and other ephemera.  Early morning thrills with mini-pinball tables and so on.  Then breakfast.  Then church – or had we abandoned church by then?  I think we had not.  Dragged there and back through the weather in our best.  Then home.  Then presents ?  No – change your clothes.  THEN Then??   NO A NICE CUP OF TEA FIRST.  Christ in swaddling clothes can we now open our flipping presents???    AFTER THE QUEEN’S SPEECH.  Save me.

Summer ’71

This may be a singular and important reason which explains why I am a republican.  The speech was always fluff and was intoned in a flat aristocratic drone.  I had no respect for The Royal Family in 1971 and even less today in 2015.

And finally.  Someone was nominated as Santa – but not before we’d been further delayed by sausage rolls, slices of ham and bread and mustard, things that mum had been ‘slaving over a hot stove for months‘ with, anything really, to keep us from the fucking presents.  There was a real tree with decorations, tinsel and a fairy on the top, the presents bulged beneath it.  It would end up in the back garden and slowly die as winter progressed toward a long-promised distant spring.

And my LP-shaped present from Mum and John Daignault – a French-Canadian name by the way – was the new John Lennon LP “Imagine”.   I knew it was from him really.  And I was actually bowled over.  I think it’s the most I ever liked him, and it remains one of the best Christmas presents I ever received.  When I was 14, brand-new LPs were a rarity.  They had to be saved for.  Our LP collection – almost all Mum’s – was small, and included Wagner’s Tannhauser Overture(see My Pop Life #94), the soundtracks to Oliver! and The Sound Of Music, The Seekers’ Morningtown Ride (see My Pop Life #210.  The Beach Boys’ 20 Golden Greats.  Simon and Garfunkel.  Van Der Graaf Generator’s H to He.  Jimi Hendrix’ Axis Bold As Love.  And of course Sounds of the Serengeti by naturalist Peter Scott which we knew off by heart.   ‘Imagine’ may well have been my 3rd-ever LP.

The Plastic Ono Band in 1969 :

Klaus Voorman,  Alan White,  Yoko Ono,  John Lennon,  Eric Clapton 

*

We were a singles family mainly.  Loads of those.  Big pop hits and obscure lower-chart singles.  We had many Beatles singles.  From She Loves You through We Can Work It Out to Let It Be.  And the Beatles had finally split up officially on April 10th 1970 when Paul announced he was leaving the group.  John Lennon had already told the rest of the band that he was finished during the previous September when The Plastic Ono Band played Toronto to an extremely warm reception but the decision was kept under wraps until the spring of 1970.  We’d all been learning to live without the Beatles for over 18 months, and it was hard.  Each and every former Beatle’s release was devoured hungrily, and although almost always not as satisfying a meal as a Beatles song, it was at least like one of the ingredients.  A special, soul-filling snack.  They were the four most famous people in the world still.  With Muhammed Ali.  If you made an LP out of the first two years of solo releases (and called it ‘Everest‘ the working title for Abbey Road), it was an AMAZING Beatles LP, with Maybe I’m Amazed, Another Day, My Sweet Lord, What Is Life, Imagine and Working Class Hero.

1964

We would learn to nourish ourselves with these offerings,  scoured for clues, hints, rifts, chords, harmonies, these musical conversations between former members now not on speaking terms.  The family divorce was played out by my favourite band separating and going their own ways.  Or rather, by Lennon and McCartney being actually divorced.  The great song-writing team was over.

McCartney

McCartney’s first solo offering, an acoustic collection which gets better with the passing years was entitled simply McCartney and released in 1970. Lennon had already explored a great deal of strange musical territory with Yoko Ono on the LPs Unfinished Music : Two Virgins and Life With The Lions (1968) and The Wedding Album (1969) all released while The Beatles were still together.  They’re almost 100% unlistenable, being more avant-garde than thou in a quite deliberate way, but to be fair, both John and Yoko were already experimentalists and these three albums mark their courtship and blossoming love.  In an unlistenable way for everyone else.

Unfinished Music : Two Virgins (1968)

Unfinished Music : Life With The Lions (1968)

The Wedding Album (1969)

All three albums dabbled unselfconsciously (?) in avant-garde experimental sounds, tape-loops, baby miscarriage heartbeats and their own voices.  Not many people listened more than once or twice.  It was the late 60s, everything to be abandoned, everything to play for.  Then in 1970 they released 2 Plastic Ono Band LPs – one each.

John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band (1970)

 The JohnLennon/Plastic Ono Band LP is a masterpiece pure and simple. It emanated from the primal scream therapy Lennon and Ono were doing in Los Angeles with Arthur Janov.  Songs about the death of The Beatles and howls of pain on subjects such as his mother and loneliness gave the album a huge depth and impact.  I listened to it at Simon’s house, but not then I don’t think.   A year or two later.  It wasn’t played on the radio or TV at all, apart from on a few late-night shows.

October 1969

But then music just wasn’t available in the same way as it is today.  Most music wasn’t played on the radio.  There was no internet, tapes, CDs, mp3s.  You’d have to be round someone’s house to hear it.  Vinyl.  So the gaps were filled – as always – by the singles.  Lennon’s first was an anguished snarl of pain about heroin addiction, Cold Turkey, which was rejected as a Beatles song and became his first solo single on the Beatles own record label Apple in October 1969.  It was followed by Power To The People and Instant Karma, big thumping sounds, exciting late 60s countercultural anthems with casts of thousands.

Bed Peace, Room 902, Amsterdam Hilton, March 25th – 31st 1969

Since meeting Yoko Ono, John had become an extremely active public person, from the mass-media wedding onwards, unafraid of making grandstanding statements and leading the pop culture into new political areas.  It was thrilling.  He was aware of his status and used it change the public discourse. The hippie dream was over, but Vietnam wasn’t.   John Lennon positioned himself clearly on the battlements as a counter-cultural leader.   As a result he was lampooned, vilified and undermined by political and cultural commentators, while becoming a hero to progressives and others.  This high-profile campaign culminated in the Green Card harassment of Lennon by President Nixon in 1972 who felt that Lennon’s high-profile activism could undermine his re-election campaign, and who issued deportation proceedings against Lennon that were only halted when Nixon himself was snared in the Watergate scandal.  But all that was to come.

In the early part of December 1971 the Christmas single Merry Xmas (War Is Over) was played on the radio – political but less punchy as a production, still anthemic, but totally anti-Vietnam.  Lennon was in his post-pop political pomp. Then came Imagine.

Tittenhurst Park 

The title track was written in John’s house Tittenhurst Park in Ascot, Surrey one morning in early 1971 on a white Steinway piano.  Inspiration was provided by a Yoko Ono poem from the collection called Grapefruit published in 1964.  The poem was called Cloud Piece :

“Imagine the clouds dripping, dig a hole in your garden to put them in.”

Words that were later placed on the LP’s back cover.   That summer at a jam in New York, John asked George Harrison if he wanted to play on the next record and George agreed.

Voorman, Harrison, Lennon, Ono 1971

 Klaus Voorman, John’s old friend from Hamburg who’d designed the Revolver LP cover was drafted in on bass guitar (Paul’s instrument) and Nicky Hopkins from Apple label band Badfinger played piano.  Session man Alan White played drums.  The first few tracks were recorded at Tittenhurst in June 1971 then the whole kit, caboodle and shebang was moved to the Record Plant in New York City in July and other session players joined such as King Curtis on saxophone (see my Pop Life #128).

Lennon & Spector at The Record Plant 1971

Phil Spector co-produced with John and Yoko, adding sugar in the shape of violins, cellos and violas as he had with The Long And Winding Road a year earlier on the Let It Be album, much to McCartney’s irritation.  Lennon had no such problems with Spector’s strings and described the song Imagine on one occasion as a political statement sugar-coated “so that conservatives like Paul would swallow it“.

The McCartneys had issued the LP Ram in May 1971, billed as Paul and Linda McCartney.  It is as good a record as Paul ever made.  On the cover he wrestles with a bighorn sheep of some kind.  A postcard inside the Imagine LP had picture of Lennon with a pig.

 There was a song too, called How Do You Sleep? with lacerating lyrics :

“the only thing you did was Yesterday,  and now you’re gone you’re just Another Day”

referencing Paul’s brilliant single which didn’t appear on the Ram LP.

1971

 This McCartney/Lennon/Ram/Imagine dialectic dominated 1971 and the bad feeling set the stereotype of the two in the public mind forever : Paul the doe-eyed soppy balladeer and John the working class hero rocker.  People took sides, as people do in divorces.  Loyalty is expected from friends and balanced love for both is punished.   The tragedy of separation.  The archetypes are of course nonsense – Paul wrote and played Helter Skelter, the rockiest birth-of-metal-moment in the Beatles’ catalogue, while Lennon soft side was never far away as evidenced by Love on the Plastic Ono Band LP or Jealous Guy on Imagine.  But England in particular loved Lennon and spurned McCartney.  I loved them both, always did, always will.  I despise the anti-McCartney camp because musically they are simply wrong.  But the anti-Lennon camp would have its day with this very song.

Imagine is a ballad of protest.  It is anti-religion, anti-nationalism, anti-war, anti-ownership and anti-greed.  It sees everything that there is to see, and imagines how life could be without them.  Simple, effective, powerful.  It stands head and shoulders above most of John Lennon’s songwriting and remains his best-selling song.  It seems incredible that serious writers could turn on a song like this – but popularity can be a critical curse, and Imagine is a huge song which went around the world and back again.  It could have been written by Paul and people would have found it sappy.  Eventually they did – after a wave of love for the song, the strange taste of the British groover found that, incredibly, Imagine was actually a stupid song, groaning under the weight of its own pretension.  Elvis Costello wrote, in the lyrics to The Other Side Of Summer :

“Was it a millionaire who wrote ‘imagine no possessions’ ?”

Well, actually Declan, yes, it was.  What do you want a millionaire to write?  Imagine more possessions ?  It’s a cheap shot, but one which was encouraged by the pop media in the years following its release and thus the sheer success and popularity of Lennon’s worldwide anthem was curdled, serially disrespected and sneered at by people who should have known better.   The song became sacred, and sacred cows must be transgressed if you are a permanent teenager.  People accuse Lennon of writing teenage lyrics – “5th form dirge” is a common-enough drop of disdain.  But the misunderstanding is deep.  What the song describes will never happen.  The song knows this.  It is a funeral march for a dream.

The rest of the album has its moments too – How is a beautiful delicate melody, It’s So Hard is classic rocker Lennon with echo vocals that would soon become ubiquitous, Oh Yoko a beautiful bouncing pop love song, the classic Jealous Guy which dated from the Rishikesh era and nearly ended up on The White Album, the angry diatribes of Give Me Some Truth and How Do You Sleep?, the simple beauty of the McCartney-esque Oh My Love…  John sounds relaxed and comfortable, playing his music with his friends, in love with Yoko, always present.  It’s not my favourite Lennon LP, but that’s neither here nor there.  It’s among his best moments for sure.   And – It was a landmark moment in my young life, a piece of treasure which I treasured and played incessantly.  We listened to it together downstairs late that Christmas afternoon in 1971, all present approved, then I took it up to the bedroom Dansette record player and heard it a couple more times – this was also the first Christmas when I spent some private time away from the family in my room and it was acceptable.  It felt like John was speaking to me personally as I lay on my bed listening to his voice.

The Dick Cavett Show 1971

Paul and John never did sing or write together again.  Although apparently they jammed together in 1974 before further estrangement the tapes from that session have never been released, if indeed there are any.  They had brought out the best in each other for an entire decade and changed the world together.  The inspiration of those years carried them through the even longer time spent apart.   Time heals, and brings closure to even the bitterest divorce camps, but tragically Lennon was gunned down outside his New York apartment on December 8th 1980 before any further healing could occur between the two of them.  His unreleased guide vocals for Real Love and Free As A Bird were backed by Paul, George and Ringo and produced by Jeff Lynne as the last two Beatles’ singles in 1995 when Anthology, the official Beatles bootleg collection finally came out.

The dream is over, what can I say ?  The dream is over, yesterday

John Lennon – ‘God’ 1970

My Pop Life #128 : A Whiter Shade Of Pale : King Curtis

A Whiter Shade Of Pale   –   King Curtis

1986 Wardour Street W1.  A basement screening room in Soho, Central London, which serves as the centre of the British Film Industry – in other words : A small group of overwhelmingly decent men and women in smallish offices talking on the telephone, often to each other.  Of course we have Pinewood and Shepperton Studios out on the M25, but this is our Hollywood:

De Lane Lea on Dean St.  Palace Pictures used to be in Wardour Mews off D’Arblay Street, near Fish where I used to get my haircut.  Working Title.   Mike Leigh’s office is in Greek Street.  The Groucho Club.  Soho House.  Century.  Blacks.  The Sound Studios.  The Edit Suites.  The Distributor’s offices.  Old Compton Street.  Marshall Street.   Meard Street.  Frith Street.  Lexington Street.  Berwick Street.  Soho Square.   The Dog and Duck.   The Coach and Horses.  The French House.  Kettners.  Ronnie Scott’s.  Bar Italia.   Oxford Circus tube.  Shaftesbury Avenue.  Lunch in Chinatown if you fancy.  A small tight and dedicated community squashed into the narrow lanes next to prostitutes walk-ups, strip clubs, pubs, bars and gin joints.   And more recently : chichi hotels and Japanese restaurants as the seedy down-at-heel glamour of the area turns into another monied area of the capital of the world’s capital.  Oh well.  Everything changes right ?

The British Film Industry has been described as a cottage industry, as a few people on the phone, as punching above its weight, as a contradiction in terms.  I’ve worked with many of these dedicated and frankly faintly insane people over the years.  It’s been my honour to have done so.  To make a film in the United Kingdom you need to be more than a little mad.  It takes years of hopeless and often unrewarded effort to get the money, the group of people, the script, the whole thing to work, and often the  punishment is a sniffy review by a critic who prefers the latest Hollywood offering to your carefully nurtured baby, your precious flower on which you have spent weeks, months, years, lunches, breakfasts, dinners, blood, sweat, tears, rages and sleepless nights to bring to the general public.   Only to have it shat on.  And for you to come back for more.  It’s like a drug and we can’t get enough.

 

On this particular day, this auspicious day, one of the better days, it was exciting to be rolling up at 2pm to an underground screening room in a hallowed Soho with a handful of actors : Richard Griffiths, Richard E. Grant, and Paul McGann and a director, Bruce Robinson, a producer Paul Heller, a composer David Dundas and one or two other faces for the first showing of Withnail and I, a film we’d all worked on 6 months earlier in 1986.   I was excited, nervous, worried, hopeful and frankly thrilled to bits.  I hadn’t done that many films at that point.   In fact aside from The Hit, in which I scarcely spoke, this was my first film.  I was almost 30 years old, done a bit of TV and walked off The Bill because I wanted to do films.  This had been the first one that turned up.  It had been a blast to make.  Here I am now sat next to lovely Richard Griffiths in the second row of the tiny theatre and the lights go down.  Only friends in here.

The first image on the screen is Paul McGann looking utterly wasted, fading drugs seeping through his pores as he smokes a roll-up. He wears John Lennon glasses and his hair is wavy.   A kind of pained exhausted beauty.  And as he sits and smokes we hear King Curtis playing that saxophone cover version of A Whiter Shade Of Pale, the huge Procol Harum hit single from 1967.  I’d never heard it before.  The saxophone seemed to be be sweating and feeling queasy and unsteady on its feet and then it found its purpose again and magnificently reaffirmed its point before spinning into a personal journey of emptiness and beauty that was so clearly a live version played by a person who was solid gone.  I mean crazy.

I enjoyed the film.  I though Paul and Richard were fantastic.  I laughed.  I loved them.  Then I came on, wearing shades and holding a fucking saveloy.  I was speaking    s  o      s  l  o  w  l  y     that I cringed inside with embarrassment.  All that lovely vibe that Richard and Paul had built up to that point had been thrown away – I was so totally off the pace it was like I was in a different film altogether.  Excruciating.  Rich Griffiths next to me patted my leg with enthusiasm :  “Marvellous dear boy, marvellous“he whispered.  I looked at him quickly in alarm.  “I’m talking too fucking slowly” I hissed at him.  “Nonsense dear boy, wonderful” he replied and we shut up to concentrate on the next scene.

Richard Griffiths in Withnail 

There were other musical highlights that afternoon, but all involving songs I already knew really well.  I loved the movie.  It was the one I had read in my flat in the Archway Road 18 months earlier.  Funny, well-written, and sad.  I though everyone was great except me.  It was a reaction that would come back to haunt me on a regular basis every few years, most recently in Bristol in early 2014 when Paul and I attended a Comedy Festival screening of Withnail and were interviewed on the stage afterwards by Phil Jupitus.  I made the mistake of watching the film again, and once again fell into the pit of finding myself wanting.  I have enjoyed my own performance on one or two occasions, and I still enjoy doing ‘the voice’, although I have rationed its professional use.  But I will never watch it again I suspect.

We retired to a bar afterwards and I found that Richard Grant’s reaction had been even stronger than mine – I believe he vomited and subsequently vowed to never watch one of his own performances ever again.  We enjoyed each other’s acting however and Bruce was happy and the mood was bright and happy so we drank some drinks (Richard drank non-alcoholic ones) and cheers’d ourselves and clinked and drank some more and went home glowing and happy.

The rest was a slow burn to infamy.  Both Richard and myself slowly came to terms with the fact that we were wrong, and that our performances were actually, like the entire film, pitch-perfect.

King Curtis had the kind of career as a saxophone player that I could only dream of.  When, at the age of 27, I was considering whether to be a professional saxophone player or an actor, I tried to imagine what a successful horn player’s life would be like.  At best I could imagine being a good session player, doing a solo on a Pink Floyd LP or Listen To What The Man Said, maybe being in a pop band for a few years like Madness or UB40, shagging loads of birds, taking drugs, becoming unpleasant and sad by the time I was 40 or disappearing into the jazz world and becoming a brilliant elusive junkie.  Curtis was the king of the instrument all right, starting as a jazzman with Lionel Hampton and others before making his mark in the pop world from The Coaster’s Yakety Yak, to John Lennon’s It’s So Hard,   LaVern Baker’s I Cried A Tear, Clyde McPhatter’s A Lover’s Question and co-writing Reminiscing with Buddy Holly.

King Curtis, Percy Sledge, unknown, Jimi Hendrix

In the mid-sixties he played in a soul band with Jimi Hendrix on guitar backing Percy Sledge, Wilson Pickett and  Cornell Dupree.  He also had his own band The Kingpins who opened for the Beatles at Shea Stadium in 1965 and cut sides for Atlantic Records including the hits Memphis Soul Stew, Games People Play and Ode To Billy Joe before opening for and arranging  Aretha Franklin at the Fillmore West which became two live albums (one by Aretha, one by King Curtis) and from which A Whiter Shade Of Pale is taken.  Much loved by the Rock Establishment – Duane Allman, Eric Clapton, Lennon and others, he was murdered in an altercation with junkies outside his apartment in New York five months after this concert.

On the DVD for Withnail & I (which Paul McGann and I did a commentary on for the special edition) I make a spurious claim, now crystallised for all eternity, that Curtis died on the night of the Fillmore West gig, just after recording the emotional genius of Whiter Shade Of Pale.  Apologies.  I can be wrong tha knows…

In the end the art of film-making hopes for a similar end result to the musician – to affect the audience.  To move you in mysterious or obvious ways.  Language is often a blunt tool, but in this opening sequence to the film that changed my life, there are no words, either on screen or in the sobbing song which accompanies it.  A man of quintessential loquacious eloquence like writer and director – conductor – Bruce Robinson knew when to let the music and the actor do the work.

My Pop Life #101 : Tired Of Being Alone – Al Green

This painting is called ‘Lichtenstein in the Sky With Diamonds’

and it is by Andrew McAttee

with kind permission

*

Tired Of Being Alone   –   Al Green

…so tired of on my own…

1971.  The year of sentience.  The year of awakening.  When every sweet note, every bass line, every guitar lick, every vocal harmony, every crunchy cymbal and sweeping organ chord-change melted into my ear for all eternity.   Every time I would hear these songs as I grew older, they would leap out of the speakers and caress my heart.   Sometimes I would remember the moment, the feeling, the teenage yearning, but often I would just be inside the music.   I know every small hesitation of these songs because I was fully available to them as they appeared in 1971.  They are magic incarnate and will always be so.  They are inside me.

I was at middle school, Lewes Priory.   Mountfield Road.   I distinctly remember the Chapel  – it was actually a church in between Middle and Upper School.  With an organ, pews, altar, the works.   It was used for music and worship.   I didn’t like “music” at school because Mr Richards had metaphorically pissed all over the record I brought into his lesson one day – and that’s for another post I think.   It was also 1971 though.   I liked pop radio and Top Of The Pops.   It’s difficult to overstate the huge impression TOTP made on all of our lives, accompanied by the possibly more important Pick Of The Pops chart rundown from 5 to 7pm every Sunday evening, a non-religious gathering of the family around the radio to hear Alan Freeman tell us whether our favourites had gone up or down the charts.   Critical, basic, essential moments.

The first time I saw Al Green on Top Of The Pops he was singing Tired Of Being Alone.  Just him, no band.  It was completely astonishing.  He was wearing some stretch top and had a small afro haircut.   And he sang this song as if his entire life depended upon it.   I didn’t know it at the time, but I would now mark this moment as my introduction to soul music.   Yes I’d seen The Temptations,  Smokey Robinson, The Four Tops, Diana Ross & The Supremes on the TV, but I can’t remember Otis Redding at all, or Jackie Wilson, or Sam Cooke, or James Brown.   I remember them on the radio – but not TV.  Having seen them since then I’m pretty sure I would have remembered them ?

Why did it have this effect on me ?  Well, I think the vast percentage of the reason must reside inside Al Green himself.   As a performer he really is second to none, and always has been.  This cannot and will not be the only Al Green post I write because I simply have too many stories spread over almost all of my life in relation to Al Green – The Reverend Al Green as he became known.  I have seen him live at least ten times, visited his church in Memphis and own all of his LPs.   I followed him through the gospel phase and then back to pop again.  He is technically a supreme singer. But the technique is the least of it.   His voice is powerful and delicate, male and female, hugely expressive, a thing of rare beauty and subtlety.   A gift.   All of which is present on this first single.  Watching him sing it – (live ?) – on TOTP was like a revelation, like a vision of something.

After one minute 44 seconds we’ve had the song, two choruses with their syncopated horn stabs, and then he starts to break it down, the music starts to vamp, Al starts to improvise, to express himself, to wonder…   I don’t think I’d ever seen that in a pop performance before, that whole section where he folds his arms and goes mmmmmm, it was simply remarkable.    It was an education.   It was soul music.

The other thing that struck me from that seminal TOTP moment was how delicate he looked – small, wiry, dynamic, he reminded me of Desmond Dekker both physically and how he moved his mouth around the words as if they were alive.   Which they were.  And perhaps, as I project back in retrospect, this was the first (I mean the second) moment that I really saw a black person, live, in close up, for an extended period of time.  He wasn’t the first of course, I’d seen Dionne Warwick, Diana Ross and others too (Desmond Dekker you fool) , but perhaps his sound and appearance was blacker than any of those others.  It wasn’t felt or experienced like that I’m sure but I’m trying to grasp something subconscious working here, something I noticed but didn’t really recognise yet.

And maybe the song just expresses a huge simple human truth.  Aren’t we all tired of being alone ?  Maybe parents surrounded by children dream of being alone, but what for ?  Peace and quiet is over-rated.  I’ve been sitting here in Prague now for two months working on Legends, and it is simply the most unsocial group of people I have ever worked with, all for different reasons, some have their families here, Sean Bean stays in mainly, the others have their own runnings.   It’s just how it goes sometimes in the wacky world of showbiz.   I cherish time alone, and read a lot, write this, and so on and so forth, but underneath all that, yes, I am tired of being alone.   Luckily Jenny is coming out in two weeks.   And Paul after that sometime.    I’m quite a social animal au fin du jour.   Which is why I have ended up hanging out with The Musketeers – here for seven months on series three for the BBC – and we all meet in the James Joyce pub, two blocks away from the InterContinental, if we want some social time.  Guinness on tap.   Food.   Convivial.   Bit of Al Green on the jukebox.

When this song was released in August 1971 I already knew what loneliness was all about.  As I wrote in My Pop Life 84 – All Along The Watchtower and My Pop Life #56 – Morning Has Broken, we had been split up, separated as a family for nine long months while we waited for someone, somewhere to house us.   Eventually a council house on a new-build estate in Hailsham was offered and we moved in together in the early spring of 1971.   Our lives together in Hailsham were, in my memory, almost utter turmoil, with frequent visits from doctors, a cupboard full of pills for depression and Paul and I becoming more ungovernable as we hit puberty and grew physically larger, causing the weapons used to beat us with to get larger in response.  But of course there were moments of repose, of laughter, of peace, of conviviality too.  I’ve blotted most of this section of my life out.  My memories are very very selective.  But I clearly remember seeing Al Green on Top Of The Pops one Thursday evening.  And that is a good thing.

Check out his microphone technique on this wonderful archive footage from 1972:

the original single, with backing vocals :