Seize the Day Page 6

  As Eddie Floyd once sang, ‘Things Get Better’, and he was right. Thank goodness for Eddie. Actually, come I think of it, I sang backing vocals with him for Paul Young’s Q-Tips at Bristol University. There was a period where I broadcast my show from a different university each week. The idea behind those shows was that I did my radio show, followed by a live set from such artists as the Tourists, the Photos, the Lambrettas and Nine Below Zero. The Bristol night was memorable for not only sharing a mic with the man who sang ‘Knock on Wood’, but also the terrible news that Led Zeppelin’s drummer, John Bonham, had died. The seasonal show featured Slade and was storming along at a rate of Wolverhampton (or whatever the Uni was called at the time) knots towards the inevitable Christmas finale when Noddy Holder announced a special guest that was going to sing ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’ with them. I’m not quite sure who I was expecting, but I wasn’t expecting it to be me. Well, this would be a moment, then. Sadly not. A chord was struck, the power went and the place was in darkness. My small but heartfelt groan of disappointment was drowned by the vocal lament of hundreds of equally disappointed West Midlands students, probably scarred for life by this musical coitus interruptus. How could the god of music, ‘Mr Apollo’, of whom the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band once sang, be so cruel? Would the chance ever come again? For those folk, like Dave Hill and Don Powell, only reading this book for the Slade bits, fast forward to 1991 and then again to 2013, when at last I got to join the band on stage to sing one of the country’s favourite Christmas songs.

  In complete contrast to the first debacle representing the country’s number one station, hosting The Year of the Child was a pretty smooth ride. The UN had proclaimed 1979 the International Year of the Child and this show formed part of the celebrations. It was organised by Major Michael Parker, now Major Sir Michael Parker, although I can’t remotely lay claim to the fact that my hosting the event helped steer a knighthood in his direction. With many military tattoos and the Silver Jubilee under his belt and Charles and Diana’s wedding yet to come, he was at the helm of this great occasion, which included some 10,000 young people from around the world, in a torchlight procession down The Mall. Hundreds more, technically known as ‘the Choir’, were squashed into the forecourt of Buckingham Palace, flaming torches in one hand and words in the other. I was hosting the event from a specially erected platform on Sir Aston Webb’s 1911 Victoria Memorial in front of Buckingham Palace, the façade of which he’d also redesigned in 1913. Do not for one moment imagine that this is mere architectural posturing. There is a point to it. Admiralty Arch was his too, incidentally. For many years I would go out with his great-niece, Alison Jenkins, and later become godfather to her delightful boys, Milo and Rawdon. The great news for architectural historians is that Aston Webb will re-appear, albeit briefly, a little later on. Anyway, on The Mall I kept the crowds entertained and abreast of the order of events, before announcing HM The Queen and HRH Prince Charles as they appeared on the balcony through the pall of smoke rising from hundreds of flaming torches. I introduced Cliff Richard, who was down to sing a few carols and whip the crowd into a seasonal frenzy. After a few songs he graciously invited me to come and join him at the microphone. I wondered how many artists, in that situation, being filmed, with footage going around the world and in the presence of the Queen and the Prince of Wales, would be happy to share the moment. We were invited into the Palace after the event and waited for HM to arrive. Cliff whispered, ‘I’ll bet she brings the corgis.’ Was he a seer and clairvoyant as well as the purveyor of hit songs? Clearly. In came the Welsh canine vanguard right on cue. We talked with HM about the magnitude of the event and the children losing time during the singing.

  ‘Oh,’ said Her Majesty, rather abashed, ‘I’m afraid that was my fault. I was wafting the smoke away and all the children thought I was keeping time and followed me rather than the band.’

  As well as Cliff, there was a liberal helping of rock royalty in my own corner of Surrey. I’d grown up in Walton-on-Thames and Weybridge so it was home territory and I bought a house there. An increasing number of rock stars and the like began to move into the area. I’d known Kenwood, John Lennon’s house in Weybridge, through my early teenage years as there were often parties there before it became the home of a Beatle. The big mock-Tudor mansion had been owned by Ken Wood, the founder of the eponymous food mixer company, and his kids had parties there. With Lennon in residence it seemed ideal to try for an article for our Brooklands College rag magazine, the establishment where I’d attempted to balance studying English Literature, Art and British Constitution with guitar, girlfriends, parties and tennis. The crest on the door read Lennon Hibernia, which appeared friendly enough, but he had a rather tetchy Welsh chauffeur who was pretty scary and very security conscious. John very kindly gave me a large Chelsea boot which had been sitting in his garden. Very decent, I thought, although it was probably a major obstacle for anyone mowing the lawn. The 7-foot-high boot had been used as a prop in A Hard Day’s Night, in the scene where Paul McCartney shrank, to make him look small. We hired a lorry and towed it around the town a few times before it came to rest near the old wall of death at Brooklands race track and eventually fell apart. Nobody seemed too bothered, but these days we’d have been looking at selling it to a Japanese collector for £100,000. I still have a photograph of it.

  Lennon eventually sold the house to a local car dealer, Billy Atkins. When we were kids Billy could be seen on his second-hand car lot complete with camel-hair coat, flogging old motors. How he came to buy Kenwood and several other houses in St George’s Hill, heaven knows, best not to ask, but he was more than generous in throwing open his doors to the regulars of the Flint Gate pub and letting the locals hang out at the house where many classic Beatle hits had been written. ‘Bring your guitar,’ he’d say to me, ‘and go and sit in the Blue Room, you’ll get some inspiration there for your songwriting.’

  The room had no furniture, so I had to sit on the floor, and it was empty except for a pair of old leather sandals that had escaped the famous division of property between John and Cynthia. Maybe I tried too hard, maybe I was expecting too much, but I only wrote one complete song there. All the same, while it might not have been as good as Lennon’s songs that came out of that room, I still have the demo I made of ‘London Town’ and it stands up pretty well. I also worked there on a song called ‘Cinema Saint’, which I felt was perfect for David Bowie. Of course he never heard it, but I was writing highly diverse material with very out-of-the-ordinary lyrics. No trite ‘I love her, she loves me’ lines from this lad. The demo is probably where it belongs, on an old cassette in a box somewhere, and I think I can say without fear of contradiction that ‘London Town’ was the least successful song to escape from that room.

  Billy was a bit of a villain, there was no doubt of that. There was something of the underworld about him. Everybody knew him around Weybridge, where he’d commandeer a desk in somebody’s office or shop, use the phone and order tea, and nobody would dare ask him to leave. He was rather Fagin-esque, sending boys to the shops on petty pilfering raids. He was probably the love-child of Fagin and Walter Mitty. He could be hellishly embarrassing. If you were in a restaurant with friends and Billy came in he’d shout ‘Don’t pretend that you don’t know me’ in a loud voice that silenced the place. The premise locally was ‘Keep on the right side of him’.

  The embarrassment was multiplied to the power of ten when he turned up at Radio One after my show one morning in December 1980. ‘Come with me,’ he insisted. He was a dab hand at ‘insisting’.

  Rather than make a scene, I followed him down Regent Street, asking several times what he wanted. My blood ran slightly cold. It was rumoured that he knew some, shall we say, shady characters.

  ‘Here we are … down here.’

  I cautiously walked behind him down a flight of rubbish-strewn steps. He knocked on a door, shouted his name and was admitted. Unfortunately so was I. So this was where the ‘shady characters’ hung
out. The place froze as I walked in. Everybody stopped whatever they’d been doing and turned to statues … all staring in my direction.

  ‘It’s all right, he’s with me.’

  For the first time I was pleased I was.

  ‘Drink?’

  I shook my head.

  The conversation was wide of anything I might have been expecting, not that I’m sure what that might have been. ‘I’ve sold Kenwood and I want you to have the door.’

  Everyone had to pass through the door to get to the house. I knew it well; the names of all four Beatles and many other interesting people were carved on it. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you’re a music history aficionado, you’ve spent time at the house and I know you have more respect than to flog it to make some easy money.’ He was right and I was grateful, but there seemed an unnatural sense of urgency about his pressing this extraordinary gift on me. ‘It’s sitting in the Reardons’ garage next door. Go round tomorrow morning and pick it up. Promise me now. Tomorrow morning. Don’t leave it any later.’

  I promised him, thanked him and scuttled back into the overworld.

  I lay in bed the next morning and reflected on the strange encounter and his absolute insistence that I should collect the door first thing. ‘Waste no time,’ he’d said. It’d be fun to have Lennon’s door. Maybe I could make a coffee table out of it or hang it on a wall. I switched on the radio. John Lennon was dead. Shot. I barely heard the details. But if I didn’t collect that door immediately I knew that I never would. Then my father happened to call round about something. I don’t think he’d ever seen me cry. He did that morning but had no idea what to do, or what to say to me. Not his fault, of course, but he stood there looking very uncomfortable.

  What’s more, that night I had to put together and present a Radio One special programme about John Lennon. It was a tough one. Emotions were running high across the country. There were a few personal stories I was able to tell, both about Kenwood and Tittenhurst Park, John’s house in Ascot, having gone to the latter the same year that the ‘Imagine’ video was filmed there, 1971. As well as the grand piano featured in the video, there was an upright piano at the house with a small plaque fixed to it listing five or six songs that had been written on it. I may be wrong, but I seem to remember ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ and ‘For the Benefit of Mr Kite’ being two of them.

  The coincidence, Billy’s insistence, the sudden and furtive meeting and the timing have made me think about it many times. Did he know something? Was there any involvement? He was, after all, obsessed with Lennon, bought his house, and the word ‘imagine’ ran through his conversation like lettering through a stick of rock.

  A few years later Julian Lennon and his girlfriend came down to my home in Holmbury St Mary, near Dorking. He talked quite extensively about his childhood at Kenwood, even expressing an interest in buying it if it ever came onto the market. Acting upon Jesus’ suggestion to ‘render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s’ I gave the door to Julian. His mother, Cynthia, later told me that he’d hung it by four chains over his bed. As a footnote, Billy Atkins sold Kenwood to songwriter Bill Martin, the man responsible for such songs as ‘Puppet on a String’ and ‘Congratulations’ and Billy told this story against himself. Just about to complete on the deal, Billy turned up at Bill’s office, pointed a sawn-off shotgun at him and demanded £25,000 in cash before he’d sign the contract. Billy played the tough guy, but he met his match with Bill, who took the gun from him, threw it out of the window and told him to leave … Glaswegian style! (i.e. forcibly and just possibly, although who am I to say, with some persuasive use of the forehead.) He left. Well, you would.

  At the end of 1980 Radio One did a week out in Birmingham, with John Peel and me holding the fort at Broadcasting House. I was just handing over to John, when a call came through asking me to race up to Birmingham as Dave Lee Travis, who’d been doing the breakfast show for a couple of years by that time, was under the weather. It was already ten o’clock and I had nothing except the clothes I was wearing – no doubt some iconic fashion items that became dated three weeks later. Nevertheless I headed off, but only got as far as St John’s Wood before my car plunged into a large unlit hole in the road where it wheezed like a newly discovered Mesolithic creature and gave up the ghost. I ran back to Broadcasting House, phoned the AA and tried to call for a car.

  ‘Don’t do that, it’s ridiculously expensive,’ said John. ‘I’ll take you up there.’

  What a decent fellow. By the time we left it was past midnight and we didn’t pull into Birmingham until sometime after two o’clock. That colourful wiz(z)ard Roy Wood was at the hotel when we arrived, so there were late-night drinks all round and just two hours’ sleep until being prised out of bed to present the breakfast show. It was a pattern I’d get used to.

  I took over the breakfast show during the first week of 1981, but it wasn’t all accolades and bouquets. I was and always have been a music lover and as such have always been passionate about it, so what was more natural in my new slot than to keep playing the artists that I’d played in the evening? If music’s good it’s good, at any time of day. Obviously I used a modicum of common sense in tandem with what was perceived as my maverick attitude, but was pulled up about it week after week. DLT had been relatively disco orientated, but I was the guy who’d cobbled together the first punk top twenty, four years earlier, at least if I could find enough records to fill twenty places, and I was keen to incorporate new musical genres. I was strongly advised to knuckle down and play the more conventional music that people were used to at breakfast or possibly lose the gig, but I soldiered on with the groups and artists that I liked, and gradually they became more acceptable as ‘daytime’ music for the station.

  It was a bumpy few months. By playing what was deemed to be ‘night-time music’ I was made to feel as though I was practising the dark arts.

  CHAPTER 3

  ON MY RADIO

  I LOVED EVERY MINUTE of my stint on the breakfast show. Those five shows a week are enough for some, but as well as two weekly TV shows, (Pop Quiz and Saturday Superstore) and Top of the Pops every few weeks, I hosted the review programme Round Table (aka Singled Out) and for periods Chart Quiz and Pop of the Form. Singled Out threw up so many giants of music on a weekly basis there is simply no room for all the stories. One rather odd show, though, was with Pamela Stephenson and Brian Setzer from the Stray Cats. While Brian and I were deep in conversation dissecting some new release, Pamela slipped under the table and undid our trousers. How we struggled. ‘Stop,’ I drawled slowly, without much conviction. The ratings did an about-turn as people tuned in to the audio romp. After another edition of the show, Phil Everly told me that he was staying in Walton-on-Thames that night, a mile down the road from my house. I was having a few people round for supper and invited him to join us for a drink later. We were still eating and had a good atmosphere going when the doorbell rang. A collective sigh went up. Was this the twentieth-century equivalent of Coleridge’s ‘person from Porlock’, come to ruin the moment? No it wasn’t, it was Phil.

  To say the company was awestruck would be a slight understatement. But soon everyone re-gained their composure. My Radio One colleague Paul Burnett talked Americana with him, and with Shakin’ Stevens and producer Stuart Colman there as well, a few songs were sung. When the Everly Brothers played Hammersmith, Phil invited me backstage after the gig. Getting there proved trickier than I had expected. People were being turned away, denied access, and the place was crawling with security guys. Now it goes without saying that the Everlys are unique, inspirational and much revered and I could have understood such behaviour had it been 1960, but it was 1984 and Duran Duran were the outfit that needed protecting. I was eventually ushered to a small dressing room that I assumed was Phil’s. I knocked, and sure enough he came to the door. ‘Hey, Mike, come on in. This is my brother Don.’

  Wow! One hundred per cent of the Everlys … in the same room. But there were t
wo more guys there. One of them approached me and extended his hand. ‘Hello, Mike, I’m George.’ Phenomenally unassuming, but I do know a Beatle when I see one, or in this case two, for Ringo was also there. I re-did the maths: 100 per cent of the Everlys and 50 per cent of the Beatles. No wonder security was tight. I seem to remember Don giving George his black Gibson (possibly a J200) as a present that evening. I spent an amazing half-hour in that room and felt incredibly privileged to be invited. Apart from being musical legends, George Harrison and Phil Everly were real gentlemen who had so much more to give.

  As well as the opportunity of working with the musical greats, the breakfast show brought with it a fantastic, and possibly unwarranted, clutch of national trophies down the years, with such accolades as a brace of Sonys and several Sun Awards and Smash Hits Awards being thrust into my grateful hands at various times. If I ever felt too comfortable, Doreen Davies, our head of music, was always at hand with a delightful early-morning outside broadcast at a time of year when the weather wasn’t particularly clement. Oh, and the town or city almost always, for some reason way beyond my comprehension, began with the letter B.

  Bromley for example. I was a milkman in Bromley. In fact I was a milkman wherever I ended up. In Barnsley the sleet drove sideways through the float as I was given my instructions by the roundsman, who I rather gathered would have preferred to have done it alone and in half the time. A tough, gnarled finger pointed and shouted a number over the prevailing wind as I, gloveless and hopelessly underdressed, trotted with yet another two pints of gold top to yet another unwelcoming doorstep. By golly, this lactic sergeant major, with a voice like a rough-hewn Michael Parkinson, wasn’t making it easy. I was also expected to make my frozen lips move at the end of every song and say something moderately intelligent. I’m not sure that I did. Was there any heart in this fourth-generation roundsman I was assisting? Any shred of humanity? Did he never stop for refreshment?