Seize the Day (21 page)

The man behind the Shoreline and the Caribbean Hotel was the incredible and inspirational Eric St John Foti, a man who has truly lived life to the full and whose middle names should have been
carpe diem
. He is still in full flow well into his eighties, with projects, flying lessons and an inexhaustible supply of ideas and energy. He offered me a few pounds a week, which for holiday money was fine, as all the food (such as it was) was free, as were the music, the incredible camaraderie and the experience. I’d have paid him for all that. Circa 2004 my pal Eddie Grant, who played at the Shoreline with his group the Equals was so delighted to know that Eric was alive and well and living in Norfolk that he insisted we caught a train up there to see him. A great reunion. Eric was and still is a driving force that brought people together and got things done. I still go to Eric’s various anniverseries, which seem unlikely to end.

Every teenager working at the place had to participate in the menial and day-to-day jobs necessary to keep the place going, but at night I was put on stage with my twelve-string guitar to play between the groups. In principle it sounds like a hot ticket. In reality the floor emptied when the heaving, sweating crowd rushed to get a drink, the sound of the Who, the Action or the Untamed still ringing in their ears, as I tottered on in my Cuban-heel boots and corduroy jacket to play a handful of Donovan- and Dylan-style songs to the few remaining souls who simply weren’t in a fit state to make it as far as the Coke bar. My job, it seemed, was to leave again as soon as the crowd returned for the second half. The manager of the Untamed, Ken Chaplin, promised me an audition with top record producer Shel Talmy, who’d worked his magic on the Who and the Kinks as well as Chaplin’s band, but despite sitting in the reception of Regent Sound in Denmark Street in my painted jeans and clutching my twelve-string Hoyer for the
whole of an afternoon, the legend never emerged from the studio and I eventually went home. There was talk of joining the Untamed, but A-levels rather obviously won out. I was also pushed in the direction of another manager who was making a name for himself, Ken Pitt. I remember playing for him in his office in Curzon Street, but despite making promising noises, nothing came of it. Looking back, I should have pushed a little more, been more assertive and projected some attitude, but I was probably too polite.

The Shoreline was an education. It was where I grew up musically. Until then I’d bought fairly mainstream pop records. I loved them then and still do, but at Bognor I discovered other music that hadn’t been on the radar. One of my jobs was to buy new records for the club, which meant heading off to the local record shop, Tansley and Cooke, once a week with a fistful of dollars to spend. The music world opened up. I bought tracks on Sue, Tamla Motown, Bluebeat, Stax and many other labels, returning with the likes of Billy Preston, Don Covay, Prince Buster, Otis Redding, the Temptations, Justin Hines and the Skatalites. The club scene was so different to the radio. I even went out on a limb and bought Frank Zappa’s early Mothers of Invention single ‘It Can’t Happen Here’. It was weird, you couldn’t dance to it and the milkman would have had a hell of a job whistling it, but it broadened my horizons.

I wrote a few songs at the Shoreline, including the Beach-Boy-esque ‘Shoreline Surfin’’ and the pop-orientated ‘Find Her’, in collaboration with Dave Hooper, much-respected singer with top south coast outfit Dave and the Diamonds. I was also challenged to write a song by a couple of holidaying Cadet Corps lads from Lancashire about Colne, their home town. I haven’t played it since, but I can still remember sizeable chunks of it:

The TV show
Whole Scene Going
, came to the Shoreline to film at that time and I borrowed a blue polka-dot tab-collar shirt from one of the cadets to wear for my scene. They filmed me playing my twelve-string Hoyer and singing ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone’. I desperately wanted to play one of my own songs, or at least something with a hint of credibility, but for them it was gentle guy plus twelve-string guitar equals folk song. Oh well.

Some summer holidays or odd gap months in the school or college holidays, I’d attempt to earn some cash as most kids do. One of my most exhilarating weeks in a school holiday was spent at the old Cheeseborough Pond cosmetics factory in Victoria Road, Acton which had stood on the site since 1923, although the Cheeseborough chaps didn’t take over the Pond people until 1956. The remit was to spend the morning collecting every faulty bottle in the factory and in the afternoon smash them to pieces against a wall in the yard. Had I been an avant garde painter, I could have sold that wall five times over. A schoolboy’s dream. I also used to escape to Lancashire and spend some time with my maternal grandparents. On one occasion I saw an advertisement in the
Manchester Evening News
for a group wanting a rhythm guitarist/vocalist. The Impact were based in Stockport, the other side of Manchester, but who cared about distance? If I needed to take four buses I would. I auditioned at the house of their leader, Graham, with their outgoing rhythm guitarist present, and yes, I had the gig if I wanted it. Indeed I did. We had a kind of uniform; I seem to recall matching shirts at least. The most prestigious venue we played was the Oasis, a very cool Manchester club where all the top groups from the Beatles down had appeared. The highlight of the Oasis night for me was playing The Temptations’ ‘Since I Lost My Baby’, which I’d bought in Bognor, the day after hearing the Action do it live on stage at the Shoreline Club.

One night the Impact didn’t collect me for a gig. There were no mobiles then, so I stood in the street for an hour waiting for a van that never arrived. I received a call later saying the van had broken down. I was disappointed, but these things happen. Well, they do, but not twice. I didn’t realise that I was on the way out. Now I’d be on it like a flash. I’d sense something wasn’t right. Their old guitarist had decided that he had made a mistake in leaving and wanted to return to the fold. It was a no-win situation for me; they were mates and had history. The third time the van ‘broke down’, I actually did that trip involving four buses and made the gig. They clearly weren’t expecting me to turn up, but again, in my naivety, I failed to pick up on the half-whispered comments and merrily joined them on stage. I played with them one more time and only then did they have the courage to tell me, on dropping me off, that they were going to revert to the original line-up. I was devastated. Didn’t I fit in? Wasn’t I good enough? Did I look too different? Did I not have the right geographical credentials as a lad from Surrey? I didn’t know. Years later there would have been a shrug of the shoulders and I’d have moved on. My grandmother was livid and telephoned the new-old guitarist’s mother. Not one to hold back, she had a real go at her about her son’s attitude, how they’d let me down and why this was not the correct way to treat someone who’d been so dedicated. Looking back, I’m not sure that I put enough into it. I was possibly enjoying the kudos without paying attention to the musicianship. But it certainly knocked my confidence at a time when it needed boosting.

Probably the first half-decent records I made were with Amber, a name I liked from reading Kathleen Winsor’s
Forever Amber
at school. Having drafted a trio of very good musicians that I vaguely knew from the Bognor Regis area, Martin Bury, Dave Gibb and Alan Smith, we recorded three songs at RG Jones studio in Morden, near Wimbledon, ‘Time and Tide’, ‘Yellow and Red’ and ‘Shirley’. They still sound as if we meant it, especially ‘Yellow and Red’. In 1999 it appeared on the compilation album
The Story of Oak Records
, alongside songs by
groups such as the Mike Stuart Span, the Game, the Thyrds and the Bo Street Runners. The sleeve notes rather embarrassingly record, ‘“Yellow and Red” is chiefly notable for Read’s excellent guitar work … any resemblance to “Astronomy Domine” is entirely intentional…’ I played it entirely with an art deco perfume bottle. As one does. The vinyl album
From There to Uncertainty
was released on the Tenth Planet label at about the same time, and contained many of my very early songs including those recorded as Mic Read and Just Plain Smith as well as Amber.

Trying to push the group meant spending some time in London away from the tennis courts and parties of Surrey. Dave Gibb’s girlfriend allowed us to stay in her bedsitter in Notting Hill. As kids we thought little of there being five people in one room. Dave and his girlfriend had the bed, obviously, and we had the floor, awkwardly. Did we notice the discomfort, the cold, the aroma of socks, and the lack of food? Of course not, we were young. It didn’t matter. Food did arrive, but in an unusual manner. When the communal phone in the hall rang it was never for any of us Amber lads, it was always for Angie in flat three. We’d knock on the door and let the occupant know that she was wanted on the phone. The odd thing is that Angie was never in. We heard this mantra several times a day from a voice that we presumed belonged to her flat-mate. One night we gave voice to our thoughts.

‘How come the calls are all for Angie and not her flat-mate?’

‘You’re right. She’s the more popular of the two, but she’s never there.’

‘What’s the other one called?’

Gallic shrugs all round.

‘Anyone seen her?’

Several heads shook in unison.

‘Why doesn’t the other one get calls?’

‘Even weirder, why doesn’t the flat-mate ever take a message?’

Days later I fleetingly bumped into one of them on the stairs
and mentioned our bemusement
en passant
. Clearly in a rush, she shouted over her shoulder, ‘If you answer the phone again, could you just ask them to call back later?’ And she was gone. Which one it was, I was still unclear.

It was after the fleeting meeting over the bannister that the bags of food were discovered hanging from the handle of our door. We ate and asked no questions. Pre-occupied with life, we failed to link the food with the countless phone calls. I then encountered the same woman in more relaxed mood.

‘Is the food OK?’ she asked.

‘Oh, it’s from you. We wondered where it was coming from.’

‘Well, you’re answering the phone, aren’t you?’

‘When it rings, yes.’ Always the ready wit.

‘It’s payment for answering the phone.’

I had to ask. ‘We’re slightly perplexed as to why all the phone calls are for your flat-mate, who’s never there, and never for you, who’s always there.’

She smiled as an ancient guru looking upon an unworldly innocent would smile. Or at least how I imagined an ancient guru would smile in the circumstances. ‘I don’t share with anybody, Angie’s my professional name.’

I still didn’t get it. ‘So if you’re working you’re too busy to come to the phone?’

She thought I’d got it.

I hadn’t. ‘So what do you do?’

‘Well, I’m with a client. I can’t very well answer the phone, can I?’

My naivety marched on unabated. ‘Couldn’t you just leave the meeting for a minute?’

‘My “meetings” are in bed, luvvie … you know … with men.’

I got it. It took me a while, but I got it. When I passed the information on, we wondered whether we should take any more phone calls or any more food.

The Mad Bongo Player of Powis Terrace was another character
associated with the house. He would arrive at any time of day or night, come in, drink tea, tap his bongos and disappear off into the cauldron of Notting Hill. We never knew his name, his purpose or anything about him. We knew even less about the transvestite that tripped down the stairs in size twelve slingbacks and make-up that looked as though he’d fallen into a basket of overripe fruit. These folk simply didn’t exist in Weybridge.

Fed up with the cramped conditions, I often slept in the basement of a West Indian café called the Surfari Tent. Nights there, though, were often disturbed by the local steel band deciding on an impromptu session in the wee hours of the morning. Complain? Not me, I’m easy going and laid back, especially if the musicians were four or five mean-looking dudes from the Caribbean. ‘Rehearse away, boys,’ I’d say, ‘Sleep is nothing to a seasoned muso like me.’ It was safer operating from the stockbroker belt.

I said I owed a debt of gratitude to Barbara Andrews and I do. As well as the encouragement when I was a ‘tiny’, she now let me and the group live in her house, and rehearse in the ballroom. She even gave us much-needed singing lessons! Also it was her art deco perfume bottle that I used to achieve the ‘Syd Barrett–Pink Floyd psychedelic guitar sound’ on ‘Yellow and Red’, strangely raved about by record reviewers on assorted CD sleeves (see above). A very keen potential manager called Joe Nemeth appeared at the Old Meuse (for that was the name of the Andrews’ house) one afternoon, offering us the moon. Instead he took us to the local shop and urged us fill our baskets with food. We needed little urging. This guy was hot stuff. Back at the house he outlined his plans; pacing, expounding and postulating, he gave a speech to put Churchill to shame. Now a real player knows exactly when to quit. You’ve built up to your peak, hammered home the salient points and captivated your audience. At that point you depart like morning mist, leaving everyone open mouthed and bewitched. Joe Nemeth timed it to perfection. He turned on his heel, opened the door and walked straight into the
larder. He emerged with his face the colour of a beetroot, found the right door and departed, with our explosive laughter ringing in his ears. We never heard from him again.

Barbara was also indirectly responsible for my first single being released, ‘February’s Child’. I’m not giving any state secrets away when I reveal that my mother, Barbara and their friend Molly Edge liked a glass or two and when the mood took them (which it did quite often) they had a wee dram. From one of these sessions, which occasionally got a tad maudlin, the idea of introducing Molly’s daughter to Beryl’s son emerged. I have to say at this point that my mother wasn’t Beryl Reid
the
comedienne, she was Beryl Read,
a
comedienne, and coincidentally happened to be a passenger in a car with the other one when they had a minor road accident. My father wasn’t Les Reed the songwriter, but was the Les Read who played golf with Les Reed the songwriter. And of course, I was never in
EastEnders
claiming ‘Pat’ll be livid’, nor presenting
Runaround
and shouting such meaningful lines as ‘Wallop!’ Mike Reid and I did, however, appear together in one episode of
Through the Keyhole
, as some wag, possibly Ian Bolt, thought it would be jolly humorous to have Mike Read/Mike Reid as the answers to both parts of the show. Anyway, Barbara introduced me to Valerie Edge and we became boyfriend and girlfriend, although part of the deal appeared to involve Barbara playing teenage love songs to us on her piano in the ballroom and getting deliciously weepy while we sat there with suitably reflective expressions. From this was to come my first single release.