Authors: Mike Read
He was as good as his word and remained encouraging at odd times over the next few years to a hungry, eager songwriter with nothing to offer in return. He was convinced I’d make it. In the early ’80s, when we were booking guests for
Pop Quiz
, then pulling in ten million viewers every Saturday evening, I suggested Barry. He was wonderfully emotional. ‘I remember when you came and knocked on my door with your songs and now I’m on your TV show.’ Yes, there were a few tears. Why not? Even in 2013 I had him as a guest on my
BBC radio show and we walked together for the best part of a day, broadcasting along the Thames. Our industry is a wonderful family.
Common sense might dictate that, following a modicum of media exposure (as it wasn’t called then), we might have stuck with the same name for our follow-up single, admittedly two years later. Or, if we were going to change our name, we might have gone in an entirely different direction. In fact we did neither of those things, rather indecisively changing it to Just Plain Jones. We may well have discussed Just Plain Brown for a third release. This way of doing things could have taken some little time. By the time we got to our millionth Russian release as Just Plain Zvorykin the Earth would have been a cold, virtually lifeless desert inhabited by baby amoebae asking silly questions like ‘Who
were
the Beatles?’
My old Walton pal Dave Ballantyne became a member of Just Plain Jones, with Bill Heath and myself hanging on in there as well. I’m not sure who else played on the track, ‘Crazy, Crazy’, but the publicity shot was simply of Dave, me and bass player Barney Tomes. We got even less publicity on that song. As I said, local bands are fluid, organic and sometimes socially difficult animals. Who comes? Who goes? Who plays what? Who falls out with who? In the end, those who are dedicated and mean to see it through come hell and high water do so, and those for whom it was a short but fun ride drift back to their more sensible jobs. Ballantyne and I slid rather effortlessly into a situation with the experienced Dave Mindel from Noel Gay publishing, putting together a non-performing group initially called Saturday. The idea was that the three of us individually wrote enough songs for an album and we’d record it at Sarm Studios in London. I’m struggling to recall all my songs, but ‘If She’s a Day’ and ‘Love Is Over’ were two of them, while Dave B. came up some pretty diverse stuff, one being a clever anti-Johnny Cash parody called ‘12 Bore Blues’. Another had no title, so Mindel, imagining Ballantyne to be a Lothario, said, ‘Oh just call it after any bird you know.’ So Dave called it ‘Chaffinch’.
From this diverse and unreleased album (no surprises there) came the single ‘If (Would It Turn Out Wrong)’, with Saturday becoming Esprit de Corps. Tony Blackburn made the track his record of the week on Radio One. What foresight and good taste he had … oh, and still has of course – there may be future singles. With Junior Campbell pulling out of that week’s
Top of the Pops
, the vacancy was quickly filled by … yes, TB’s record of the week. This was it! The third single and we were there. Well, not quite. Mindel and Ballantyne along with musicians Barney Tomes and Bill Pitt performed, while I sat disconsolate in the dressing room. I wasn’t a member of the Musicians’ Union. It hadn’t even crossed my mind. It did then. It crossed, criss-crossed and double-crossed. This was the big moment, the one that would lead to a string of hits and tours of Britain and the States, and I was missing it. If I’m completely honest there was also an unspoken undercurrent of hostility, as happens in groups. With the impatience and intolerance of guitar-toting youth come the differences of opinion over song policy and musical direction. As it turned out, there was no UK tour, no US tour and no hit. The
Top of the Pops
performance hadn’t cut it. Maybe it wasn’t that, maybe the masses had been deterred from buying it because, being on the Jam label, there was a large pot of jam on the record sleeve, or maybe they knew somehow that it would in the distant future appear on the
Rubble
compilation series and they could buy it then. I consoled myself with imagining that my presence would have made a difference. Rubbish, of course, but it was a much-needed temporary boost as I bemoaned the loss of my only chance to be on
Top of the Pops,
or so it seemed at the time.
As I had since college, I continued to perform live at as many venues as would book me. OK, the pubs and tennis clubs of Surrey may not have been the Roundhouse or the Marquee, but they paid for tins of beans and sausages and Vesta curries. To be fair, there was the odd London gig, including one at the Pocock Arms in the Caledonian Road and another at a pub in Shepherd’s Bush that was
subsequently pulled down. As far as I could see, there was no connection. Sometimes the gigs were solo, sometimes as a duo. My most frequent partner was Big Stan (Colin Standring), although I did many with ex-Gracious frontman Sandy Davis or Dave Ballantyne and the occasional one with Rod Roach. In 1973 I got my first cover, when Henry Hadaway’s Satril label released Jon Lukas singing a song I’d written the year before, ‘Summer Sun’. Not a hit, but what a thrill. My version was quite gentle, and he gave it a bit more oomph.
My next recordings came via Sandy’s home studio and somehow found their way into the hands of David Bryce, who worked closely with Cliff Richard. David played them to Cliff’s manager, Peter Gormley, who invited me to the organisation’s office at Harley House. The walls were lined with gold discs by Cliff, the Shadows, Olivia Newton-John, the New Seekers and John Rowles; these guys had really shifted some records. Surely I was motoring now. Peter informed me that he probably had a deal for me with EMI after playing the demos to Roy Featherstone, one of their top executives. Peter put me with Tony Cole, who’d written great songs for both Cliff and the New Seekers, but I found him rather scary. Older, wiser, bearded, more talented, at least that’s what he implied, and, I gathered, not overly happy about being given a new boy to work with. I found him so intimidating that I didn’t really give my best in the studio, despite being given Cliff’s musicians to back me. The confidence has a habit of slipping away when the producer and engineer switch the intercom off and talk between themselves. You interpret every shake of the head and grimace as being a negative and imagine (with good reason) they’re despairing of having to dig deep into your well of meagre talent to salvage something half-decent. Of course if you’re a great singer, you rise above it with the arrogance of youth. But it was becoming clear that I was a better writer than a singer.
The three songs that emerged from the session at RG Jones studio were ‘Have You Seen Your Daughter Mrs Jones’, ‘Beatles Lullaby’ and ‘Girls Were Made to Be Loved’. Sadly ‘Captain Noah’s Floating
Zoo’, a song I felt had a lot of potential, didn’t make the cut, so I only have a rather thin-sounding demo of it, recorded on cassette on a boat at Maidenhead an hour after I wrote it. Although I remained part of the extended family at Peter Gormley’s office, the deal with EMI fell through for various reasons, thankfully nothing to do with the performance or the songs. ‘Mrs Jones’ came out as a single on the Rainbow label in 1975, complete with a talkie bit which has made me (and others) wince ever since. Bad image too. We came up with the name Micky Manchester and they put me in a rather ghastly striped jacket. Not destined for the chart then? I still find the B-side, ‘Chamberlain Said’, quite listenable. It was a musical representation of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s return to Heston Aerodrome after his 1938 meeting with Hitler in Munich and his subsequent assurance to the people of Britain. I wrote of a yet unchanged Britain, with blacksmiths and district nurses still content pottering about in herbaceous borders and playing cricket! It was backed primarily by bass and mandolin. A little heavier and it would have been prog rock, a little lighter and it would have been a poem. For some obscure reason ‘Mrs Jones’ escaped for a second time in 1975, this time on the Satril label. Were no lessons learned from the first release? ‘Chamberlain Said’ popped up again as the B-side of ‘Are You Ready’, a raucous little number that took about ten minutes to write, if ‘write’ is not too elevated a word for it. The UK clearly wasn’t ready for this 7-inch chunk of fun, recorded in Sandy Davis’s studio with more than a dozen fairly well-lubricated mates on sound effects and backing vocals, all vying to get their individual voices heard over the cacophony of sound. It was wisely released in Belgium on the Biac label. I suppose I could pretend it went to number one, as I doubt whether you’d find a Belgian that would argue the point, but it didn’t. It didn’t get to number anything. No taste. That was my first and last Belgian release. The single was re-released on Satril after I joined Radio Luxembourg. The cover shot for the sleeve was taken outside the old Roxy in London in a vague
and ill-conceived idea to make me look punkish. I didn’t, I looked like Nick Drake with a mild perm. The B-side this time was ‘London Town’, the song I’d written in the Blue Room in John Lennon’s old house, Kenwood.
When I joined Radio One late in 1978, the station was about to change its wavelength from 247 metres to 275 and 285, and to that end, a single was being recorded as part of the awareness drive. My very first job at Radio One was to be part of the group of station DJs that were adding their voices to a song co-written by Peter Powell and Showaddywaddy, who provided the backing and the better-sounding vocals. ‘New Wave Band’ by Jock Swon & the Meters (you couldn’t make it up … although somebody must have done) was released in November on the BEEB label to a wave of apathy. I don’t remember it being played on the station, but maybe it was. Showaddywaddy were probably press-ganged into it, but it was fun to be a part of, and it was a little piece of history. It was the only ‘New Wave Band,’ that was emphatically not New Wave.
By the time the next single came out I had been at Radio One for six months and was presenting the evening programme before John Peel came on air. I had a batch of new songs that I’d played to friends and thought a couple of them quite commercial, but they all went for one I hadn’t considered, ‘High Rise’. The song was inspired by the block of flats in Walton in which Sham 69’s Jimmy Pursey lived. He was on the eighth, and top, storey. Keith West of ‘Excerpt from a Teenage Opera’ and ‘Tomorrow’ fame had once lived in another of the flats and Martin Briley from Mandrake Paddle Steamer and Greenslade had lived in yet another. The block was on the site of the old Nettlefold Studios, one of the UK’s pioneering film studios, where they shot the
Adventures of Robin Hood
TV series with Richard Greene. It was also where I fell 60 feet out of a tree, when the area was heavily wooded, miraculously grabbing the last branch before I would have hit the ground at a speed from which it would have been tricky to get up. Backed by the Stadium Dogs, I went back to RG
Jones to record ‘High Rise’ under the name of the Trainspotters, and it was picked up by Arista, who released it as a single in May 1979. Produced by Colin Giffin, who as it happens had been at Woking Grammar School a few years before me, the single was incredibly well received and even got Radio One airplay, until the powers that be thought it a bit close to home and it was quietly dropped. Though not before I’d made personalised jingles from the backing track for many of the DJs. Even though they all used them, it was mine that seemed to catch on and find a life of its own. I was in Leeds doing a show from the university when I first heard someone singing it in the street. I was actually shocked. They sang the whole thing, unwieldy as it was. This was no snappy two-second soundbite; it was a gruelling marathon that almost rivalled Wagner’s Ring cycle: ‘Mike Read, Mike Read, 275 and 285, Mike Read, Mike Read, National Radio One.’
I have no idea why that jingle should have caught on and ended up being sung around the world by UK travellers. The postcards, letters and, later, faxes poured in with vivid, dramatic and often embarrassing descriptions of where the jingle had been performed: at the North Pole, at the South Pole, on the top of Snowdon, in a submarine, at Buckingham Palace, at the world’s southernmost radio station, swimming with dolphins, on the back of an elephant, on top of the Berlin Wall, with the Red Arrows and thousands more. Extraordinary. Not only was the jingle well travelled globally, but it also travelled through time and is still sung (and even tweeted) to me with amazing regularity to this day.
The Trainspotters’ follow-up single at the tail end of 1979 was virtually written on the day of the recording. I’d been doing a Radio One gig in Barnstaple the night before and only realised that I only had one song when the Stadium Dogs van overtook me on the M4 en route to RG Jones. I drove off the motorway, sat in the car with the guitar for thirty minutes, wrote ‘Unfaithful’ and arrived at the studio with a few minutes to spare. The focus of the session rather slipped away,
as I had two delightful assistant producers who turned up add their input to that of producer Colin Giffin, namely Ian Page from Secret Affair and Jimmy Pursey. It was fun, we laughed, we threw crazy ideas around and everyone chipped in, but there seemed to be little cohesion. I still have no idea how to categorise that single. It appears to have a light ska feel with punk overtones but no devotee of either of those genres would have given it a home. In hindsight, the B-side, ‘Hiring the Hall’, was much tougher, more direct and should have been the A-side. Arista, bless them, even went for a third single, but why on earth I changed the group name to the Ghosts rather than sticking with the Trainspotters brand I have no idea, apart from the fact that we were entering a new decade. Pete Waterman had been very taken with ‘High Rise’, and came in to work with me on this third single, ‘My Town’, which probably leaned a little towards the Jam. It seemed pretty commercial to us, and really should have been the Trainspotters’ third single from a completist point of view. Close again, but still no cigar.
Later in 1980 I veered off in an odd direction, when the Hot Rock label released a fun single I’d recorded full of Elvis Presley song titles, ‘Big as Memphis’, which came out under the wickedly witty name of the Memphis Tenor Cs. The following year saw yet another single release, yet another direction and yet another failure to trouble the accountants. ‘Teardrops Fall like Rain’ had been the B-side of the Crickets’ ‘My Little Girl’, both good songs from the early ’60s, but really having no relevance in 1981. The only bonus was the writer, Jerry Allison, telling me that he loved our version of it. He may or may not have actually liked it, but he was Buddy Holly’s drummer, that’s what he said and it was good enough for me!