Authors: Mike Read
Matchbox, who’d had already taken five songs into the top thirty in a two-year span, covered one of my songs in 1981. I’d already demoed ‘24 Hours’ but hadn’t really thought about placing it, when their producer, Pete Collins, asked if I had a song as they were one short for the new album,
Flying Colours
. What is now the polo bar
at the Langham Hilton was an old BBC recording studio, and that’s where Matchbox put the track down. It turned out well enough to be included on the album, was also a single in Germany and has notched up a few thousand hits on YouTube.
By 1982 I’d put the Rock-olas together, named after the jukebox of course, with the aforementioned Keith West, Barry Gibson and Paul Foss. We performed on the Radio One Roadshows, gigged occasionally, appeared at Oxford and Cambridge balls and even supported the Beach Boys at Alexandra Palace. No, I have to be honest we topped the bill. Seriously. Well, to be even more honest, they wanted to get away early and asked if we minded them going on first. ‘As long as we can say we topped the bill and the Beach Boys supported us.’ Bruce Johnston and Mike Love said that was fine by them. We were thrilled, forgetting the reality that we’d actually have to follow one of the world’s most successful groups. We had Tony Rivers in the band with us that night, whose Beach Boy harmonies are as good as the real thing, so when the group left the stage after their encore and the crowd were shouting for
Sloop John B
., we decided to open with it. I can’t remember whose mad idea it was but we launched into it unrehearsed and unplanned, only to see Bruce and Mike peering back onto the stage with incredulous looks on their faces. How we had the audacity I don’t know. It was like topping the bill over the Beatles and opening with ‘She Loves You’. The Rock-olas also played a lot of tennis and released three singles. At one point when Pete Waterman and I were looking for our second single, quite late one night I had a sudden thought. I called Pete: ‘“Let’s Dance”, the old Chris Montez number.’ Pete’s reply was short and to the point. ‘Print the silvers!’ Despite appearances on
Saturday Superstore
(even though I fronted it, it wasn’t a shoe-in) and
Crackerjack
, there were no silver discs. There weren’t even bronze discs. The third single under the Rock-olas banner was what I considered a fair re-working of Tommy Roe’s ‘Dizzy’, which as far as I recall included Ric Parnell’s brother as part of the session crew. At around the same time, and I’m not sure
whose idea it was, Paul Burnett and Dave Lee Travis, who were with me at Radio One, Radio Luxembourg’s Tony Prince and I released a novelty version of the old Four Lads song ‘Standing on the Corner’, with most of the music industry appearing in the video. A bit of fun but, not surprisingly, no chart position.
In 1984 I was back in RG Jones with Stuart Colman at the helm. A necessarily hard taskmaster in the studio, Stuart was responsible for Shakin’ Stevens’s string of ’80s hits and Cliff Richard’s version of ‘Livin’ Doll’ with the Young Ones. We put down four tracks with Cliff’s backing vocal team, led by the hugely talented Tony Rivers, and ‘Tell Me I’m Wrong’ was released in the spring. Rather than coming up with yet another weird and wonderful name, some bright spark suggested that I used my own. Nick Wilson, one of our producers on
Saturday Superstore
, directed the video, which we shot in a car scrapyard near Wembley and which featured fork lift trucks, old car parts and fenders (guitar meets car). Written by John David, who’d penned classics for Cliff, Status Quo and Alvin Stardust, the song almost made it, storming (my own word) into the chart at eighty-something, and sitting above Duran Duran and Michael Jackson. OK, they were probably on the way down after a blistering run in the higher echelons and I doubt whether it affected Michael’s career one jot, but it was a ‘moment’. Actually that’s all it was. The following week it had disappeared from the listings. Hey ho, there was always the follow-up, ‘Promised Land’. Admittedly, a much-covered song, but it wasn’t simply a case of saying, ‘let’s do the Chuck Berry number again,’ as dozens of artists had before us. In the studio we’d fallen to talking about the romance of American place names and how they worked so well in songs. New York, San Francisco, Chicago, New Orleans … there was a great ring to them, while British names like Basingstoke, Hounslow, East Grinstead and Bognor Regis somehow just fell short of the mark. Never one to shirk my own challenge, I beetled off to the local garage, bought a road atlas and re-wrote Chuck’s ‘Promised Land’ with English place names. I needed
a good long road that would give me as many options as Route 66, and went for the 284-mile A30, running from London to Land’s End. I figured that I could make places sound moderately attractive by qualifying them, as in ‘Memphis, Tennessee’ or ‘Houston, Texas’, and so used ‘Basingstoke, Hampshire’. I also pepped up the town’s romantic image by having it ‘bathed in the morning sun’. Unlikely, I know, but I needed the rhyme. I even attempted to make Hounslow and Staines sound thrilling. I was on firmer ground by the time I’d sang my way to the West Country and more American-sounding places like Indian Queens and Launceston.
The potential catchment area for sales was enormous. Surely folk would want a record with the name of their town or village writ large, with the bonus that it was a picture disc, bearing the features of Bert Weedon. On top of that, the song was promoted through another Nick Wilson video, featuring my old MG TF, the red-bereted Captain Sensible, the oldest surviving garage in Surrey and a Cajun knees-up at a local pub. What more can a chap do to please the record buyers? Or maybe we were just pleasing ourselves. We probably didn’t please MCA Records as there was no third single.
Back on the comedy road, the Legacy label released ‘Hello Ronnie, Hello Gorbi’, a spoof of Alan Sherman’s ‘Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah’, for Comic Relief, which consisted of a two-way between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. Paul Burnett was Ronnie and I was Gorbi, but it was too much of a last-minute idea to pick up plays or make a dent in the listings. Let’s not dismiss, though, some of the convoluted rhymes such as ‘I met Maggie at Brize Norton, | She wants a long chat, I want a short ’un.’ Eat your heart out, Oscar Hammerstein II.
One of the singles I released was a version of John D. Loudermilk’s ‘Language of Love’. A good writer is John, with songs such as ‘Angela Jones’, ‘Ebony Eyes’, ‘Indian Reservation’, ‘Sittin’ in the Balcony’ and dozens of others, giving him a phenomenal catalogue. When he came to play the Country Music Show at Wembley, I met him through my
old friend Trisha Walker, who’d moved to Nashville years earlier. He asked me to stop by his hotel and pick a little (see how effortlessly and naturally I’ve slipped into the American phrasing) so I stopped and I picked … well, strummed. I must have slipped through the chord sequences with enough dash and elan to impress him, as he asked me to join him and his wife on stage to perform ‘Language of Love’ at Wembley. My new buddy and I played and sang, while his wife performed the song in Indian sign language. Somewhere there is a photograph of us on stage with me dressed in a decidedly un-country pullover and John sat on a canvas stool looking for all the world like he was casting for speckled trout. It turned out that he liked my version of the song; it’s always good to get the ‘thumbs up’ for a cover from the guy that wrote it.
All went quiet for a few years on the recording front, but then in 1987 I got involved in a charity single. It had been conceived by
The Sun
in the wake of the Zeebrugge cross-Channel ferry disaster, with their journalist Garry Bushell securing Stock, Aitken and Waterman for the project. I’d had to cope with the news live on
Saturday Superstore
over a three-hour period, a situation that I was expected to deal with back then. Children’s TV wouldn’t be anywhere near a story like that now; it would be in the hands of rolling news. One-hundred and ninety-three passengers and crew had been lost when the
Herald of Free Enterprise
went down and
The Sun
, having promoted cheap tickets for what turned out to be a fateful day, spearheaded the fund-raising campaign.
Over a three-day period in March, a cavalry charge of artists invaded the PWL Studios in Borough, south-east London, to record a new version of Paul McCartney’s song ‘Let It Be’. Paul sang the basic track, with contributions from the likes of Kate Bush, Boy George, Kim Wilde, Nik Kershaw, Mark Knopfler, Gary Moore and Edwin Starr. I was in the choir of backing vocalists alongside such luminaries as Rick Astley, The Drifters, Suzi Quatro, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Bonnie Tyler, Go West, the Alarm and Errol Brown.
The song went to number one in the UK, Norway and Switzerland and made the top ten in several other countries. I even presented an outside broadcast for Radio One, from a ship in the English Channel, with surviving crew members from the
Herald of Free Enterprise
going back to sea for the first time since the disaster.
Anyone who owns a horse will tell you that their feed and vets’ bills far outweigh any scraps of money they might pick up in a selling plate at Towcester. I’d been a co-owner in a quartet of the four-legged fiends that sapped my bank balance for a while. From the mid ’80s, Lambourn trainer Charlie Nelson selected our animals at the Doncaster Sales and brought them to peak condition. John Reid, who rode almost two thousand winners, steered our most successful horse, Sir Rufus to several victories, although every nag we had ate more than it won, as you’d expect. That earlier investment was now about to pay dividends. Not on the racetrack, but in the chart. Cast your mind back to Valerie Edge, who inspired my first single, ‘February’s Child’. In 1991 she and her then husband, Peter, invited me and Alison Jenkins, my girlfriend at the time, to a lunch party, which included Simon and Rosie May. Over lunch Valerie brought up my racing period and the moderate success of the final nag, Sir Rufus (some three or four wins as I recall), was discussed. Simon expressed complete surprise at my not inconsiderable knowledge of the more basic points of the Sport of Kings and probed deeper than one normally would over the gooseberry fool. I guessed that he might be hankering after squandering a few of the BBC postal orders he received for writing the
EastEnders
theme, or indeed many others, on a horse. Not so. He’d been asked to look at writing the theme for a new TV series that focused on the loves and lives of a racing community. Would I like to write it with him? Yes please. I thought the song, ‘More to Life’, might suit Cliff Richard, so I approached him with the idea. He liked the sound of it, loved the demo and a few months later we were back at RG Jones laying the track down, rounding the session off with rather smashing Indian cuisine and a
few glasses (oh, all right, bottles) of wine in Wimbledon Village. Cliff performed it on
Top of the Pops
, wearing a shirt that rather cleverly resembled jockey’s silks. We were over the first, as they say in jump race parlance, and possibly on our way to being first past the post. The run-in, though, wasn’t the simple task we had imagined. There were other runners jostling us as we headed towards the top twenty. Cliff’s usual team at EMI (the owners) would have dealt with it via their promotion team (the trainers), but because it was a TV theme, it was put with a different part of the company which just assumed that because it was Cliff (the jockey), and his last single, ‘Saviour’s Day’, had been a number one, there was no work to be done. In tandem with that simplistic and assumptive approach, EMI had a major company gathering somewhere outside London the week that the song cruised effortlessly to number twenty-three, meaning that no one was around and at a crucial time, the single was left to its own devices. Despite that, we got news through that the sales had doubled and that a top ten place looked inevitable. However, as Martin Luther King said, in far more important circumstances, ‘change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability’. In fact the wheels rolled the other way and the record slipped a little. However, whenever I feel a wee bit disappointed about a chart position, I project myself back to my schooldays and the unthinkable prospect of somebody like Cliff Richard performing my songs and charting them. If anyone had suggested that to me at the time, I’d have bitten their hand off. ‘More to Life’ has turned up on a couple of Cliff’s albums, including the re-released
Small Corners
.
Trainer
was sold to many other countries, but failed to last beyond a couple of series. Directed by Gerry Glaister, it was filmed in the village of Compton, near Newbury, and featured Mark Greenstreet, Susannah York and David McCallum and was transmitted on a Sunday night. The second series was relegated to a midweek slot as they laboured to spice up the plots. One of these brought in singer Kym Mazelle as the ‘love interest’ for a couple of episodes, for which they also needed
a song. Simon and I wrote ‘Woman of the World’ for Kym, a number which gave the woman the role normally associated with the man. Lovely girl, great voice, infectious laugh and by her own admission, seriously well endowed. We all wondered how, in the episode where she and Mark Greenstreet ‘got to grips with each other’, he managed to avoid any flicker of emotion as Kym loomed over him on the bed, displaying her more than ample assets. Again we recorded at RG Jones and mention must be made of the timeless, youthful and omnipresent Gerry Kitchingham, one of the great engineers. After the passing of old RG himself, Gerry
was
the studio. Kym arrived, Kym went. Where, no one knew – the ladies’? the shops? McDonald’s? – but surely she’d be back soon. No, we discovered that she’d gone to New York. We waited. Allegedly she left a taxi with the meter running at Heathrow while she did a quick round trip to the big apple. Now that’s rock & roll, and one heck of a bill for EMI. We were dealt another blow as EMI were set to release her from her contract just about the time that they put out the single. Maybe it was the excessive taxi fares.
Leaving
Trainer
on a high note, Simon and I did finally get into the winner’s enclosure to pick up the Television and Radio Industries Club Theme of the Year award, a TRIC as they’re known. During our speech Simon delighted the industry gathered at the Grosvenor House Hotel by thanking director Gerry Glaister for providing him with his three children. Was there no end to Gerry’s talents? Of course Simon had meant that through working a lot with Gerry he’d been able to support his tribe and educate them. I had a lovely note from the chairman of the BBC, Marmaduke Hussey: ‘On behalf of the BBC I would like to congratulate you on the
Trainer
signature tune winning TV Theme Music of the Year at yesterday’s TRIC Awards ceremony. This is immensely well deserved and a tonic to us all at the BBC.’ What a kind thought. However, having given the BBC a tonic, it was at this time that I was wooed to Capital Radio by Richard Park, as the word was that the station was going to be awarded the national commercial licence and he wanted me to ‘open the batting’.