Seize the Day (25 page)

Late in 1991, I approached Frankie Howerd’s manager, Tessa Le Bars, with an idea for a cover of Right Said Fred’s ‘I’m Too Sexy’. I could see him delivering it in his own inimitable way. We had a meeting at his London house in Edwardes Square, so he could see how the project would work. It was getting dark by five o’clock as we put the final nuts and bolts together and in the gathering twilight Frankie shouted to Dennis, his partner and manager, ‘Switch the light on, it’s so gloomy in here.’ Dennis turned on an old standard lamp which illuminated Frankie but no one else. Imagining himself on stage, he said, ‘Oh, I’ll do at least an hour now.’

We recorded the song at Red Bus studios in Lisson Grove and during a lull I popped down to Church Street market to buy something for lunch. On the way back I spotted a bargain. Five pairs of gaily coloured boxer shorts for £5. Unbeatable value. Frankie couldn’t believe his eyes. ‘What are they?’ I explained the brief history of boxer shorts and he was captivated. In fact he was so enamoured that I had to go and buy another five pairs for him. At least I was part of his education. Rather splendidly, Right Said Fred let us have the original backing track and Frankie got the feel for the song and the doctored lyrics I’d written. I suggested he throw in the odd catchphrase. You know the kind of stuff, ‘Nay, nay and thrice nay’, ‘Titter ye not’ and the like.

‘No,’ he said, ‘you write it where you want it, and I’ll say it in those places.’ I told him I felt slightly fraudulent writing his personal lines. ‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘that’s the way I like to work.’ I still felt fraudulent. Sadly Frankie died not long after the recording, so we weren’t able to give him that last hit. Hitter ye not. We used a top British Frank Sinatra tribute act to sing the B-side, ‘I Did It Howerd’s Way’. I suspect the title might well have been more amusing than the song.

The following year I got a call from George Martin, asking me to perform on a new album. We had worked together before on a musical I had written based on the poems of John Betjeman, which
you can read all about in the
next chapter
. Anneka Rice had been asked on her TV show,
Challenge Anneka
, to put together an instant album to raise money for Tommy’s, a new maternal and foetal research charity based at St Thomas’ hospital in London. She called George and George called a few likely folk. Essentially a children’s album, it contained songs and poems, sung and read by a variety of artists, including Joanna Lumley, Phillip Schofield, Maureen Lipman, Pam Ayres, Nanette Newman and Emma Forbes. We recorded the album at Air London studios at Oxford Circus and George asked if I fancied doing ‘My Old Man’s A Dustman’, with Right Said Fred backing me. Of course. What a hoot. Move over, Lonnie Donegan. The album has recently appeared on iTunes, so the Fred boys and I are skiffling all over again and the charity is deservedly having a second bite of the cherry. After the recording was done I had a delightful thank-you letter from George Martin:

The same year, I was asked to write and record two children’s albums for Avon (yes, the door-to-door cosmetics company),
A World of Colour
and
On the Move
. I can’t for the life of me recall whether the titles were the briefs they gave me or my idea. Not that it really matters; they were fun to create and turned out extremely well, with George Martin’s right-hand man, Rod Edwards, and me laying down both albums in a very short space of time in a studio in Shepherd’s Bush. The songs on
A World of Colour
had titles such as ‘I’m a Frog’, ‘Rainbow’, ‘Balloons’, and ‘Paintbox’, while those on
On the Move
included ‘Toby the Toboggan’, ‘Chummy the Funny Car’ and ‘Postman’s Bike’. They were only meant to be for young people to have fun while they were learning, but
Record Collector
magazine later commented:

That’s kind of comforting to know.

Also in 1992 I had an idea for a song based on
Baywatch
. I wrote it, demoed it and approached Timmy Mallett, with the idea of him being the skinny guy on the beach who beats all the muscly guys to the girls, or something along those lines. The idea moved on and we ended up recording the old classic, ‘Hot, Hot, Hot’, which involved shooting a video in a Majorca-type resort and re-naming him. I juggled with naming him Costa del something, but decided on Del Costa. My girlfriend Alison and Dawn Andrews, Gary Barlow’s future wife, were the dancers and the result of the shoot was terrific, but it made a hole in my pocket that wasn’t compensated for by any great chart position or sales graph. The single pottered up the charts and was looking moderately healthy, but it staggered to a standstill outside the top seventy-five and refused to budge. What happened to that fan base from his number one, ‘Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini’? Timmy needn’t worry about his chart career, he’s actually a seriously good painter. History will re-assess him, relegating ‘Mallett’s Mallet’ and promoting Mallett’s palette.

‘Hot, Hot, Hot’ came out on Silhouette, the label I formed to circumnavigate the problem of always having to do deals with different labels. Great idea, but a financial drain when the buck stops with you. With independence comes responsibility.

The year 1992 was a great one for playing with highly unusual groups. One you’ll find in
Chapter 14
, but this one was a rock & roll
hierarchy gig. Well, apart from me. My old buddy Bert Weedon was King Rat that year and as we’d been sparring partners since I started in radio he asked me to bring my guitar to the annual ball. On the evening, someone kindly took it from me and put it backstage. ‘I’ll give you the nod,’ said Bert.

‘Nod for what? What are we playing?’

‘Oh, a twelve-bar maybe.’

Good enough for me. After something nameless and custard had followed the other massed ranks of culinary delights in a southerly direction, I received the nod. Replete and somewhat heavier than an hour earlier, I excused myself and winched the body from the table. Backstage it was dark. Very dark. I fumbled around among a mass of what I assumed were stagehands until I found my guitar. I staggered out onto the stage to meet Bert for our impromptu duet and was outraged to discover there were interlopers trying to get in on the act: George Harrison, Bruce Welch, Brian May, Lonnie Donegan, Joe Brown and Chas McDevitt. The gig extended to one elongated song, but what a wonderful five minutes. I hoped we might stay together and tour the country. An album or two maybe and then a series of US gigs? It turned out that they had their own bands. Well, they passed up a great opportunity. I still have the photograph, though. As Frank Sinatra once said, ‘They can’t take that away from me.’

As I left Radio One to join Capital Gold, I found myself represented on two chart albums simultaneously, Slade’s
Wall of Hits
and David Essex’s
His Greatest Hits
. It had been suggested at Radio One that I should make my mind up whether I wanted to be a songwriter or a broadcaster, but I’d shown it was perfectly possible to do both. Surely it’s a major plus if you live, breathe, play and write music as opposed to just doing the voice. Now, as even the most cursory glance at the Radio Six Music schedule confirms, they pull in rock stars to present programmes.

On re-visiting this period of my life, I’m frankly staggered that I had time for TV, radio, books, croquet, poetry and tennis. Being a
great tennis lover and avid player, when I was asked to front a tennis single in the spring of 1993, for release in time for Wimbledon, I pondered for perhaps a tenth of a second and agreed. They needed a fun band name for the doo-wop-flavoured song, so I came up with the not terribly inventive Don Wimble and the Aces. In the video for ‘Game, Set and Match’, featuring former British number one Annabel Croft and Des Lynam on backing vocals, I played a match at David Lloyd, Raynes Park with that rising star of the court, Cliff Richard. Plenty of posing, lots of tennis, great fun … but no hit. I’d masqueraded under many names so being Don Wimble for a fleeting moment was no real hardship. Aficionados of the game point to this video as the inspiration for our future greats Tim Henman, Greg Rusedski and Andy Murray. ‘Training, talent, stamina and mental strength are only a small part of it,’ they say. ‘The avant-garde armoury of shots displayed by Don Wimble and Cliff Richard were ground-breaking.’ At least, that’s how it plays out in my dreams.

That same year I wrote a couple of songs with a guy that I consider to have been one of the great and innovative songwriters of the ’60s, Geoff Goddard. ‘Johnny Remember Me’, ‘Wild Wind’, ‘Son This Is She’, ‘Just like Eddie’ and ‘Tribute to Buddy Holly’ were just a few of the seriously influential songs that poured from his pen. He was a shy, modest man who had studied at the Royal Academy of Music, but along with the legendary producer Joe Meek, he challenged the chart domination of the major record companies and won a decisive victory. We routined and later recorded ‘Flight 19’ and ‘Yesterday’s Heroes’ at Reading University, where he worked. As well as writing the songs together, Geoff and I corresponded as we honed them: ‘I have written in riffs and basic ideas for arrangement [for ‘Flight 19’] which I hope you may like’ and ‘Please find enclosed two copies of ‘‘Yesterday’s Heroes’’, which I have developed from our song “Do You Remember Me” … the vocal range is one and a half octaves, the same as “Johnny Remember Me”.’ We planned to write some more songs. While Geoff was waiting for the muse to strike, he wrote, ‘Not having
felt very creative lately. I have no new ideas at the moment but should inspiration return I’ll send a tape if that’s OK.’ Sadly Geoff died in 2000, but I was delighted to be invited to a red plaque unveiling at Reading University and a commemorative evening for him in 2013, along with two great singers who worked with Geoff, John Leyton and Mike Berry. John Leyton was keen to record the songs and even talked of me writing a musical around them, but it didn’t happen.

I pick up the guitar most days and write a song a week on average, the good ones I demo, the others I keep working on and sometimes there’s a bonus. A few weeks back a Matchbox singles collection landed on the mat and there was
24 Hours
. I also had the good fortune recently to be asked by Nigel Elderton at Peer-Southern Music to write English lyrics to an international hit made popular by Yves Montand. Written by Francis Lemarque,
A Paris
was full of so many notes that it was mathematical as well as lyrical, but enormous fun to work on.

I
’
VE ALWAYS LIKED
poetry, both reading it and writing it. As a child I often, in my mind, put words to what I thought were sympathetic tunes. Somewhere around the age of ten I discovered a book of handwritten poems by my mother. I had no idea that she’d written poetry, but it was atmospheric stuff and unlike my less than fair hand, at least it was decipherable. It wasn’t quite the immaculate copper-plate effected by my maternal grandmother, with her bank of Swan pens, but it trounced mine by a country mile.

When I started to set John Betjeman’s poetry to music, there was no plan. No rumbling strategy that had been brewing like an approaching storm. No Archimedes moment. I had a book of Betjeman’s poems and had been rolling ‘A Subaltern’s Love-Song’, also known as ‘Joan Hunter Dunn’, around in my head. A tune appeared and I liked it. It seemed natural and had a flow to it. A day later it was complete and I seamlessly moved on to another Betjeman poem, ‘Harrow-on-the-Hill’, closely followed by ‘The Fete Champetre’ and ‘Newest Bath Guide’. I was on a mission without knowing why I was doing it or where I was heading, at a time when I was up to my ears in TV, radio and personal appearances with hardly a spare moment.

Within a short space of time I had half a dozen songs with my music and Betjeman’s words but had no idea what to do with them. Step forward Charisma Records CEO Tony Stratton-Smith. Ever ready to promote Englishness and quirkiness through his label, Strat loved the whole idea and was up for putting out a six-track CD/LP. Thank goodness for inspirational characters like him in the industry. There are too few now, if any. When asked about a producer I decided to aim for the top and called George Martin. Our initial meeting was marvellous: we got on well and George visualised it immediately. He did some initial orchestrations and arrangements and we began putting down tracks at Air London, with George producing alongside Rod Edwards. After we’d done most of the tracks it became obvious that I wasn’t going to stop writing and that a full-length album was in the offing. George had to head off abroad to produce an album for Kenny Rogers and left Rod in charge of production. It worked very well. I kept writing, Rod and I kept producing, and we frequently hired the Rolling Stones’ mobile studio, which we parked in my drive at home. Afternoon tea, a little croquet, another song: it was an equable way of making an album.

On top of all that I was pitching songs from the album to various singers. Justin Hayward, who had once heard Betjeman reading at his local youth club, recorded ‘Tregardock’, Steve Harley sang ‘Harrow-on-the-Hill’, Annie Haslam did ‘Hunter Trials’ and Captain Sensible recorded ‘Parliament Hill Fields’. All those were done at my home, The Aldermoor, in Holmbury St Mary. I had to collect the Captain from Crawley railway station as he’d come by train from Sussex, where he pursued his love of rabbits, Jimi Hendrix and cricket. It was rush hour and I was a little late, but unconcerned, he was sitting in his trademark white shorts, shirt and red beret on the ground, with the crowds pouring round him, eating curry from an assortment of tin foil dishes spread around him. The rest of the album, mixing, production and vocals, was done at Mickie Most’s RAK studios in St John’s Wood. Mike Nocito (on the brink of finding fame with Johnny Hates
Jazz) engineered, while Mickie popped in now and again to make a salient point or sagacious observation. He was also the chap that went for the fish and chips! I think he’d really done it all. With dozens of classic hit singles and albums over the previous twenty years or more, he’d got the badge, the T-shirt, the mug and the hundreds of gold discs. He was now happy to take the lunch order, get on his motorbike and whizz off for half an hour, or watch Chelsea play at home.

I ended up singing two of the songs by default, backed vocally by Cantabile, as no ideal artist sprang to mind. Cantabile (now the London quartet) had been on both
Saturday Superstore
and Radio One many times, so I was acutely aware of their harmonies and humour. One of the songs in which they sang backing vocals, ‘A Subaltern’s Love Song’, was parodied with appalling scansion by
Tatler
, which imagined me changing Betjeman’s words to squeeze in lines like ‘super-hot-shot powerplay’. I suppose I was fair game.

Ralph Allwood, Precentor and Director of Music at Eton College, was enthusiastic about the Eton College Chapel choir recording ‘May Day Song for North Oxford’, but practicalities meant recording it at the school, which proved an onerous task in many ways. Setting the microphones for the right balance was an intricate and elaborate process and by the time that had been executed it was lunchtime. The organist had obviously enjoyed a cracking lunch and had a wee bit of a post-prandial struggle getting to grips with the mighty instrument. That was solvable with time and a strong coffee, but the Heathrow flight path was slightly beyond my control. There seemed to be a plane every five minutes or so. Even if we couldn’t hear it, the sound man’s semi-permanent wince gave away the problem. This is what sound men do, they wince. A passing bluebottle 100 yards distant … wince. A lorry reversing 2 miles away in Slough … wince. The Queen turning the sound up on the TV across the road for the 2.30 at Newmarket … wince. I’m not convinced these coves are that sensitive. I believe it’s a power game. ‘You may be the producer, mate, but
I’ll
tell you when you can record. I hold all the cards.’ With fortitude, determination,
strength of mind and sheer luck, we got the track ‘in the can’ as we music biz types say and it was a corker. Earlier in the decade we might have had David Cameron and Boris Johnson in the ranks of the choir on that track. A few years later the Princes William and Harry might have been giving forth on it.

With Ian McNabb from the Icicle Works, Alvin Stardust, Simon Bowman and Cantabile also on the album, the only unknown act was an outfit called the Students of Architecture. These guys had previously gone under the names England and the Rose and they were seriously talented. We recorded their track at Abbey Road and went through the usual routine when anybody records in what was the Beatles’ studio: ‘Do you think Lennon stood here? He must have done … Oh yes, this is definitely where Ringo’s drums were … Can you feel the magic?’ and so on. I thought there might be an outside chance that Paul McCartney would sing ‘Archibald’, the poem about Betjeman’s much-loved bear. I had a conversation about it with Paul outside RAK Studios and he made one or two suggestions that might help the structure. It sounded promising, but Alan Crowder at Paul’s office came back to say, ‘Regretfully he can’t get involved in this project due to the enormous amount of things he has going on himself, but wishes you every success with the musical.’ Pity.

CBS looked to be the main contenders for the album. We discussed the marketing, the sleeve design, the overall strategy and the possible first release. The most likely candidate for a single was David Essex singing ‘Myfanwy’. This track almost didn’t make the album. Rod Edwards was convinced that we already had enough songs and really didn’t need another one and he was probably right, but you can’t stop a chap when he’s on a roll. I pleaded the case for a song I’d just finished writing over breakfast at the kitchen table. I have to say, it wasn’t looking good until he heard it. He reasoned that if he was convinced by my live version on one guitar, then it was worth considering. Chris Rea had originally recorded it and even performed it at the Royal Albert Hall, but the Magnet Records boss, Michael
Levy, not yet elevated to the peerage, refused to let him release someone else’s song.

We felt that it was a possible hit single, but were adrift until Dave Dee suggested David Essex. He was on the money. David was absolutely perfect for it. His version of ‘Myfanwy’ was given the thumbs-up by CBS and we looked set fair. Set fair, that is, until one of their promotion guys heard it. His comments went something along the lines of ‘You’re joking, aren’t you? It’s a bloody waltz with an orchestra, how the hell can I get Radio One to play that?’ They thought again, and that effectively ended the potential single and album deal with CBS. Luckily Arista, headed up by Peter Jamieson, picked up the single and ran with it. The launch was at Kettners in Romilly Street, opened in 1867 and a favourite haunt over the years of Oscar Wilde, Edward VII, Lillie Langtry and Agatha Christie. Bing Crosby once sang from a balcony to keep hundreds of cheering fans happy. The invitation was ‘To have morning tea with Mike Read and David Essex.’ We were joined by Arista Records boss Peter Jamieson, Betjeman’s publisher, John Murray, and some of the artists on the album, including Justin Hayward, Captain Sensible, Steve Harley and Annie Haslam. Justin kindly dropped me a note saying, ‘Lovely to see you this morning, the mix of “Tregardock” sounds great. The best of luck with the whole project.’ We all have doubts, but sometimes a few well-chosen and sincere words keep us flying the flag.

I put together the story-board for a video and persuaded the good master of Magdalen College, Oxford to let us shoot around the building and grounds. Not only was it Betjeman’s
alma mater
, but we were also able to use his rooms for a tea party scene and those of visiting dons as David Essex/Betjeman’s study. Mr Strutt, the head porter, gave his staff instructions to co-operate fully, including ideal, and sometimes very precise, camera positions, one anticipating a shot ‘from New Building’s Staircase 3, Room 7 bathroom’! David was the consummate professional, insisting on discussing the shoot at length, working at the correct dynamics between him and Rachel Roberts, the
wonderful young actress who portrayed the role of Myfanwy Piper, and even cutting his hair to give it that ’20s look. He commented at the time, ‘I’ve always had a soft spot for Betjeman. I liked the poem and I thought the music that Mike had written for it was terrific.’ The lovely Gordon Elsbury from
Top of the Pops
directed the video, which we completed in just one day and which included some wonderful shots of the Oxford skyline and the town. Now, unfortunately, I can’t find a copy of it. I keep hoping it’s going to turn up on YouTube.

Radio One actually seemed happy to play the song. It was promoted for Arista by my old pal and first publisher, Dave Most, and slowly began to climb the chart. Week by week another ten places and another, until we were convinced by the sales pattern that it was going to be a top ten hit. When it hit number fifty-six, it was sandwiched between Percy Sledge and Ben E. King on one side and Tina Turner and Smokey Robinson on the other. I was happy to dwell in that holy place.

We found an unlikely ally when Princess Alexandra helped the single to chart with the copy she bought in Durham. The press reported that she was on an official visit to the city when she spotted a Virgin record shop, had the barriers removed where the police had cordoned off the road and proceeded ask the bewildered manager for a song she’d heard on the radio at five o’clock that morning called ‘Myfanwy’. She told him that she’d been so taken with it that she ‘simply had to buy a copy’. The embarrassed manager explained that he’d just sold the last copy, but, good businessman that he was, he called Virgin MD Andy Warrell in London and before the princess arrived back home at Richmond Park, a copy had been delivered by motorcycle messenger. Even Tim Rice sang the song’s praises in
Punch
: ‘The tune is bewitchingly simple and marvellously arranged.’ He was very gracious in his comments: ‘The real eye-opener is the music. Mike Read, the composer, is a totally unknown quantity, but those who might have dismissed him as a mere jock or children’s TV host will have to think again.’ Two things stopped it from carving its way through
the forty. First, the folk that compile the chart would often ‘downweight’ a single if they thought that sales weren’t evenly spread. The thought was that someone could be deliberately buying copies to give the track a false chart position. This of course was nonsense. If a group were from Manchester, where the core of their fan base was, it was likely that there would be more sales in that area. They noticed what they considered an unnatural peak in Wales for ‘Myfanwy’ and downweighted it. Well, who’d have thought it – a song titled with an archetypal Welsh girls’ name popular in Wales? But we could still bounce back as we’d been offered
Sunday Night at the London Palladium
, the last of the series. That’d catapult the song into the upper stratosphere, surely? Ah, but life isn’t that easy, and this is where we encountered our second stumbling block. David’s manager, Mel Bush, would only let his boy do it if he topped the bill. Dave Most protested that although David was indeed a major star, Diana Ross was on the same show and took precedence due to her longevity and level of success. Pleas, entreaties and whatever else fell on deaf ears. Either David topped the bill or he didn’t do it. He didn’t do it and the single stalled at number forty-one. We would have made the forty had it not been for Zodiac Mindwarp’s ‘Prime Mover’ appearing out of nowhere and sneaking into the position above us. Frustratingly, ‘Myfanwy’ stayed at number forty-one for two or three weeks. Was there any consolation in being higher than the new releases from Go West, the Fall, UB40 and the Housemartins? Not really. It’s a terrific testimony to the track, though, that it still spent over two months on the chart and was very popular in Australia. The weird and frustrating postscript is that when
Sunday Night at the London Palladium
began its next series, David sang ‘Myfanwy’, but it was too late, even though the single leapt back into chart on just that one play. Seemingly still popular, it’s now notched up well over 100,000 hits on YouTube and was selected by Tim Rice as one of his Desert Island Discs, alongside the Everly Brothers, Elvis Presley, the Rolling Stones and ‘Once in royal David’s city’. Not bad company.

What did Myfanwy Piper, the subject of the poem, think about the song? I was invited for lunch a couple of times to the Pipers’ house at Fawley Bottom, near Henley-on-Thames. Her husband John Piper, one of the great British artists of the twentieth century and not too well by that time, was nevertheless very welcoming, even showing me dozens of his of paintings that he had stashed away, presumably as yet unseen. The ladies from Myfanwy’s era seemed to retain their acuity and perception. Over lunch she encouraged me to talk about my songwriting and writing in general, while she listened and gave little away. Was she interested in the written word or not? I wouldn’t have known. It was only when we went into the kitchen to make tea that I noticed a well-worn poster on the wall, crudely stuck up with ancient and yellowing Sellotape. The poster proclaimed her to have been a librettist for Benjamin Britten. That generation sure knew how to deal an ace without moving their hands. She was quite kind when talking to the press: ‘I wasn’t mad about previous musical treatments of his poems. I’d rather they were left as they are. But I know many people get pleasure from them so I’m glad. And I’m sure he would have liked it.’