Authors: Mike Read
As a kid, there’d been a lot of records that I’d found inspirational, but I never linked them together until later. Many of them had been produced by the legendary Joe Meek and the best ones written by a chap called Geoff Goddard. I knew only a little about Geoff, but I discovered that he lived in the catchment area of our radio station and so, not surprisingly, put a call out. At length a very shy and reluctant Geoff turned up at the station, which is when I discovered that he had actually played the organ on the global multi-million-selling single ‘Telstar’. I came to know Geoff over the years, writing a couple of songs with him and hearing how, after Joe’s suicide, he never really wrote again except for the odd creative excursion. He told me how one of his songs was stolen from him and went to number one. He had the squeeze put on him and even Joe, who knew that Geoff had written it, failed to support him, with the result that the courts ordered him to desist from claiming ownership. The deception not only destroyed his will to write, but also left him with severe headaches for many years. I consider myself privileged to have written and recorded two songs with Geoff, ‘Flight 19’ and ‘Yesterday’s Heroes’. Geoff died in 2000 and I feel that, as he was probably my earliest influence in wanting to write songs, I should record here the fact that he was a truly great songwriter, a gifted musician and an unusual man. He worked in the refectory at Reading University, clearing away the plates at lunchtime and generally cleaning up. He didn’t have to do it, as he still made enough from his royalties, but he enjoyed the camaraderie and it gave him something to do. He was heavily into the spiritual world and confessed to me that he often left his tape machine running while he
was asleep in case it picked up any alien or spirit voices. I still experience both joy and sadness when I listen to the two songs we wrote together and which feature Geoff’s voice. I feel proud to have known and worked with him and I hope the future brings belated recognition. In 2013 Reading University erected the first of their Red Plaques to Geoff in a ceremony that I hosted; two of the recipients of his great songs, John Leyton and Mike Berry, performed afterwards, so perhaps that recognition is beginning to come about.
But back to Neil ffrench Blake’s outfit. At the time I remember being slightly peeved at having to interview non-music people, such as the local bin men’s leader during a strike, the organiser of the local cycling club, or a spokesman for the Thatcham Walkers … we wanted to play records! However, I now confess to being retrospectively grateful for the horizon-broadening opportunity. One of the most bizarre of those interviews was with the Duke of Wellington, the interview taking place while we had a putting competition. Had it not been for my stature, non-Gallic countenance and the fact that I didn’t stuff baguettes down my trousers whenever I marched on Russia, I’d have felt decidedly Napoleonic going head to head with Wellington. I would return for a further encounter at Stratfield Saye, the Wellington digs since 1815, almost 200 years after they moved in, for the BBC. I must have been damned impressive in 1976 to get that re-booking.
Being on the radio didn’t mean that I stopped doing gigs with my guitar in various pubs and clubs, or that I stopped writing songs and poems. My first book of poems was stolen, presumably by mistake, when a miscreant entered the house I was sharing post-college. Unless the break-in was the work of a literary madman, I’m certain that my verses weren’t his main target. I was pretty peeved, though. Still am, I suppose; no one likes losing creative stuff. If some of those gems within, like ‘Autolycus’ Satchel’, ‘Trinitrotoluene Triolet’ and ‘The Last Journey of the Fuscous Gnomes’, ever turned up I’d probably be horrified at how ghastly they were. Luckily most of my diaries have survived, so I can vaguely see what I was up to. I recorded in my
diary that for compering the first International Drag-Racing Show at Crystal Palace I trousered the princely sum of £25. I continued to play cricket for Tim Rice’s Heartaches, for whom I’d turned out since the team’s inception in 1973. I’d known Tim since 1968, when he and Andrew Lloyd Webber had been given a breathtaking advance of £200 each, in the hope that their writing bore fruit. I remember sitting with them in the Lloyd Webbers’ flat in west London as
Jesus Christ Superstar
came together, working on the PR for
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
and singing on the demos for one of their musicals that never came to fruition,
Richard the Lionheart.
Tim even sang backing vocals on my first ever single, which you can read all about in
Chapter 8
. I also turned out for the 210 cricket and football teams, for which NffB kept wicket and goal respectively and always in shades. Hey, we were in showbiz … that’s what you did. NffB was a hard taskmaster, once making me turn out for a match when I had chickenpox and a temperature of over 100.
Not only did I get flannelled up for cricket matches, but I also put in some hard batting and bowling practice at the Alf Gover indoor cricket school at Wandsworth. Alf, the one-time England and Surrey fast bowler, was still around then, having begun his career in the late ’20s, and was on hand to give invaluable advice to anyone who wished he could bowl as Gover himself had in the ’30s. His bowling action was once described as ‘a little disjointed and exciting; rather as if he were exchanging insults at extreme range with the conductor of an omnibus that had the legs of him by half a mile per hour’. Be that as it may, I was happy to be gleaning any words of wisdom from the man who’d taken four wickets in four balls against Worcestershire in 1935. My best for 210 was six wickets against the local police, but at the cost of many runs and an imagined persecution that lasted for my eighteen months at the radio station. In retrospect it was an unwise thing to do, but you can’t appeal against your own bowling, and one of the opposition subsequently booked me the following week for reversing all of 2 yards into a one-way street. The music
press reported that I was robbed of a hat-trick against another local team, when rain stopped play after I’d taken two wickets in a row. It’s quite possible that I even wrote the piece myself. Many singers and musicians were drafted into the team on occasions, including Billy Ocean, Robin Sarstedt and members of Mud, Sailor, Kenny and Cockney Rebel.
Not content with having cricket and football teams, NffB took the station into the realms of pigeon-racing! A squad of the finest flyers were donated, including a brace from the country’s leading owner, Louis Massarella, and a fine specimen from the royal loft at King’s Lynn, owned by Her Majesty the Queen. We certainly had to be all-rounders to work at 210; there was no shirking. A surviving press release points out that Steve Wright and I had virtually become stunt men. During one outside broadcast I had to participate in golf, cricket, basketball, judo, bowls, gymnastics, table-tennis, weightlifting and roller skating, as well as scale a sheer wall commando style and sit on the bottom of a pool in a frogman’s outfit; terrific for a non-swimmer! (ffrench Blake was clearly flirting with the spirit world, as this would stand me in good stead for the jungle in the future.) Steve had to fly with the Rothmans Aerobatic Flyers! The boss also got me signed up as a member of the local drag-racing team, made Steve and me broadcast in drag (of another kind) for the Silver Jubilee and made me do a show from the back of an elephant. The animal and I clearly had an understanding, as there was not a hint of defecation. Eat your heart out,
Blue Peter
. The punishment didn’t stop there: during the Reading Rock Festival, Steve and I clocked up forty-one hours of on-site broadcasts.
On one occasion, after interviewing the much-vaunted teen group Flintlock, Steve Wright and I were invited to write some sketches for the programme in which they featured, Thames TV’s
You Must Be Joking!
, which later became
Pauline’s Quirkes
. With the aid of our younger listeners and the TV show’s producer Roger Price, who came up with the wheeze of getting us involved, we crafted live on air some
material for the show, with Roger then inviting us on to take part. I don’t recall watching it, but I’m sure I didn’t miss much as we were a couple of amateurs alongside the talented on-air team that included the young Pauline Quirke, Linda Robson and Flintlock’s Mike Holoway. If I ever get my hands on the person that suggested the script that accompanied our appearances … it was a cringeworthy long-running gag over the misinterpretation of our names, Read and Wright. This’ll give you an idea, but I’ll trim it to about a hundredth of the actual length.
‘No, I’m Read, that’s Wright.’
‘He’s right.’
‘You just said you were Wright.’
‘I am.’
‘So you see we’ve both been right all along.’
There was also some kissing involved, which bizarrely got past the pre-watershed censors. Not, I hasten to add, between Wright and myself.
The press proclaimed this fun excursion into writing sketches for television via radio as the first-ever TV and radio link-up of its kind, but it was in the heyday of people claiming firsts. It was the aim of Flintlock’s guide and mentor, the omnipresent, blue-blazered Newton Wills, to establish them as the new Bay City Rollers. A handful of girls were always outside Thames TV to scream on demand and Newton was always whisking the boys away from interviews in the ‘Flintmobile’ to their ‘Flint Manor’ in the depths of the country. Both were figments of the fanciful but effusively charming Wills’s imagination, which, as a wonderful PR man, he had by the truckload. I remember introducing one of their concerts at Reading, which was meant to be live. When the tape, five-part harmonies included, began, the group were still some 5 or 6 feet away from the microphones and their instruments! They were good lads, though, and I guess it was all part of a learning curve with a good laugh thrown in; much like life really. (Whose life I’m not exactly sure.)
When we weren’t interviewing Flintlock, or Aerosmith in the cloying mud of the Reading Festival, the Read and Wright show would often broadcast from the roof or from the pavement outside the station, just because we felt like it. It was in amazement that we sat with tea and cake on the kerb and asked drivers to wave or hoot if they were listening to us. This was Neanderthal audience research at its finest and a quick fix for us, as it proved that someone was actually listening. We also had the habit of running out of the studio to listen to our own show going out on a transistor, again to prove to ourselves that we were really ‘on air’. Read and Wright were decidedly odd creatures. We also had a blast inventing a series of fictional characters that we then interviewed, doing all the voices ourselves. There was Greenfingers Hothouse, the station gardener with a cod Berkshire accent, Micky Striker, the Liverpudlian footballer who only ever scored
off
the pitch, and pop singer Zoot Furnace, who only ever mimed. The bizarre thing was that listeners would often turn up to get their autographs, imagining them to be real guests.
Evidence of the swiftly changing standards on radio are borne out by the fact that there was an almighty debate as to whether Greenfingers Hothouse should be allowed to say ‘dung’ on the wireless. We skirted round it for a bit, using ‘manure’ and ‘something that’s good for the roses’, until finally pushing out the barriers of decency and plunging headlong into the ‘dung’. Laughable now of course in an age where even a certain ratio of fellatio is considered laddish and
de rigueur
. Those sweet old-fashioned things Read and Wright always referred to the radio as the wireless and were apt to come up with catchphrases and non-station jingles as well as regularly junking commercials in favour of playing more records! That is now a sacking offence. We regularly used to add our two bits’ worth to existing on-air commercials, especially for some reason, the advertisement for Yellow Pages. We realised we’d done it once too often when NffB came bearing down on us like a rhinoceros with sciatica who’d just been told that his annual holiday to Bermuda had just been cancelled.
It transpired that Mr Yellow Pages himself was heading in our direction and NffB was going to make damn sure that we were in the front line to take the flak. The ‘I’m going to watch you boys get a flogging’ sadistic smirk soon faded from Neil’s face as Mr Pages declared how many more enquiries they’d had in the area since we’d started fooling around with his commercial. We even had to record a re-enactment of us being naughty with the advertisement in question. Now as all naughty boys know, it’s hellishly difficult to be mischievous when the mischief is being condoned and I suspect that we fell rather short of our usual mark.
The motley collection of DJs on 210 gradually changed as members of the original team fell away. David English departed at an early stage. An actor, cricketer, Bee Gees manager and loveable bloke, he was wont to personalise the news, as will become clear in
Chapter 12
. The cool and laid-back evening jock Alan Symons, a former Radio Caroline DJ, disappeared over the horizon after NffB suspected him of imbibing certain substances on air. Alan defended his inability to string a cohesive sentence together by claiming that he’d got chapped lips! A bold attempt, but just not plausible enough. Australian broadcaster John Flower handed in his notice in grand style. He began by committing the treasonable action of reading out the schedule for other radio and TV stations that he felt would be a better option than listening to his show on 210. I daresay he was technically right, but that, as every DJ knows, is a firing squad offence, or at least transportation, which was almost certainly his goal, with a big pay cheque into the bargain. John soon got into full flow as more heinous wireless crimes followed, capped with a glorious once-in-a-lifetime offer to his listeners in which he invited them to ‘stick their heads up a dead bear’s bum’. Whether he was implying that there were so few listeners that their heads would collectively fit into said ursine orifice, or whether indeed he knew of such a bear, fit to grace a travelling Victorian freak show, I never actually found out. Needless to say, that was the last we heard of John Flower, the bear and that unique offer to the 210
listeners. 210 was a family. Tony Fox fixed anything and everything that needed fixing, Tony ‘Jogger’ Holden took the listeners jogging, those that is that weren’t having their heads extracted from the hind quarters of the bear, and Mike Matthews did his programme with a pipe full of something that smelled of thick black shag, with his Labrador asleep at his feet. The fastidious Paul Hollingdale, when not on air, would be busy yet again, ‘polishing the studios to an even higher gleam’, with a yellow duster and a can of furniture spray, while Vera the cleaning lady would interrupt any programme to vacuum the studios, whether the microphone was live or not: ‘I can’t hang around, I’ve got to get back to get Ron’s lunch on.’ 210 was a second home and a cosy microcosm of all that was fun, exciting and at times perplexing. That era of local radio has long gone, to be replaced by stations linked together by virtue of being owned by the same corporate, run by accountants and without a heart or soul.