Authors: Mike Read
Where A-roads made cycling or walking impractical, I put the miles in doing circuitous routes. Around the Wash I must have cycled hundreds of desolate lanes to make up for the trunk roads. I had the support vehicle, but we could only reconnoitre at accessible points and it was tough to know when to leave the bike and when to take it. East Anglia? ‘No problem,’ I’d said, ‘it’s flat.’ It may feel it in a car and walking’s not too bad, but cycling you could feel the slightest incline that often went on for miles. Now some regular cyclists may sneer at this as much as they would at a pair of plastic-coated cycle clips, but I’d hardly cycled since I was a kid. There were times when I wondered what had possessed me to raise my hand for this lunatic scheme, but as I gobbled up the miles I could sniff the sea air at Frinton. I made it in exactly two weeks. What an adventure. Will you have me certified if I tell you that I played tennis that night? Clothed.
I
N THE WEEK
that I joined Radio Luxembourg and was offered my first TV series, the first
The Guinness Book of British Hit Singles
was published, co-written with Tim Rice, his brother Jo and my future Radio One colleague Paul Gambaccini. We just thought that it’d be quite useful for us to have all the hit records listed in one book. The project had been given the thumbs-up by the ‘Guinness Twins’, Norris and Ross McWhirter, a short while before Ross was tragically gunned down on his own doorstep. We assumed that Norris wouldn’t want to continue with the book, but he must have had amazing fortitude, as things carried on and he remained firmly in the saddle. For my part, I spent weeks and weeks at Colindale, where the British Library’s magazines and newspapers were stored until 2013, requisitioning the old music papers, logging every chart entry and its weekly movement on huge sheets of graph paper. Having ordered my periodicals for that day, an expressionless porter would eventually glide towards me with my ‘kill’ on a trolley fitted with specially muffled wheels. I would then toil away for hours at a time. Looking back, it seems such a cumbersome and lengthy process now that everyone is so laptop friendly and computer literate. There was a strict ‘no food’
rule at Colindale and as I became a notorious grub smuggler and as such a marked man, I was frisked on a regular basis. I did manage to sneak the odd snack past the Colditz-style guards, but trying to consume stuff without being spotted was like trying to eat in class; you never really enjoy the pork pie or sausage roll as much as when you can savour it with a cup of tea and reading a book. Shovelling in the odd mouthful when you think no one’s looking doesn’t hold as much appeal for me. The moment is to be savoured. Nevertheless avarice won the day.
We had no idea that the books would take off in the way they did, with the second edition even topping the bestsellers. We assembled an intriguing mix of chart artists from different eras to grace its cover. Cliff Richard, Joe Brown and Craig Douglas posed alongside Elton John and Kate Bush as Errol Brown and Danny Williams lined up with the Drifters, Hank Marvin and Paul Jones. The four most senior representatives were Vera Lynn, Russ Conway, Johnny Ray and David Whitfield. The new breed were represented by Bob Geldof, Billy Idol and Tom Robinson.
It was fascinating watching the interaction between the artists, one of the most memorable moments being Elton sidling up to Johnny Ray asking for an autograph for his mother Sheila, who was apparently a huge fan. Tim, Jo, Paul and I were photographed with Kate Bush with the happy snap being captioned ‘Three men with Kate Bush in their eyes’, a bastardisation of one of her song titles. Another edition had a front cover that featured the artists who had been the most successful each year. Then we started issuing albums books and other spin-offs. One of these was
Hits of the ’70s
, when again we assembled a rather decent crowd of hit makers, this time at the House of Commons, with Norman St John-Stevas, Minister for the Arts, as our host. The criterion for inclusion was a number one hit from that decade. The Village People in full stage gear seemed delightfully outrageous in those surroundings and Freddie Mercury was his usual charming and erudite self. Lieutenant Pigeon and Bryan & Michael
mingled with members of Mud and Slade and dozens of others, and we ate, drank and made merry. It was Elton, though, who grabbed the next day’s headlines. He perched himself on the Speaker’s Chair and shouted ‘Order! Order!’
We also published
The Guinness Hits Challenge
and
The Guinness Book of 500 Number Ones
. The launch for our number ones book, which came out in 1982, was held at Abbey Road Studios, where more UK chart toppers had been recorded than any other studio. It is famous for recording the Beatles, Cliff Richard and the Shadows and Pink Floyd among hundreds of major acts including, outside rock and pop, Glenn Miller, Sir Edward Elgar, Sir Malcolm Sargent and Yehudi Menuhin. We invited everyone who’d topped the chart, with Billy Fury as a special guest representing all those great acts who almost made it to the coveted number one spot. Among his string of success running from 1959 to 1983, Billy had seven top five hits. It was an emotional re-union for Billy and Cliff, who hadn’t met up since the early days of rock & roll. It wasn’t long before Sting appropriated a patrolling policeman’s helmet, which he sported for some of the evening. I think there must have been a timeshare on the helmet as Cliff also wore it for a while before it appeared on the head of former Shadows drummer Tony Meehan. The brothers McCartney were there, Mike representing the Scaffold and Paul representing the Beatles, for whom this studio had been the crucible for most of their global success. Linda McCartney was there too, representing Wings with Paul. Unit Four Plus Two swapped stories with Bucks Fizz; The Hollies, who topped the chart in 1965, chatted with one of the Johnston Brothers, who’d been at the number one with ‘Hernando’s Hideaway’ in 1955. Of course George Martin was there, and how could he not be? He practically kept the place going single handed and produced a heck of a lot of number ones. In fact I’m not sure that we didn’t interrupt one of his sessions to start the party. The other great Abbey Road producer of the era was Norrie Paramor, responsible for hits from Cliff and the Shadows, Helen Shapiro and more. We invited
his widow in his stead. Even St Winifred’s School Choir made it … well, not all of them, obviously. Brian Poole and the Tremeloes were photographed with Alvin Stardust, Bob Geldof with Ray Dorset of Mungo Jerry and Des O’Connor with Ricky Valance. Roger Waters of Pink Floyd shared a drink with Aneka of ‘Japanese Boy’ fame, the first UK number one to be recorded in Scotland. And for the big finale, a happy snap of the most number one artists ever assembled. Among them was Micky Dolenz, who’d written the lyric ‘The four kings of EMI are sitting stately on the floor’, referring to the Beatles, for the Monkees’ hit ‘Alternate Title’, and here he was, sitting stately on the floor, next to one of the four kings, Paul McCartney.
We soon sailed through the half-million sales mark and on, with Guinness presenting us with ‘Half Million Club’ awards in front of another crowd of major artists, including Lonnie Donegan and Adam Faith. From 1978 to 1986 our Guinness books were phenomenally successful, and they continued to be after that, but I bowed out after a delightfully long run.
There were books off the back of the TV series
Saturday Superstore
and
Pop Quiz
, as well as
The Cliff Richard Chronicle
, which was repackaged and re-written a few times, and a biography of the Shadows.
The Story of the Shadows
was enormous fun to write, with Hank Marvin, Bruce Welch and Brian Bennett giving me a colossal amount of time, some of which was spent on Hank’s or Brian’s tennis court. If we ran late they’d give me a bed for the night, even though I had to get up at the crack of dawn for the Radio One breakfast show. Hank had been my inspiration for learning the guitar, but I could never have imagined back then that he’d be bringing me a cup of tea at five o’clock in the morning. The book has now acquired some sort of rarity value, one guy even telling me how he’d heard of one in a shop in Haverfordwest on the west coast of Wales and had driven the round trip from London just to secure a copy. Many Shadows fans have asked me to bring it up to date, so who knows … one day?
As I’ve mentioned here and there, I’d always written poetry from
a very young age and had a few bits and pieces that I added to for my first collection of poems. I ended up buying as many copies as I could, not through vanity, but the juvenilia soon made me squirm a little, so I reasoned that the more I snapped up the less other people could buy them. I guess there are still a few copies of
The Aldermoor Poems
out there somewhere that I missed. The next collection,
Elizabethan
Dragonflies
, was better, with poems on places such as Rutland, Invergowrie, Badminton, Hurlingham, Land’s End, Loch Lomond and St Enedoc. There were also poems on diverse characters including the painter Georges Braque and ‘William Hickey’. I was asked to write some lines for the last-ever Hickey column in the
Daily Express
, so I had the final word in the diary that had been going since 1928, when Tom Driberg, later a Labour MP, became the first journalist to use the pseudonym of the infamous eighteenth-century diarist. In the ’60s Nigel Dempster took the helm, perhaps the most famous name to do so, and the last of some fifty journalists to fill the role was Richard Compton Miller.
My poem ‘William Hickey – 1933–1987’, had the final word:
From ’30s to ’40s,
From Driberg to Miller,
Collecting the crumbs
From society tables,
Steering the blue-blooded
Beaverbrook tiller,
Through the sea of reality,
Fiction and fables.
It has been pointed out that the column started in 1928, but the date the Daily Express gave me at the time was 1933. So we re-write history?
A ‘funeral’ was held in which the theatrical procession marched across Fleet Street to the journalists’ and printers’ spiritual home, St Bride’s Church, complete with New Orleans-style jazz band and a
coffin filled with champagne bottles, topped by a rusty typewriter. The contents of the coffin were consumed, naturally, in a nearby pub. It was a privilege to be a part of the send-off.
I was delighted to have many of my poems featured in the
Poet’s England
series, each book representing poetry about each county down the ages. Several poems were spread around the volumes with Surrey, rather wonderfully, featuring four of them;
Effingham Station, High Surrey (Coldharbour,) Along the Banks of Mole and Wey
, and
The Great Fire of 1951. Effingham Station
was also featured in a volume of railway verse,
Marigolds Grow Wild on Platforms.
During my time at Classic FM, one of the programmes had a feature where they asked various folk to talk about the favourite room in their house. I decided, unquestionably, that mine would be the library. On reflection I thought that the word ‘library’ might come over as being a little stuffy so I called it ‘a room with books’, and wrote a poem to go with it. Not surprisingly, it would end up being the title of my next book of poems, published in 1996. After reading ‘A Room with Books’ for the programme, I found myself inundated with favourite poems from listeners. This led, rather inevitably, to my producer, Tim Lihoreau, and myself compiling the listeners’ top 100 poems. Thousands and thousands of votes poured in, giving us a logistical, but ultimately rewarding, nightmare. Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’ and Kipling’s ‘If’ came out as the top two, with de la Mare, Browning, Tennyson, Masefield, Keats, Brooke and Rossetti all featuring in the top ten. I edited the volume of poems, and wrote a one-page biography of each poet in the top 100 and a foreword that included the poem that had started it all off, ‘A Room with Books’.
There’s feeling in a room with books, the love,
The depth, the warmth of something that’s alive.
The ranks and rows of old campaigners stand,
Passed from hand to hand, friend to friend, to me.
The flames in shadow dance upon them all,
Who themselves once danced upon this earth;
Burns, Belloc, Blunden, Bridges, Beardsley, Brooke;
Inscribed with care from lover, mother, friend:
In faded hand ‘December 1910.’
Books from the libraries of laureates,
Volumes revered as bibles at the front;
Diaries of dear, dead days, letters of love,
Classics, passions, open wounds; injustice.
As full-bodied wine, verse, chapter, stanza,
Spill and flow out across the floodlit lawns,
From leathered desk to some dark, secret place.
And here I sit, surrounded by my friends,
Their words remain though they themselves are gone,
Their lives re-lived within my favourite room.
In 1998, we followed
One Hundred Favourite Poems
with
One Hundred Favourite Humorous Poems
, again with a single-page biography of each poet. While pondering on how to write a more novel introduction, I began to amuse myself by thinking of links between the various poets featured in the top 100. I ended up with something called ‘Stanley Holloway in Thirty Moves’, starting with Holloway and seeing if I could get back to him in thirty moves using poets featured in the book. I was allowed to use a poet more than once if applicable. It’s a wedge of literary fun, so let’s include it here.
Stanley Holloway made his London debut in
Kissing Time
in 1919, which was co-written by P. G. Wodehouse. Wodehouse wrote with Ira and George Gershwin, whose song ‘I Don’t Think I’ll Fall in Love Again’ was influenced by G. K. Chesterton. Chesterton was such good friends with Hilaire Belloc that people referred to them as ‘ChesterBelloc.’ Belloc’s farrago ‘The Four Men’ heavily influenced ‘The Soldier’, Rupert Brooke’s most famous poem. Brooke’s early poems were
published
in the
Granta
magazine, once edited by A. A. Milne. Milne successfully adapted Kenneth Grahame’s
The Wind in the Willows
for the stage, as did Alan Bennett. Bennett contributed to the book
Larkin at Sixty,
a celebration of Philip Larkin’s life and work. Larkin was the librarian at Hull University, where he met and influenced a young student called Roger McGough. McGough wrote hit records, as did Cole Porter. Cole Porter wrote the music and lyrics for
Kiss Me Kate,
based on
The Taming of the Shrew
by Shakespeare. The Shakespearian characters Othello, Richard III, Hamlet and Macbeth were all portrayed on stage by William McGonagall. McGonagall’s American counterpart was Julia Moore (known as the American McGonagall), who was a major influence on Ogden Nash. Nash wrote the musical
One Touch of Venus
with Kurt Weill, who collaborated on
Lady in the Dark
with Ira Gershwin, who wrote with P. G. Wodehouse. Wodehouse was knighted, as was John Betjeman. Betjeman was a pupil at Marlborough with Louis MacNeice. MacNeice described John Cornford as ‘the first inspiring communist I have met’. Cornford had actually been christened Rupert in memory of Rupert Brooke. Brooke was remembered in the poem ‘At Grantchester’ by Charles Causley. Causley wrote the poem ‘Betjeman 1984’. Betjeman bought a new book of poems in 1976 and praised it as being full of ‘good, honest country poems’. It was a collection of poetry by Pam Ayres. Pam Ayres presented a radio documentary about Jane Austen, who read and was influenced by William Cowper. Cowper’s father was a rector, as was the father of Lewis Carroll. Carroll’s
Hunting of the Snark
was influenced by
Bab Ballads
by W. S. Gilbert. Gilbert almost became the artist for the Alice books by Lewis Carroll. Carroll was educated at Rugby, as was Walter Savage Landor. Landor was the model for Lawrence Boythorn in Dickens’s
Bleak House,
while the Dickens
musical
Oliver!
once starred Barry Humphries. Humphries was a regular contributor to
Private Eye
magazine, home of their fictitious poet-in-residence, E. J. Thribb. Thribb was created by Richard Ingrams, one of the
Private Eye
founders, while the founder of the Eton College magazine,
The Etonian,
was W. M. Praed. Praed’s work was often compared to that of Thomas Hood. Hood was the joint editor of the London Magazine, while the editor of the
Classical Review
was A. D. Godley. Godley’s translations of Horace were published in 1898, while another poet to translate and write poems in the style of Horace was Rupert Brooke. Brooke’s cousin Erica was infatuated with George Bernard Shaw, whose play
Pygmalion
became
My Fair Lady
and starred … Stanley Holloway!