Ray Connolly Journalism - Ray Connolly

How Terribly Strange To Be Seventy (Daily Telegraph, 27 April 2012)

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

You don't realise that you're knocking on a bit until some delectable young woman on the Tube stands up and offers you her place, "What, me?" your smile tries to joke, as you pull yourself immediately more athletically upright. "No thank you. How strange that you should think I might be so old. It must be the white hair. A family trait. I've had it since…oh, just the other day when I was forty. And, besides, don't you know that seventy is said to be the perfect age these days…"

Can that be true? The perfect life at 70? Well, that's what a British Airways survey of financial advisers has found. With our pensions, free local travel, valuable homes with mortgages paid off, those of us who are around the three score years and ten mark are apparently the most fortunate generation in the country.

From a purely financial perspective - and remembering that there will be many without generous pensions, a good bus service or a home of their own – there's probably some truth in this.

But what about life in the round? When in 1968 Simon and Garfunkel (now both 70) sang "How terribly strange to be seventy" in their song Old Friends, it struck a nerve with baby boomers everywhere. Yes, how odd it must be to be old, we all thought. Not "strange" so much as terrible and unimaginable.

Yet here we all are, and seventy isn't strange at all. It isn't old either, not any more, if we judge age by mental faculties and overall health. Actually, it’s terrific. I'm 71, but sometimes feel as though those numbers are back to front, in that the passions I enjoyed at 17 still guide and lighten my life. Indeed one obsession of my life back then, rock music, went on to become a major plank of my career.

I suppose, not having had a regular salary since I was 31, I probably haven't stored up as much treasure for my dotage as one of those financial experts would have advised – so I still have a mortgage, although I've done all right. But, born absolutely at the right time, I've had, and still, have, like so many of my age mates, the luckiest of lives.

Nursed by the National Health Service, educated free of charge up to university level, with a student living grant included - this must sound like Utopia now to debt burdened undergraduates. And it only got better. With jobs available for the asking in the Sixties, I had my first Fleet Street column at 26 and was able to buy our first house at the same age. God couldn't have been kinder.

I was even too young for National Service so I never had to fight any foreign wars, the only minor scars I've got being the easily fixed results of too much sun bathing on Mediterranean holidays.

I remember my grandparents. They were old and worn at seventy. But they'd had hard lives, never been abroad, and, by the time I was aware of them, shuffling around, exhausted.

This summer we'll take our grandchildren once more on a bucket and spade holiday to France, where I will every day play football for hours on the beach with my grandson. He's eleven so he'll always beat me, and I know my knee will ache a bit, but if this is my second childhood, bring it on, because I'm hardly a case of Shakespeare's "sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything". Actually, for those interested, I've got all my gnashers, bar one tricky wisdom tooth – a benefit, no doubt, of the rationing of sweets during the war.

Obviously there are some things you can't do after 70, and every year I regret never having run in the marathon. I was always too busy (or lazy) to train, and it’s probably a bit late to start now. And I'm long used to being invisible when in the company of beautiful women – apart from the aforesaid occasional one on the Tube who takes pity on me.

But for every loss there's also a gain. Youth can be hasty, all energy, instant decisions and quick judgements. It seems to me that age brings a greater tolerance, a wider perspective and maybe a rediscovered innocence.

As usual, for my generation, Bob Dylan (aged 70) summed this up best when he famously sang of a reflective maturity following his ever-protesting youthful days with his line: "For I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now". Which is exactly how I feel – hopefully just a little bit wiser and more forgiving than once I was.

At 71 I'm not young, but certainly I don't feel old, and, as I cross my fingers for continued good health, grateful that my generation have been the beneficiaries of the sacrifices of our parents, I hope to write every day until I drop.

The pensions and free travel aren't bad either.

****

Ray Connolly's novel Shadows On A Wall is now available as an eBook on Amazon.

Why Pop Girls Top The Young Rich List (Daily Telegraph, April 13, 2012)

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

You only had to see the audience, predominantly female, swaying and singing together in their massed legions at Adele's televised Royal Albert Hall concert last week, to know where the big money is in young British pop music these days. It's in the bank accounts of the top half dozen girl singers in the country.

And why? Because more than at any time in the history of popular music the various factors which govern pop fame, and therefore wealth, are coming together to create glamorous, seemingly strong female stars with whom a generation nor two of confident, independent girls and young women can identify.

When Adele sings Rolling In The Deep, yet another song of hers about a relationship that went wrong, she's touching a worldwide nerve – not the traditional one of the pleading, girl supplicant, but that of the tough, young survivor who's knocked around a bit, and, sadder but wiser, knows the score.

An awful lot of girls recognise that feeling, and there's Adele, up there on stage and screen, the friend, who, unlike a fella, won't let them down.

Adele has, of course, a fantastic voice, which explains why, at 23, she's already worth around twenty million pounds – making her far and away a wealthier lady than the five runners up in the latest Sunday Times Rich List of music stars under thirty.

But, with Cheryl Cole, Leona Lewis and Katie Melua each sitting on around twelve million, and with eleven of the top fifteen young earners in music being women, something as well as music must be happening.

A large part of that something, it seems to me, is television. Yes, I know that Adele, Jessie J and Leona Lewis are all alumnae of the BRIT School in Croydon that educates and brings on young artists. So, full marks to that establishment in spotting the talent and then shaping it.

But these days, more than at any other time, new talent has to be seen on television to take off – and it was on those Saturday evening Simon Cowell-type television shows, with, I suspect, their largely female viewers, that we all first got to know Jessie J and Leona Lewis; and where Cheryl Cole, formerly of Girls Aloud, continues to financially flourish.

Once upon a time people listened to music with their ears pressed to the radio or record player. Now, in this post-MTV age of the image, it would appear they listen equally with their eyes, and it can't escape anyone's notice that Jessie J, Leona Lewis, Katie Melua and Duffy are all lookers, packaged for their glamour as well as their singing.

There's nothing wrong with that. Elvis, Cliff Richard and Paul McCartney weren't exactly ugly, but back in pre-history girl pop fans saw male rock stars in terms of fantasy boy friends. Young Western women's attitudes to life and its possibilities, have happily changed massively since then.

The Spice Girls tapped into this fifteen years ago with what they called "girl power". But the Spice Girls were dressing up as, and behaving like, little girls who were pretending to be big girls. Today's generation of performers suggest a sexual maturity, and perhaps a certain world weariness and self knowledge, that the Spice Girls never showed.

But, you may be wondering, what's happened to all the young male stars who used to command such devotion? Where are the Mick Jaggers and David Bowies of today? The truth is, in an industry that is endlessly self replicating, it's more difficult for them than at any time.

After the Sixties, male guitar groups, like gangs of outlaws, were dominant for decades, and you had thousands upon thousands of bands fighting it out with each another – here and in America, and nothing like so many girl singers.

Eventually solo singers like James Blunt emerged and for the next few years the charts were filled with blokes with distinctive voices, right up to Craig David and Paulo Nutini, who, though today's top male earners, are relative paupers worth only eight million apiece.

But the impetus in the modern world was with the girls. Along came Beyonce in America, and Amy Winehouse and Adele in the UK, music fashions changed, and the scramble was on in the record business to find more retro-inspired female solo acts, in the tradition of Dusty Springfield. You only have to turn on television to see how successful that formula has been.

Will it continue? Will our musical boys continue to be eclipsed and pushed out of the spotlight by these talented young women, having to content themselves in the back room by being merely producers and co-writers for stars like Adele?

It depends. The locomotive of a new male sensation could change a lot. But for the time being the demographics are with the girls. They've changed. Their audience has changed. And it's their time.

******

The Ray Connolly Beatles Archive, a collection of his journalism about the Beatles, is now available as an eBook from Amazon.

Sons Of The Beatles - Don't Do It, Boys (Daily Telegraph, April 5, 2012)

Thu, 5 Apr 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

There are many advantages in having a supremely talented and successful parent. Money is rarely a problem, and family access to those who might be helpful in a career cuts a lot of corners. But, when Paul McCartney's only son, James, let slip this week that he and some of the sons of the other three Beatles had discussed getting together to form a second generation Fab Four, it occurred that the gods of fortune might be playing games with them.

It's easy to see why such a venture might appeal. Young McCartney, Sean Lennon, Dhani Harrison and Jason Starkey (the sons of John, George and Ringo) have all grown up watching from the wings of global fame, seeing their fathers as dads to them but worldwide icons to everybody else. And it can't always have been easy.

Not surprisingly, like many children born into musically creative homes, they all learned instruments and became competent musicians. What could be more natural, therefore, that, finding themselves in the somewhat unique club of being always identified in relation to their four impossibly famous fathers, they should want to get together? They have so much in common. What could go wrong?

Actually, everything. Because no matter how talented these young men are, and James McCartney got encouraging reviews when he appeared solo at his dad's old stomping ground of Liverpool's Cavern on Tuesday night, as Second Generation Beatles they can only fail by comparison with their dads. If they want to play together privately to entertain themselves and their friends, that would be terrific. Go for it, fellas.

But the public glare can be cruel. The brickbats could be vicious. The Beatles weren't just common or garden rock stars. Forged by the accidental cross seeding of extraordinary talents in a post war environment of social change, their grip on the world's imagination cannot be replicated. All the elements that came together then and helped create them and their myth cannot recur.

Wisely, after having been broken up by their founder John Lennon in 1969 at the very height of their fame, the Beatles were never tempted to reunite, despite a begging world and tens of millions of dollars being offered. They knew it wouldn't, couldn't, be the same - that only disappointment for the fans lay down that particular road.

What chance then that a late blooming by their sons, already in their thirties and older than the Beatles were when they broke up, would be anything more than a dynastic circus of warped nostalgia.

Simply by choosing careers as musicians the four have already sorely tempted fate. Sean Lennon has made several records, but can anyone hum just one of his songs? His elder half brother, Julian, who will be 50 in a few weeks time, had a couple of hits in the year after his father was murdered, but that was a long time ago. Actually, not seeing his name in the proposed line-up of the new Fabs, makes one wonder how left out he must, once again, be feeling today.

Success being passed from one generation to the next in rock music is not completely unknown, but it is rare. Ringo Starr's eldest son, Zak, has made a successful, though rarely publicised, career, drumming with bands like the Who and Oasis. But he is the exception.

Lisa Marie Presley might have assumed that because she was a woman she wouldn't be compared with her father. Some hope! When, by the grace of technology, she made a video singing a duet with dead Elvis, one reviewer wrote that unfortunately she had inherited her dad's looks but her mother's voice.

Of course wanting to follow in the profession of one's parents happens in many homes. It makes sense. We all learn most from our parents, so there should be no surprise that careers in medicine, the law, theatre and even journalism seem to be in the DNA of some families, while Hollywood is stuffed with the sons and daughters of movie stars.

But, putting aside the Dimblebys in television, Michael Douglas, son of Kirk, in movies, and the acting Redgraves, few children have the popular success of the starriest parents. For example the sons of Tom Jones and Michael Parkinson prefer to manage their fathers' careers than pursue the limelight themselves, taking background jobs that don't reply on the ever fluctuating whim of public taste or that impossible to recreate flicker of charisma.

How wise, too, was Stella McCartney to go into fashion, David Bowie's son Duncan Jones into movie making and Carrie Fisher, the daughter of Debbie Reynolds and singer Eddie Fisher, into writing. She may have begun adult life acting as Princess Leia in Star Wars, but it's for her books and screenplays that Carrie Fisher is best known and most admired.

The contacts with which all three grew up inevitably helped, but by choosing different careers they've all emerged from under the potentially suffocating blanket of comparison, and become successful in their own rights.

Sixty years ago Noel Coward told Mrs Worthington in song not to put her daughter on the stage. It was good advice, that others might heed. Some acts, the Beatles more than any other, are just impossible to follow.

The Ray Connolly Beatles Archive, a collection of his journalism about the Beatles, is now available as an eBook from Amazon.

That Sgt Pepper Cover, 2012 Version, (Daily Mail April 3, 2012)

Tue, 3 Apr 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

When the Beatles' album Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album was released in 1967 at the very height of their fame, it was a wonder of its age – and not only for its songs. Almost as important was its packaging - that ornate, folding sleeve that showed the four Beatles in fancy dress at the centre of a flowery, hippy montage of characters from Karl Marx to Bob Dylan, Oscar Wilde and Laurel and Hardy.

The most expensive and famous cover ever designed, it was to change the art work on albums for ever, as well as bringing everlasting renown to its designer, pop artist Peter Blake.

Unfortunately it didn't also bring him commensurate remuneration, in that, as the agent who negotiated for him was high on pot at the time, Blake only received a £200 fee. Ah, well, it was the Sixties!

In a few weeks time Blake will be 80, and to celebrate his birthday he's designed a new Sgt Pepper cover, 2012 style, replacing the original images, including those of the Beatles, with old friends and people he admires and whom he believes celebrate British culture.

It's a terrific idea, claiming back an idea that he so cheaply sold. But his choice of the people portrayed in his new montage is where he and I might not completely agree. In fact, some of his choices are decidedly rum. Understandably, being an artist, the visual arts, and especially fashion, figure prominently, so I've no particular grumble here.

It's nice, if surprising, to see Justin de Villeneuve again, Twiggy's forgotten former manager and boy friend, and, despite her Olympic team designs, Stella McCartney isn't unwelcome. Nor are film directors Ridley Scott and Alfred Hitchcock.

Presumably, though, sculptor Anish Kapoor and the artist-in-the-frock Grayson Perry only made the cut because they are good mates with Peter Blake. Fair enough, I suppose.

What really puzzles me, though, is the plethora of restaurateurs and chefs. I know the entire nation has gone potty about food, with the endless succession of books and TV programmes (so cheap to make) about eating, but are the late Fanny Craddock, Mr Chow, Rick Stein and three other kitchen potentates all really icons of British culture. Or are they just cooks with big hats?

It's all personal, of course. It has to be in any list that includes Tommy Steele and Shirley Bassey. But sometimes Blake's choices seem just plain random.

How could he choose Mick Jagger without Keith Richards, when we all know that without those Richards' guitar riffs Mick Jagger might well have stayed at university and ended up running a City bank?

Surprisingly, because I know Blake was interested in wrestling for a time, what is completely missing from the new montage are sporting heroes, although boxer Sonny Liston was in the original. There's no David Beckham or my own favourite footballer, the ever reasonable John Barnes – and not even Bobby Moore who gifted the nation with the only World Cup we’ve ever won.

He might even have found a place here for comedian Eddie Izzard, if only for his heroic, long distance walking feat for charity, or Lewis Hamilton for his Formula One exploits.

And while the playwrights Tom Stoppard, Harold Pinter and Terence Rattigan are all included, with the exception of children's authors JK Rowling and Roald Dahl, there are few novelists.

What about David Nicholls, whose brilliant novel One Day became an admittedly unbrilliant movie, or Helen Fielding who tapped into the minds of a generation of women and invented Bridget Jones. Then there's Robert Harris, Sue Townsend, the one-off and very brave Terry Pratchett, and the wonderful graphic artist Posy Simmonds. All these, and Michael Morpugno, the man who wrote War Horse, would have made my list.

The original Sgt Pepper included several comedians, but with the exception of Nick Park, whom everyone admires for his creation of Wallace And Gromit, and Richard Curtis, who gave us Black Adder, Four Weddings And A Funeral, and much else, there aren't any intentionally funny people.

Which is surprising because one of the things we Brits particularly excel at it's being funny. Thirty five years after Fawlty Towers we’re still laughing at John Cleese as Basil, while Jennifer Saunders' Ab Fab creation of Edina Monsoon was wickedly inspirational. They should be there. Then there's Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse who've created whole casts of full, funny characters

To be honest, I rather like the idea that, as the Beatles company Apple have never offered to make reparation for the fact that Blake was, albeit accidentally, ripped off for his work on the original Sgt Pepper cover all those years ago, the artists puts himself and his family front and central in his new illustration. Good for him.

But, although Paul McCartney is there in the third row, surely there should have a been a place for all four Beatles, without whom Blake's career would have been a little different. Equally, had I been doing it, I would have found a central spot for the Beatles' producer George Martin, who did as much as almost anyone to create the Sgt Pepper album in the first place.

Obviously, as Peter Blake admits, it's impossible to get everyone into a montage, and I suspect some of his friends might have been feeling a bit put-out when they woke up yesterday to discover that they hadn't been included, but there are some significant gaps in his cultural spread.

I would like to have seen David Dimbleby for the way he tells loquacious Cabinet ministers to shut up on Question Time, Jeremy Paxman for his pantomime indignation when facing the froth of the mighty and powerful and Melvyn Bragg for his career long battle to bring culture to the masses.

Then there's Gareth Malone who taught the Soldiers Wives and many children to sing, as well as Mary Portas whose Channel Four programme took a group of unemployed young people in Middleton and set up a company making lacy knickers and, in so doing, changed their lives. These people, like Camila Batmanghelidjh of Kids Company, are inspirational, as is the telegenic scientist Brian Cox who even managed to make physics sexy - not a phrase you will often hear.

Everyone would have a different list. As I could scarcely care less about fashion, there would be no room for Peter Blake's favourites of Vivien Westwood, Mary Quant and Barbara Hulanicki in mine, but we would agree on including Sir David Attenborough - although I might add his film making brother Richard, too.

And I would insist on Russell T. Davies, who has reinvented Dr Who for a new generation, and Rob Brydon, if only for Marion and Geoff, while no mosaic that captured contemporary Britain would be complete without Julia Donaldson's creation of the Gruffalo.

Last, though by no means least, and as delightful as the former Kate Middleton is, and I think she's lovely, it seems to me that no pictorial account of Britain is complete without the Queen. Some of my more cynical friends will mock me, but I believe she bridges generations, class (in that she's so far removed from everyone else she's classless) and politics. Sixty years on from her coronation, still working and probably regarded with more affection now than at any time in her reign, she is totally remarkable. She should be on anyone's list.

I can remember when Sgt Pepper first came out, rushing to buy one of the first copies, and then sitting by my Dansette record player listening to the songs - Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, She's Leaving Home, When I'm Sixty Four and the rest, and studying the faces on the cover, trying to make out who they all were.

I never did identify all of them, and I'm sure millions of hours have been spent by others in the same pursuit. Which, when you consider it, was an enormous contribution that an artist called Peter Blake made to all our lives forty five years ago. I hope he has a very happy birthday.

The Ray Connolly Beatles Archive, a collection of his many interviews with the Beatles, and articles about them, is now available as an eBook on Amazon.

How To Make A Monster Flop (Daily Mail, March 23, 2012)

Sun, 25 Mar 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

There's something eerie about sitting perfectly alone in a large cinema. It's as though something terrible has happened somewhere else and you are the only one who doesn't know. That's how it felt this week, anyway, as I bought my ticket and sat down to watch the new Disney epic John Carter.

I soon discovered why I was alone. John Carter is a terrible film with an incomprehensible story, ludicrous, mutton-headed characters and unspeakable dialogue, and already Disney have announced that it is likely to lose $200 million dollars so abject have been the first box office takings. From what I saw in my West London local, that figure may be an underestimation, with John Carter heading rapidly for the movie flops record book.

No amount of tall, four-armed, computer generated creatures, of gravity-less leaping, monster slaying savagery and visual homages to Star Wars and Gladiator could redeem such a complicated farrago of boring daftness.

But how did it get like this? Nobody sets out to make a flop. At the start of shooting of any film, everyone involved is filled with hope and expectation about the wonderful entertainment they are about to create, about the prizes they might win and the money they might make.

That would have been how it was when Disney gave the green light to invest a total of $350 million dollars in John Carter. Based on a character created by Edgar Rice Burroughs, who also brought us Tarzan, with writer/director Andrew Stanton riding high as a Hollywood power player after the success of his animated movies Finding Nemo and Wall-E, all it needed was astonishing special effects, which is pretty much a given these days in hi-tech Hollywood, and a popular star. Step forward US TV favourite Taylor Kitsch playing the intrepid Carter on a nineteenth century trip to Mars, where he finds not just red dust but monsters galore.

With so much going for it, the movie should, on paper, have been a shoe-in for success. Unfortunately that success was absolutely not assured on the paper on which the screenplay was written.

Once again a vastly expensive movie fails because, in part at least, the ingredient which should be the cheapest in the whole blancmange, the screenplay, wasn't good enough.

Once denigrated as "schmucks with Underwoods", screenwriters have never been the most visible stars in the Hollywood firmament, although the best are extremely well paid these days as they sit at their computer screens with their dedicated screenwriting programmes.

But the rules still apply. If they don't get the screenplay right and make a blueprint for the telling of an interesting story with believable characters and clever dialogue, no amount of money, beautiful stars, stunning special effects, brilliant cameramen or visionary directors will make the beast work.

Everyone in Hollywood knows this, yet, somehow, a lot of people continually manage to forget it, sometimes even the writer himself when, like Andrew Stanton, he also happens to be the director. How else do we explain Heaven's Gate which was written and directed by Michael Cimino?

Having tasted financial and critical success with The Deer Hunter, Cimino set out in 1979 to make a modest $7.5 million Western starring Kris Kristofferson and Christopher Walken. Two years and around $45 million later he presented an unshowable five hours long movie to United Artists, the studio that had backed him.

In his book about the film, Final Cut, former United Artists executive Steven Bach explained how Cimino, who had once been a commercials director, fell in love with the sumptuous images he was shooting rather than the story he was telling. The result was, Bach says, that the "viewer became a victim sensory overload".

But why did United Artists let Cimino keep on shooting when they could see the budget was out of control? Basically, because of some very fancy Hollywood-style contracts that protected Cimino, and, perhaps more importantly, because they couldn't afford not to finish the movie.

There's little as worthless as an unfinished film, and sometimes it seems, or at least it seemed to them, that the only solution is to keep throwing money at it in the desperate hope that something magical will finally emerge.

It didn't. Heaven's Gate sank at the box office, and, less than a month later, United Artists had to be sold to MGM. Cimino's ambition had been too great. He could never bring himself to stop shooting.

Other movies (actually, lots of them) should perhaps never have started. Take Gigli, a tasteless comedy about a Mafia hit man (Ben Affleck), who is assigned to kidnap a mentally retarded brother of a California district attorney, and assisted by a presumed-to-be lesbian assassin played by Jennifer Lopez (she of the bottom before Pippa).

Worried about the unfunny scenes they were seeing in rushes, the studio executives apparently kept demanding script changes throughout shooting. It didn't help. The movie was withdrawn from the cinemas after a three week run, a big chunk of the $54 million budget never recouped, and Affleck and Lopez ended their engagement. Who says there are no sad endings in Hollywood?

The Hollywood habit of engaging one screenwriter after another (and many are never credited) to work on a project, while sometimes successful (as was the case with Gladiator, on which British writer William Nicholson made an important difference), can also indicate that something was wrong with the idea of the movie right from the beginning.

This may or may not have been the case with Battlefield Earth which starred John Travolta in an adaptation of the book by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard and involved at least two writers. One American critic was unimpressed by their efforts. "A million monkeys with a million crayons would be hard-pressed in a million years to create anything as cretinous as Battlefield Earth," he wrote of the screenplay which cost $42 million and recouped $22 million.

On Sahara, which starred Matthew McConaughey and Penelope Cruz, it wasn't just that too many cooks in the writing room may have spoiled the script, it was also that there was a plethora of producers, twenty being credited in all. Stuck in the sands of Morocco for endless months as the budget edged up to $241 million, one of them, a friend of mine, had to take a year off after shooting to get over her experience.

Of course it's easy to be amused by the hubris of movie directors, the interference of executives, the overweening vanity and demands of some film stars and the eye-watering losses. But this is all in retrospect. It's easy to be wise after the event.

If Ishtar had been a hit, no one would have criticised Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty for being too obviously in love with themselves on screen. But it wasn't and they did.

While, on a more modest level, if Swept Away in 2002 had been as successful as director Guy Ritchie's later efforts, it wouldn't have mattered that it looked rather like a vanity film for his then wife Madonna.

Now I don't want to hold out too much hope for the makers of John Carter, they don't deserve it, but it doesn't always follow that all movies that do badly in their opening weeks are destined to be complete flops.

Blade Runner opened disappointingly in the US in 1982 - shortly after E.T. smashed all records and captured a different kind of public mood. But foreign sales, TV and video rights, and acclaim as one of the classic films of all time, have followed ever since. Whether that means it's ever gone into profit, I rather doubt, however. Net profit can be a hazy concept in terms of Hollywood bookkeeping.

Surprisingly one film that, against all expectations, is said to have gone into profit was Cleopatra, the 1963 movie on which Elizabeth Taylor got off with Richard Burton. Dogged throughout by Taylor's delicate health, with the director, Joseph L. Mankiewicz rewriting the screenplay every night to negotiate the vicissitudes of filming, it cost the equivalent of about $300 million in today's money, but finally broke even in 1973 with sales to TV.

Back to John Carter. Although there were still only eight people in the cinema when the lights went up the other night, Disney isn't about to go bankrupt because of its losses. The movies the big studios put their hundreds of millions into these days, those aimed at hormone bubbling teenage boys, will still keep coming, and some will get it right.

And how is the best way to get it right? By making sure the screenplay works before filming starts and the hundreds of millions start flooding out.

***********

Ray Connolly's black comedy novel Shadows On A Wall, about the making of a movie on which the budget is out of control and the stars and director are found dead, is now available as an eBook from Amazon.

Regrets and Pipe Dreams (Daily Mail 28.2.12)

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

Show me the person who has no regrets and I’ll show you either a devil or a saint. But most probably I'll show you someone with absolutely no imagination. Because having regrets, that ability to look back at our lives and reflect on choices made, actions taken and things said or unsaid, is part of what makes us human.

So when I read yesterday that, according to a survey, most of us spend almost three quarters of an hour a week pondering our missed chances and the wrong roads taken, my first thought was "only three quarters of an hour? What's everyone doing for the rest of the week?"

We all share these ramblings of the mind, often in the sleepless wee small hours, when we latch on to some incident from decades ago, and then tie ourselves in knots re-evaluating it and wondering what might have happened if we'd done one thing instead of another.

For instance, Sunday was a lovely day in London, and, as I was sitting out in the unexpected sunshine, I remembered another sunny early spring day in 1961 when I'd been a student.

One lunchtime I'd got to talk to a beautiful French girl and when she told me she had nothing to do, I'd skipped lectures and spent an idyllic afternoon climbing the Monument in London with her. I was instantly in love, but, because I didn’t have the nerve to ask her out. I never saw her again. That day is as fresh in my mind as yesterday. And it’s always been a regret that I was so shy.

Then there was my night that never was with Maria Schneider. She was soon to become famous as the young star of the erotic Marlon Brando film Last Tango In Paris, but when I met her, she was just a very pretty French girl with a puppy dog face.

Should I have gone back to that flat with her and the other young actress for the little party they suggested? Obviously not, so it's not quite a regret, but… Well, a fellow couldn't help wondering when he saw so much of her in her famous film the following year.

Girls and boys. They're what make the young world go round. So it isn't surprising that 20 per cent of us are said to have regrets about our romances, which is clearly reflected in the high incidence of divorce. But family life can cause just as much, if not a great deal more, real heart searching.

When my children were small I was loaned a movie camera to take on holiday to Portugal, and, because I didn't really know how to operate it, and was very busy when I got home, I never got around to having the film processed.

The reels have since been lost, meaning that although I have thousands of still photographs of the children, there are no home movies of them showing the way they were that summer, learning to swim and playing games on the beach. I'm sure the film wouldn't have been very good, but it would have existed. It was my own stupid fault and nothing I can do will put it right. That's a real regret.

As is the fact that although I spent years armed with a tape recorder interviewing very famous people, it never occurred to me to record my own mother's voice. I don't know why I didn't. I just took her for granted. And now it's too late.

When I was making my career she was, like all mothers, very proud of me, but, again, I was always busy, not realising that she would perhaps have liked to have spent more time with me…perhaps just with me alone.

When she got very old she lived alone on the South Coast, a two and a half hour drive away. I went to see her, obviously. But not as often as I could have done and wish I had done. She was lonely. I let her down. That's my biggest regret.

But there are small regrets, too, that I can't undo. I used to bump into an old and good friend from university from time to time when we would always plan to get together for a night out to reminisce. Then one day I got a phone call from his widow. He'd died unexpectedly from a heart attack.

Like many people of my generation I've had an incredibly lucky life. I don't regret, as apparently many do, not working harder at school. I did just enough to get to university where I did just enough to get a degree, which always seemed to me to be the right balance.

But it's been a lifetime sadness that I never took the time to learn the guitar and play in a band – any band. That being said I could easily have started guitar lessons later in life but somehow never bothered, so whose fault is that?

When I finally realised I wasn't as good a runner as I used be, I began to wish I'd taken part in at least one marathon, just to test myself. But, again, how honest am I being? I'd had years to do it and could never be bothered to even start training.

I've always been hopeless with money, too, never paying enough attention, if you want to know, because the work I do always seemed so much more interesting. So I suppose I'm not as well off as I could have been, something, which, in the darkest hours can chide me. But that's probably me just being greedy. Most people, I would imagine, would think I've done all right.

Like everybody, I've made some unwise career choices, though they didn't seem foolish at the time. But then, isn't that the problem with regretting anything. Only in retrospect can we see the mistakes we think we made and imagine the road not travelled. And even then how honest are we really being with ourselves?

For instance, let's return to the French girl I took up the Monument. What if I had asked her out and she'd turned me down, as I probably thought she might? That would have been a dagger in my heart for ever.

Alternatively, what if she'd said "yes", and we'd gone out together, and on better acquaintance I'd discovered that she wasn't quite as perfect as I'd imagined. The result would have been that I'd have forgotten her, as I've forgotten other girls, and I'd have missed the bittersweet daydream of never knowing. And believe me I have enjoyed that daydream.

In the film It's A Wonderful Life the James Stewart character is driven to the brink of suicide, thinking that all the life choices he made were a mistake. Then up pops his guardian angel, Clarence, to save his life and show him how things would have been if he'd never existed, and how all kinds of little decisions he'd made helped make his world a better place. Maybe we all need a guardian angel to point this out to us sometimes.

It's often said that you don't regret what you've done, only what you haven't done. There's much truth in this. But we have to be careful with some of those night-time self-reproaches, the ones that point to the other gloriously successful lives we might have had. Because, in truth, they're often just pipe dreams that vanish with the morning.

We only ever know for certain the consequences of what we did. And although we like to paint for ourselves the rosiest of pictures of the road not travelled, we can never be sure. It might have led to disaster. And basically we did what we did because we are who we are, for good and bad.

Not that we don't wonder. But that's because we're human.

How Hollywood Gets Sex Wrong (Daily Mail February 1, 2012)

Thu, 2 Feb 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

We've been watching quite a lot of frantic sex in our house over the past few weeks. It happens every year at this time, when BAFTA, the film and TV society for professionals, begin counting the votes for their annual awards ceremony in February, and DVDs of the latest movies are delivered to the homes of its 6,500 voting members.

In this way, along with the usual adventures of spies, detectives, criminals, pirates, vampires, wizards and quirky talking toys, the modern way of sex reaches us.

Or does it? Somehow I doubt it. I mean, if everyone in the country was having sex the way it's portrayed in most of the movies we've been watching recently, it would suggest we're living in a nation of super-athletes. And a look at any bus queue tells us we're not.

There was a time when Hollywood bedroom scenes demanded that one foot stay on the floor at all times. As that was plainly impossible for anyone but a couple of contortionists, it was, of course, never tried, and, as was the intention, there was no sex on screen.

Then we got to the Doris Day/Rock Hudson romantic type of comedies where young, attractive, married couples in pyjamas would climb into single beds alongside each other, and, after a couple lines of more or less snappy dialogue, put out the bedside light and go to sleep. If anything, that was even more unlikely.

But was it any more foolish than the way movie sex is now so frequently portrayed, where the actors seem to have been given the direction "bonk as though your life depended on it, as athletically as you can and we'll add all kinds of exaggerated sounds to make it even more exciting".

Were these the instructions given to Daniel Craig before he and that Girl With The Dragon Tattoo went at it with such gusto, or to Michael Fassbender before he pretended to do similar things with all manner of people, and in all kinds of manic ways, in Shame?

Admittedly Fassbender was playing a sex addict, so I suppose some over-diligence might be expected in his case. But the bed crashing, the pulsating gasps, the sound effects magnified off the register, and the naked prostitute being addressed against a plate glass window half way up a glass tower block…?

I don't know about you, but I've seen a lot of tower block windows in my life, but I've never seen that. I didn’t believe it, and I didn't care. And when you don’t believe or care in a movie it isn't working for you.

For the same reason I didn’t believe last year's champion in the over-athletic bonking stakes either. That was Julianne Moore in The Kids Are All Right – but it didn't seem right at all. On the contrary, it was absurd that her character, a lesbian, would suddenly get such a hetero rush for Mark Ruffalo that she went into what looked like frenzied, comic mortal combat with the guy.

I suppose the thinking behind such exaggerated displays of passion is, taking a lead from the porn industry, the more torrid the scene, the more we see and hear, the more entertained we'll be.

But is that really the case? It seems to me that for sex scenes to really work as the film makers intend, the viewer has to identify with the characters and the emotions being depicted on the screen. Like porn, sex as a spectator sport can quickly become boring.

Despite the legend, it was tedious in the first of the much over-hyped Hollywood bonkathons, Don't Look Now, which showed Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland at it like over intimate wrestlers. Poetic? I don't think so. That was in the Seventies, and it was downright ridiculous by the Nineties when Jeremy Irons acted out his trysts with Juliette Binoche in Damage.

I know Irons was playing the part of an MP, so, I suppose, all things are possible, but the scenes of him banging the lady's head on the floor in mid-passion were neither romantic, nor erotic. People in the cinema I attended laughed out loud. I wondered whether the movie should have been retitled Brain Damage.

Obviously viewers like to see attractive people without their clothes, be it in films, advertisements in magazines or on canvas framed on the walls of art galleries. That's just the way we humans are. But by turning sex on screen into a display of strength, energy, physical suppleness with off the board sound effects added it seems to me the entire point is being lost.

Which brings me to an example of where, if we are to have depictions of a sexual nature on screen, and why not, it works rather better: Birdsong, the BBC's two part adaptation of love, infidelity and the First World War.

Yes, there's a lot of rolling around between glistening, starched white sheets, and the odd peeps at the unembarrassed breasts of a beautiful French actress called Clémence Poésy, but there are no gymnastics.

There doesn't have to be. Having watched an hour of the soon-to-be lovers catching each others' eyes and touching ankles, we are as much in love with the idea of them being in love, or, at least, in an enhanced state of mutual lust, as the characters are themselves.
That's how it is, or was, some of us will remember - or at least, that's
how we wished it had been.

In other words we, the audience, are not just uninvolved voyeurs of the passion, but feel we are the characters themselves. Now I know at my time of life, or indeed at any time of my life, I never looked much like Eddie Redmayne, but on Sunday night it was me that Clémence Poésy was looking at with those extraordinary eyes.

And I'm pretty sure there were a few million married ladies around the country, who were thinking what she seemed to be thinking, as she gazed at young Eddie. That’s the magic of passion on the screen when it's done right.

Obviously this filmic strand of Birdsong is just upmarket, literary Mills & Boon really, pretty people, gorgeous French setting, hot summer, stolen moments, impossible desire, all those clothes to take off, etc.. But at heart I bet most viewers (with the possible exception of hormone booming teenage boys with their Inbetweeners comic smut) are a lot closer to Mills & Boon in their romantic fantasies than to Hollywood's utilitarian bonkathons.

And as someone who sees an awful lot of athleticism masquerading as desire on screen whenever the BAFTAS come around, it's a rather welcome relief.

Ray Connolly's novel about the making of a Hollywood movie, Shadows On A Wall, has just been republished as an eBook for Kindle.

Our Phony World

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

Professional footballers up and down the country did what they are paid to do over the weekend. They tried to score goals, and when some of them succeeded their various team mates rushed to engulf them in euphoric tangles of arms, legs and kisses. Why such passion? They play twice a week. A goal isn’t that rare a phenomenon.

But then nor are prizes in acting for Kate Winslet who whinnied and hyperventilated in apparent astonishment when a couple of months ago she won yet another. Knowing that she’s brilliant, she must surely have stopped being surprised at her own success years ago. Everybody else did.

And why do we see the regular academic weep-athon when sixth form girls fall upon each other’s necks to sob with joy when they read their A-level results every August?

I’ll tell you why. We are all beginning to behave in the way we think we’re expected to behave. That is to say, the footballers, Kate and the sixth formers are over-reacting by way of tears, gasps and over-dramatic celebrations because that’s how they’ve seen characters over-react for years in melodramatically directed television soap operas.

“Life doesn’t imitate art,” Woody Allen declared some years ago, “it imitates bad television.” And that was in the days when bad television, at least in this country, was nowhere near as vapid as it is now.

So, welcome to our Phony World.

I’m not talking here about the way some of us make ourselves look - fake tans, fake bosoms, fake hair colour, fake teeth. Mankind has always tried to pretty or sexy itself up, whether it be by wearing cod pieces, make-up or bustles. That’s all part of the mating and status raising process. No. What I find odd is that absurd displays of cheesy exaggeration on television have been so absorbed by viewers they are now copied and considered normal behaviour.

They aren’t. There’s nothing normal about the ludicrous scowls of Alan Sugar in The Apprentice. What he presents is a laughable bogeyman in staged scenes of pretend tension. Yet you can be sure that little management Napoleons up and down the country are aping Sugar’s glares and rudeness in offices this very day.

Similarly the pantomime indignation of Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight as he tries to get a politician to answer an impossibly complex question with a single word, “Yes or No”, isn’t real vexation. He’s just playing a part – that of the entertainer interrogator.

It’s cod exasperation and he does it very well, considerably better than all those copycat bullies who no doubt use similar eye-popping smirks in schools, colleges, police stations, courts and offices everywhere, in risible attempts to display their interrogatory skills.

Nothing, of course, is remotely as counterfeit as that found in the virus of reality pop music shows with which Simon Cowell has infected television. Here contestants are encouraged to break down as though their entire families are about to be wiped out at any moment, when actually the very worst that can happen is a quick elimination from the next round; while in front of them judges over-act bullying, falling out, surprise and wet-eyed empathy as they parrot lines of crass banality. “Tonight, you own that song!” they lie, as television manipulation and phoniness reaches its nadir.

And from such flim-flam fakery, and similar less insidious earlier shows, it's but a small leap before the sobbing virus finds the tear ducts of the young and impressionable. Hence the squealing and sobbing when exam results come through, with older teachers almost certainly thinking: “What’s all the fuss about? I didn’t go into meltdown when I got my results”.

But that would have been before a couple of generations had been born, nurtured and finally brainwashed by camera phones, unreal reality TV, pop videos, online profiles and all things visual. It wouldn't surprise me if many young people of today feel they are almost living in their own TV programme.

Actually some of them are. On YouTube and our mobile phones we find elaborately rehearsed and stage managed weddings, marriage proposals and all manner of other, usually private, performances. Everywhere we look we find ordinary people acting out parts – perhaps none more so, perhaps, than the Rambo lookalikes of the Libyan civil war.

The movie The Truman Show, in which a boy/young man spends his days unaware that he’s living in a fake world specially constructed so that TV cameras can follow his every move, carried this to a satirical extreme. But then came Big Brother, where participants begin acting up for the cameras by copying the overstated behaviour of soap characters?

With celebrity now an ambition in itself, almost everyone wants to be a star. But sometimes the magnet of instant celebrity is not so warming. Were all those pious pilgrimages to Amy Winehouse’s home by fans carrying roses wrapped in Cellophane really displays of deep and genuine grief? Or were some of those people just turning up because they quite liked her singing, she was famous and local, there were TV cameramen there, and the laying of flowers at a scene of tragedy is what happens on the telly?

In such ways loss for one family may be transmuted into momentary fame for another, as shots of the apparent mourners get their ten seconds on the TV news.

Ah yes, the television news. Obviously by the very nature of their job newsreaders have to frequently announce pretty upsetting events. But does Fiona Bruce have to emote quite so much? She’s sitting there as a messenger, not an actress.

Happily it’s become increasingly rare to hear music used as an accompaniment to news items. But what about those documentaries where it's poured on to the soundtrack like gravy to heighten tension or stir sympathies…thus turning investigation into entertainment.
Not that phoniness is dispersed only through television. It’s all around us, with party political conferences excusing it as “presentation”.

Closer to home, there’s the false intimacy by which call centre employees so quickly wish to address us when they want to sell us something – overlooking the fact that we are total strangers to them. “Do you mind if I call you John?” they ask cosily. It seems priggish not to let them, even though only they and the tax man know me by that name.

Then there’s the internet where the average Facebook member has, apparently, 130 online “friends”, although he or she will never have met most of them, and couldn’t care less if someone called Dilly in San Diego has lost her cat and wonders if any of her “friends” has seen it!

Often the spurious friendship comes by email. While I’ve been writing this article I’ve had a message saying “We miss you…” from a company selling men’s toiletries, an organisation from which I’ve never bought anything. How can they miss someone they’ve never known?

It’s good to have pals and to know they “sort of” mean it when they say they’ve missed you. But everything else is bogus – not unlike the explosions of laughter which follow the weakest of jokes in those doleful Radio 4 comedy shows.

Not much on Radio 4 is very funny since Linda Smith died. But if you didn’t understand English and could only measure how amusing a line was by the decibels of appreciation that follow its delivery, you might reasonably assume that Radio 4 transmits the utterings of the funniest people in the world.

It doesn’t. Studio audiences are generous with their hearty guffaws because they understand that the very reason they are there is to laugh. But the level of their good humour, as picked up by those strategically placed microphones, invariably sounds exaggerated when heard on our radios. It’s a cheat.

You could argue that since the evolution of our species we've always been guilty of duplicity in our dealings with each other, and that the much admired British stiff upper lip was just as phoney in its way as any of the emotional conflagrations on The Only Way Is Essex.

But I don’t think so. British understatement and stoicism were cultural characteristics which took generations and hundreds of years to develop and be passed on. Tat television and the internet is changing us within a few decades.

There was a fashionable phrase some years ago that went “you are what you eat”. Now we’re in danger of becoming what we watch - a nation full of insincere phonies acting like the wallies on the wretched X-Factor.

Wherever You Are and the Military Wives (Daily Mail, 21.12.11)

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

There's nothing phoney or saccharine about the song, and nothing fake or glitzy about those who sing it. Wherever You Are, as sung by the choir of Military Wives, is reality put to music - the reality of waiting and praying, by those who wait and worry.

They aren't a glamorous choir. They're better than that. They're beautiful. In that everyday, busy prettiness of young wives and mothers, with their high street dresses and the roots showing in their newly washed hair, there's an honesty about them, a beauty in their very ordinariness.

They don't look like stars. They look like women you see in the supermarket or at the school gates, but this week theirs is the best selling record seen in this country for six years, out-selling one by last week's X-Factor winners, Little Mix, by a factor of six to one.

Both records are in aid of charities, which is excellent. But while the ambitions and generous intentions of the young in Little Mix should be applauded, they are already finding their lesser success tainted by the brass faced commercialism of their mentors, Simon Cowell and his crew.

Because, for Little Mix, as for so many artists who make charity records, there is inevitably an element of show-biz opportunism. There's nothing wrong with that. It's a fact of life in our over glamourised, market-led world. So, good luck to Little Mix in their careers: may they be long and fruitful.

Wherever You Are, however, is something quite different. It's a prayer not a show-biz opportunity. "Wherever you are my love will keep you safe," go the lyrics. The choir knows, and we all know, that's an eternal hope, not a reality when daily there are deadly explosive traps laid in the ground for our troops to step upon. But the line is valid just the same. Because it's a prayer about love, and love strengthens resolve like nothing else.

Based on lines from letters and poems sent by the women in the choir to their partners serving in Afghanistan, then turned into song by Aberdeen University's professor of music, Paul Mealor (who incidentally composed the new music for this year's Royal wedding), the effect is truly genuine, moving and inspiring.

What a song. From the moment the dark haired opening soloist with the tattoos and the glasses begins to sing that litany of love, hope and pride, to when the full choir joins in, any possible argument about the point of the soldiers' mission is transcended by the nobility of the uncomplaining message. "Light up the darkness, my prince of peace," they sing. It's the very spirit of Christmas.

Millions of words have rightly been expended on praising Gareth Malone, the inspirational young choirmaster who coached the Military Wives from the tri-service RMB Chivenor in North Devon, and who through other television programmes, has made choir singing a national pastime again. He's a breath of fresh air in the midst of the posturing of vainglorious TV personalities, and his contribution to the fabric of so many lives, both directly and indirectly, cannot be exaggerated.

But what Gareth has shown in his choirs isn't something new. The joy of singing together is in all of us. It's part of being human, part of being a group.

For most of our lives, as church going has been replaced by supermarket shopping on Sundays, communal singing lost its way in our increasingly secular society. Somewhere in this world of universally available cheap recorded music it seemed to go into slumber mode in these recent electronic decades.

But it's always been there, just waiting for a Gareth to remind us that we learn to talk and to play together through singing nursery rhymes, and that the sound of Christmas carols sung by however amateur a group of singers will, as if by magic, send hands into pockets and purses in the act of giving.

Recently only by seeing and hearing the majesty of the mass singing of Jerusalem by five thousand promenaders at the Last Night Of The Proms have we been annually reminded of what we’ve been missing.

Earlier generations understood the link between singing together and living together far better. When Vera Lynn sang We'll Meet Again for the troops in World War II, and heard them immediately join in with her, she would have realised that she was tapping into an ancient language of shared emotions, one that expressed through music those universal dreams and hopes too deep for words.

That's what music can do better than any speech by the most eloquent of speakers. It links minds and hearts, and, yes, tears, too. For thousands of years soldiers forced into battle stilled their fears with songs that instilled camaraderie while workers sang together as they toiled to keep up the rhythm of their work. More recently protest groups sang as they marched, as today football crowds sing their team's anthems in great emotive swirling masses, be it You'll Never Walk Alone or The Wonder of You. It's why we have national anthems, too, songs to remind us that we belong, that we are part of a group bigger than ourselves.

Most of us think we can't sing. But Gareth Malone has shown that most of us can sing, maybe not well enough to appear at La Scala in Milan or even make a record, but, unembarrassed in a crowd and particularly one that is well run, we can surprise ourselves. We shouldn't. That was what we learned to do through the millennia of evolution. We just began to forget it.

You night think that after a long shift down the mines in South Wales the colliery workers would simply want an exhausted quiet night in. But for generations, pit workers would hurry home for their tea and then be off out to make the sublime music of Welsh male voice choirs.

And why? Because singing is not only good for us in that it sucks oxygen into the lungs and in doing so releases chemicals into the blood which make us also feel good, but because it's an act of sharing.

More than anything in the year, Christmas is about togetherness, when families and friends cross the country or the globe to be together at Christmas, and when the music of carols binds the generations.

This year many will come together and be comforted by the lyrics of Wherever You Are, and the stoicism of those who sing it. Many of us these days don't know anyone in the armed services, their numbers now being relatively few and the job they do seeming so distant from our daily lives.

But the spontaneous applause that used to break out at Wootton Basset as the fallen soldiers were brought home from Afghanistan told us that, though out of sight, they are not forgotten. Deep within most of us, albeit usually hidden, there remains a gratitude for their bravery.

And it's that gratitude which will make Wherever You Are a musical focal point, not only for this generation and the ones to come, because I suspect it will prove popular for many years. But for all those who went before when women waited and wondered and kept the home fires burning and prayed that the knock on the door would never come. For my mother, widowed in 1944 when I was three, it did come. Through inevitable tears, she would have loved and understood this song.

The language of music, with its short cut to the deepest of our emotions, can often talk to us more clearly than any conversation. Through the work of Gareth Malone, Paul Mealor and the brave Military Wives the words of Wherever You Are will provoke millions of tears this week. Good, grateful tears.

Footnote: Proceeds from the sale of the Military Wives CD will be divided between the Royal British legion and the Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen Families Association.

Joe Frasier - a gentle man

Fri, 25 Nov 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

Joe Frazier may have been able to give and take all manner of beatings in the boxing ring, but out of it he was easily wounded by unkind words. I discovered this when, shortly after he’d beaten Muhammad Ali to become undisputed world heavyweight champion, he made the mistake of believing himself to be a soul singer as well as a boxer.

Possibly imagining a second career in music, Frazier toured Europe in 1971 accompanied by a band called the Knockouts. I never heard him sing, but according to the reviews he was not good. And by the time we met for an interview in his tiny hotel room in London, he was close to tears, at a total loss to understand why he was being ridiculed.

Having just returned from a run, and, stripped to the waist as, by habit, he smashed one vast fist into the other, his chest seemingly almost as deep as it was wide, this ex-abattoir worker looked a menacing sight.

But in conversation he was sensitive and kind, upset by taunts, and talking at length about his father who had died early and never enjoyed the fun and luxury Smokin’ Joe could have shared with him. Of all the hundreds of interviews I've done Joe Frasier impressed me more than most.

When The Beatles Met Elvis (Daily Mail, October 6 2011)

Thu, 6 Oct 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

As summits go it might have been a secret meeting of heads of state. It was the evening of August 27, 1965, and police motorcyclists had been deployed to block any following traffic as three limousines sped west down Sunset Boulevard and into the gated Bel Air millionaire community of Beverly Hills.

But this wasn’t a political meeting of giants. It was a cultural one. The Beatles, then the most famous people on earth, were being taken to see Elvis Presley, the “king” of rock and roll.

It should have been a meeting of minds: only the four Beatles and Elvis knew what it was like to be so universally worshipped; only they had experienced being in the eye of a global musical hurricane. And as John Lennon would repeat until his death fifteen years later, “Before Elvis there was nothing”.

But, as the exhibition “The Beatles and Elvis”, which has just opened in Liverpool recalls, in the event the party that took place that night at Elvis’s house, 565 Perugia Way was something of an anti-climax.

With a nervous John Lennon being characteristically smart ass before his idol, Elvis was shy, embarrassed and almost certainly jealous.

That would be understandable. Before the Beatles had invaded America twenty months earlier, he had been the undisputed leader of all he surveyed in rock music. Now they, the young pretenders, had stolen his throne. And, while he found himself contractually imprisoned in one tacky Hollywood beach movie after another, for which he recorded the worst songs of his career, everything the Beatles touched was turning to gold and critical praise.

Only 30, he, who just a few years earlier had been the great young revolutionary, was looking old fashioned and out of touch. He hated it…and probably them for what they represented.

Not that the four Beatles could have been fully aware of this. Even if they were disillusioned with Elvis’s recent records, they knew how much they owed to him. Indeed the very emergence of Elvis and Heartbreak Hotel nine years’ earlier had summoned the instigating moment that had led the schoolboy Lennon to form his own skiffle group, the Quarrymen.

Paul McCartney had been similarly obsessed, and all through their years playing in Liverpool’s Cavern Club and in Hamburg the Beatles had included over a dozen Presley songs in their repertoire.

So, universally famous and feted as by 1965 they had become, as they were led across the deep white shag carpet that night into the sitting room where Elvis sat with his heavily made up and bouffant haired girl friend Priscilla Beaulieu, they were nervous. In fact so overawed were they, that at first none of them could think of anything to say.

It was Elvis who broke the ice. “Well, if you guys are just gonna sit there and stare at me all night, I’m going to bed,” he said, before calling for guitars to be passed around. Things got a little better after that, with Ringo, in the absence of a drum kit, beating time on a table with his fingers.

This meeting of idols had not come about by chance. Rather was it due to the work of a young music paper journalist called Chris Hutchins who was reporting on the Beatles latest tour of America and who got on well with Elvis’s manager, the self styled ‘Colonel’ Tom Parker.

Hutchins was after a scoop, and, as he recalls in his memoir Elvis Meets the Beatles, (which has just been republished as an eBook on Amazon) having met Elvis and quickly realised how curious the star was about the Liverpool group, he set about coaxing Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein and Parker into the meeting.

It was a venture that required not a few diplomatic niceties. Firstly the Beatles would have to go to Elvis. The king would not go to the new pretenders. Secondly, there were to be no reporters, other than Chris Hutchins, in tow, no photographs, no recordings and no advance leaking of the plans.

Barrow remembers that at first George Harrison was doubtful about the evening. Already disillusioned with Beatlemania, he feared a publicity and fan hoopla. While John Lennon suspected Elvis might cancel before they got there.

Elvis didn’t cancel. Arriving at the huge Bel Air mansion (once the home of the Shah of Persia) the Beatles found a Rolls Royce, two Cadillacs and a herd of Harley Davidson motor-cycles waiting for them beyond the sentries at the gates.

Elvis had summoned a dozen of his Memphis mafia and their molls, and now greeted the Beatles and their retinue (which included their road manager Mal Evans – a huge Elvis fan) with much polite shaking of hands in a large circular room that was bathed in red and blue lights. At one end of the room, Paul McCartney would later remember, a juke box kept playing Charlie Rich’s Mohair Sam, with Elvis playing along on his bass guitar.

With conversation at first pretty limited to reminiscences of near-misses while flying around on tour (the Beatles’ plane having caught fire a couple of weeks earlier, and a plane Elvis was flying on having had an engine cut out on his way to an early recording session), it was only a jam session that helped everyone relax.

The Beatles I Feel Fine had been a recent hit and as Elvis played along with it on bass he joked, “See, I’m practising.”

To which McCartney replied “Don’t worry, between us, me and Mr Epstein will make a star of you,” before, as a nod to Priscilla (wearing a sequinned mini-dress) he played a little of You’re My World, a recent hit for another Priscilla, the Beatles' old Cavern friend Cilla Black.

John, as usual, was just being John. “Why have you dropped the old rock stuff?” he asked Elvis bluntly, adding that he’d loved his early records and didn’t go for the film songs.

Elvis, not used to being even mildly criticised, and hating the film songs himself, responded that he would be making rock records again soon.

“Oh, good. We’ll buy them when you do,” came back John.

The Beatle probably wasn’t being rude. That was the way he always talked, as he wasn’t making fun either when, putting on a funny Franco-German accent, he added: “Zis is ze way it should be…ze small homely gathering wiz a few friends and a leetle muzic.”

According to some memories there was worse to come. Overhearing Elvis say that he was being paid a million dollars a movie and one had only taken him fifteen days to shoot, Lennon is reputed to have cracked: “Well, we’ve got an hour to spare now, let’s make an epic together, shall we.”

History doesn’t recall Elvis’s reactions that night, but five years later when the Beatles had broken up, a by-then drug-soaked Presley would make an extraordinary secret trip to Washington, ask for and be given an audience with President Nixon, and tell him of his worries about the bad influence of stars like John Lennon on the youth of America.

The meeting of the musical giants had begun at ten o’clock and as the evening wore on Ringo went off to play pool in the next room, while Brian Epstein began trying to persuade “Colonel” Parker to let him present a series of Elvis concerts in the UK. It was never to happen.

At two a.m. the party came to an end, with the Colonel handing the Beatles and their friends going-home presents by way of Elvis albums, and John standing in the garden shouting, his comedic foreign accent: “Sanks for ze music, Elvis. Long live ze King,” before suddenly inviting his probably puzzled host to join the Beatles at their place the following night.

“Well, I’ll see. I’m not sure I’ll be able to make it,” came the inevitable reply from the star who only ever socialised in his own home.

At which Lennon turned to some of the Memphis Mafia and said: “Well, you’re welcome to come with or without him”. They went.
As they got into the waiting limousines Tony Barrow reckons he heard John Lennon say: “Elvis was stoned.”

To which George Harrison replied quietly: “Aren’t we all!”

The next day John Lennon would be telling everyone: “ There’s only one person in the USA that we ever wanted to meet – not that he wanted to meet us,” before adding privately somewhat disappointedly “It was just like meeting Engelbert Humperdink.”

That being said there were Elvis records on John Lennon’s juke box when the Beatle was murdered. I wonder, did Elvis have any Beatles record on his?

************************

Elvis Meets The Beatles by Chris Hutchins and Peter Thomson is now available as an eBook on Amazon, price £7-48.

Back to the top

Getting On (May 2011)

Wed, 1 Jun 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

Happiness, it appears, peaks at the age of 74. So says a survey of 21,000 people, quoted in a new book on ageing by Lewis Wolpert anyway - which is something to look forward to.

Apparently if I look after myself, keep fit, keep my mind busy, have a positive outlook on life, think I’m younger than I am, eat my greens and am lucky with my genes, I could go on for years. And for those of a religious bent, or simply well off, things could be even better. Money matters. People in the richest part of London live about seventeen years longer than those in the poorest areas.

Quite how accurate that age of maximum happiness at 74 is, or even how that happiness was calculated, Professor Wolpert, wryly, doesn’t say. But looking around at friends of my own age and those a good bit older, there could well be some truth in it. There may be a muffling of deafness amongst some of them (I’ve been lucky there, the hearing’s terrific), but by and large they’re a contented and happy breed who don’t think they’re old at all yet.

Not that the young understand that. To them old age begins at 65, other surveys suggest, and I would bet that to the really young at a much earlier age. I well remember when my wife’s cousin, then a student, told us about a chap who’d tried to get off with her. Did she fancy him, I asked.

“God, no!” She scorned. “He was your age.” I was then not yet 35. I didn’t feel 35. I don’t feel much older than that now.

Others obviously see me differently. When, while travelling on the London Underground recently, a very pretty young woman stood up and offered me her seat, I was almost insulted. Did she really think I was too old to stand? “Don’t be misled by the white hair,” I wanted to say. “That’s an inherited family thing. I was grey at 30. I’m quite young really.” I didn’t, of course. I just stood there, more athletically upright, admittedly, and smiled in fake amusement at her kind, but obviously mistaken assumption.

Age - it obsesses us, every day becoming both a blessing and a problem as the population of the Western world gets older. We’re all living so much longer. In 1900 male expectation of life in London was 42: by 1950 it was 51. Today it’s around 80. The number of people in the UK over 85 doubled between 1983 and 2008. And the figure is growing all the time.

I remember my grandmother being 70. She was an old lady. She died at 82, quite ancient, I thought then, but only the same age as a friend of ours was when she went on a trip to Antarctica recently. She’d sailed up the Amazon the year before.

She looks amazingly young, too, but isn’t that what we all want to do – stay young and, hopefully, beautiful? Indeed to many people beauty is only to be found in the young. To Professor Wolpert this is no surprise. Evolution, he says, wants us to reproduce and so has selected us to find young people most attractive, since they are the best reproducers. It’s all programmed in our unromantic cells.

But, as it is impossible to stay young, an estimated £57 billion are spent in the cosmetic industry every year by women, and to a lesser extent, men, desperate to mask their real age.

It was ever thus. Cleopatra used to put lactic acid on her skin to protect it from the dry desert heat, while both men and women in Ancient Greece were heavily into make-up. The fountain of youth was an unholy grail. I like the story of Roger Bacon, a thirteenth century Franciscan friar who wrote a book on ageing, suggesting it could be warded off by, among other things, inhaling the breath of a young virgin.

According to Professor Wolpert, Friar Roger may have got this idea from the Old Testament story of King David who, when he was getting on, liked to sleep between two virgins (without, of course, having sex) in order to restore his youth. It sounds a bit like a Biblical bunga-bunga party to me.

Then there was a chap called Juan Ponce de Leon who’d been with Columbus when he discovered the West Indies. Told by the natives there about a place to the north where the waters would restore youth to anyone who bathed in them, he set off to find it, only to discover Florida.

Considering the millions who now retire to Florida and the recent reports that there’s been an increase in sexually transmitted diseases in Miami in the over-sixties since the introduction of Viagra, perhaps he just got there 600 years too early.

It’s undoubtedly true that many of those of us of the Third Age, as it’s called, are now enjoying more active, fulfilled lives. In London’s Hyde Park there’s now a pensioners’ playground for keeping fit, while pilates and badminton are everywhere and golf courses log-jammed with legions of the grey, the bleached and the bald. Then there are classes in well…just about everything you can think of. While in Japan there’s even porn for the elderly.

All of which is splendid for some. There is a reverse side, however. We call it ageism, that prejudice that routinely, often thoughtlessly, dismisses those over sixty as “past it”, that shallow thinking that sees only enterprise and creativity in the young.

This is quite fallacious. Beethoven, Michelangelo, Bach, Rembrandt, Titian and many others who created the beauty of our world did some of their best work in their later years. They were geniuses, yes. But is it not everyday evident that many elderly, and I mean those in their eighties, have accumulated wisdom and are often better at solving problems than those younger? Until the day she died at 92 my mother could beat me at Scrabble.

Yet how do we casually in conversation caricature the old? Sadly, as comic “grumpy old men” and “silly old bats”, a view which partly comes from television, and is ever magnified by that medium. In a survey of prime time US television it was found that only 3 per cent of characters were over 65.

British television is better…slightly. Yet, while many more older people watch TV than younger ones, most programmes would appear to reflect the reverse.

Of course ageism in the UK is still institutionalised by the mandatory age of retirement at 65. Retirement is splendid for those who want it and can afford it, and obviously necessary for those who can’t adequately fulfil the demands of their jobs any longer. But to others who want to work on, it’s a worry.

While some people may feel cheated that they will have to work longer for their pensions, as it becomes economically necessary if the country is to support a population that lives ever longer, work can be a contribution to good health. I dread the thought of ever retiring.

Many people into their mid and late eighties are in good condition, but we know it won’t always be like that. Wear and tear will get us all in the end, which is why we’re so terrified of senile dementia, with 20 per cent of the over eighties believed to be suffering from some form of it.

There’s long been a vague belief that some primitive and ancient societies revered their elderly more than we do, the children of the old who so often shut our frail, depressed or muddled in care homes and try to forget about them: out of sight, out of mind.

But that’s only partly right. While the wisdom of the elderly may have been prized, or at least listened to, in the good times, when societies got close to starvation, it was the old who were often sacrificed so that the young might survive.

We won’t do that in these enlightened times, but the breakdown of the extended family and the potential economic hazards facing us hardly bodes well for the future of our oldest people.

And, though it seems impossible when we’re young and beautiful and healthy, we’ll all be old one day.

(You’re Looking Very Well: The Surprising Nature Of Getting Old by Lewis Wolpert is published by Faber and Faber.)

Back to the top

The Ray Connolly Beatles Archive

Tue, 31 May 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

Much of my Beatles journalism has now been collected in "THE Ray Connolly BEATLES ARCHIVE" which is now available on Amazon.

"THE Ray Connolly BEATLES ARCHIVE"

Most books about the Beatles are by writers who never met them. I was lucky. I was a journalist and I was there. I knew all of them, John Lennon confiding in me during a visit to Canada that he’d left the Beatles four months before it became public knowledge, and later Paul McCartney asking me to interview him so that he could explain his side of the break-up.

Before that I went to Beatles’ recording sessions at the Abbey Road studios, knew their wives, visited the homes of three of them, and perhaps over-regularly hung around their London base at Apple playing their demos. In the front row at George Harrison’s Concert for Bangladesh in Madison Square Gardens, I also followed the Magical Mystery Tour around England’s West Country, and when John decided to send his MBE back to the Queen it was me he phoned to break the news. Later, when he lived in New York, there would be letters from him, while Ringo had the second lead in a movie I wrote called That’ll Be The Day. Then in December 1980 I was about to take a plane to New York to interview John when I got the phone call to me he’d been murdered.

This isn’t a biography of the Beatles. There are enough of those already. Nor is it a dissertation on their music or an analysis of their lyrics. There are even more of those.

It is 100,000 words of my story of the Beatles, a selection of some of my many interviews with them and others connected with them, as well as articles, reviews, news stories and reflections that I’ve published over the past forty four years in various British national newspapers. There are also several pieces that are being published here for the first time.

Not all the articles are exactly as they were when first written. Hindsight is wonderful, and nearly every piece needed a paragraph or two of scene setting and then another for consequences. I suppose if this were an album it might be described as a remix, as some articles have been cut back when I thought they were too long, while others have been extended when, for one reason for another, I’d originally had to leave things out.

Among the previously unpublished interviews are one with John when he reflects on his songs, another with Cynthia Lennon talking about their marriage, and a very recent one with record producer Sir George Martin. Inevitably in a compendium of articles there is some repetition of information and quotations, but as it isn’t envisaged that the chapters of this book will necessarily be read in chronological order, I hope readers will bear with that.

Chronicling the music, lives and careers of the Beatles as events were unfolding around them, and seeing the effects the Beatles had upon my generation and those that followed has never been a less than fascinating part of my own career. And believe me, I do realise how lucky I was to find myself with such extraordinary access to some of the most talented and famous people in the world.

Ray Connolly,
May 2011

List Of Contents

1962-1966: A Fan’s Story
1967: Joining the Beatles’ circus
1967: The Magical Mystery Tour: ‘Maybe we goofed,’ says Paul
1968: Paul on home, culture and Lady Madonna
1968: Ringo home from meditating: ‘It was just like Butlins’
1968: Ringo: ‘Sometimes I go to John’s house and play with his toys and sometimes he comes and plays with mine’
1968: Apple boutique…from take-away to give-away?
1968: The enigmatic Yoko
1968: The White Album
1969-1971: Great and turbulent times at Apple
1968: ‘If George leaves, he leaves,’ John during the unhappy filming of Let It Be
1969: On the roof - the last gig
1969: Paul marries Linda and John marries Yoko
1969: The Ballad of John and Yoko
1969: There are various ways of doing business and there’s Allen Klein’s way
1969: Elvis, Dylan, John and me
1969: Paul talks about Abbey Road…the album
1969: ‘Paul is dead’ and John’s MBE goes back to the Queen
1969: The day the Beatles died
1969: ‘I’ve left the Beatles…’ said John
1969: A weekend in Canada with the Lennons
1970: ‘You’re the journalist, not me…’ said John
1970: Paul on ‘Why the Beatles broke up’
1970: A note about George
1970: John and the Ignoble Alf
1970: John talking about his songs
1970: John… ‘performing flea’ or ‘crutch for the world’s social lepers’
1971: Beatles in court
1971: George and the Concert for Bangladesh
1971: Imagine that’s the B-side
1971: John and Yoko’s early days in New York
1970-72: Michael X and John
1972: No more ‘Four gods on stage’
1972: Ringo in the movie That’ll Be The Day
1972: Paul on how he turned down John’s invitation for them to play together again
1973-74: The Lost Weekend
1979: Paul and his favourite songs
1980: Japanese Jailbird
1980: December 7
1980: Unimaginable
1980: Mark Chapman and what turns a fan into a killer
1985: The story of ‘Working Class Hero’…my movie that never was
1987: Twenty years after Sergeant Pepper…hit and myth?
1995: Paul talks about the Beatles Anthology
1998: Linda McCartney 1941-1998
1998: The story of Paul and Linda
1999: The Cavern… ‘That’s the youngest tramp I’ve ever seen’
1999: Paul back at the Cavern
1999: George is stabbed
2000: John, the FBI and MI5
2000: Hospitals, gangs, drums and Ringo
2000: Has Yoko whitewashed John’s image?
2001: George the reluctant Beatle 1943-2001
2002: Paul in Las Vegas
2002: Liverpool Dr Winston O'Boogie Airport
2005: Mal Evans - the gentle giant
2006: ‘That was so cruel, inhuman…’ Cynthia Lennon
2006: Whatever happened to Ringo?
2007: Pete Best…the man with a knife in his back
2009: My lost Beatle interviews
2009: A degree in Beatleology
2010: ‘Save Abbey Road’
2010: Lennon the Unfunny!
2011: Produced by George Martin
Afterword: ‘What if…?’

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ray-Connolly-Beatles-Archive-ebook/dp/B0052AFE6S/ref=pd_rhf_p_t_1

John Sullivan 1946 - 2011

Tue, 24 May 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

John Sullivan, who died yesterday of viral pneumonia, aged 64, was the writer who has made us laugh more than any other over the past thirty five years.

A clever, lovely man, he used his own working class background to define through television comedy some of the changes that have occurred in British life in recent decades.

Because Sullivan was the comic genius who created and wrote every word of the nation’s favourite television series Only Fools And Horses, as well as Citizen Smith with Robert Lindsay as Wolfie in a Che Guevara beret, the much loved romantic comedy series Just Good Friends with Jan Francis and Paul Nicholas, and Dear John, about a recently divorced man. On Thursday the BBC will show his latest creation, a prequel to Only Fools And Horses, Rock & Chips.

Few of us can have watched his characters without recognising aspects of ourselves, our friends and our families. But we didn’t laugh at them so much as we laughed with them, and in so doing, at ourselves.

This was perhaps never demonstrated better than in the Only Fools And Horses episode when working class Rodney takes out middle class Cassandra for the first time and is mortified when she gives him a lift home to Peckham. Deliciously funny, it was also sad. Sullivan could make us cry, too.

For all his social observations, Sullivan, absolutely a self-made man, dipped deeply into his own background. Born in 1946, he grew up in a tough part of Balham in South London, where his father, who had been released from a German prisoner of war camp a year earlier, worked as a plumber and heating engineer… “although we never had central heating in our house”, he would remember.

After failing the 11-plus he was educated at a secondary modern school where the only lesson that interested him was English. “We had a teacher with a glass eye who would read Dickens to us,” he once told me. “He was probably a frustrated actor because he would act out the dialogue and make the words come alive.” When he found success Sullivan would still read Dickens, buying himself a complete set collection.

There was never any possibility of taking O-levels. “That had been more or less decided on the day we joined the school at eleven,” he would say. “Those who had school uniforms sat O’levels, those of us who wore jeans didn’t.”

The result was that he left school at fifteen with no qualifications and got a job as a messenger with Reuters news agency in Fleet Street. The result was his eyes were opened to a whole new world of professional people.

“I suppose I was intelligent enough to know that I’d had little education. So I used to spend my weekly wages buying all those Teach Yourself books…maths, English, history…German, even. There was a German receptionist at one place I worked and I dearly wanted a second language. I never managed it though.”

Eventually he moved to an advertising agency, again as a messenger, after which he went to work cleaning cars. He didn’t know it then but the characters for Only Fools And Horses were already forming out of the dodgy dealer world of the second hand motor trade, just as much as they’d been conceived in the street market in Balham where he’d had a Saturday stall while at school.

“The characters were incredible: fly-pitchers, guys with sovereign rings and camel haired cats. The whole atmosphere had a rich vein of humour.” He was, he would discover, one of life’s observers.
He was 19 when he wrote his first script. It was, in an early sign of the direction his comedy would take, about social change and pride.

About an old man who kept a beautifully polished, copper plated Gents and who had to change his style when a new one with Muzak opened down the road, it was turned down by the BBC.

But he’d caught the writing bug and for the next ten years as he went through a succession of jobs…in a brewery, as a plumbers mate, a lorry driver, a building labourer and even cleaning carpets at the House of Commons, he kept writing and failing to get anything accepted.

Finally he decided to write to the BBC and ask for a job where he might get some experience from the inside and was amazed to be taken on moving scenery with the strict warning not to annoy the stars.

He didn’t. He watched and learned. He already had an idea for a series about a Trotskyite character he used to see in a pub in Chelsea who was always saying that as soon as the pub closed he was going to start the revolution.

“He was pathetic, really, but funny. I thought there might be something there so I mentioned it to a producer I’d got to know who challenged me to either write it or shut up about it. I took a fortnight’s holiday and wrote a single play. It was accepted. Citizen Smith had been born. It was 1977. Catching the moment completely, it ran for three years over 28 episodes.

Sullivan immediately gave up his job, and became a full time writer.” He was thirty and could now do no wrong. Class differences and the changing sexual attitudes were nearly always present in what he wrote, but in a gentle, never vulgar way, shown to massive effect in the relationship between the upmarket modern girl Jan Francis and the charming chancer Paul Nicholas in Just Good Friends.

This, too, was in part autobiographical, his wife Sharron, whom he met in Chelsea in 1972, coming from a “comfortable background” with a nice job as a secretary in the West End. “She was earning more than me, while I was living with four other blokes in a flat in Battersea and having quite a good time.”

Then when Sullivan noticed that many of his friends were getting divorced, and that newly single men found it difficult to cope, he wrote the funny though sad series, Dear John, which starred the late Ralph Bates who was to become a close friend. The American version of the series would run for over seventy episodes.

Writing so many episodes for series meant his work load was impossible, and he skirted around the edge of a breakdown a couple of times, but he always managed to produce his brilliant and funny scripts.

Inevitably he will be remembered for ever in television for his creation of the characters in Only Fools And Horses - Del Boy, the pathetic older brother always looking for a quick deal in his Reliant Robin, Rodney, whom he would say was “a teeny bit like a young me…a naive dreamer”, and Boycie and Marlene for whom he wrote a series of their own, The Green Green Grass.

And yesterday as news of his sudden death was announced, Mark Thompson, the BBC director general, said “his work will live on for years to come. He had a unique gift for turning everyday life and characters…into unforgettable comedy”. David Jason who played Del Boy said, “We have lost our country’s greatest comedy writer, but he leaves us a great legacy, the gift of laughter.”

John Sullivan wasn’t given an easy start in life. But he made a great career and life for himself by discovering and then using his innate talents, and never giving up through years of rejection. He is survived by his wife, their daughter, two sons and two grandchildren.

Back to the top

Produced by George Martin

Mon, 25 Apr 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

“John…” says Sir George Martin measuring his words, “hated his voice. When we were recording he was always asking me to distort and disguise it by putting different sorts of echo on it. In that way when he heard it through his headphones in the studio he could forget that he was listening to John Lennon. I loved his voice.”

So, of course, did hundreds of millions of others who never suspected Lennon’s insecurities. But, for seven years in the Sixties, Martin, the serene, elegantly spoken man who produced every Beatles record, observed in close-up all the little worries and ego clashes of the most famous four people in the world.

It’s sometimes been said that Martin, now 85, was the “fifth Beatle”, in that, as well as helping arrange the group’s recordings, he played on at least thirty five of them. I believe he was more important than that.

It seems to me that had the Beatles never met George Martin, they would still have become a great rock and roll band with some terrific songs. But with him, a classically trained musician with an ear for adventure, they became a cultural phenomenon that changed the course of popular music.

To think of Martin solely as the Beatles’ producer as many do, is,
however, to overlook four fifths of a remarkable career. Did you know, for instance, that as a young man in 1951 he produced what is probably the most familiar piece of music in the UK, when he recorded the theme music for The Archers? By my reckoning that jaunty little jig (officially titled Barwick Green) has been played getting on for 60,000 times since then.

And it’s pretty certain that if he hadn’t recorded Gerry Marsden singing You’ll Never Walk Alone, that song would not have become the great football anthem which is now sung on the terraces not only at Liverpool Football Club but also at Celtic, as well as clubs in Holland, Germany and Japan.

Before that he’d recorded the evergreen children’s favourite Nelly The Elephant, comedy by way of Goodness Gracious Me from Peter Sellers and Sophia Loren, and Right, Said Fred by Bernard Cribbins. And then there was the London Philharmonic, jazz virtuosi, tunes for Scottish country dancing, piano recitals, choral pieces, the London Baroque Ensemble and much else that was to prove invaluable when he came across the kaleidoscopic song writing talents of Lennon and McCartney. Tens of thousands of records, all of which explains why on Easter Monday BBC 2’s Arena is devoting a ninety minute film to his life and work.

But how did this extraordinarily varied career begin? Well, not in an educated, musical, upper-middle class home as Martin’s carefully enunciated speaking voice might suggest, and as the Beatles first imagined.

“We were very, very poor when I was a child, living in a flat in Holloway, north London, a run-down four storey house with a family on each floor,” he remembers as we talk at his elegant Georgian country house in Oxfordshire. “My father was a machine carpenter, and was out of work for nearly two years in the Thirties. My mother had to scrub floors to keep the money going. The Depression blighted their lives.”

By sheer chance, however, since neither of his parents could play, they always had a piano. “My uncle was a piano tuner, and he started a company with a friend making pianos. Unfortunately they went broke, but as they had a number of pianos lying around we managed to get one.

“I can remember reaching up to the keys trying to play when I was very small. I only ever had eight piano lessons when I was about ten. Then my mother had a row with the teacher. I’m completely self-taught, because I was playing before I got those lessons. I can’t remember not playing. I can’t really explain it, but I was born with an understanding of music and perfect pitch.

“Paul McCartney can’t read or write music but he’s probably the best musician I know, because he has this innate sense of what music is about and the way that it’s structured. I had that, too. I suppose that was why Paul and I related so well.”

When World War II began the family moved out of London to Bromley in Kent. It was there that he heard his first full orchestra when Sir Adrian Boult brought the BBC Symphony Orchestra to his school for a public performance. Captivated, he began dreaming of becoming the second Rachmaninov, and at 16 went to a private recording studio to record a piece he’d composed.

“Looking back it was nothing amazing, a bit florid and Debussy-like by a very pompous little 16 year old git. At the end of the recording I said ‘You have just heard Fantasy by George Martin’, but when they played the recording back to me what I heard was ‘Fain’asy by George Mar’in’,” and he exaggerates a working class, glottal stop London accent. “I thought, ‘Christ, do I really sound like that!’.” From then on, he consciously began to change his accent. To be a composer he would “have to speak like a BBC person”.

University was financially “out of range completely”, and leaving school at 16, with his parents’ anxious advice to “get a safe job…in the Civil Service”, he did that for a year before volunteering for the Fleet Air Army, much to the distress of his mother who was sure he would get himself killed.

As it happened he never saw any action (“we dropped a few depth charges on what we thought was a submarine, but it might well have been a whale”), but got a lucky break when he went to hear a concert by a fairly well known pianist of the time provided by the Royal Navy.

“I missed my piano when I was in the Navy, so after the pianist had finished and the hall emptied I went up to the piano to play to myself. What I didn’t know was that he was still there, heard me, and asked what I was playing, which was one of my own pieces. He then told me I should send it to a chap called Sidney Harrison at the Committee for the Promotion of New Music.”

The result was a sort of pen-pal relationship with Harrison, sending him everything he composed and getting back pages of stern criticism. And when in 1947, now an officer and speaking like one, he was offered a twelve year commission in the Royal Navy it was Harrison who insisted that he should become a musician. He was good at it.

“I didn’t see how I could. I was 21 and had no musical education to speak of. But he arranged for me to meet the principal at the Guildhall School of Music, where, as an ex-serviceman, I was paid for three years to learn composition, orchestrating and conducting and a second instrument, the oboe.”

He could play enough to earn “a kind of a living”, but knew he would never be good enough to be a performer, when, aged 24 he was invited to a meeting at EMI Records. His influential pen-pal Sidney Harrison had recommended him once again.

“I didn’t know what EMI was, but I put on my naval great coat and got on my bike and cycled over to Abbey Road studios…”, where he was promptly made assistant to the head of Parlophone Records on a salary of seven pounds, four shillings and threepence a week.

Thrown in at the deep end it was a steep learning curve doing every kind of music with the smallest of EMI’s labels. “Jimmy Shand’s Scottish country dance records were our biggest sellers then, but I thought there might be a market in comedy. I loved the Goon Show and recorded Spike Milligan and Michael Bentine. Then there was Rolf Harris, Peter Ustinov (“an expert on baroque music, by the way”) and Flanders and Swann. He produced pop hits, too, most memorably Matt Monro’s Softly As I Leave You and trad jazz with Humphrey Lyttelton’s Bad Penny Blues, which would later become a starting point for the Beatles’ Lady Madonna.

But then he seemed to get it wrong, when, in the late Fifties and now head of Parlophone, rock and roll arrived. Columbia Records, one of EMI’s much bigger labels had Cliff Richard, and the pressure was on for Parlophone to have a rock star of its own.

“I knew something about pop music, but rock and roll….I mean it was there, but it was alien to me. I was never a great Elvis Presley fan, so maybe that was a black mark against me because everybody else was…” including Judy, his second wife of 45 years. “I was always looking for a rock and roll act, but…”

Then in 1962 Brian Epstein turned to him in desperation, having seen his group, the Beatles, rejected by every other recording company in Britain.

“When Brian played me their demo tape I told him that if he wanted me to sign a group based on what I was hearing the answer was ‘no’. But he looked so crestfallen I told him to bring the group down from Liverpool and I’d give them an hour in the studio to see what I could find. That was it. I didn’t fall head over heels.”

But then he met them. “We liked each other. They were charismatic. I thought if they could charm the pants off me they could charm the pants off an audience. And if I could find them a hit song I’d have a hit group. They didn’t have a song themselves.” Love Me Do, he still thinks, wasn’t much more than a riff.

Desperate not to let this opportunity pass the Beatles agreed to record a song Martin had been sent called How Do You Do It? (Later a number one for Gerry and the Pacemakers.) They did a workmanlike job, “but John begged me not to release it. They wanted to write their own songs. When they’d first played me Please Please Me it was really dreary, but they went away and speeded it up, and we worked on it and put a harmonica on the beginning and it was great. I think I said at the time ‘You’ve got your first number one’.”

Did he know that later some American disc jockeys wouldn’t play it because they thought it was about mutual heavy petting? He laughs. “No. We were so innocent then.” He pauses, then smiles.
“But it’s quite probable it crossed the boys’ minds.”

“The boys…” That’s how he still fondly refers to them, as a schoolmaster might about special pupils. Just how special they were he was soon to discover. “They were eternally curious. They so much wanted to learn, and Abbey Road studios (with its band room full of old, forgotten instruments) was like a fantastic toy shop for them.”

But there was something else. Although he won’t admit it, I believe that more influential than the Abbey Road “toy shop” was Martin’s vast musical knowledge which the Beatles also raided. They knew everything about rock and roll and not much else. He didn’t know much about rock, but he did know a vast amount about other kind of music.

When Paul McCartney (“he always had very good ideas”) brought in Yesterday, it was Martin who scored it for a string quartet, and later when the same writer came up with Eleanor Rigby Martin dug into his knowledge of film music, and, as “it was a very spiky piece”, borrowed from Bernard Hermann’s orchestration for Hitchcock’s Psycho. While for Lennon he wrote and played the electric piano break which sounds like a harpsichord on In My Life, made a Hammond organ sound like a fairground on For The Benefit of Mr Kite.

Was he aware of Lennon’s envy of McCartney’s gift for melody?
He sidesteps the question. “There was a competitive element between them, and if John was envious of Paul’s musicianship, Paul was envious of John’s facility with words. John’s musicianship wasn’t as deep as Paul’s but he had an uncanny knack of finding the right musical vehicle for his lyrics. For instance, Imagine (which Martin didn’t produce) is a simple song based on just a couple of chords. Only John could have written that. Paul couldn’t. Both were incredibly talented people, and scoring points off each other and envying each other, proved to be a ladder that they climbed together.”

Shortly after the Beatles broke up John Lennon said to me, “Paul and me were the Beatles. We wrote the songs.” Was that fair?

“It’s not far off really. They got rid of one drummer in Pete Best and Ringo became the luckiest drummer in the world. How many people would get the opportunity to become an integral part of the Beatles? If they’d changed their lead guitarist, too, and engaged another they would still have been the Beatles because John and Paul would have gone on writing those songs which made them so successful.

“Ringo became a rock solid part of the band and George developed. His early songs were derivative and rubbish. He wasn’t part of the Lennon and McCartney song writing team and he found that frustrating. He would have loved to have had a collaborator but he didn’t and had to work by himself.

“I didn’t encourage him enough, which I regret because I should have done, but I was rather occupied with two other people. Eventually he came up with Here Comes the Sun, which was a great song, and one of the best love songs ever in Something. It makes Paul wince when I say that, because that was Paul’s domain.

“But they were a band and they would work out ideas between them. George was always good for a guitar lick, and Paul, too, sometimes. John would sing his songs to me on his acoustic guitar and then I’d go over to the piano and play what I thought it was, and then we’d decide how we were going to do it. They’d all put their oar in with ideas. John had immense faith in Ringo’s taste. If he was singing and playing something he’d ask Ringo what he thought. If Ringo said ‘It’s crap, John,’ he’d just drop it and go on to something else.” He pauses. “I don’t think Ringo was quite so honest or vocal with Paul.”

It’s been said that Paul never knew what his best songs were when he’d written them, I suggest.

“He still doesn’t,” comes the reply. “You can’t expect a genius to have the same critical faculties as someone who isn’t a genius, can you? Yes, I think he’s a genius. I’m happy to go into print on that. John, too. When you look back at their work…it’s incredible.”
His loyalty is touching, because his “boys” weren’t always loyal to him. With the Beatles’ success the balance of power in the studio shifted.

“When in 1969 they recorded the Let It Be album John said bluntly ‘We want this to be an honest album, George, so I don’t want any of your crap on it’” (referring to the overdubbing of additional instruments and arrangements that had made Sergeant Pepper such a tour de force two years earlier).We’ll play and you just sit there and tell us if it’s all right.’

“So they started recording and it never was right. It was a very unhappy time. They’d be up to take 53. In the end he and George (Harrison) took the tapes away and gave them to Phil Spector to edit, who then did all the things John wouldn’t let me do, overdubbing like mad. I was very cross about that.”

Actually he felt betrayed. He never recorded Lennon again after the Beatles broke up. “After John died Yoko said to me that she wished I’d worked with John once more. If he’d asked me I would have jumped at it, but he never asked.”

McCartney did, and there would be several more chart topping collaborations between the two in the Seventies and Eighties, but, due to the caché Martin had acquired through his Beatles work, he was by then in great demand everywhere. “It gave me a freedom to do what I wanted to do.”

That included composing the scores to fifteen movies, including the James Bond film Live And Let Die (McCartney wrote and sang the title song), building two recording studios, one on the island of Montserrat (sadly later destroyed by a hurricane and volcano), and working with the King’s Singers, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Webb, Celine Dion, Kenny Rogers, the John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra, the hit group America and dozens of others. Then there was the night he produced the biggest selling single of all time in Elton John’s the reworking of Candle In the Wind after the death of Princess Diana.

He once assumed that after Sergeant Pepper popular music would go on “building into, without sounding too pompous, a new art form. But then along came punk in the Seventies. The Sex Pistols singing God Save The Queen was like people coming in and dropping their trousers and showing their bums. I found that very disappointing. But what we’d done has fed into the bloodstream so it’s still a part of music as it’s metamorphosed into something else. It’s still healthy.”

Less healthy is his hearing, his “nerve endings withered by sitting in front of the studio speakers all those years”. Now one of the patrons of Deafness Research UK, sounds come across as “tinny and Dalek-like” and when five years ago he was asked to mix the music for the Beatles’ Las Vegas show Love he was grateful for the younger ears of his son, Giles, who is also a record producer. “The thing about deafness is that in a social environment it’s very difficult to tell what’s going on and you feel emasculated.”

Not that that stops him composing, having recently finished a 15 minute choral piece based upon his unused score for the film The Mission. “I write from memory because I know what the notes sound like. But, of course, I will never hear the piece properly.”

It seems a terrible irony but he appears to accept it with a smile:
George Martin, still the quietly dignified man who helped make the Beatles something more than extraordinary.

Ray Connolly’s new novel about music, The Sandman, is available as an eBook from Amazon.

Room At The Top Revisited (Radio Times, March 29, 2011)

Tue, 29 Mar 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

It isn’t often that the title of a novel captures the mood of the moment, but author John Braine’s naming of his first novel “Room At the Top” was absolutely timely.

Although written in the early Fifties, when it was first published in 1957 Britain was on the very cusp of change, and, with traditional class divisions having been dislocated by World War II, Braine’s ambitious working class character, Joe Lampton, was instantly recognisable. He wanted a “room at the top” is a small town society. How could he get there?

I was sixteen at the time and can remember this first person narrative about a young man-on-the make becoming an immediate best seller, its title quickly working its way into newspaper headlines and general conversation. “There’s room at the top for a bright lad like you,” went the knowing, jokey catch phrase. Today the line remains a well-worn part of the English language.

Despite the novel’s immediate impact - and its vivid descriptions of lust and sex three years before the Lady Chatterley’s Lover trial smashed the censorship barricades certainly helped its notoriety - what we didn’t know then was that soon the bubbling general frustration that John Braine identified would explode and change the face of Britain.

The Fifties was a time of drab austerity. Rationing was slow to finish, even mildly provocative sex scenes were invariably blue-pencilled in books, films and theatre, few girls were encouraged to go to university, and the lives of the working class rarely written about or dramatised.

And brilliant as the books of Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh may have been, they were also snobbish. Enid Blyton, then the most popular writer for young people, only wrote about children who went to boarding schools.

Then suddenly there was Joe Lampton, John Braine’s central character (I hesitate to call him a hero), a working class pudding of ambition, a bolshie, unsubtle, randy, chip-on-shoulder, straight talking Northerner, reinventing himself through sex and social climbing, dreaming of an Aston Martin, a girl with a Riviera suntan and a thousand a year.

He, like the university educated but lower middle class Jimmy Porter of John Osborne’s play Look Back In Anger, which had been first staged just a few months earlier, were the original angry young men who spoke in everyday language about a repressed Britain. Interestingly both characters would marry above the social strata into which they’d been born. Posh tottie ever was a magnet.

Room At the Top and Look Back In Anger, as well as Allan Sillitoe’s novel Saturday Night And Sunday Morning and Shelagh Delaney’s stage play A Taste Of Honey, all of which became successful films, were together seen as part of a late Fifties trend, and usually referred to as “kitchen sink” dramas.

But that description, suggesting sordidness, surely missed the point.
Yes, they were mostly about the problems of ordinary people, but their shared over-riding theme was frustration and anger at the lack of opportunity which still governed a Britain where people still “knew their place”, especially in the back streets of the Northern industrial towns.

Yet even as Braine, Oxborne and Sillitoe were writing, change had begun. A generation behind that of Braine, young people weaned on the post-war Welfare State, were, to the backbeat of rock and roll music, starting to see a new kind of future just over the horizon. In hindsight we now call that future the Sixties.

Due to a massive piece of social engineering in the shape of the 1944 Education Act, it had become possible for children - war babies and baby boomers, if you like - from modest homes to go to grammar schools and on to university, all at the state’s expense - which must seem like Utopia for today’s students.

Their parents had lived through a depression and a world war but the youth of 1960 would reap the benefits in a time of peace, full employment and every increasing prosperity. “You’ve never had it so good”, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan said in the election of 1957. It was undeniably true, and it was going to get better.

Suddenly new opportunities were arising for the nations Joe Lamptons, as, by the Sixties, the universities and art colleges began producing a new class of meritocrats. This was most obvious in the headline grabbing arts, where new rebels were to be found in the shape of art student John Lennon (he even made reference to the phrase “room at the top” in his song Working Class Hero) and university drop-out Mick Jagger, in the satirical mockery of television’s That Was The Week That Was and Jack-The-Lad movie heroes like Michael Caine’s characterisation Alfie.

Then there were the working class photographers like David Bailey and Terence Donovan, grammar school fashion designer Mary Quant and the Bradford born artist David Hockney.

Joe Lampton had railed against the lack of opportunity for people from his background. Suddenly opportunities were everywhere, as young people with regional accents ascended quickly though the professions, even into the Civil Service, those local government “zombies” who Lampton so derided for their lack of enjoyment of red-bloodied life.

Indeed by the mid-Sixties, the class attitudes that had seemed impenetrable barriers just a few years earlier now looked like residues from the dark ages – and not least for women. Fear of pregnancy had always hung like a guillotine, but armed with the Pill which went on sale in 1961, young women could for the first time enjoy sex without fear of pregnancy.

And as working opportunities continued to increase, it was possible for a young woman to live a new, independent, modern life that had been suggested, though not enjoyed, by the unhappily married Alice, Joe Lampton’s lover, in Room At The Top.

It’s unlikely that John Braine envisaged the changes that were to come. But he saw more clearly than most the pent-up frustrations, continuing class unfairness and sexual repression which were so very soon to become part of the bleak history of his time.

Back to the top

Cliff Richard and the Knockers and Mockers (11 March 2011)

Fri, 11 Mar 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

The news was hardly out of his mouth before the knockers and mockers were sniding away this week. “Cliff Richard to record an album with soul singers Percy Sledge, Candi Staton, a Motown songwriter and maybe a couple of rappers! Ha-ha! There’s a laugh from that old Peter Pan of a coffin dodger”, ridiculed a chorus of instant, internet abuse.

It was an easily anticipated reaction, mimicking as it did the generational scorn and herd mentality of disc jockeys, comedians and pundits. To them Cliff Richard has long been a figure of fun, the living antithesis of everything that is, for want of a better word, groovy.

And which, the singer says, is the attitude that stops his singles being played on Radio One, the one that portrays him as a grandmas’ favourite who was never any good anyway.

Is that fair? Actually, not at all. Those of us with long memories still see Cliff Richard’s very first hit, Move It, in 1958 as the first proper British rock and roll record. He was 17 and considered at that time, not least by the BBC, to be a malign influence on British youth. Hard to believe now, I know.

For the next four years he was the British Elvis. And he didn’t just sing about his Living Doll. There was a terrific cover of a Jerry Lee Lewis hit and even a sexually suggestive (certainly for those zipped-up times) number one called Please Don’t Tease. Maybe Cliff didn’t read the subtext in the lyrics as he tried to look moody on television’s Oh Boy!

Fans may have already intuited that he wasn’t really a menace to morals, but his image problem only began in the early Sixties when he decided to pitch for the all-round entertainer market. Rock and roll was a passing fad, managers were telling their boy clients. So along came Cliff, no longer greasy hair and petulant sulk, but youth club eager, in films like The Young Ones and Summer Holiday.

The trouble was the doom-mongers were wrong. Rock and roll wasn’t dead or even poorly. It was thriving in little clubs and cellars around the country. And while Cliff was on his London bus chanting “We’re all going on a summer holiday”, or on TV singing about being a loveable Bachelor Boy, four other boys in Liverpool were plotting his overthrow.

It was the tipping point. Suddenly in 1963 Cliff, now the wholesome family entertainer but still only twenty two, looked old fashioned, as the Beatles swept the world, soon to be followed by the decidedly unwholesome Rolling Stones.

He still had hits, but his appeal, if not his boyish looks, was almost middle-aged. The greatest irony of all was that two of the Beatles, the young, new boys on the block, were both older than he was - albeit John Lennon by only five days. He’d begin too soon.

By now the moody, early Cliff, had morphed into the Cliff of the Eurovision Song Contest, where, with apologies to its very nice songwriters, he had a career-blighting success with the terrible Congratulations.

There was no way back, and Cliff couldn’t be what he wasn’t. He didn’t do drugs, or get out of his head on drink, and of groupies there was no sign. He was just a smiling, healthy goody-goody when it was becoming fashionable to be otherwise.

Not only that, he became very publicly a Christian goody-goody. Ridicule rained on him. It seemed you could believe in anything you wanted to in the Sixties, so long as you didn’t believe in Christianity. Actually it still feels that way.

Eventually there would be chart topping Christmas hymns like Saviour’s Day, which only managed to heap derision upon scorn for the now weirdly youthful-looking singer. And so it has continued.

But in all this it seems to me the detractors haven’t been listening.
Because, along the way, Cliff Richard has made some of the best pop records ever recorded in Britain, songs like Miss You Nights, Devil Woman, It’s All Over, You Mean Nothing To Me with Phil Everly, and We Don’t Talk Anymore, a huge hit in 1979 in which he had to sing in a higher key than he would normally have attempted. He’s never stopped trying.

The truth is the guy can sing. You don’t have over a hundred hits, or get up out of your seat on a rainy day at Wimbledon and entertain unaccompanied for forty minutes to keep the tennis fans happy as he did in 1994, without having something going for you.

Will be make a hit with his new soul album? Will be he able to reinvent himself as did Johnny Cash in the last years of his life, or Tom Jones, now a white haired gospel singer? Probably not. No matter how good the album is, his detractors still won’t be listening, even it’s recorded in Memphis and he wows them (maybe) in Las Vegas as he hopes.

But if it is good, he’ll have proved something to himself, which, I would have thought, is pretty much all a multi-millionaire of seventy, needs to do.

Back to the top

Billion Dollar Quartet (Mail on Sunday January 23 2011)

Sun, 23 Jan 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

One December afternoon in 1956, Elvis Presley at 21 was cruising in his new Cadillac around Memphis, Tennessee, showing a new girl friend his home town, when he spotted a gathering of cars outside a small, single storey building he knew well. It was 706 Union Avenue, home of Sun Records, from where he’d leapt to world fame in less than a year. He pulled over. So many cars could only mean one thing. A recording session must be taking place. It was time to look in on old friends.

At first he chatted with Sam Phillips, the owner of the studio, who, with his office manager and lover, Marion Keisker, had discovered Elvis before selling his contract just twelve months earlier to the giant RCA Records. In that year Elvis had had six million-selling hits, two number one albums and made his first film, Love Me Tender.

Like a “golden boy” going back to his old school, after talking to Phillips, Elvis joined the musicians who were taking a break from recording. They included Carl Perkins, a young, unknown, blonde pianist called Jerry Lee Lewis, and, a little later, Johnny Cash. Then making his way over to the piano Elvis began to play and sing the Fats Domino hit Blueberry Hill.

Quickly the others, who must have been awed by his success, joined him with guitars and harmony, while Sam Phillips, never one to miss an opportunity, called the local daily newspaper suggesting they send a photographer to capture the moment. He also switched on the tape recorder. “I thought, man, just let’s record this,” Phillips would later say. “This is probably an occasion, and, who knows, we may never have these people together again.”

They never did, but the result that afternoon was a jam session which was to become legendary. Known as the Million Dollar Quartet, after Elvis’s girl friend of the day joked that the four should become a quartet, it was a moment in rock and roll history that I’d heard about for years before a short bootleg album appeared in the early Seventies.

And here I must declare an interest because rock and roll music, especially early Elvis, has been my passion, and later partly my career, since I was a schoolboy in the Fifties. To this end I was able to visit Memphis several times and interview not only Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Carl Perkins and record producer Sam Phillips, but also Elvis himself, and so many of those who came after him, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Keith Richards and Bob Dylan.

Actually the first bootleg album I heard of the Million Dollar Quartet was little more than a fragment. Only after the death of Elvis in 1977, when his Graceland home was scoured for any private recordings that might have a commercial value and three reels of Sun tapes were unearthed, was the full session heard again - a treasured recording which has now formed the basis of a new West End show, Million Dollar Quartet.

Available on CD, and now due for a resurgence in interest, those original tapes reveal two hours of the young stars gathered around the piano chatting, singing and playing snatches of over forty songs. There’s shared appreciation and singing of Chuck Berry’s latest release, then blues, spirituals, country ballads, current hits, several gospel hymns and Little Richard’s Rip It Up. “Well, it’s Saturday night and I just got laid…” sings Elvis, giggling as he makes the lyrics somewhat more earthy.

They were fooling around, but, they though they didn’t know it, Elvis and friends were leaving for posterity a master class in how the melding of styles had created their branch of rock and roll music. Years later the Beatles would be copying their arrangements in the Cavern.

And it’s that moment in popular music history in 1956 that the show Million Dollar Quartet brings back to life - a show that began life as a few pages in the book Good Rockin’ Tonight by two English rock devotees Colin Escott and Martin Hawkins.

“I got a call out of the blue from film director Floyd Mutrux in 2000 saying that he thought this jam session could be a show,” Escott, now 59, explains from his home in Nashville, the country music heartland of America to where his obsession as a rock archivist and author eventually led him. “I knew who Floyd was because he’d written and directed American Hot Wax, which I think is the best rock and roll movie ever. So we set about writing a show based on that day in Memphis.

“Everything takes longer than you expect, but in 2006, after countless rewrites, we opened at a theatre in Florida. I couldn’t be there at the first night, but I went a few days later and saw a queue outside the booking office. I thought, ‘maybe we’re on to something here’”. They were indeed. There are now productions in Chicago and New York, with the London opening on February 28.

Dramatising that single occasion as the basis of a show, when Elvis returned to his roots, before he became too big and too remote to play with anybody else, was an inspired idea, one which, to be absolutely honest, I wish had occurred to me. And it’s absolutely right that it should put Sam Phillips at the centre of everything.

Because Phillips, the young radio engineer who in 1950 had invested his meagre savings into his own recording studio where people could walk in off the street and make a record for themselves, was the catalyst behind all his young stars’ careers and much that followed in popular music over the following decades.

“I would tell people they were welcome to come and try to do what they did best,” Phillips told me in 1973, standing in the wreck of his old studio which after he sold Sun Records in the Sixties had been turned into a motorcycle repair shop. “But I didn’t want anyone trying to sound like Nat King Cole or something they weren’t. I wanted their soul poured out on this damn floor.”

These days the grease and motorcycles are gone again and the Sun Records studio has had a make-over as a heritaged Memphis tourist site administered by the Elvis Presley organisation, to which fans flock in their annual thousands and occasional modern stars, such as U2, go to try to capture some of the old magic.

Back in the early Fifties, however, it was a shabby little self-built place, where grass grew between the paving stones outside and Phillips struggled to make a living by recording black blues artists and selling the tapes to record companies in Chicago.

Then one day in 1953 an eighteen year old Elvis stopped by and paid four dollars to record a song, probably just to find out what he sounded like. Phillips was out so Marion Keisker recorded him singing a Thirties’ country ballad, My Happiness.

“I’d noticed him outside with his guitar, too nervous to come in, and when he did he was very shy,” she told me during one of my visits to Memphis. “Anyway, I recorded him and took down his name and address, and, so that I’d remember what he looked like, I wrote ‘Timothy Sideburns’ alongside his name. I’d heard Sam say a hundred times that if he could only find a white singer who could sing with as much feeling as a black singer he’d make a million dollars, and I thought, maybe Sam should hear him.”

Phillips told me a slightly different version of events, mainly that he’d made that first recording, but his recognition of Elvis’s talent was what really mattered. “I gathered that Elvis lived in a very poor area and I saw in his eyes that same look of fear that was in the black man’s eyes, that he might be somewhere off bounds for the likes of him. I’ll never forget his look of amazement when he heard himself on record – amazement not at the way he sounded, but also that someone should be treating him with such respect.”

Some months later Phillips put Elvis together with two local musicians and before the evening was finished the boy, who had never sung in public, had made his first record, That’s All Right, Mama. “We didn’t do but three takes and we used the second. I was so delighted, I said, ‘Y’all have come off fantastic tonight, because if this isn’t good enough, then Lord, knows, I don’t know which direction to go in’. I knew we had something that wasn’t fish nor fowl, but that had tremendous excitement and abandon.”

Elvis had, of course, too much “excitement and abandon” to stay. By 1956 he was gone, leaving Phillips to record other young men now attracted to Sun by Elvis’s success and Phillips’s vision, people like Johnny Cash, who immediately had a hit with I Walk The Line, and Carl Perkins who wrote and sang Blue Suede Shoes.

So when Elvis saw the cars and called in on Sun for that pre-Christmas afternoon jam, when the studio, as Marion Keisker, who died in 1989, once told me “looked like nothing so much as a chicken coop nested in Cadillacs”, he already knew Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash - although Cash’s later assertion to me that they would frequently all join in on each other’s records may not have been strictly true.

Listening now to the fly-on-the-wall recording of that day, as everyone connected with Million Dollar Quartet show must have done many times, is like stepping into a time warp. At first Elvis, who would later be described by one of his friends as “the world’s worst pianist” sits at the piano, until, when given the opportunity, the cocky young Jerry Lee proceeds to give him a lesson in how it should be done. “The wrong man’s been sitting here at the piano,” we hear Elvis say as Lewis takes over.

“Well, I been wanting to tell you that all along. Scoot!” comes back Jerry Lee, never short of self-confidence. And off they go again, with Elvis maybe showing off a little bit, choosing most of the songs.
It was a moment when rock and roll was fun, young and innocent, and when none of those present had any idea of where it was going or where it would take them.

As with any group of friends there were probably little personal rivalries being played out, with, it is said, Johnny Cash, who was always jealous of Elvis, going off to do some Christmas shopping after the photograph had been taken - although he later denied it. While the very likeable Carl Perkins was no doubt reflecting that a few months earlier, while he’d been in hospital recovering from a car crash, Elvis had pretty well made his song, Blue Suede Shoes, his own. On the other hand was he just grateful for the additional large song writing royalties he would have been earning from the Presley record – and still is?

Whatever their personal feelings towards each other that day, these musicians were on top of the moment, talking about songs and records as only teenage boys and young men can. Soon we hear Elvis regretting that he’d missed out on recording the Pat Boone million seller Don’t Forbid Me, because he hadn’t been aware that a demo record of it had been sent to him. “It was written for me and it was sent to me,” he admits, “and it stayed over at my house for ages, man. I never did even see it.”

Before he starts demanding everyone listen as he raves about how he’d just been to Las Vegas (where he’d met the girl he was with) and seen the unknown young Jackie Wilson doing an impression of Elvis himself singing Don’t Be Cruel – and modestly admitting that Wilson had done it “much better than that record of mine. I went back four nights straight, man. I was under the table when he got through singing.”

He, the biggest star in the world, had become an instant admirer of another singer, with an enthusiasm that reminds me of conversations I had separately with both Bob Dylan and John Lennon after I’d interviewed Elvis and seen him on stage in 1969. Their questions to me were almost identical. What did he sing, they both wanted to know. “Did he sing stuff from his days at Sun Records? Did he sing That’s All Right, Mama, and Mystery Train?”

Playing again the CD of those four young men in Memphis over half a century ago as they tried to remember the lyrics of favourite songs and the keys to play them in, not only is the racial and cultural background from which they sprang illustrated, but also the religious.
That might surprise some, but church music, the way it was sung in the Baptist churches around Memphis, was always a rich seam in early rock and roll harmonies and characters.

The stories go that when Sam Phillips and Jerry Lee Lewis (who’d once played at Christian revivalist meetings, but who, ironically, is perhaps best remembered in Britain for Great Balls Of Fire, marrying his thirteen year old cousin and being forced to leave the country when that became known) began arguing about religion they could go on for hours, and recording sessions would have to be cancelled.

Not, I suspect, that religion plays too large a part in the stage version of Million Dollar Quartet, nor many of the hymns that were actually sung on that day. This recreation of the event is an excuse for a rock and roll celebration.

“Rock and roll has been done on stage before, but usually Broadway-ised” says Colin Escott, who has a new show about the Shirelles and Sceptre Records opening in New York in the Spring. “We wanted our show to be small and grungy, with the actors actually playing and singing and maybe making mistakes, just three or four guys in a garage, like it always was.”

In the case of Million Dollar Quartet it was four guys at the top of their professions and a brilliant record producer called Sam Phillips, who welded hepped-up, white working man’s guitar led country music with the local Memphis rhythm and blues of black musicians.

And, in doing so, created a style of rock and roll that has been copied and adapted ever since - from the Beatles’ early repertoire to Creedence Clearwater Revival and right on down through the years of “guitar, bass and drums” bands to Raising Sand, the 2008 Grammy Award winning album by Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant and Allison Krauss.

“I hate to get going in these jam sessions,” said Elvis that day as the singing ended and he said his goodbyes to his old friends. “I’m always the last one to leave.”

Perhaps sadly for us, but even more so for Elvis, Sam Phillips, who died in 2003, was right in his prediction. A jam session like that, with those same musicians, never did get going again.

One thing is for sure, though: considering the wealth those four artists were to generate during their careers, they might better have been described as the Billion Dollar Quartet.

Ray Connolly’s latest novel about music, The Sandman, is available on Kindle from Amazon.

Not Just The King's Speech... (Daily Mail 10.1.11)

Fri, 14 Jan 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

Daily Mail, January 14, 2011

When, some years ago, the Queen Mother was asked by screenwriter David Seidler whether she would like a film to be made about her late husband’s struggle with his stammer, she replied: “Not in my lifetime”. Even as an old lady, and many years after his death, the memory of the distress that a speech impediment had brought King George V1 was still too raw.

Because he, by accident of birth, been fated to become King and the head of a worldwide Empire, at the very dawn of radio. The world wanted to hear the King speak, especially at the outbreak of World War II. And that he did only with the greatest difficulty.

This week, nearly nine years after the death of the Queen Mother, the film, The King’s Speech, about George VI’s relationship with the Australian speech therapist who did much to prepare him for radio broadcasts, opens across the country. Colin Firth plays the monarch in a BAFTA winning performance.

A bad stammer would have been upsetting but mainly a private matter when George VI was just Bertie, the young Duke of York and second son. Public speaking could be largely avoided. But when, after the abdication of his elder brother, Edward VIII, he became King, the misery and fear at having to speak publicly must have been crippling.

But what is it like to be anyone who can’t get his or her words out, whose explosive consonants repeat themselves unstoppably, whose face goes into rictus contortions at the struggle to speak, whose eyes sometimes close involuntarily, who blushes and gulps for air and whose entire body strains?

What is it like to be terrified of having to pick up a telephone, or buy something in a shop, or ask for a fare on the bus? What is it like to have a really bad stammer?

As someone who grew up with a crippling stammer, and who had one until well into his adult life and career, I can tell you one thing: it isn’t funny. Did King George VI hate the First World War song “K-K-K-Katy, Beautiful Katy” as much as every other stammerer ever since? I’m sure he did.

Not that we don’t find such insensitivity today. “Of c-c-course the king can curse,” ran a headline in a Sunday newspaper about the Colin Firth film. To most people it would seem an innocuous headline. But, believe me, stammerers winced internally when they read it, as recollections of mocking chants in the playground flooded back.

Nor is it only children who can be cruel. “C-C-Co-nn-olly!” one Latin teacher would call me, before later deciding I couldn’t be in the school choir because I was “too jerky”. He mustn’t have known that stammerers don’t stammer, or “jerk”, as he put it, when they sing? Though I could certainly sing, I was excluded from the choir.

But then, as most young stammerers quickly recognise, being excluded is part of everyday life. I was rarely asked questions in class because I could never speak to answer them. One French teacher suggested that I should run out to the front of the classroom and write the answer on the board because she didn’t have time to wait while I got the words out. Thirty seconds, maybe? I didn’t take up her suggestion. That would have meant making an even bigger exhibition of myself. So she didn’t ask me any questions. I became silent and invisible.

That’s common, too. Unable to display much personality other than that of someone who seems to be tearing his face apart in order to make conversation, who is bursting with frustration, and who, yes, is often fearful of being mocked, young stammerers tend to keep quiet. It’s easier that way.

There’s clearly far more understanding of stammering today than there was when I was a boy, but I strongly suspect that those who stammer are still often regarded as basically timid, nervous types. That, it’s assumed, is why they stammer.

Actually that’s back to front thinking. In my experience if stammerers appear any more nervous than anyone else it’s because they know they’re going to stammer, not the reason they stammer.

It was probably with this misapprehension in mind that my headmaster wrote to my mother when I was in the sixth form suggesting that he might be able to put a word in for me in some form of local government where I would never have to speak. It was a kind thought, but I had other plans.

Not that university was easy at first. After giving a class paper in my first few weeks, and thinking I’d done rather well, I was brought down to earth when my blunt tutor privately said to me: “I suppose you realise we couldn’t tell what you were saying most of the time”, and advised me to see the college psychiatrist.

As it happened I had, by then, been seeking help for years, at first from an elocutionist, later from a child psychologist and a speech-therapist. All kinds of techniques were tried, from breathing exercises, to copying the sounds on spoken records.

There’d even questions into my sex life. At fifteen I’d been asked by a buxom young speech therapist whether I ever did anything when I was alone of which I was embarrassed. It was only years later that I realised what she was talking about.

At university they were Freudian times. When explaining to the college psychiatrist how I had trouble speaking when asking for my fare in the Tube station, that is projecting my voice into the hole in the ticket seller’s window, I was asked whether I thought I might have a sexual problem. No, I’d never thought that, I replied. Not that I’d ever had any sex either.

You could say, to use modern parlance, that my stammer defined me. Plum, my wife recently admitted that before she introduced me to her flat-mates she warned them about my speech. And when we became engaged her aunt advised her that she was taking on someone with a serious handicap.

It was a problem, but somehow more for others than for me, because, in my head, I didn’t stammer, I was quick witted, even good with words. And perhaps having a stammer inadvertently made my career. I couldn’t talk, so I wrote, eventually forcing myself in my mid-twenties to the attention of Fleet Street, where I was given a job as an interviewer and my life changed.

Not that my speech changed much at first. Recently playing back some interview tapes made forty years ago I was shocked to realise how difficult it had been for me to speak then. But I was warmed, too, to hear how patient so many very famous people had been to me.

I still stammer, although not when you might expect. I frequently go on radio and television and address classrooms and halls full of people and speak just about fluently. Publicly my speech is no longer a problem. But, in truth, in those situations I’m faking it. Like an actor I’m playing the part of a person who doesn’t stammer.

But around the house with my family, or with friends who know me well, the stammer is usually there. I don’t act with them. I’m me. I suspect that when George VI relaxed at Buckingham Palace, having triumphed over his handicap and made an entire speech word perfect, he slipped back into his normal halting delivery with those closest to him.

Great progress has been made with the treatment of stammers in recent years, with the emphasis gradually moving away from psychological causes. But, although brain imaging studies show significant differences between the brain activity of people stammering and fluent speakers, there’s still no single explanation.

Generally about one per cent of the adult population stammer, with a slightly higher figure in children, nearly four times as many boys as girls having a problem. Nothing in the statistics suggest that the number of people who stammer is changing over the generations, but, as I seem to be less aware of it these days, perhaps speech therapists are helping children at a younger age.

As the Queen Mother didn’t want The King’s Speech made in her lifetime, I wouldn’t have written this article when my mother was alive, my articles on the subject then always making light of it. I hid the hurt with jokes, because there was absolutely nothing more she could have done to help me.

But if you have a child with a bad stammer don’t assume that because that child doesn’t complain he or she isn’t suffering torment inside. I don’t suppose George VI complained very much. But his widow felt his pain for the rest of her life.

Back to the top

Divine Madness - At Any Age (Daily Telegraph 6.1.11)

Thu, 6 Jan 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

Love, like youth and sex, can be wasted on the young. Naturally I didn’t think like that when I was young. No young person ever does. For the young, who reinvent the romantic wheel with every first flush of adolescent hormones, love is theirs alone, their beatifying joy and their anguished misery. Surely, they believe, no-one who isn’t shining with youth can ever fall in love.

But they can, and they do. Because, though limbs may begin to creak and complexions crease, when it comes to romance no-one is old in their heads. Hearts still leap at a smile from a beloved: just to be close to the object of devotion makes the world a warmer place.

When it comes to romance most of us are psychologically frozen at somewhere between the ages of sixteen and twenty. I know I am.
That’s the time in our lives when everything is new and at its most intense.

But if we think that’s the only time when our hearts metaphorically flutter, we’re wrong. The bathroom mirror may tell us one thing, but the one inside our heads shows a quite different picture – that of our own eternal youth.

Sometimes some of us, like seventy five year old Michael Andrews who briefly met and then fell head over heels in love with the 90 year old Duchess of Devonshire, can behave inappropriately when in the grip of a new romantic obsession. That can be sad.

“Silly old fool,” the cruel probably commented yesterday as the Duchess finally had to resort to magistrates to prevent her suitor from further pestering her with his letters and texts of adoration. But those who did forget what for millennia poets have called the divine madness that love can bring. And they overlook, too, that age is no impediment to infatuation.

Most songs and films, tell it differently. For them love needs the bloom of youth if it is to sell, so it’s tender and true, sweet sixteen and salad days innocent. That’s understandable. Young love is so much more tuneful and prettier on the eye, and we’ve all known that teenage tug of the heart, that glance or smile that can change a day and then a lifetime. One changed mine. We like to remember and relive those moments and feelings through others in melodies and movies.

But old love is no less intense. Traditionally we smiled at the charming image of a Darby and Joan later life. Robert Browning wrote “Grow old with me, the best is yet to be…” and that was the ideal. It was a pleasant dream, but ideals don’t last for ever. Age can wither hearts as well as bodies, and death will inevitably take one partner sooner than the other. In any couple there is always a survivor.

Until relatively recently that often meant years, even decades, of loneliness. For many it still does. And who is to say that for some memories of love are not enjoyed more than new ones?

But for others there are new possibilities now as attitudes change and lives get longer, fresh chances of romance and companionship, extra avenues for making relationships. Recently I met up with a former tutor from my Sixties’ university days. Now 81 and divorced he’s found a new love on an online dating site. She’s a widow. They’re very happy.

Not that any of this will be much consolation to the heartbroken Mr Andrews, who, it has to be said, might have been pitching his affections at someone somewhat out of his league. Not, I hasten to add, that the Duchess might have considered herself too grand for him. Absolutely not.

But didn’t he know that the lady is a keen Elvis Presley fan? Did he really think he could compete for her affections with Elvis? Divine madness indeed.

Back to the top

John Lennon 30th Anniversary (The Lady 6.12.10)

Tue, 14 Dec 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

The Lady, December 6, 2010

It’s early December, short days, Christmas lights, and the radio is playing Beatle records. Do you get the feeling we’ve been here before? We have, every December since the night a mad fan ended John Lennon’s life with five bullets, and, in so doing, turned the witty, provocative and sometimes wilful musician into a martyred saint. That was thirty years ago, which makes this year a special anniversary.

The shooting happened at just before eleven at night on December 7, 1980 in New York, which was already nearly four in the morning on December 8 if you were in Britain. Nearly everyone who was old enough to realise who John Lennon was can tell you exactly where they were when they heard the news.

I was asleep in bed in Wimbledon when the phone woke me at 4.30. In the darkness I thought it must be someone calling to tell me that I’d overslept and the taxi to take me to Heathrow was waiting outside my house.

I was, you see, due to fly to New York that morning to interview…John Lennon. I’d had a phone call from Yoko Ono the previous afternoon wondering why I wasn’t already in New York, so had arranged to fly over on the first plane the next day.

Before I’d gone to bed at midnight I’d called John, only to be told by a secretary that he’d gone to the recording studio, but had left a message saying he was looking forward to seeing me again and that I should go straight to the Dakota when I got in. Four hours later on returning home he was murdered.

I didn’t catch the plane to New York. Instead I did what the journalist who woke me with the news expected me to do. I wrote about John Lennon; and on TV and radio I talked about him, as I’ve done at the beginning of December several times since.

Something has struck me this year, though, that I seem to have overlooked before. It’s that, even before the murder, there was always something very pre-Christmassy about the Beatles. From their eruption in 1963 to the beginnings of their dissolution in 1969 their music dominated almost every Christmas, with an album and a single released at exactly this moment, just in time to be bought as presents and played at parties.

So iTunes’ recent issuing of the entire Beatles’ canon for downloading to our MP3s was following in a well-worn tradition. Whether they get the Beatle Christmas number ones they were hoping, we’ll have to see. Does the magic still linger?

Actually there’s something ironic about the way Lennon’s own magic has been reshaped since his death. He used to say he didn’t “believe in dead idols, like Elvis and James Dean,” but he’s now the biggest dead idol of them all.

Not only that. He wasn’t averse to using his fame for what he believed to be worthwhile causes, but I can’t imagine he ever expected his image to be used to sell Citroen cars, as happened this year.

Always the first to make a joke against himself, he’d no doubt have laughed it off, as he probably would have when his Imagine lyric about there being no heaven, “above us only sky”, was used as the motto for Liverpool John Lennon Airport. Helping sell charter flight seats to Benidorm wasn’t actually what Imagine was about.

Of course, if he was wrong and there is a heaven, this year’s biopic about his teenage years, Nowhere Boy, must have had him scratching his head lugubriously. “I never knew I was so unfunny,” I can almost hear him saying of the wrong-footed movie.

Cynthia Lennon, his art college girl friend and first wife, put it another way: “So, who was that about?” is said to have been her reaction after seeing the film, puzzled, no doubt, that her large part in Lennon’s young life had been written out of history.

Without Mark Chapman, John could have expected to have had his seventieth birthday a few weeks ago. How, we wonder, might he have spent the thirty years he was denied? Paul McCartney has recently been in Brazil with the world’s best Beatle tribute band, but Paul always liked performing more than John.

My guess is that Lennon, always the dilettante, would have been more of a writer. He liked words, enjoying letter writing. I received some very funny ones. So he would have loved email and Twitter, turning up on chat shows occasionally, jokingly blunt as ever, always ready to call a spade as spade…even when it was just as likely to be a wheelbarrow.

The Pickpocket And Me ---Evening Standard 16.11.10

Wed, 17 Nov 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

The Pickpocket And Me (Evening Standard, November 16, 2010)

Having your pocket picked on the Tube might not seem like everyone’s idea of a good start to a day out, but in the end that’s exactly what it was.

It all began in mid-afternoon on a train between Fulham Broadway and Earls Court, just two stops away. I’d been invited to a reception at the House of Commons to lobby MPs to support the Public Lending Right ‒ that’s the six pence a book that an author receives from the public purse whenever one of his or her books is borrowed from a library.

As I was going to the mother of Parliaments I though the least I could do was wear a suit, my only one, and a tie, a rare occurrence. By my standards I looked quite a swell, maybe even rich. Looks can be so deceiving.

Anyway, there I was standing on the train when I became aware of a well dressed, narrow faced, very tanned, young man next to me looking repeatedly at a map of London and then at the Underground diagram above the carriage window.

My first thought, though, was that he smelled of biscuits, or was it dried perspiration? Whichever it was, he seemed too close to me, so I moved to the opposite side of the train by the door.

At the next station, West Brompton, he joined me with his map. “Excuse me, sir, can you tell me how I get to centre of London, like Piccadilly Circus.”

Of course I could help him. “You get off at Earls Court, go down the
steps to the Picadilly Line. It’s about six stops. Couldn’t be easier.”

He didn’t seem to understand and pushed his map towards me to further explain, so I took the map and repeated the instructions a couple more times, anxious to make sure he got on the train going east and not the other way to Heathrow.

As in fits and starts the train continued, I now became aware that there were two other fellows with him. But, although he was in expensive autumn clothes in the style of Italian and Spanish young guys, his pals were quite different, rough looking lads in old anoraks and jeans.

Strange that they were with him, I thought, and it seemed curious that hardly one of them seemed to understand my simple instructions. They were, they said, Spanish, but they could have been from just about anywhere in Southern Europe.

By now the penny should have dropped. It didn’t, not even when the train reached Earls Court and they seemed disinclined to get off until I virtually had to push them out before the doors closed again.

In fact it was only when, fifteen minutes later, I walked into the Santander bank on Victoria Street and felt for my credit cards that I realised. The thin dandy amongst them had somehow got his hand inside my jacket pocket while I was busy looking at his map as his pals blocked the line of vision of anyone else in the carriage.

Nothing could have been more obvious. On reflection, though a deft pickpocket, he hadn’t even been a good actor, over-egging his stuff with the map, playing dumber than anyone realistically could, hanging around on the train at Earls Court until the doors were about to close, thus making sure I couldn’t follow him.

How could I have been so stupid? I know a lot about con-men and their diversionary tactics. I spent a year researching and writing an entire TV series, Perfect Scoundrels, about con-men. I’m now working on a screenplay about a con. And yet I fell for the simplest trick in the book.

That’s the bad part of the story. The good part began immediately. Explaining what had happened to the lady in front of me in the bank queue she insisted I go first, adding, “you need a nice cup of tea, dear”.

The bank staff gave me a phone to cancel my cards, and while I was doing that another customer, a total stranger, having overheard the story, came across and offered to lend me twenty pounds to get home. I thanked him, but it wouldn’t be necessary. The pickpocket had missed my Freedom Pass.

Back on the street I ran smack into an old school friend. Telling him what had happened, his hand immediately went to his wallet, wanting to give me money to get home, too.

Reaching the House of Commons I realised that in addition to the credit cards, my invitation had also gone missing. So, to get in, I told, my story all over again to police and security right through to the reception. Every single person took it as though it had been a personal assault upon them, making sure I hadn’t been hurt, offering advice, telling me their stories of being robbed. Everyone wanted to help.

By the end of the reception I could even laugh about it when author Helen Fielding, seeing me for the first time in a tie, let alone a suit, joked that dressed up as I was I’d been asking to be robbed.

The following day a world-weary friend shook his head and said “You can’t trust anyone these days”. But I disagree. In forty years travelling by Underground this was the first time anything adverse had happened to me, and immediately a tsunami of kindness had flooded my way.

The whole experience was so life affirming. I was the winner. The credit cards were promptly stopped and will be replaced, as will my driving licence. No money was taken, no skin broken. The sewer rats who robbed me got away with absolutely nothing of value to them (apparently not even for identity theft), while I was reminded yet again that altruism, empathy and generosity are what makes society work, not simply greed and opportunism.

That being said, if you’re travelling by Tube and a dandy looking guy with a deep suntan and a map asks you to help him find his way to his destination, take a quick look around to see if he has a couple of scruffy looking mates lurking in the background.

And whatever you do, don’t let him get too close.

Back to the top

Who Killed The Rolling Stones? (Daily Mail, October 25, 2010)

Mon, 25 Oct 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

Let’s face it, the Rolling Stones are dead. It really is all over now. It hasn’t been officially announced, and probably never will be, so intricate are the business deals that bind the individual members. But the chances of them ever touring or recording together again have to be nil.

And who finally finished off the Stones, those once seemingly indestructible dinosaurs of rock? None other than Keith Richards, lead guitarist and one of the founders of the band.

In a series of gossipy and snide sexual and insulting references to Mick Jagger in his autobiography, Life, Richards has made any future for the band impossible. After almost fice decades the original enfants terribles of rock and roll, now perhaps better known as its ancien regime, are finally going to have to call it a day.

How, after reading pages of wounding personal tittle-tattle about himself, can Mick Jagger ever stand next to his former friend on stage again? How can he pretend that it doesn’t matter what juvenile jibes Keith has written about him, when he knows that most of the audience, who will all be fans, will have read the book that has ridiculed him?

Jagger hasn’t uttered a word, but what I’ve been hearing from his circle is that he’s “furious and hurt”. And although Richards has been quoted as saying that Mick had read the book, Jagger’s friends are insisting that he was only shown parts of it. What’s more, it’s rumoured that when the book is published tomorrow other jokey sneers and insults will be revealed.

As a songwriting and performing partnership, Jagger and Richards was always a rocky marriage. In their uproarious beginning of a Sixties sexual-free-for-all they called themselves the Glimmer Twins, Mick having the distinctive voice and brilliant stage performance while Keith invented much of the guitar sound that was the Rolling Stones.

They needed each other, but they were always very different creatures. If that marriage exists now in any form, and I can’t really see how it can, it’s said to be “rockier than ever”.

How can it not be? Would any man, famous or otherwise, not be appalled and mortified to read in his oldest friend’s book a scornful reference to the size of his “todger” ‒ to use Richards’ schoolboy euphemism?

For all his adult life, Mick Jagger has gone blithely about his job of being a famous rock star, apparently not giving a damn when he was publicly attacked. Certainly he’s never been one to sue journalists who wrote deeply unflattering stories about him or even libellous accounts. He seemed to just laugh them off, believing that they only added to his notoriety. And that notoriety never stopped increasing the commerciality and wealth of the Rolling Stones brand.

But those attacks came from outside. Richards’ jokey little insinuations come from within the family of the Stones. It seems to me that in an act of rock and roll fratricide Richards has deliberately tried to castrate the reputation of his oldest friend and with it has destroyed the Rolling Stones themselves?

Knowing the damage he was certain to do, his motives seem unfathomable. Could it be simply that he’s jealous, always has been, and that finally it’s showing?

Last week Jerry Hall, Mick Jagger’s second wife, referred witheringly to Richards’ taunts as “penis envy”. She’s a smart woman.

Rock and roll is music. But from the beginning it was always associated with sex. “Sex, drugs and rock and roll,” goes the mantra that has accompanied the Rolling Stones for getting on for five decades. But if Keith Richards came to represent the drugs element of that equation, Mick Jagger, stripped to the waist on stage, those famously full lips curved around the microphone, was always the sex part.

From the beginning, his performances were deliberately lascivious. That was his role, while off-stage there’s been a long litany of beautiful women at his side and in his bed - from Jean Shrimpton’s younger sister, Chrissie, in his earliest days of celebrity, through Marianne Faithfull, Marsha Hunt, Carly Simon, his first wife Bianca Jagger and on through Carla Bruni, Jerry Hall, model Luciana Morad and many more to his current girl friend American model L’Wren Scott.

That sounds to me like a guy with few doubts about his sex appeal.

But now, acting like a naughty schoolboy, Keith Richards, with whom Jagger wrote all the Stones’ biggest hits from The Last Time and Satisfaction to Brown Sugar and Honky Tonk Women, has gleefully, wilfully tried to puncture the virile, sex symbol image of the friend he’s known since he was four years of age.

Richards says he’s been informed (presumably by one of the women both men have slept with - which probably means either his first wife Anita Pallenberg or Marianne Faithfull), that his pal, doesn’t provide the most fun in bed.

The inference here is clear and boastful: it has to be that he, Richards, has been told that he was the better Stone between the sheets. And seemingly he chose to believe it. Well, he would, wouldn’t he!

In teenage boys such boasting would be pathetic. From a man of 67 it’s incomprehensible.

Keith might excuse himself by saying that it’s just part of his usual droll, outrageous, mischievous conversation, and that he’s been winding up Jagger for the fun of it all their adult lives. But it’s a lewd assertion to which Jagger has no way of responding, short of turning to his legion of women, and saying “ask them”, which, of course, he would never do.

Many will argue that none of us knows, let alone cares, whether anything Richards says is true or not. The naïve might even think it tells us something about Mick Jagger that we didn’t already know.
I would disagree. I think we know more about Mick Jagger’s love life than that of any other man on the planet.

What it does (itals) tell us, as do the other assertions that for years Richards has referred spitefully to Jagger in the recording studio as “Your Majesty” and “Brenda”, is quite a lot about Keith Richards.

And though he’s been amusing us for donkeys’ years with fictitious stories created to further embellish the outlaw image he’s created for himself (such as how he snorted his dead father’s ashes), it would seem that a deep-seated resentment about his song-writing partner has finally surfaced.

But where does that resentment come from? Could it be simply a matter of lifelong jealousy? Does it go back to the early days on the road when the goofy young Keith was, according to a ‘girl count’ by former Stones’ bass player Bill Wyman, unsuccessful with the opposite sex?

Or is it finally get-back time for those occasions in the late Sixties when Jagger stole Richards’ girl Anita Pallenberg for the occasional dalliance while she was appearing with the singer in the film Performance?

In his book, Richards professes not to be the jealous type, saying that when Pallenberg, whom he himself had ‘stolen’ from a third Stone, Brian Jones, sometimes didn’t come home at night after filming, he knew where she would be and simply went off and slept with one of his old girlfriends.

“I didn’t find out for ages about Mick and Anita, but I smelled it,” he writes. “Mostly from Mick, who didn’t give any sign of it, which is why I smelt it…”

Then he assumes a worldly nonchalance. “You’ve got an old lady like Anita Pallenberg and expect other guys not to hit on her? I heard rumours… Good luck to him… Anita’s a piece of work. She probably nearly broke his back”.

I don’t believe he wasn’t hurt, isn’t still hurt. It might have been, as he says, “like Peyton Place back then, a lot of wife-swapping or girlfriend-swapping”, a period of free love among musicians, but I think he cared a lot more than he lets on. Indeed, he admits he wrote possibly his greatest song, Gimme Shelter, while waiting for his unfaithful girlfriend to leave Jagger and come home to him.

He and Jagger might have been partners in music, but there was, he says, always a rivalry about women. ”It wasn’t the first time we’d been in competition for a bird, even for a night on the road,” he writes. “Who gets that one? Who’s Tarzan around here? It was like two alphas fighting. Still is, quite honestly. But it’s hardly the basis for a good relationship, right?”

Right. And crowing about how forty years ago he got even when Jagger was living with Marianne Faithfull and he called round and had sex with her when his friend was out is hardly the basis for any kind of future for the Rolling Stones. “I was knocking Marianne, man,“ he writes with a touch of vitriol towards Jagger. “While you’re missing it, I’m kissing it.”

As it happens his brief delight was cut short when Mick came home early. “It was our only time, hot and sweaty. We were just there…in the afterglow, my head nestled between those beautiful jugs. And we heard his car drive up and there was a big flurry, and I did one out of the window, through the garden…and I realised I’d left my socks. Well, he’s not the sort of guy to look for socks. Marianne and I still have this joke. She sends me messages. ‘I still can’t find your socks’.”

Women: they’re one interpretation of why Richards seems to have so deliberately set about destroying the group and billion-dollar brand he helped create. But there’s another which might be equally potent.

Could it be that for years Richards has resented the way Jagger used his growing marketing and business acumen to take over the running of the Rolling Stones after the group had been ripped-off by their American manager, Allen Klein, at the end of the Sixties?

Is Keith jealous that, as he spiralled into heroin addiction, his pal Mick, the boy who when they started out couldn’t even play the guitar, cleaned up his act and became the first among equals in the band ‒ in effect, the manager?

Has it been driving Keith mad that over the decades Mick has become increasingly sophisticated and high-handed, making all the business and most of the artistic decisions, leaving him to simply play his guitar, the singer’s side man?

He may have deservedly enjoyed the plaudits from the rock cognoscenti, because he’s a brilliant, knowledgeable and original musician, but to the world at large Jagger is the main man, even having accepted a knighthood.

Has all this been irking Richards, the arch rebel, for years?
Very possibly. But there’s another side to the story. Without Jagger taking over the running of band, the Rolling Stones would almost certainly have ceased to exist decades ago. Keith Richards certainly wasn’t equipped to do it. He never even tried.

When Jagger, largely by dint of personality, assumed the paramount role in the early Seventies the Rolling Stones were facing a crisis. Despite having already had all their biggest hits, they were nothing like as rich as they should have been because of bad deals they’d signed early in their careers. They still don’t own most of their early recordings. Without a decent manager they were heading for rock and roll oblivion.

So Jagger reinvented the group as “the greatest rock and roll band in the world”. And as ‘stadium rock’ arrived in the Eighties, no penny was spared in making Rolling Stones’ shows into circus-like spectacles as they travelled the globe. It was a business plan that worked, finally making the Rolling Stones, including Keith Richards, very rich indeed.

But to do it all, Mick, the one from the London School of Economics with the business brain, had to go from being simply the vocalist and focal point in the band to becoming the boss.

Maybe Keith just couldn’t stomach that. Is that why he describes Jagger as sometimes being “unbearable”? Ruefully, he says he hasn’t been to Jagger’s dressing room in twenty years, and wonders where his old friend went: “Lost to fame” he suggests.

The truth is people change with age, and all rock groups break up at some point, almost invariably because of inner tensions between the members. That Jagger kept three of the original members (Richards, drummer Charlie Watts and himself) together for so long is extraordinary.

Years ago, Mick Jagger was given a huge advance by a publisher to write his account of his life and the group’s adventures. In the end, he sent the money back claiming not to be able to remember much of what happened. There was probably much truth in that, but was there also a diplomatic reticence to open old wounds?

Richards, on the other hand, seems to have been determined to do the exact opposite. Is it possible he didn’t realise how lancing his comments would be? Or is it all a remarkable calculation, a way of ending the band and a friendship which had long since, like a dead marriage, grown cold?

If that is the case, then it almost seems like a rerun of the demise of another famous band 40 years ago. They were the Beatles, whose end came when John Lennon deliberately did everything he could to smash the band’s image, while launching some scathing comments about Paul McCartney, his chief partner in the group.

Bands live much of their lives in the public eye. That’s part of their job. It wasn’t enough for Lennon to simply walk away quietly - he had to attack the person he’d been closest to.

Now Keith Richards, too, is ridiculing the boy he started out with, raking over the coals of their musical marriage. And why? Maybe Keith himself doesn’t really know. Any psychiatrist he visits will have a field day.

The irony to all this is that it’s been rumoured that there was to be a special issue of commemorative stamps by the Royal Mail in 2012 to celebrate the Rolling Stones fiftieth anniversary as a band. The very notion that the most rebellious anti-establishment group of the Sixties would one day be so honoured would have been something no-one could possibly have imagined back in those tumultuous early days. It will be a shame if the issue is now called off.

I’ve seen the Rolling Stones on stage many times and what great nights they gave us as the tours and shows got bigger and bigger. Will there be any more? I don’t believe so, and I, like millions of others, will be very sorry.

Back to the top

To Dye Or Not To Dye (Readers Digest 2010)

Sat, 23 Oct 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

Once, when a man got past forty, his hair began to go grey. When he reached sixty it frequently turned white. It was nothing to be ashamed of, just part of the ageing process.

This didn’t necessarily apply to mature women, of course, whose hair has always come in many splendoured shades ‒ from marigold to papal purple. But for us men, our genes alone governed the pigment of our hair.

Well, not any more. A recent survey has found that 11 per cent of American men routinely colour their hair, and a glance at Questions to the Prime Minister will confirm that it’s catching on here, too. I’m not talking about the new man at Number 10, but just look at the rows behind him.

I know there was a large intake of new, young MPs at the last election, but not that many. Whatever happened to all the silver foxes who should be visible on the backbenches? David Davis and Alan Duncan stand out like patches of unmelted snow in a springtime pine forest.

Come to think of it, the last government had begun to look as though it had found the elixir of eternal youth. Don’t tell me that is John Prescott’s real hair shade. Or that only at the sides is Peter Mandelson going grey? True, Alistair Darling’s hair is as blanched as a brand new tennis ball, but those Kiwi boot polish eyebrows?

All this wouldn’t be so bad, if it was only for politicians that time has stood still follicly-speaking. But it isn’t. In one TV news report recently I spotted a scientist, a senior policeman and a financial expert with hair that was quite clearly a fake colour, while soap actors are more dyed around the skull than anyone.

Perhaps there’s an excuse for them. They make their living by pretending to be someone else. The ability to look younger may extend a career by a good decade. I suppose license can be given to rock stars, too. Although most people alive can scarcely remember a time when rock wasn’t the world’s most popular music, it’s somehow still considered “young”. Grey or white are not young colours.

Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney both understand that when fans go to see them they want to see a Rolling Stone or a Beatle. Okay, if they want to catch time in a bottle, good for them, although the new silver and grizzled Tom Jones has never looked better.

Surely, though, this forever-young fad should end with entertainers, if for no reason other than dyed hair on a middle-aged man just doesn’t look good. While women’s hairdressers, with their highlights and other tricks of the trade, manage to make their clients appear, if not necessarily younger then certainly more sparkling, men usually look as though they just dipped their heads in a can of undercoat.

Now, those who know me might be smiling at all this. You see, I had the odd white hair at nine years of age and quite a few more in my teens. I went grey in my late twenties, was as much salt as pepper in my thirties and as white as a polar bear at 50.

Yet never once have I considered dying it. And it isn’t that I’m not vain. Quite the opposite, actually. I’m too vain to want anyone thinking I’m vain enough to dye my hair. I wouldn’t want people staring at me thinking “does he or doesn’t he?” It must drive Melvyn Bragg mad.

But there’s something else. No, it isn’t that I think men who colour their hair are effeminate, as an older generation might have done. It’s worse. I think it makes them look phoney.

I know I’m being irrational and certainly sexist, but while I can accept hair colouring on a woman, it seems slightly sad on a man. I can’t help thinking that men who colour their hair are admitting openly that they fear for their jobs and virility; that if the tell-tale signs of age were displayed on their heads their status in our youth infatuated society would be reduced.

But, even more than it being a surrender to our obsession with everything young, it seems to me that to colour your hair is to tell a little lie about yourself.

So when I see serious men wanting to look younger than their years, I feel uncomfortable. It’s as if they’re trying to put one over on me by the way they look. And, if they are, what else are they disguising?

Anyway, is it even true that we want our people in top jobs, or even
any jobs, to look younger? Surely we want them to look clever, capable and experienced. Does colouring your grey hair copper give you more gravitas? Just the opposite, I think.

Of course I could be wrong. Was I deemed less attractive in my thirties because of my prematurely grey hair? Was I passed over for jobs because I was thought to be older than I was? I’ll never know, but I can’t say I care. Would I really want to work for people who only rated me because of the colour of my hair?

I’ve recently heard that since the credit crunch some of those whizz kids in the City who got us into this mess have taken to trying to add a few years of wisdom to their appearance with a touch of grey at their temples. That seems to me just as duplicitous as septuagenarians with conker coloured curls.

No doubt there are many men, probably supported by their wives and partners, to whom returning to their natural colouring would be a terrifying prospect, rather like owning up to friends and colleagues that they’ve been living a lie for years. But it needn’t be. Everyone has always known, they’ve just pretended not to notice. It’s the bathroom mirror that’s been doing the lying.

Take my advice. Go grey gracefully. Think what it’s done for George Clooney.

Back To the Top

The Inbetweeners - Neither Man Nor Monkey (October 2010)

Sat, 23 Oct 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

Neither man nor monkey. That was how wise grandmothers would once describe teenage boys, and if we need evidence that nothing really changes over the generations ‒ not in human development, anyway ‒ we need look no further than The Inbetweeners, an award winning comedy show than can be seen on the digital station E4 tonight.

Not that those of a sensitive or prudish disposition should be encouraged to go looking for it. If they do, they’ll be aghast at the language that spills out of the mouths of four sixth form boys at a London comprehensive school.

With repeated slang references to parts of the body not often given even their Latin names in other comedy programmes, and with male hydraulics and manually generated emissions being particular obsessions, this is not a programme for the delicate viewer. Grange Hill this isn’t.

That being said, though everything is grossly, comically overstated, there will be few male readers who don’t recognise at least the tone and territory of the banter, remembering it from their own schooldays, when it was perhaps delivered in a more diluted form.

And take away the explicit crudeness of tongue, what we find at the root of The Inbetweeners is an innocence ‒ that eternal comedy of youthful embarrassment and confusion that is the lot of being a sixteen year old boy.

In many primitive societies there are coming of age rites and challenges to endure at this time of a lad’s life. All we have now are hormones bubbling like geysers and obsessions with sex and self image, with hardly a notion of what to do about either.

The four leading characters of The Inbetweeners are the kind who don’t quite fit in anywhere else at their school and therefore gang-up together. There’s the crude Cockney boy Jay who’s given to absurd exaggerations about his sexual successes; the nice looking Simon who’s hopelessly in love with pretty Carli; Neil, the gawky one, who gets physically over-excited while dancing with a woman teacher at the school hop; and Will, the story-teller, the boy who’s come from a public school and is now trying to make sense of a different world. Though whether the language would be any different, I very much doubt.

It’s all very silly and often gross, but last week’s episode about a school fashion show was undeniably funny. There they go, four ordinary boys, older brothers perhaps of Kevin and Perry, destined to repeatedly make idiots of themselves in their desperation to find outlets for their needs, totally out of sync with the emotionally more mature girls in their class.

As a series The Inbetweeners might not be the most accurate portrayal of contemporary sixth form life ‒ I hope not, anyway, but it certainly taps into that period in most boys lives when girls are a mesmerising yet terrifying fantasy.

Parties are often the venues where modern rites of passage take place, from getting drunk to first sex and drugs, and though initiations may occur a little earlier these days than they did when I was young, there are still bridges that have to be crossed, mistakes to be made.

And in many ways what the Inbetweeners suffer is not that different from the embarrassment at my first teenage party. Then someone suggested putting out the lights and playing a game where the boys sat down and the girls went round the room sitting on the boys’ knees and “necking” with them before moving on to the next boy.
It should have been great fun, except I didn’t know what “necking” was. I knew what “snogging” was, although I’d never done it, but “necking”? This was a word I’d heard but didn’t understand.

In my fevered, and very callow brow, I decided it must be something quite different from snogging, an erotic variation, perhaps, having read in a copy of the Readers Digest at the barbers that the neck was an erogenous zone.

So as the lights went out a succession of bewildered girls made their way around the darkened room to my knees and turned their pliant young lips to mine ‒ only to find me dodging mine away and rubbing my neck against theirs like a rabid swan.

And though the game went on for much of the evening, because obviously everyone else was enjoying it very much, never once did my lips touch another’s. That’s absolutely true. There must be women, now in their sixties, all over West Lancashire still wondering what was going on that night.

Perhaps it isn’t surprising that I wasn’t romantically very successful, with girls usually telling me that they liked me “as a friend”, which, after the death penalty, must be the worst words any teenage boy will ever hear.

But as The Inbetweeners and adolescent boys have discovered from time immemorial it’s impossible to get it right with girls. Their signs and rules are so difficult to read. There was one occasion, for instance, when, at 17, having taken a girl home from a party in the family car, I ventured to put an arm around her.

She looked at me in horror and said: “Oh, Ray, do we have to behave like animals?” I should have said “Well, yes, I was rather hoping we would”, but I was too mortified.

Yet, not very long after that, while going from one party to the next, another girl I was with said: “You know, Ray, I feel really randy.” To which I responded helpfully, “Oh, well, Olly Morrison’s going to be there. You could get off with him.”

“That’s bloody rude,” came the reply.

See what I mean. Boys just can’t win.

We all recognise the boy like Jay in The Inbetweeners, who wildly exaggerates his conquests. I have a friend who claimed for years that not only would the goings-on between the girls and boys on the top deck of his school bus have made Nero blush, but also that as a sixth former he’d lost his virginity to the girls’ gym teacher. Only recently, thirty years after the event, did he admit that he and the teacher “never actually did it”.

The frustrations (and fibs) of teenage boys and young men have always made for good sit-com, ever since The Likely Lads in the Sixties, but the dialogue and stories have always to be tailored to suit the sensibilities of television audiences.

The strength of The Inbetweeners is that its characters’ needs and language more honestly reflect their age and ages, warts and all ‒ or, if we’re being honest, mainly warts, because some of their behaviour is pretty gross.

Written and produced by former stand-up comedian Iain Morris and Damon Beesley, the series has been building viewers since it began on Channel 4’s tiny digital offshoot E4 just over two years ago. The third series which is currently running, is now attracting over two million viewers, but will, say the writers be the last, as the boys reach the end of their sixth form. A film is now being planned as well as an American version.

No doubt the vulgarity of the language will come in for increasing criticism as the show becomes more popular. That’s only to be expected. I’ve written before that I found it crass for the “F” word to be used on a chat show aimed at a mass BBC-1 national audience of all ages, as was the case with the Jonathan Ross programme. Actually I thought it was celebrity bullying.

But horses for courses. I’ve less problem with four letter words in the splintered world of niche, digital television and YouTube, which is where most viewers will watch The Inbetweeners. Hardly anyone who is likely to be upset will be honestly able to say that came across it by accident.

Way over the top though it may be, coarse and sometimes puerile though it certainly sometimes is, young people recognise themselves and some of their language in a lampooned form in this show. Adults may not like to admit it, but this is how a lot of teenage boys are. And if we modify the language a little bit, we’ll remember that’s how they always were. Neither men nor monkeys.

And, though parents may not like The Inbetweeners, their teenage children do.

Back to the top

THE SANDMAN TO STAY ONLINE

Thu, 7 Oct 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

After nine weeks the free serialisation of The Sandman has come to an end. Initially launched as an experiment in publishing, the results have outshone all expectations, with daily downloads in nineteen countries, including Russia, the Ukraine, Japan, India, Germany, Spain, France, Australia, the UK and the US.

It had been intended that the website would be closed a few days after the end of serialisation. But, as not all readers are up to the same place in the book, some having joined late and others having missed episodes, it will now stay online for at least another month in order that everyone might finish the novel.

Further news about The Sandman will be published shortly on this website. Thank you for reading.

Should any reader have any comments to make about the novel please write to mail@rayconnolly.co.uk.

BACK TO THE TOP

Who Needs Editors? Everyone - Especially Bloggers

Wed, 1 Sep 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

I appear to have rattled a few publishing cages with my recent Guardian article about my experiment in serialising my new novel The Sandman online on this site. That’s fair enough. Good to see my old friend and former editor Ursula McKenzie giving the publishers’ point of view in an answer in the same newspaper ‒ although I hardly think I was suggesting a storming of the publishing Bastille, Ursula.

What wasn’t quite so fair was the reaction of a widely-read publisher blogger called Paul Carr who, in his rush to ridicule me and illustrate how everyone needs editors, quoted a line from The Sandman without reading enough to consider its context. The result was that he misunderstood the purpose of the line completely, and, in doing so, made himself look snide, silly and plain wrong.

Of course everyone needs editors. No-one would deny that. The Sandman had two as well as a proof-reader. But, you know what ‒ bloggers need them, too.

Back to the top

Who Needs Publishers?

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

Who Needs Publishers? The Guardian (August 13, 2010)

You won’t hear it said in many publishing houses these days, where those editors and managements who have survived the ten per cent cull in their numbers following the credit crunch now appear frozen in the headlights of the onrushing digital revolution. But from the point of view of authors, these are potentially exciting times.

Because, though advances have been slashed and literary agents are wringing their hands at the difficulties in finding publishers for all but the most guaranteed fiction, change is on the way. With Apple’s iPad recently joining Amazon’s Kindle and the Sony Reader as devices for reading downloaded books, power in publishing might just be shifting in the authors’ favour.

For as long as anyone has been writing books, authors’ careers have rested on the judgments or whims of publishers. Would the novel that took so many months, or even years, to write be read, let alone chosen, by editors? Who could tell? Who knew what publishers were looking for?

This was bad enough when editorial departments had the authority to buy manuscripts themselves. But then came the endless rise of marketing departments, and soon novels were increasingly being selected according to which genre they fitted.

That situation largely maintains, but with the news that Amazon now sells almost twice as many digital books as hardbacks in America, it’s clear that publishing is changing. And if publishers can sell their books online, why can’t writers?

Actually, they can. It isn’t difficult. Anyone who is computer savvy can become a publisher these days. I know because I’ve just become one.

I’m now Ray Connolly, writer, editor-in-chief and head of marketing of Plumray Books, and now any of the two billion computer owning people in the world who want to read my new novel, The Sandman, can do so at the click of a mouse. Chapter by chapter it’s being serialised on my website where, over ten weeks, it will build like a part work. In the words of a friend “I’m doing a Dickens”.

What’s more, it’s free, though, should any readers want to find out how the The Sandman ends before October, and hopefully quite a few will, they can download the entire book for less than the cost of a paperback. After that it will go on to Amazon.

With one digital bound I’ve become an entrepreneur. There’ll be an iPod version later, for those who want to listen to it being read, and of course there are Facebook and Twitter links. Having begun this new career as an ePublisher, I feel empowered. As a one man band, I have nothing to lose.

Apart from the time spent writing The Sandman, the other costs have been relatively small. And for the first time in my writing career, and I’ve written movies, TV series, radio plays, short stories and several novels, I’m in total control. It’s an experiment, obviously, but I’m enjoying it. And, as it happens, the subject of the novel might be prescient.

When I was writing The Sandman, a thriller that links rock music with cults and involves a television reporter who investigates a series of deaths she suspects may have occurred because of grooming on social internet sites, I thought it might be slightly ahead of its time. I was wrong. With the furore over the recent events on Facebook it’s absolutely topical.

And now I’m going to market it, using exactly the same tools that are central to the story ‒ namely those of the computer and social online sites. In other words a novel about manipulation through the web is being made available for readers in serial form…through the web.

Obviously I’m the tiniest drop in the largest ocean, but how long will it be before there are more authors like Ian McEwan , who’s already done an exclusive deal with Amazon doubling his royalties for eBook versions of his back catalogue? Not long. Already other writers are enquiring about the possibilities of putting their out of print books on their websites.

It’s often been said that, with the squeeze in publishing and the closing of so many bookshops, this is a terrible time to be an author. Well…maybe not. Perhaps the Arctic Monkeys, Lily Allen and other rock acts, who reputedly made their first records privately, even in their bedrooms, are showing the way forward for writers.

Undoubtedly it will at first be difficult for most authors to be noticed in the dense forests of online information and much mush. It’s not exactly like having a stack of books in a high street shop window. But writers are creative people. My bet is they’ll find ways of publicising their wares not yet dreamed about.

As for me, whether anyone will be interested in reading The Sandman I’m about to find out.

Back to the top

The F Word

Thu, 5 Aug 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

The F Word (Daily Mail, 2008)

Can someone tell me exactly what is so funny about the F word, that Middle English verb, adjective or exclamation which used to refer solely to sexual intercourse but which is now used in a plethora of catch-all ways to indicate just about any kind of situation.

It obviously must be funny because television studio audiences howl with glee whenever it takes the place of a joke when uttered by a comedian, or when a star being interviewed on Friday Night With Jonathan Ross lets it slip.

And when no studio audience is to hand, as in location filming, TV producers, who clearly think it’s very funny, too, make sure we don’t miss the joy by kindly adding a roaring laughter soundtrack whenever it’s said, to tell us that we should be amused.

Perhaps audiences think it’s brave of comics to use a four letter word instead of making a joke. It isn’t. Not any more. No-one is going to reprimand them or ban them from the airwaves for being lazy rather than funny. And it’s a jolly sight easier.

But, so amusing do some TV people find the word, it often seems to be the only point in those bloomers and bleepers programmes, with those endless out-takes of actors forgetting their lines and saying “Fuck!” instead—which can then be unsubtly bleeped out.

I can see that this situation might be faintly amusing if an actress playing, say, Queen Victoria uttered the famous four letter word when she suddenly discovered that a pretend Buckingham Palace door was jammed shut just as she was about to make a grand exit. The incongruity of the situation would be worth a demi-smile.

But there’s nothing unexpected in seeing a girl from Eastenders in the Queen Vic so proclaim when she forgets what she is supposed to say next. It’s what many of us would expect her to say.

Actors often swear, as do many journalists, City workers, doctors, princes, factory workers, professors, soldiers, jockeys, nurses and farmers. Indeed all kinds and all classes of people, men and women, use words these days that their grandparents wouldn’t have done. That’s neither good nor bad, it’s just the way language evolves over generations.

Perhaps nuns don’t ever swear, but I wouldn’t be too sure. I once knew a Catholic priest who had a very salty tongue when it suited him.

What I’m certain the priest didn’t do, though, was to use that language in front of his mother, his parishioners, or children, or, indeed, in the presence of anyone whom he thought it might offend.

And there’s the difference. Using the word as a lazy, four lettered exclamation on television for a cheap laugh based on some dubious idea of its shock effect, is not the same as saying it in certain private situations among selected colleagues or age-mates.

The circumstances in which the F-word is used and who might hear, or overhear, it, changes its weight entirely.

When it comes to language, I’m no saint, but I don’t believe my children ever heard me use a four letter word until they were in their twenties, and even then, only rarely. I didn’t want them to grow up believing that that was an appropriate way to speak.

Naturally my mother never heard me say the F-word, either, and nor did any of my older relatives. It would have been offensive, even upsetting, to them and therefore quite wrong of me.

On television, however---although, curiously, not on radio---the most common four letter word is a part of many comics’ patois. I imagine the justification would go along the lines that it’s only a word, a pretty meaningless word of everyday usage that has lost much of its original sexual context. So, “What is there to get upset about?”

I’ll tell you. While it's true, the original meaning of the F word may have largely disappeared,it still retains, for many, the ability to offend. In fact, although the comics and the producers of their shows may not care about this, I suspect the word is likely to offend as many millions of viewers as it is supposed to entertain.

Hearing it said on TV today might not generate the tumult it did when Kenneth Tynan purposely made himself notorious by suddenly saying it in a live debate in 1965, but it still grates upon the ears of many.

It might be “just a word like any other word”, as it is routinely excused, but to hear a couple of lads effing and blinding loudly on a bus nearly always brings looks of distaste from other passengers, who don’t wish to hear it, or for their children to hear it.

Such behaviour, is, if nothing else, bad manners. Actually I think it’s an unwitting kind of bullying of everyone else in earshot.

And whether we are among those who use it or those who hear it, it’s all about the balance of freedoms. Yes, we live in a free country, so we’re allowed to say anything we like in private. But, if what is being said loudly in public is repugnant to others, surely it is the equal right of those listening people not to hear those words—be it on the top deck of a bus or coming from a television.

And don’t tell me that it is no longer a powerful word. No-one who has lip-read it being snarled at a referee or an opposing player during a televised football match can be in any doubt as to its continued potency.

For me a comedian on popular television who speaks like a loudmouth on a bus or a football pitch is exhibiting not just a dearth of good material as he goes for the course laugh, he’s broadcasting his boorish bad manners.

Transmitting four letter words in a show of general evening entertainment without a thought or care as to who might hear them are an assault on all those who don’t want to hear them, or wish their children not to hear them.

I know the argument against that would be that if you don’t like what is being said in a show then change channel. But in many homes that can be just passing the buck to parents. Would you want to switch off a popular programme and warrant the wrath of your twelve year old children? Besides, the parents’ problem with the programme might well be not with the whole show, but just with the four letter words.

There is a place for four letter words in our lives and in our drama. I watched an excellent film recently called In Bruges in which a multiplication of expletives were used in an almost absurdly poetic way. But this was not general knockabout entertainment. It was an intentional exaggeration of the language for dramatic and comic effect, and you would have to go out of your way a little bit to see it. I doubt children would want to see it.

General comedy entertainment is different. It’s easy access. It’s all around us. I can understand why poor, struggling comics with a dearth of ideas fall back on the F word for quick laughs, hoping to shock. But what I don’t understand is why the clever ones do it, too—people like Ricky Gervais and Frank Skinner. They don’t need to. They really don’t.

Because they should know, a gag with "fuck" in it is rarely more funny than it would be without it.

An Inspiration Called Flipper (July 28, 2010)

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

An Inspiration Called Flipper July 28, 2010

Jackie Cobell doesn’t look like a star. A council foster carer, she doesn’t have a glamorous job, and at fifty six years old, she’s so fat she’s had a gastric band fitted. All in all she just doesn’t fit your usual image of a cute, young, fake-tanned, TV celebrity.

But a celebrity is exactly what she is ‒ a real celebrity in its truest sense. That is to say, she’s someone who has done something worthy of being celebrated. Because last weekend, against all the odds placed on her by her age and size, she swam the English Channel.

She didn’t do it because she’s a fantastically accomplished Olympic swimmer. She isn’t. She’s just a happy amateur. And, though they may have called her Flipper when she was a schoolgirl, because she enjoyed swimming so much, she took so long to reach France from Dover that she broke the wrong kind of record.

If there’d been a wooden spoon she would have got it as the slowest person, using nothing but muscle power, ever to make it across to France. But that hardly mattered. Her real achievement was in her courage, determination and endurance.

Taking nearly twenty nine hours to cross the Straits of Dover, she was dragged and buffeted by tides and currents so much, that she ended up zig-zagging through 65 miles of turbulent sea, instead of gliding through the twenty one miles that is the shortest route.

And when, after just eight hours of her double marathon-plus-some, her left arm became useless as a result of an earlier injury, she didn’t give in to the mental siren calls which must surely have been urging her to clamber into the warm blankets of the support boat and accept failure. She swam on and on for another 21 hours…one armed.

Her grit, maybe even her stubbornness, call it what you will, were astonishing as she ploughed on through the water, all through one day, then on through the night, and on again into the next day. Just think about it. On and on, face down in the water, lifting her head to breathe only every three or four strokes. She may have trained for five years for this moment, but it’s still daunting just to imagine.

So, why did she do it? Well, it wasn’t because she liked showing off, or because she wanted to be famous. I suspect the thought of fame never crossed her mind, although she’s certainly famous now.

She isn’t a rich, spoilt teenager who at sixteen convinces foolish parents to allow her to sail around the world, and ends up having to be rescued in mid-ocean. She wouldn’t understand that world.

Her role in life is as a carer and giver, and what she did was for others, for charity, raising more than £2000 for research into Huntington’s Disease for her swim.

Yes, she admitted, as on dry land she began to recover, there were moments of doubt in mid-Channel. “But I just kept thinking of all the people I would let down if I stopped.”

We should mark those words well. She didn’t want to let anyone down. She didn’t.

Her experience is unique, but anyone who has taken on any kind of personal challenge, no matter how tiny and irrelevant, will marvel at her determination. I remember as a sixteen year old boy on a school camping holiday, when, sharing a tent with some hulking great rugby players, two of whom went on to play for England, I alone decided to swim across the widest bit of Coniston Water.

To a good, strong swimmer it would, I imagine, be no big deal. But I was an eight stone weakling who’d never swum further than a length in Southport open air pool before, and, at the place we were camping, Coniston must have been more than a mile wide. It was certainly as cold as a glacier.

But, once started at my delicate breast stroke, and very quickly having serious misgivings about the venture, I just couldn’t give up. That would have been to let myself down and to have failed the other boys who were in the rowing boat urging me on.

Eventually reaching the other side of the lake I was so cold and exhausted I couldn’t stand and had to crawl on my hands and knees out of the water and be lifted bodily into the boat. But I’d done it.

Not surprisingly the teachers in charge, who’d been absent when I’d set off, were, quite rightly, furious with worry when I got back, and put me to bed covered in blankets and hot water bottles. But, in an otherwise undistinguished boyhood, I’d proved something to myself.

Jackie Cobell proved something to herself, too. But, more than that, she proved something to us all. In a hi-tech, entertainment soaked world, where instant fame for its own sake has become as vapid a career ambition as is imaginable, she showed that without true achievement and purpose life in meaningless.

This is not necessarily to criticise those to whom celebrity has become an end in itself. They didn’t create the world that is sold to them every time they turn on a television or computer, where looks and glamour are seen as easy, exciting, sexy stepping stones out of dull toil and mundane obscurity.

It isn’t their fault that they are force-fed continuous distraction by way of repetitive computer games, where virtual prizes are little more than questionable rewards for childhoods spent in darkened rooms staring at flashing images.

If we worry that many young people grow up misunderstanding the meaning of real achievement, let’s remember that perhaps we, too, should share not a little of the responsibility for this.

And let us applaud and reward with our admiration the examples set by people like Jackie Cobell and comedian Eddie Izzard, who ran the length and breadth of the country until his septic feet bled with pus and he was catatonic with fatigue.

And remember that they, and many other unsung good people like them, do it all for charity and to prove to themselves that life just doesn’t consist of comfort and entertainment, that there is an inner need within us that needs satisfying, too.

Jackie Cobell miscalculated when she left Dover at just after half past six last Saturday morning. She’d trained by swimming up and down Lake Windermere and thought that by doubling the time taken and adding a bit for the Channel currents, she would be in France by that night.

She was way out. But that didn’t stop her. She showed that life is about overcoming challenges, even unexpected ones, by preparation and endeavour, that there are no short cuts. In her case her journey actually turned out to be nothing but long detours, but she kept on keeping on, the mantra in her head being an old Spencer Davies hit, slightly changed to “Keep on Swimming”.

As she swam she would have known that no matter how hard she tried there could be no guarantee that endeavour would bring success. Her epic swim wasn’t like that and life isn’t like that. Her body might well have just given up on her and her husband might had have to haul her into the support boat. But she would have known, too, that if is she gave in, failure was guaranteed. That, it would seem, was not an option.

I don’t know who will be in the next honours list. But as much as anyone, Jackie Cobell deserves something. Not for her swim. Swimming is her hobby and she obviously loves it. But for the determination she showed, and the terrific example she set to us all over last weekend.

For that, Jackie Cobell is more than an inspiration called Flipper. She’s a star.

Back to the top

Wimbledon

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

WIMBLEDON: The Axeman Serveth - Television Review (Evening Standard, July 1982)

At around 5.30 yesterday afternoon it occurred to me that, if there were any two people with whom I would not wish to be stuck in a lift, one was John McEnroe and the other Jimmy Connors.

At that time Connors was beginning to do his mad axeman act as his eyes glazed over with the scent of victory and, with clenched fists, he bawled defiance at the heavens for every shot that went in, before goose-stepping, fingers popping, back to his line.

He seemed like a man in the grip of some demonic possession, and he was alive and loose not two miles from my own home. Getting up, I locked and bolted the door lest the champion-to-be should escape the Centre Court and come looking for me.

There is something of the Jack Nicholson in Connors. The postman might always ring twice, but you can’t be sure with these wild men of tennis.

The chap on the other side of the net was by this time in a state of some equal mental disbalance, muttering, screaming and shouting to himself as though conversing with unheard voices. I cannot imagine what psychiatrists make of the Saint Joan spirit in John McEnroe. I know what I think. We all know about people who talk to themselves.

John McEnroe, for all his skills, reminds me of nothing so much as a disturbed child, so total is the concentration, so selfish the attitude, so sulky the sportsman.

Born in another time, he would have made a wonderful star for those teenage delinquent movies of the 50s, all rebellion authority-hating and forever sorry for himself. He could have made a fortune playing the lead in such classic films as I Was A Teenage Werewolf, frightening us all into craven submission.

My theory is that he should have stuck to soccer, but was convinced by either his father, teacher or coach that there was more money in tennis. And, ever since, the poor lad has been convinced that everyone older than himself or in a position of some authority is yet another manifestation of those who drove him into a sport which he so obviously detests.

Another clue to this attitude might be detected in his behaviour towards Peter Webster, the shiny-pated linesman who, after giving a succession of calls with which McEnroe disagreed, found himself the subject of some hysterical abuse. “You’ve got to be kidding,” screamed the American werewolf in London before beginning a loathsome incantation of “baldy …. baldy.”

Could it be that our young hero has a subconscious resentment towards older men who are short of hair on top? Is that why Mr McEnroe senior always wears that white sun-hat through the lashing winds and rains of a Wimbledon summer? Is he trying to hide something?

Dan Maskell, who himself is not over-endowed with hair, was almost angry. “This is unbearable,” he muttered, killing with politeness. “McEnroe is clearly very much out of sorts with himself.”

As a game of tennis, it was all about as sporting as The Battle of Borodino. While McEnroe burned and smouldered at one end, turning his laser eyes on any poor unsuspecting linesman who had the unenviable task of officiating the game as laid down by the Rule Book, Connors was collecting a penalty point for persistent rudeness.

“If looks could kill, we’d have several dead linesmen today,” someone said. Bob Jenkins, the umpire, wouldn’t have been so lucky. He’d have been vaporised.

Then suddenly, it was all over. Connors went into a clinch with a comely Barbie-doll, who, I understand, is his wife; and the crazy, mixed-up, misunderstood kid became catatonic with grief. It was the first time that McEnroe had been silent all day.

The War of Wimbledon, the battle between players and officials that is, was over for another year. It only remained for the All England Lawn Tennis Club to invite John McEnroe to become a member. As the saying goes, I cannot imagine that he would wish to join any club that would have him as a member.

back to the top of the page

Devil's Work

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

Are We Doing The Devil’s Work For Him? (Daily Mail, 2007)

What was nineteen year old Robert Hawkins thinking as he looked down the sites of his rifle at the anonymous shoppers in the Westroads shopping mall in Omaha, Nebraska, this week?

What was going through his mind as in just a few minutes he picked off eight of them, one by one, and took their lives, before ending his own? Was he feeling anger that his family didn’t want him, frustration that he’d broken up with his girl friend, or depression that he’d lost his job?

Probably all three played some part. But according to the suicide note he left behind there was something else on the mind of this disturbed young man. “At least now I will be famous,” he is said to have written.

Of course! FAME! He wanted fame.

The desire for fame is the addiction of our age. Everybody wants to be famous.

Indeed celebrity for itself alone is almost seen as a sole ambition by many young people. Traditionally fame came for outstanding achievement. It usually suggested great merit.

That is not necessarily how fame is viewed nowadays. Go into any school and ask fourteen year old kids what they want to be when they grow up, and a surprising number will say, perhaps as Robert Hawkins would have done: “I want to be famous”.

And, in a sense, that’s now possible, if only in the Andy Warhol “fame for fifteen minutes way”. All you have to do is perform something zany or outrageous on your mobile phone, maybe even happy-slapping, edit it on your home computer and shove it on to one of the internet sites that cater for these things, and there you are, virtually a film star, with millions of people able to look at you.

Who knows, if you’re really lucky, you may get the chance to perform on some reality TV show and make a career out of nothing more than your celebrity. It happens---in a world swamped with junk TV and the internet. See how well Jade Goody has done.

For most young people, and it is mainly young people who become hooked, the drug of fame will, of course, be a transitory, harmless one. But, disastrously sometimes, that is not the case for everyone.

For some, like Robert Hawkins, it can provoke a compulsion to do the unthinkable. And although his deeds, and similar acts by others, are purely the responsibility of those who pull the triggers, perhaps we should all be looking into ourselves and asking a question.

It is possible that in some wider sense we may be unknowingly encouraging such killers?

I was thinking about that this week, before I read about the Omaha shootings, after seeing a new film about Mark Chapman, the man who murdered John Lennon in 1980.

Chapman is still in jail and will, I suspect, remain there for the rest of his life. But if he has access to a television in his cell, and I think he might, he has a treat coming. Because, sooner or later, some American TV station is sure to show the film about him. It’s called The Killing Of John Lennon. And he’s going to love it.

There he will see not the chubby nerd we remember from newsreel footage, but a handsome, muscular, personable Mark Chapman as played by actor Jonas Ball. Perhaps this was how he imagined himself all those years ago.

Not only that, he’ll also find himself mirroring the role of Travis Bickle, the stalking, homicidal character played by Robert De Niro in the Martin Scorcese film Taxi Driver. There he’ll be on his TV, just like Bickle, filling his revolver with bullets in slick, shining close-up, then standing sideways on to a mirror, his arm outstretched as he holds his gun, its trigger cocked, rehearsing his role as assassin. “Bang bang, you’re dead,” he says in the film several times. “Bang, bang you’re dead!”

Bang bang and John Lennon was dead, just like those shoppers this week in Omaha.

Now, I’m not suggesting that actor Jonas Ball or writer/director Andrew Piddington set out to glorify Mark Chapman by making a movie about the events leading up to that psychopath’s moment in history. But the actor’s very attractiveness, the choice of camera angles, lenses and lighting, and the way the New York streets at night recall the mood of the Scorsese movie, cannot help but glamourise him.

And at this point I should declare an interest. I knew John Lennon and was due to see him the day after he was killed. The last message I got from him was “John’s looking forward to seeing you”, given to me on the phone by a secretary just four and a half hours before Chapman ended Lennon’s life.

So, yes, I was going to be upset, seeing, on screen, a double of a man I liked being shot four times in the back, and then watching dams of his blood burst across the New York pavement.

But putting personal feelings aside, forgetting director Piddington’s grotesque creation of Chapman’s violent imagined bloodbath when we see him blasting away at a couple of homosexuals having sex in the next room at the YMCA; and even overlooking the tawdrily erotic scene with a prostitute (of dubious veracity, by the way) the night before the assassination, I can’t escape the feeling that the decision to make this film was wrong headed.

“I was nobody until I killed the biggest somebody on earth,” Chapman told police after the murder. In other words “I wanted to be famous, and now by killing someone extremely famous, I am.

Hurrah!”

Just like Robert Hawkins in Omaha.

Fame was the scent which drew Chapman to his victim, and achieving personal fame through murderous association was his spur. Indeed, by Chapman’s own admission, if he hadn’t shot Lennon, he had a back-up list of other famous targets, including actor George C. Scott and President Kennedy’s widow Jacqueline Onassis.

He murdered Lennon to satisfy some malign sense of celebrity: to be, in his tortured mind, a somebody. But, it seems to me, by affording Chapman almost two hours of cinematic space, two hours in which we listen to his ramblings and justifications for his act (basically Lennon was a “phoney”, as defined in J.D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye, and therefore he deserved to die) the film is making the insane Chapman famous all over again.

In other words the film makers, and we the audience, are giving him another giant fix of the drug he always wanted. Fame!

This in itself would be a depressing state of affairs if it concerned only Mark Chapman. But, as we can see, it doesn’t. While he’s been in jail the world has changed beyond recognition. With the invention of the internet, the introduction of blogs, and the popularity of websites like YouTube and Facebook, not to mention reality television, an entire worldwide generation, like no other time in history, now dreams of becoming famous.

Fame, it is thought, means an easy, luxury life; fame means being attractive, being lionised and photographed, and being invited to all the best parries. Fame means being rich. There’s nothing as sexy as fame.

But how do you become famous if you have no particular talent and are unlikely ever to be a success at anything? That’s easy. Through notoriety. Indeed, notoriety, owning up to some very odd interests, has become the mindset of the day.

Not to prejudge the investigation, but Amanda Knox, now known universally as Foxy Knoxy, and her Italian boy friend Raffaele Sollecito, both being held in Perugia in connection with the sex murder of Meredith Kercher, both had, shall we say, very unusual websites.

Obviously, for most young people, logging on to YouTube and Facebook is simply an amusing pastime. And some of the little amateur films made by loggers for YouTube are quite brilliant.

But for a few, internet sites can provide an unhealthy oxygen with which to fan the smouldering embers of darker desires. And in Omaha this week, and month after month, we see evidence of how global digital technology, and the part played by mass television and the internet, is being used as a platform for self-glorification and self-justification among the seriously deranged. Mark Chapman would have fitted into the internet generation perfectly.

Last April a young American student called Cho Seung-Hui put together, with the help of a web cam, a thirty minute media package of himself and his guns, sent it to the US television network NBC, and then went out and murdered 32 people, mainly college students, at Virginia Tech.

When NBC realised what had arrived in the mail, they didn’t transmit the full package, but unable to resist their scoop, they showed some of it, and quickly flashed images of Cho Seung-Hui around the world to other TV stations. Instantly Cho Seung-Hui, the loner with a history of psychological problems, got what he most wanted. For a few days he was world famous, and television and the internet became his accomplices.

And it’s inconceivable that in Finland Pekka-Eric Auvinen didn’t know about the man behind the Virginia Tech massacre when he posted his message on YouTube and began his high school killings last month. His posthumous infamy in a country with a small population will be more shorter-lived globally than that of Seung-Hui, but no less deeply felt by those bereaved. And, like Seung-Hui, he was able to use modern communication technology to promote his ravings on his YouTube site: to become a “somebody”.

But, you might say, isn’t this use of the internet or television as an outlet of expression for crazed, gun carrying loners just a new means of an ancient desire to be noticed?

Yes, it is. But, I suspect, something more sinister may also be at work here. My concern is that with the way mass communications now saturate us a malign new psychopathic virus that feeds on the ultra-modern quest for celebrity is emerging, a mental infection that we may not be able to control, particularly in America with its absurd laxity over gun control.

Will we get more copycat mass killings, where the alienated insane justify their deeds to hundreds of millions over the internet and then on through endless showings on TV? I’m afraid we will. That’s what publicity does. It attracts attention.

And while for most of us the attention seeking exploits of Robert Hawkins, Cho Seung-Hui and Pekka-Eric Auvinen will provoke horror, as Mark Chapman’s murder of John Lennon did, their subsequent notoriety might well also encourage other unbalanced young people towards equally terrible acts.

It was, after all, only eighteen months after Mark Chapman’s murder of John Lennon that John Hinkley shot and injured President Reagan, believing in his deranged way that the shooting might impress actress Jody Foster on whom he had a stalking fixation.

Al Quaeda, of course, realised the strength of the internet and television as a brain-washing agent, as well as one for recruiting and terrorising, even before the attack on the World Trade Centre, since when they’ve used it with sickeningly callous regularity.

Make a video of the last self-justifying speech of a suicide bomber, or of a threat to murder a hostage, or even of the murder of a hostage, as was the case with Ken Bigley, post it on an internet site, and within minutes TV stations around the world will be showing an edited version.

It took a little time but these days most Western television stations are much more cautious about how much they show of such videos, and how much they do the propagandists’ work for them, as was evidenced with the relative downplaying of the video of the British hostage in Iraq this week.

But the terror videos, as those of the Japanese suicide cults who encourage death rather than counsel against it, are still out there on the internet to lure the impressionable.

Once warped minds would have found it difficult to meet others with the same obsessions. Now, as we’ve seen from the growing paedophile internet rings, it’s disturbingly easy.

But what can anyone do about the internet which roams freely across the political borders of the world, and appeals so particularly to young people? We can’t uninvent it, even if we wanted to, and we don’t. The access to legitimate, important information which it provides for everyone is extraordinary.

The problem is the internet is so new, and developing so quickly, we haven’t yet learned how to cope with it. We know that the major young people’s websites, like YouTube, are policed, with inappropriate material being weeded out—although Pekka-Eric Auvinen’s contribution seems to have been missed.

But new sites are springing up every day, everywhere in the world. They can’t all be policed. And those who want them enough will always find them.

I suspect part of the answer lies with us, the overwhelmingly vast majority of rational people in the world who might be sleep-walking into accidentally encouraging these insane killers.

And how are we doing that? By doing nothing.

Somehow, be it by pressure on news organisations, internet service providers or television stations (and we can do this by simply choosing to watch other channels), we need to withdraw the oxygen of publicity which greets every atrocity, and then provokes the next copycat massacre.

My own profession, particularly in television, carries an obligation to report the news---but also to make sure we aren’t wallowing in the blood. We must starve the perpetrators of violence of the publicity they seek.

We mustn’t do the Devil’s work for him, which means, perhaps, that we don’t encourage the making of films such as The Killing Of John Lennon. In short, we should everything we can to deprive the perpetrators of these killings of the fame they seek.

But, more than that, we also have to look at what has gone wrong with the world into which our children are growing up, and to outlaw the pernicious message they now learn from the cradle.

And the message? That fame just for itself, without any achievement, is good; that fame is to be desired at all costs; that fame is the be all and end all.

It isn’t.

Daily Mail, December 10, 2007

back to the top of the page

Drugs

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

Drugs—How Did We Ever Get To This? (Daily Mail 2008)

A father of two is murdered when he tries to stop two drug addicts stealing his car radio; a boy is stabbed to death in a London street by a gang calling themselves MDP--that stands for Money, Drugs, Power; a popular television presenter kills himself when his actress girl friend dies after a drug-fuelled twosome; and we watch bemused as within a few days both Amy Winehouse and Peaches Geldof are questioned (although not charged) by police about possible drug offences.

Drugs--they are everywhere in our news headlines because they are everywhere in our country, from the marbled bathrooms of the richest banks in the City to the most rancid kitchens of our sink estates.

They are in public schools and comprehensives, sixth form colleges and universities, and lavatories, clean and dirty, in thousands of pubs, clubs and restaurants.

Rife in our prisons, they are the sticky tentacle which entraps and then ties girls to the servitude of prostitution, as we saw during the investigation into the multiple murders in Ipswich last year; while the street sale of heroin across Britain helps provide the funding for the Taliban to obtain guns with which to kill our soldiers and condemn Afghan women to life in the Middle Ages.

Drugs are the scourge of our time. Soon the Home Secretary will introduce legislation to reclassify cannabis as a class B drug, reversing the decision four years ago to downgrade it to class C.

Armies of people who believe themselves to be forward looking are angry at the decision, and it has to be said the decision flies on the face of both the government’s own advisers and some police.

Others, like Julia Donaldson, the author of the Gruffalo books, whose son committed suicide after depression that she believes was caused by years of smoking cannabis, applaud it. And neuroscientist Susan Greenfield has long warned that cannabis can precipitate psychotic attacks and have long-lasting effects on the brain.

Clearly there is a difference of opinion on this, but I’m with Julia Donaldson, and the parents of so many other young people, whose lives have been ruined, some lost, by drugs.

Something has gone wrong in our society. How did we ever get into this state where a coroner reports that so-called recreational drugs are involved in an increasing number of road deaths, a university study reveals that many teenagers routinely use ecstasy, marijuana and cocaine to spice up their sex lives, and magistrates courts are littered with tales of muggings in pursuance of funds to feed heroin or crack habits?

We are a well-run, well-informed, educated, civilised, democratic, caring people. How could we have allowed all this to happen? What could we have been thinking of?

The truth is we weren’t thinking. Drugs have become the problem they are because we let it happen, you and me and everyone else who smiled and thought it didn’t concern them.

It’s no use simply blaming government inactions or wrong actions over the past forty odd years during which the plague has been spreading; or to pin the responsibility on the police, customs controls or magistrates.

We have to face up to it. It’s our own fault: our own responsibility. As parents and teachers, professional people and unprofessional, rich and poor, clever and not so bright, too many of us have collectively turned a blind, unworried, unchallenging eye to the growing curse in our midst.

And why? Mainly, I suspect, because we didn’t want to be thought of as “unhip” or old fashioned.

“Everyone does it,” some of us told ourselves, smiling indulgently as decade by decade the habit spread. Then, even more lethally, “It’s part of being young,” others parroted as new, ever more potent drugs followed, as pot became skunk and the taking of ecstasy became the norm in clubs. “It’s normal,” it was agreed.

But; in what way is it normal? Generation upon generation of people lived quite happily when drug taking wasn’t a normal part of being young at all. When I was at university in central London in the early Sixties (just before the arrival of what came to be known as the “Swinging Sixties”) I didn’t know one person who had ever tried drugs. I was by no means a goody-goody, nor were my friends, but drugs just weren’t part of our lives.

And, no, we didn’t get out of our skulls on booze every weekend, either, as some who are in favour of the liberalisation of drugs will probably throw back at me. Young people rarely did then. They couldn’t afford to. Yet, looking back, it seems to me, we had a pretty good time. Being young is good fun in itself.

So how is it that the notion that drug-taking is “part of being young” has come to be accepted? Is there something that makes today’s youth different from all the other earlier generations when drugs weren’t available? Have we produced in the past couple of generations a new, mutant breed of human beings who are chemically distinct in that they need new stimuli to enjoy themselves?

Or have we simply allowed ourselves to believe a convenient, defeatist myth because we don’t know what to do about a problem?

It seems to me that what makes today’s youth different is its bad luck to be endlessly targeted by a worldwide, criminal drug production industry, which has its distribution networks spreading to every town and city in the country. Until the late Sixties that had never been the case.

But that’s only part of the problem. Because at the same time as the growth in the drugs industry a culture has arisen that implicitly supports that criminal industry by making “recreational” drugs appear as cool as any designer accessory.

And in that respect my generation is complicit. For forty years we’ve made uncritical jokes about the “sex, drugs and rock and roll” excesses of rock groups. Then we’ve watched in amusement as the super-rich and glamorous turned their druggy excesses into fashionable behaviour---a lifestyle to be admired and copied.

Look at it another way and the phrase “sex, drugs and rock and roll” might be interpreted as part of a devastatingly successful advertising slogan for an exciting life, a life which the rest of us by our silence have sanctioned.

Because seemingly no matter how often role models to the young get into trouble with drugs, few of their careers ever seem to suffer.

Obviously there are some tragic individuals who pay the ultimate price with their lives, people like rock star Kurt Cobain and Paula Yates.

But, let’s be honest, the vast majority of beautiful people who are doing drugs are cocooned by a widespread attitude of tolerance. Television chat show producers and interviewers still kneel in supplication before clearly coked-up Hollywood stars, and model agencies still find clients with millions to spend on the right pretty face, no matter how many scandals there have been connecting her with drugs.

We all know and shake our heads about the prevalence of drugs in the inner cities, with those squalid Trainspotting images of dirty needles. But somehow in television, in advertising, in the music industry and in the City that image of drugs is washed clean. Attractive, clever, successful people do drugs in those professions, we are told. What can be the harm in that? In truth, everything.

Drugs are drugs, whoever takes them, and wherever they take them. They are harmful to those who use them and they are the product of a violent industry. People kill each other in turf wars for the “right” to sell them; and while the criminal bosses prosper, poor people risk their lives or their freedom by carrying consignments across borders in their suitcases and in condoms inside their bodies. And when those condoms accidentally burst…the poor person, the “mule” as he or she is known, faces an agonisingly slow death.

Do any of the beautiful, professional people with their cool attitudes to the drugs they use ever consider this? Do they ever think that by doing a line of cocaine in a shimmering clean bathroom or in a state of the art studio that they are recruiting officers for a dirty, dangerous trade?

Some years ago there was a campaign in the United States for young people built around the slogan “Just say no”. It had some success.

But would it, I wonder, have been more successful if it had been combined with a crusade aimed at an older generation of drugs users, the trendy rich, the successful City traders, the popular media stars who revel in their super-cool images, all of whom, with a wink and a nod, seem to condone drug taking and make it fashionable?

For three full generations, since the end of the Sixties, the drug problem has been growing. Now many pessimists believe that it can’t be stopped. I disagree. It isn’t inevitable that young people will get into drugs. It isn’t written into their DNA. They didn’t once. They needn’t again, though with the battalions of the criminal drugs industry laying siege to them it gets more and more difficult for some of them to resist.

But they’ll need help from us all. Not just changes in the law, but changes in our mindset. To turn the tide against drugs it isn’t enough to simply preach about the dangers and corrosive nature of ecstasy or crack cocaine.

We have to change our own attitudes to drugs. We have to stop thinking that stand-up comedians are funny and streetwise when they make light of the subject; we have to show disdain for those hip-hop and rock musicians whose very images are defined by drugs; our club and pub owners have to bar the pushers from their premises; and our broadcasters and advertisers have to show zero tolerance for those rich, careless celebrities who flaunt their drug habits.

But mostly we all have to stop surrendering to the pushers’ campaign that drug taking is normal, usually harmless behaviour among young people.

It isn’t. We know it isn’t.

back to the top of the page

Music and Memory

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

Music And Memory (Daily Mail, August 2008)

We all recognise the moment. Suddenly a song or a piece of music that we haven’t heard in decades comes on the radio, and immediately we’re transported back in time to a key moment in our lives when that melody happened to provide the accompaniment.

It doesn’t matter if we aren’t particularly musical. The effect is always the same. A few bars of a particular tune and an early meeting with a girl friend or boy friend is instantly back there on the inner screens of our lives with all its anticipations and joys. If we’re still together with that person we might think, “They’re playing our song”.

Or perhaps the music relates to something we did at school or in a club, is something our grandmothers used to sing, or was once the theme music to a television programme we used to watch. The music from Z-Cars will forever he associated with police cars for some people; the Elton John and Kiki Dee record Don’t Go Breaking My Heart with O-levels for others.

We all have our own triggers, those melodies that can bring tears or laughter, pride or excitement, and conjure up instant visions of faces and situations long entombed in what we thought were the closed vaults of our memories.

Golden oldies radio stations like Smooth FM and Radio Two have long been tapping into pop music’s memory lane, and doctors, as well as poets, have always known that there is much that can be therapeutic in music.

With this in mind a group of cognitive psychologists is now engaged in research, asking 3000 people from 69 countries to relate their recollections of Beatles’ songs, their aim being to help better understanding of the musical link between our pasts and our presents.

No doubt Yesterday will feature for more than a few respondents, along with memories of Beatlemania, first kisses, first babies and other fragments of autobiography. But the research being presented this week to the British Association Science Festival is no trivial nostalgia exercise.

We’ve all heard occasions when interviewees become suddenly emotional when choosing their records for Desert Island Discs. And those of us who’ve seen very elderly patients in old people’s homes suddenly emerge out of virtually semi-catatonic states to sing clearly and happily songs they learned nearly ninety years ago can’t help but be moved.

What memories are these songs evoking, we wonder, as we listen. What is the long forgotten world that is being recaptured through music?

Most memories unearthed, researchers say, are positive and happy---the colour of a girl’s dress, the smell of the bluebells, or the heat of sunshine suddenly reinvading the senses after decades. Whenever I hear Elgar’s Chanson de Matin I am nine again, running eagerly from the garden to the wireless in the kitchen to listen to the latest episode of Bunkle Butts In on Children’s Hour in 1950.

But music can invoke sadness, too, sometimes inexplicably. All my life I wondered why whenever I heard You Are My Sunshine tears came to my eyes. Musically I could see that the song’s jaunty tune ran counter to the message implied by its lyrics and the fear of loss in the line “please don’t take my sunshine away”. But that was no reason for it to upset me. It was only a song.

And then some years ago the BBC asked me to present a television programme about servicemen who’d been lost in World War II. As a prop I asked my mother if I might borrow my father’s wallet, which had been sent to her by the War Office after his body had been washed up in Brittany in 1944.

I’d always known about the wallet’s existence, but, for some reason, it wasn’t until the night before we filmed on the French beach where his body had been found that I fully examined its sea-stained contents. A few faded scribbled words were just legible on the reverse of a shopping list of children’s clothes he’d been asked to buy while he was away. They read “You Are My Sunshine”.

I was three when he was lost at sea in 1944. You Are My Sunshine was a huge wartime hit and my mother must have asked him to buy the sheet music for her when he was on his last visit home. The song, which would have been played all the time on the radio, would have provoked tears in our house after his death. Tears I was too young to understand, but which had been lying there, ready to be released and shared with her all my life.

But where does this uncanny link between music, memory and emotions come from? How can melody instantly retrieve long buried thoughts?

Today, while music is all around us, and its uses in entertainment and commercials clearly understood, opinions are divided as to its origins. Some think it may in a very primitive sense have pre-dated speech itself. Others, and I would agree with them, believe it developed alongside speech as a separate way of communicating.

In other words, music is a language of its own, created specifically for the conveyance and sharing of emotions, originally in a very primitive sense, now very sophisticatedly—even manipulatively.

Film makers have always understood this. It’s one thing for a romantic hero to tell the girl he loves her, but it becomes something much more emotional when a symphony orchestra swells behind him as he tells her.

Remember Kate Winslett and Leonardo di Caprio and that Celine Dion Titanic theme song. Without the music the film would have been a story about a big ship that sank. With the music it involved all of us, because, through Kate and Leo, it drew in our emotions.

Then again music can draw great crowds together, as we see on the Last Night Of The Proms, when the singing of Land Of Hope And Glory provokes tears of a, usually forgotten, national pride. And we all know what sobbing wrecks some grown men can become at football matches as they hear the off-key strains of You’ll Never Walk Alone.

But if music speaks so directly to our emotions, just a conscious glimpse into our own pasts quickly tells us how closely linked are memory and our emotion. Ponder any long ago event in our lives and we’ll recall exactly how we felt---be it anger, hurt, affection or whatever.

I believe music works in a slightly reverse way. It makes a shortcut to our emotions, which then throw up in crystal detail the incident which provoked those emotions—the girl, the night, the match. All we need is the right tunes as keys to unlock the mental doors to our pasts.

It’s well known that music helps the memories of small children. They learn and enjoy nursery rhymes as soon as they can speak, while studies have shown that material given to the mentally retarded is retained better if given to them in song rather than in a story.

Now in an age in which one person in five in the world will soon be over the age of sixty, failing memory is becoming an important and worrying problem for the most developed societies.

The idea of sitting around in an old folks home only coming alive for the singing of Yellow Submarine or When I’m Ninety Four might be a chilling prospect to those who still have their faculties.

But a better understanding of memory, and the way it links with music, might be one more vital step to making millions of lives happier and more fulfilling.

back to the top of the page

Pink Granite Coast

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

The Pink Granite Coast (Mail On Sunday, 2010)

My father never visited France---although he is buried in the tiny village of Servel, near Lannion, in Brittany. He was on his way to the Far East when he died in October 1944, the huge tank landing craft on which he was a passenger, and which was being towed in a flotilla, being sunk in the Western Approaches in what was then described as “the worst storm of the war”.

Fifty four other men were lost, his body being only one of two which were ever found. Two young Breton boys discovered it six weeks after the storm while playing ship-looters on the beach at the mouth of Lannion’s river, the Léguer. His papers were still on him, wrapped in a waterproof folder, and included sea stained photographs of my sister and me, aged 2. I still have them.

I’d visited his grave twice since it was first located for me while working on a BBC-TV documentary in 1994. But my third visit, earlier this summer, afforded me time to look around a little bit more and to reflect upon the irony that through the loss of a parent whom I never knew, I discovered one of the most lovely and dramatic stretches of coast in Europe. That is, the Côte de Granit Rose---the Pink Granite Coast, part of the Côtes d’Armor.

And what I found to be particularly pleasing is that, although there’s inevitably been some holiday building in small clusters here, it hasn’t been over-developed. There are small resorts, Trébeurden, Trégastel and Ploumanac’h, and, further on around the corner, the slightly larger Perros-Guirec, but, unlike the French Riviera, the area hasn’t been ruined by concrete mixers.

This may well be because the weather in Brittany is almost as uncertain as it is in Cornwall, a hundred and fifty miles or so due north, and the French do love their sun. But I like to think it also reflects the local pride we find through much of rural and small town France, a civic self respect.

And nowhere is that better evidenced, albeit on a tiny scale, than at my father’s grave. Lying there next to the tombs of two French soldiers, it has been tended and repaired meticulously for over half a century by both the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and the parks and funeral people in Lannion.

But then the French take heritage very seriously. A walk around Lannion itself is evidence of this. Originally a tiny port on the Léguer, the town, which still has a population of under 20,000, bustles with a thoughtful mix of the medieval and the modern and is everywhere decorated with flowers.

Alongside the river runs the market, while up a steep hill on its north side are stunningly renovated 15th century houses and alleyways, through which there are organised historical walks on Thursday evenings in the summer. What I found particularly interesting were the six storey 17th century mansions in the main square, half-timbered but slate fronted as a protection from the rain. Then there are the 140 steps to the Templar (as in Knights) Church of Brélévenez.

There’s actually a little airport at Lannion, which is now a telecommunications centre, but with no through flights from Britain we chose to go by boat and car from Portsmouth, from where Brittany Ferries now run a high speed catamaran service to Cherbourg. This gave us the advantage of calling in to see the Bayeux Tapestry, which was hugely more impressive than I’d anticipated, and witnessing again the ever ghostly apparition of Mont-St-Michel while on our journey.

We didn’t stay in Lannion on this occasion, but chose instead a modest little hotel by a beach just beyond Trébeurden, which is the next town around the coast, going west to east. With its sea view it was ideal.

Most places look good in the sunshine, but with the sun on empty white sandy beaches in numerous coves, the sparklingly clear water, the fields and hedgerows of wild flowers and, yes, the slightly rosy rocks, the Pink Granite Coast is dazzling.

Trébeurden is now a yachting centre with quite a big marina, but there are also some 4000 year old graves. In fact with engravings of breasts and necklaces there are traces of megolithic and bronze age man (and obviously busty woman, too!) right along this coast. There’s even a nudist beach close to Beg Léguer for those who have nothing to hide.

The next town along is Trégastel, one of our favourite spots which is blessed again with twelve white beaches, from where you can take a three hour boat trip to the Sept-Iles archipelago which lies just off the coast. A group of seven tiny islands, some not much more than rocks, they’re mainly sanctuaries for puffins and other sea-birds.

On the other hand if you don’t fancy sailing through what can be some pretty choppy waters, there are several beautiful walks, of varying lengths, around the headland and the lagoon, where vast, scattered smooth rocks balance on each other, some like giants’ tables. Of these the three hour Sentier des Douaniers five mile walk is the most striking.

Nor are the walks difficult, a lot of public money and work having gone into making them accessible (but never ugly) for all.

From the land the coast is mesmerising, as the sea goes out so far, leaving, in some places, maybe half a mile of rock pools twice a day. But, beautiful though it may be to look at, I’m told these can be tricky waters if you’re under sail. Indeed when a friend of mine sailed into the harbour at Ploumanac’h a few years ago, he found that in no time at all the water seemed to have gone down a plug hole and he couldn’t sail out again for some hours.

When we went to Brittany it was June and the beaches were empty. No doubt it’s busier during the school holidays, but since there aren’t that many hotels or even restaurants, my bet is the Pink Granite Coast never gets over-full.

Probably the grooviest place, although definitely in a minor key, is Perros-Guirac on the north coast. There’s even a casino here, though I can’t imagine who goes to Brittany to gamble. Children will, no doubt, enjoy the waxworks, the Musée de Cire, with its gruesome depictions of the French Revolution.

Which brings me to how un-French Brittany sometimes feels. Jutting out into the Atlantic, with road signs in both Breton and French, twelve per cent of the schoolchildren in Lannion learning Breton (I don’t know for how many years), and the Celtic sounding place names, so many of which begin with Tré, it’s easy to see the ancient links with Cornwall.

Driving back along the coast towards Servel and on to Lannion as the tide went out leaving miles of rock pools, where children peered and parents watched over them, it reminded me that my father, who was only 33 when his ship sank, never knew what it was to take his children on holiday. Nor that such a lovely, peaceful place existed---yet that is where he is buried.

For a family holiday, even an old fashioned one maybe, away from the clamour and the glitz, I can’t recommend the Pink Granite Coast highly enough. We will go again.

back to the top of the page

A-Level Results Bad? Don't Worry...

Sun, 25 Jul 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

A-level Results Bad? Don't Worry (Daily Mail, August 2008)

For thousands of young people around the country a dream came true yesterday. Their A-level results told them they’d got the grades they needed to begin their glittering careers at the universities of their choice.

Congratulations to all of them. They worked hard and they’ve been rewarded. No matter if some question the value of A-grades these days. That isn’t their problem. They took the exams they were set, and they excelled. They couldn’t do better than that.

But for all the successful candidates, there are also unsuccessful
ones---the girls and boys who didn’t get the results they needed. For them the future is suddenly less certain, their tears will be those of disappointment not euphoria.

As their parents worry, many will hit the phones trying to get a place through Clearing at a college other than the one they’d hoped to attend. Perhaps they’ll get on another course, or study a different subject.

And, yes, the lucky ones will find alternative places and begin planning for a slightly different future. Who knows, it may well be a better one.

Some, however, won’t be lucky. Quite why they were unsuccessful in the exams in June they may never know. Did they work hard enough? Were they unfortunate on the day with their choice of questions? Did nerves overcome them? And will retakes be the answer for them? Maybe.

On the other hand perhaps some of them just weren’t cut out to study for a degree in the first place. Every teacher of A-levels knows the truth of this.

Unhappily we’re a nation of snobs when it comes to education, many parents and school careers advisers making it sound as though university is the only proper aspiration for any young person.

But that, by inference, means that those young people who don’t get into university feel as though they’ve already failed in life – that anything else they do after school is somehow inferior, that therefore they must be inferior.

And that is so short sighted, so wrong, and potentially so wasteful.
We all develop at different stages in our lives, and examinations measure only a limited part of our abilities. At eighteen, with our hormones and emotions raging, perhaps worries about student debt on the horizon, and all the other problems that face adolescents, university life isn’t the answer for everyone.

Life is so much richer, so much more varied, than that. People aren’t all the same. Exams can’t evaluate the infinite varieties of our talents and abilities. Often we don’t discover them ourselves until we’re older. One size of career training doesn’t fit all, and not to get into university is not necessarily to fail. As one door closes another will open for those who seek it.

The real world of today, that busy, entrepreneurial, creative place outside the dreaming spires and murmuring libraries, can offer bounteous opportunities for interesting, fulfilling and successful lives for people who start work without a degree, who learn on the job. In fact the work place is as populated with those who suddenly shone when given something to do that interested them as universities are with those ordinary brains who had that happy knack of passing exams.

Wherever we look in business we see self-made men who either didn’t have the opportunity for further education or who didn’t want it, being in a hurry to get on with their lives rather than spend three more years studying.

Think only of the degree-less business knights, Richard Branson, Philip Greene and Alan Sugar. Then there’s chef Gordon Ramsay and fashion designer Vivienne Westwood.

In the world of media there’s Radio Four’s interrogator in chief John
Humphrys, former film producer and now advisor to the government on education Lord Puttnam, the writer A.A. Gill, and Terry Wogan, Michael Parkinson and Simon Cowell.

No doubt there are more than a few holders of honorary degrees among that little group, but not a youthful day spent in a university lecture room between the lot of them. And they’re hardly a roll call of failures.

While, of course, far from going to university, neither Delia Smith nor John Lennon managed a single O-level between them. In fact our most famous writer on cuisine swotted up cookery in her own time in the Reading Room at the British Museum while working in a travel agency.

Damien Hirst did marginally better than her. He got an E for his art A level.

Then there are the people who did go to university and, like one in seven of current British students, dropped out, some from boredom, some simply because they were anxious to begin their careers.

There’s Bill Gates, for instance, the nerdy chap who founded the computer giant Microsoft and became the richest man in the world, and Ralph Lauren, who quit college to sell ties in a New York men’s store.

These, of course, are all well known people whose success we measure, and perhaps too narrowly, by their wealth. But for the vast majority of us a successful career isn’t about piling up millions and running a business empire. It’s about enjoying what we do in our work, having happy and fulfilling lives, and finding that niche where we can make the best of ourselves. And this is what we want for our children.

Earlier this week, the universities secretary John Denham admitted in an interview that many young people who currently go to university would be better off doing an advanced apprenticeship. To you and me this might sound like a somewhat late in the day expression of the obvious, when we consider that something like six out of ten arts graduates are now over-qualified for their jobs.

But I’d like to think that it’s also a signal that we as a nation are at last waking to the idea that perhaps we grant too much status to academia and the professions that spring from it, and give too little respect to the people who make much of our ever more technologically complex world work for us.

Some of the nicest, most learned and clever people I know are university teachers in art history. But what good are they to me when the drains get blocked, the lights go out, or my computer goes down? None at all.

Yet while art historians, like so many other academics, deservedly enjoy great status, the plumber, someone who these days has to understand an increasingly complicated rationale of gases, heating systems and valves, not to mention the Victorian vagaries of London’s water and sewage system, is often dismissed as a mere “handyman”.

This is clearly a silly and unfair state of affairs, though, hopefully, not for very much longer. Increasingly we are finding that vocational qualifications, such as apprenticeships, are being seen as just as valuable to the individual as a degree, and in many cases considerably more useful to society as a whole. In most jobs little is as important as practical experience.

None of this is to deride a university education. For those whom it suits it can be an invaluable experience, three or maybe four dazzling years that can leave the new graduate with an array of options in life. So, if it’s right for your son or your daughter, you should always encourage them to go for it.

But it isn’t right for everyone. And if yesterday’s results were disappointing, whatever you do don’t think of your tearful teenage offspring as a failure, and don’t let them think that way either. No-one is a failure at eighteen.

There’s a whole world out there to be explored, with countless different fascinating roads to be taken for those who have the energy, the pluck and the desire.

Help your son or daughter go and find the right road for them.

Back to the top

Spike Milligan 1971

Sun, 25 Jul 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

SPIKE MILLIGAN (Evening Standard, June 1971)

Spike Milligan reckons he was born a clown – just as some people are born with funny shaped noses or whatever. In fact one of his earliest memories has him as a little boy of seven playing a clown in the school Christmas play.

‘I remember it so clearly,’ he says. ‘They’d given me blue to put on my face and I thought it should have been black. And then the last scene, when all the other children were crowded round the Virgin and Child I wasn’t supposed to go on, but I did anyway. It didn’t seem fair. So I went on and stood alongside the manger with the others. I thought the clown had a part in life.

‘It’s strange, but that little cameo in my early life says it all.’

Spike Milligan lives, sleeps and works Mondays to Fridays from a cluttered, jammed yet neat little office in Bayswater. There’s so much work to be done he just has to be there, he says, and when he is there, he isn’t inflicting his neuroses upon his family. Then at the weekend he can go home to Finchley to his semi-detached, four children, wife, au pair, nannie and dog.

Yesterday he was getting over a boozy night out – the result of a reception held for him by the publishers of his new book, Adolf Hitler – My Part in his Downfall and suffering from a miserable bout of catarrh. He looks so gentle and fragile that a jolt might shatter him.

At fifty-four, his mind continuously races in as many directions as a mind can go at any one time, and the room is crammed with box files where he’s collected odd thoughts which might someday be useful. He calls these thoughts ‘mind furniture’.

What is he working on right now? I ask, and he grabs a pile of letters, circulars and scribblings.

‘Today?’ he asks. ‘Well, people write to me all the time asking me what I can do to help them, so I do what I can. I’m a member of all the anti-cruelty and anti-vivisection societies there are, for instance. You wouldn’t believe how much cruelty there is to animals in the manufacture of women’s cosmetics.

‘Then here, you see, I’m vegetarian. Then here’ … and he picks up a pile of drawings … ‘I’m a member of the Finchley Society, which was formed because in Finchley there is no attempt in any way to preserve things of architectural interest.

‘Basically, I’m working for the human race. And when I’ve time I try to get a bit of work done for myself. Every day I try to write down some comedy. I’m under contract to the Marty Feldman Show as a writer and a performer, so I’ve written masses of stuff for that.’

On the shelves are files which say God! Ha! Ha! – ‘I thought of writing a comedy version of the Bible: it must have been a very happy occasion when the world was created’ – and others devoted to children’s poems. One Christmas he taped masses of children’s conversations. It would, he thinks, make a lovely book.

He’s everything – from serious poet, to songwriter, to cartoonist, and as he talks his hands wander through sheaves of paper haphazardly.

His new book is an autobiographical account of his own youth in the army during the Second World War. It is very funny indeed. It is also, he insists, a true account of the way things were.

What of the complaints, which have already been made, that the war was nothing to laugh at?

‘Well, you expect some people to complain, don’t you? It’s the dead soldier syndrome. These people live permanently being humble about the war as though it were a medal of respectability. But for the dead it’s a private thing. I lost my mates in the war, too. I still get a pension because of the war.

‘I got wounded in the leg and became a neurotic with a chronic anxiety state. I got shakes – and, like you, I got a stammer. Every time a gun went off I started to stammer. Even now when I get very uptight I stammer.’

His injury, which was caused by a shell blast, changed his life tremendously. Before it, he was very nice and easy-going and people took tremendous advantage of him, and consequently he tried to do as much for everyone as he could.

‘Somehow when I got blown up it made a positive decision about whether or not I was a neurotic, and it eventually resulted in my nervous breakdown in 1956.’

‘I just went on working and going until I couldn’t stand it any longer. I don’t want it to happen again. I’m much more aware now. I won’t let them screw me up again. Sometimes when it gets on top of me I just take a whole pile of letters and throw them away rather than answer them.

‘I hate doing it, but I have to. It’s the only way.’

In a strange way he believes that the war saved him from what he might have been – ‘probably a foreman by now at Woolwich Arsenal and wondering why I was unhappy.

‘Adolf was my salvation.’

Before he received his ‘cunningly worded invitation to partake in World War II’ Spike (christened Terence) had been a quiet, protected lad from South East London, who had a passion for playing the trumpet and a seemingly dull future ahead of him.

The war changed everything, and by the time he was demobbed in 1947 he was a different man, making his living playing with a little jazz trio and touring the armed forces all over Italy.

‘Eventually when I came back to England in 1949 Val Parnell came to see us, but he wasn’t interested and after a miserable time touring I left the others and went to work as a barman in Westminster. As it happened, the owner of the pub used to write scripts for Derek Roy and when he heard me cracking jokes he invited me to help him.’

Later came the Goon Show, and then the rest.

‘But it wasn’t until I played Oblimov on the stage that I realised I was a very good clown. I was forty-four. Maybe it was too late. I’d very much like to have done comedy in films, but I haven’t. And I wonder how people who are less funny than I am have got into it. I’m not sorry for myself. Just puzzled.’

He is funny on virtually everything he talks about and his bright blue eyes just smile away kindly all the time, but he’s funniest of all when he recounts tales of his troubles with his bank (despite an income of something like £40,000 a year).

‘You know,’ he says, ‘they sent me a letter saying it had come to their notice that I was £5000 overdrawn on my current account and would I like to drop in and see them. So I answered “How dare you?” and pointed out that in my deposit account I had eighteen shillings.

‘So they duly answered saying “yes” they’d transferred the eighteen shillings but they noticed that I was still £4999 2s overdrawn, and would I like to go to lunch.

‘So I answered “How dare you!” but if they were to put the cost of the lunch to my overdraft it would reduce it still further. Then when they wrote again I answered that it was my habit of putting the names of all my creditors into a hat once a month, and if they didn’t stop pestering me with their letters I wouldn’t put their name in next time.’

Joe Frazier 1971

Sun, 25 Jul 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

JOE FRAZIER (Evening Standard, June 1971)

Right on 6.30 yesterday evening, just three weeks after negotiations for our meeting were begun and ten days after I first tried to interview him, Joe Frazier, naked from the waist up, came lumbering out of his hotel bathroom, yawned and stretched so wide that I momentarily wondered whether the room was big enough for both of us, and hurled himself down across his bed like a jumbo jet doing a belly flop landing. King Kong himself couldn’t have made a more impressive entrance.

We all know that Joe Frazier, the heavyweight boxing champion of the world, is a big man, but it is not until you actually find yourself gaping at the width and depth of that barrel chest that you begin to realise what bigness means in his league. At five feet eleven he isn’t a tall man, but no tank was ever built on so solid a chassis.

‘I recall the time when people said to me I’d never be champ,’ he says. ‘They said I was too short, my arms wasn’t long enough and that I didn’t have the punch to put those big fellow away. But I proved it to them. I did it. And now I’m gonna prove that I’m a singer too.’

Touring Europe with his own show as a soul singer, Joe and his group, the Knockouts, have not met with an overwhelming display of enthusiasm. In fact, the truth is that although there have been some full houses, an awful lot of their appearances have been notable for the lack of public interest and for the bad critical notices in the newspapers. He may be world champion boxer but his appeal has strict limits: he took Ali’s crown but none of his charisma.

Poor Joe can’t understand it. He knows he’s not as bad as they say he is so why do reporters write such lies, he asks, with a gentle, warming innocence.

‘Why do they say such things like “the champ can’t perform”? All the time I’ve been in the ring I’ve never done or said anything to hurt anyone, and now day after day these cats are throwing rocks at me in the papers. I mean there are all those bad guys in the world going around doing bad things but they don’t get the bad publicity I do. And I know there ain’t one other athlete done as well as me in entertainment. It really takes a champ to stomach it all sometimes.’

He’s such a friendly, guileless, wounded man that you wonder where he got his image as ‘Smoking Joe the killer tiger’, or from where he ever summons the necessary aggression to turn himself into a fighting machine. Yet, as he lies there, alternately thumping each titanic fist into the opposing palm, it’s impossible to remain unaware of his enormous potency for destruction.

‘I’ve never fought out of the ring since I was a boy,’ he says. ‘Sometimes some guy will come and punch me in the tummy or challenge me, but I just try to walk away, because if I hit him I’d probably hurt him. And I don’t wanna do that. I’ve never been a violent man.’

He was born the youngest of thirteen children to a poor South Carolina family.

‘My father only had one arm on account of how they had to amputate one after a car crash, so as a boy I was always my daddy’s left hand. He was really a hustler. I mean he’d cut wood, or chop cotton or be a junk man, collecting old cars and cutting up the metal. I was his baby and he took me everywhere, and consequently I was like a mature man by the time I was thirteen.

‘For my daddy I never could do no wrong. Momma would go fussin’ and give him the devil and say he was ruining me, but he didn’t mind. And I never took advantage. He taught me to be a good man and a strong man. He passed away in ’65. He knew I was fighting but he never got the chance to see me as big as I am today. I wish he could have lived to enjoy himself and have some fun. I’d like to have shown him what living is really like – and to have shared the things I enjoy doing with him.’

He talks very softly and with a slight nasal intonation, caused no doubt by the flattened, scarred nose. He is affable and pleasant, quite unlike his surly image.

‘I’ve always been singing. I’m a Baptist and I was in the church choir. My daddy and me would sing always when we were working together. When I was fourteen I volunteered for the army, but I flunked the tests. They give you all those blocks and squares and rangle-tangle triangles, and I couldn’t do all of them. In ’64 they passed me 1-A but by then I had a growing family, so I didn’t have to go.’

At fifteen he married Florence, a distant relative who was two years older than him, and they moved first to New York and then on to Philadelphia where he worked butchering cows in an abattoir. Then at sixteen he took up boxing because he wanted to lose weight, and soon found that he could make a good living out of it.

‘No, I never feel any pity for any man I beat. But I respect any man who signs that contract to fight me, because he knows I’m gonna go out there to take him apart. When I punch a fellow and see him crumble from the power of my hands and fall on to his back I feel great excitement. There’s a great thrill to it. But you don’t become champ by misusing yourself, by drinking and smoking and chasing after women. I’ve never done that. What I’ve got I’ve had to work for.’

He’s a strange old-fashioned figure with a rather touching regard for respect and chastening virtues of honest labour and in the couple of hours or so I spent with him, he neither criticised anyone else nor uttered anything which might have been considered profane. He is truly the gentle giant, the twenty-seven-year-old father of five who is looking forward to getting home so that he can keep the kids out of mischief during the summer holiday, go riding on his Harley Davidson motorcycle with his friends and get back to more regular training.

He believes in a rigorous, Spartan schedule, and at six o’clock yesterday morning, after driving back from a performance in Wakefield through the night, he decided to change into his track suit and go for a run right round Hyde Park – ‘You know, past that statue of some king or something you have over there’.

In America he was accused before his victory over Ali last March of behaving with toe-scraping humility, but I see no sign of it, just an honest, if possibly narrow, view of his own surroundings.

‘People ask me why I don’t help with the Civil Rights movement. Well, to be honest I really don’t understand all the details involved. I’ll help with money where I can, but before stepping into something like that you have to know more about it so you don’t get involved with the law or go upsetting black or white brothers. Nobody in my family has ever been in a movement of any kind. We’re not politicians and just because I’m champion of the world I don’t think it’s right that I should get up and start talking about things I know nothing about. Why should I make a fool of myself?’

For a man who was reputed to have been paid more than £1,000,000 for his one fight this year he is not living in any kind of grand style in London. His hotel room is small, almost poky, although it is in a new luxury block, and is littered with suitcases from which the contents are trailing in all directions. Under a contract to a syndicate called Cloverlay in Philadelphia, the percentage he keeps of his earnings is a well kept secret. Still he reckons that with his investments he will have enough to live on for the rest of his life.

‘The most exciting thing I ever knew was to realise that I could have all I wanted and live a comfortable life. That was my dream when I was young. I didn’t want to live like daddy and mom. I understand that they didn’t have the opportunity, but they did for me what they did and I’m gonna do better for my kids. They’re all musical so maybe we’ll be a family of entertainers.’

But first he has to prove himself an entertainer, and no amount of setbacks are going to stop him, he says. He’ll just go on and on and in three years when he retires from the ring, he’ll become a full time singer.

But when will he fight next? ‘I don’t know. I might even challenge you next. What d’you say?’

POSTSCRIPT They say that boxers and writers always get on well together, and although I had always been an Ali fan I found myself drawn to Frazier because of his basic niceness. I was pleased when he retired, because I suspect that his second fight with Ali did them both terrible harm. Of course he never did prove himself as a singer. He couldn’t sing.

James Baldwin1971

Sun, 25 Jul 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

JAMES BALDWIN (Evening Standard, July 1971)

A chat with James Baldwin can be a pleasant, jokey, easy-going relaxed affair, but an interview with him can be very hard work. He differentiates between the two encounters. Not I.

As soon as he believes an interview has begun he switches on a new persona, forgets that it’s he, Jimmy, who is being interviewed, and discusses race in a series of esoteric polemics, turning every question back to the interviewer, and then watching him wonder how to answer with a piercing gaze out of those great round eyes.

The trouble is that it gets very difficult to know what to say, and worse, before long you find yourself playing his game of turning his statements over and tossing them back towards him, hoping that he’ll carry on and eventually illuminate us all.

When I went to see him I was determined not to get caught up in the matter of race, as virtually everyone else who has written about him in the last ten years seems to have done. But it is impossible. There are, I know, many, many things he can discuss other than race, but he appears to assume that since he has become so famous as an articulate black man, then it is colour that he will be expected to talk about.

He is sitting in the corner of a Grosvenor Square hotel lobby with his brother, David, an actor and wit, and a representative of his publishers. A strangely fey man of forty-six, his hands butterfly around his face as he talks.

In the last ten years, since the overwhelming success of his early novels Go Tell It On The Mountain and Another Country, Baldwin, the Harlem child and eldest of nine, has seemingly accepted without dissent the cloak of being a black symbol. Yet he continues to live outside America, at present working from a home in the South of France.

Does he not feel alienated from Harlem by his success, I ask.

‘No,’ he says. ‘Success depends upon your point of view.’ Long pause. ‘I don’t feel alienated. I find Harlem everywhere. Here in London if you like.’ Longer pause. ‘It’s all over. In the music. You call it rock and roll. That isn’t what we call it. I know the price paid for it. How it got here. And why it’s here.’

‘You once described yourself as “a very tight, tense, lean, abnormally ambitious, abnormally intelligent and hungry black cat”, - I’m not sure why.’

The Baldwin brothers smack their hands together and hoot: a family enjoying a private joke.

‘I’m not modest. I can’t afford to be. You called me a world figure. I have to accept that. And whoever that happens to has to go through some very difficult changes. I’m a very arrogant man. I’ve had to be. But between me and my work I’m very modest … I know I’m not equal to what I see.

‘The piece of paper is a terrifying thing. You can be arrogant with your girlfriend or your boyfriend. But you can’t be arrogant when you’re trying to do something which is impossible to do. Then you lean towards humility.’ His eyes are about five inches away from mine.

‘Some reviewers have suggested that they are tired of seeing you making your private hell your public persona,’ I say, and inwardly shelter from the inevitable reaction. Baldwin looks at me with a cool toleration.

‘My dear, I’m not talking about my private hell. I’m talking about something else altogether in my work. And I’ve used myself as a witness. I’m not talking about Jimmy Baldwin. I’m talking out of him. There’s no reason for you to care how Jimmy Baldwin suffers. I’m not so abject. I’m not a beggar. But I’m using a technique to make you use something …’

At this moment an American tourist passes through the lobby with a Stars-and-Stripes handbag. The Baldwins laugh again, grasping hands momentarily.

He goes on: ‘I know I’ve been condemned for being self-pitying, but I’m happy that I haven’t stopped in my work. I’ll never know whether being labelled as the angry, young, articulate, black man has helped or hindered my career. Time has proved that I had something to be angry about. And I’ve never been bitter. If I had I would have been much less talkative.

‘You think that black people come out of the skull fully grown. And that when you’ve heard of us we should be happy that you’ve heard of us. I don’t mean you personally, and when I talk about “I” I don’t mean Jimmy.’

Why do you live so much in France, I ask. An obvious diversion.

‘The French left me alone which was what I needed. I wanted to be able to make it or not. The English are like Americans. And that maybe truer than you think.’ Long silence.

‘I’m not talking about racism. The French are equally as racist as the English. But you have a different attitude towards you own flesh. It’s part of your Puritanism. That’s what makes you so problematical.’

We’re interrupted momentarily as a couple of middle-aged white American tourists walk over and shyly ask Baldwin if he’d care to autograph a copy of his new book. Certainly, he smiles.

‘Thank you very much, sir,’ says the man, and Baldwin goes on with his dissertation.

‘The French haven’t got the same sort of sexual paranoia that you have. If I’m walking down the street in London with a white girl there’s a certain reaction from your, shall we say, working class. I wouldn’t get the same reaction in France from their working class. The Frenchman assumes no one can take his woman away from him. But you assume that I’ve only got to beckon and she’ll come running to my bed. That’s your madness, not mine. And it’s true of all of you. I don’t know why. That’s a question you must answer.’

Would he agree that some of his books are fuelled on sex, I ask.

‘Which gas station, Shell, Texaco, BP? That’s not a comment about me. It’s a comment about you. No one accuses a dirty novelist of being dirty. Only the serious ones. It comes back to you. It’s your attitude.’

‘I was thinking particularly of Another Country.’

‘I’m sure. Someone told me there were 189 sexual encounters in Another Country. It’s a love story, involving several people who try to love each other.’

Presently he’s working on a new novel about a young girl in Harlem who is expecting a baby. The novel is about her watching the world her baby will be born into, he says. A world that is not a civilisation.

The conversation becomes very involved, and I don’t truly understand what he’s trying to tell me. For some reason I mention that he appears to be polarising everything we are discussing. He becomes quite excited, talking almost evangelically. He once was an evangelical preacher.

‘You talk about polarisation as though I was never on a Virginia plantation working for you, picking your cotton, building your railroads and your cities and letting you sell my sons. When you talk of polarisation it’s because the tide has turned. It was always polarised. You polarised it. You invented the word black. I didn’t. And you pretended you were civilised and I was not. You’re confronted with a bill that no one can help you pay. The bill of your history. And you’re going to have to pay it. If it isn’t faced there’s no hope for you.’

‘Nor for you either?’

‘Oh no. You are the minority. The world is not white.’

‘Nor black.’

‘It’s not white. The Chinese weren’t considered yellow, nor the Indians brown. They were treated like niggers. Yes, my dear, let me point out to you that there are not many people who would tell you this. I’m accused of hating white people. But that is not true. If I did I wouldn’t talk to you at all. The dangerous people are the street sweepers, the bus drivers, the porters.’

Does he see no hope for us?

‘That depends upon you.’

‘And you.’

‘No,’ he says. ‘I’ve paid my dues. I can no longer come to you. It’s very difficult for people to become disentangled from their history.’

‘But I always feel great hope when I see the social progress that has taken place in my lifetime …’

‘No, darling.’ he says. ‘Don’t fool yourself. Try to tell that to a black kid of seventeen.’

‘But I have such faith in human nature. When a man falls down in the street five people rush to pick him up.’

He looks at me disdainfully. ‘Yes, I know. But those same five people would stone that man to death, especially if he were after their jobs.’

So far as he is concerned the interview is over and he begins to tell stories about his times in the South with Dr Martin Luther King.

‘Once I flew down to Birmingham, Alabama, and Martin had warned me never to arrive in Birmingham after dark, but I got on the wrong plane. So when I got there I didn’t know what to do, and sat down on my typewriter. I wanted to go right across town to the black district where I was to stay, but in Birmingham in those days you just didn’t call a taxi if you were a black man. There was a city law which said that white drivers couldn’t take black men.

‘So I asked a black porter if he could get someone to call a taxi for me from the black part of town. But after forty minutes of sitting there it hadn’t come. And everyone was watching me. And I was watching them, too.

‘Then suddenly a cab pulls in, with a white driver, and he offers to take me. And then I really am in trouble. Because I know I have to go on a long dark car journey, past a lot of trees, and to a black man in the South trees are things to be frightened of, but if I don’t go I have to stay at the airport and maybe there are some trees around there, too.

‘So I decide to go with him. And he was a really nice man. We both wanted to talk, but we just weren’t able. We had no point of communication. It was very sad …’

‘And you know,’ says brother David. ‘All that cat saw when he drove into that airport and saw you sitting there, was food for his wife and kids …’

Karlheinz Stockhausen 1971

Sun, 25 Jul 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN (Evening Standard, September 1971)

I’m sitting in the Albert Hall which, apart from a cluster of technicians around the platform, two pianists and a disembodied Germanic voice that seems to be drifting down from heaven with instructions, is quite empty.

The two pianists sit facing each other at opposite sides of the platform. They are playing chromatic scales, but again and again they have to repeat the exercise as again and again they are stopped short by the unseen German calling from somewhere up in the gods.

First the left-hand piano is too strong: microphones and screens are shifted, knobs are twiddled. And then there is the same trouble with the pianist on the right. To me the music sounds exactly the same every time the two pianists play. But to the ear of Karlheinz Stockhausen, that ear which he describes dismissively as a mere microphone, every scale is different in balance. To him, acoustics take on a whole new universe of meaning.

“I have intuitive visions of sound,” he says. “And when I deal with them they organise themselves. They respond very well to me, and I to them.”

Stockhausen, now 41, remains possibly the most unbridled prophet of the new world of music: a revolutionary of the avant-garde. Those who don’t understand his music, and there are many, hear his work only as noise. The use of the electronic devices, and the inclusion of the chance sounds to come from a transistor radio used at the beginning of one of his pieces, puzzled his early critics.

But now he’s moving on into an almost mystical belief in his own contribution: “I am not making my music,” he says, “but transcribing the vibrations that I receive.

“What I mean by that,” he told me after rehearsals had been concluded to his eventual satisfaction, “is that I cannot have any intuitive flashes unless I get vibrations from other people, and also from patterns of sound waves from outer space. When I compose I realise that I cannot explain my most important intuitive insights.

“For instance, I cannot explain why I wrote the piece I am composing at the moment. Psychological analysis would be a chain which would lose itself. It’s far more realistic to live with the daily experience that there’s a completely organised spiritual activity acting through me. And all that is important is that I am able to materialise it. Ultimately the music is already there.”

In short, he regards himself as a radio receiver, transcribing the vibrations he receives.

Stockhausen was born in a small German village where his father was the local schoolmaster. His early life was traumatic.

His father was a member of the Nazi Party and Karlheinz was expected to help in collecting the village funds, but he remembers now how his father faced inner conflicts when friends who were known socialist sympathisers were imprisoned by the Gestapo.

When Stockhausen was very young he was put into a special school – because of his “obvious intelligence and physical appearance”, he says. His mother had by this time been committed to an asylum for the insane.

“My mother was taken away from us when I was four years old. She must have been a very talented person because her parents bought her a piano, which for people from her background was most unusual. Then when I was 13 I came home for a holiday from school to see my father who was on leave, and he told me that she had been killed. They used to kill people who were in institutions for the mentally ill because food was so scarce during the war.

“They asked us whether we wanted the ashes but we decided not to have them. I remember I was not very shocked at the time. That’s just my way. I took it as just being sent. It was a challenge for me.

“The more that was taken away from me the stronger I became, until I was completely on my own and had nothing. I think that because both my parents are dead they support me much more than they could if they were alive. I remember I saw my father for the last time in 1945 during his last leave. He was killed just before the end of the war.”

During this time Stockhausen was attending a military academy, where the timetable was governed by the blowing of a bugle, and where every finger nail was controlled. Sport was of paramount importance, and privacy non-existent.

At the end of the war he worked in a military hospital, as he was too young to fight. The experience was unforgettable, he says. He watched thousands of men die.

Music has always been with him. In school he learned to play several instruments and then in the hospital he would entertain the soldiers by playing their requests for them – “from jazz to Beethoven, to a vulgar peasant song”.

“I remember how I stunned everybody because having heard a tune only once on the radio I could immediately sit down and play it with all the right harmonies. I never had to work for this. It was just there from being six or seven. I have six children now, and I notice how one of them has perfect pitch and can play and imitate immediately.

“I work very hard all the time, and I’m always trying to explore new possibilities.

“I think we’re living in a time when people who are extraordinarily devoted to their talent are decreasing in number and are being attached everywhere. There is not much place for a lot of extraordinarily talented people, because the general tendency is to cut off the peaks of the mountains and not to accept that there are natural differences. Now my greatest pleasure is to sit for 10 to 12 hours at a time and compose.

“The attitude is that because you have two ears you have the same right to judge music as anyone else. And that is not true at all. Being musical is something very special. It has been computed that only one person in a thousand is musical.”

He considers sounds as others consider sights. “Everything is visual in our society,” he says, and we have very few words to describe different kinds of sounds, other than words which we borrow from the visual.

“Because our whole reality is visual, our acoustic ability has decreased. All the time now everyone is talking about the design of the environment – about what you can see. But the acoustics – even the sounds you hear in the streets are taken as quite normal.

“If the visual world were so full of garbage as the acoustic world is full of acoustical garbage the people would just protest all the time. Which just shows that most of the people are acoustically deaf, and don’t even notice the acoustic pollution of the world.”

He broke out from the confines of the established musical study when he was 23, and studying music at the conservatory in Cologne. He performed an original piece in public and was immediately attacked by his professor for it. “I remember saying to him that he was trying to see a chicken in an abstract painting,” he says.

He believes in continued work as the essential method for continually being creative. Laziness, he thinks, leads to a negative process, and he lives alone now that he might be able to work more easily. When he asks himself “why me?”, which he does all the time, he invariably comes up with the answer that he must have been chosen by the divine spirit of the universe – the spirit of the total being. A devout and practising Catholic until 10 years ago, he left the Church, when he fell in love with another woman while married.

While we’ve been together we’ve been having lunch, with Stockhausen going into a marathon talking session. Suddenly he says something which occurred to him only that morning: “I thought this morning I heard the sentence in me ‘liking is remembering.’ When you like something you are not aware of the fact that you have been that thing already before.

“For instance, I respond very positively to certain birds – particularly eagles. And now I know from my experiences in dreams that at some time in a past life I have been a bird of that particular kind, because I know exactly the feeling of flying and living in the body of that bird..”

Karlheinz Stockhausen, the musical genius who has so influenced so much of today’s progressive rock and contemporary classical music, remains a man of controversy.

Back to top

Marc Bolan 1972

Sun, 25 Jul 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

MARC BOLAN (Evening Standard, February 1972)

Marc Bolan of the group T. Rex is the one super pop hero to have emerged in the vacuum left by the dissolution of the Beatles and the emigration of the Rolling Stones. While Jagger, Lennon, McCartney and friends drift quietly down the path towards middle age, Bolan, at twenty-four, with five number one hit records in just over a year, is beginning to scale the heights of mass hysteria and teeny-bopper adulation.

Bolan and T. Rex (formerly known in more pretentious days as Tyrannosaurus Rex) had been around for some time before they first began to make big circles in the pool of pop, but it wasn’t until they moved from a rather dull acoustical sound to straightforward electrified rock and roll that the screaming began.

To speak of T. Rex in the plural is actually misleading. Marc Bolan is T. Rex – and the rest of the band are just faceless back-up musicians. It’s Bolan with his sequinned tears glued to his cheeks before every performance, his guitar jutting out rudely like some enormous phallic symbol from his hips, his hair like an abused loofah, and his elfin, effeminate face who the kids go to see.

I interviewed him at the shabby Maida Vale flat he and his wife June have been living in since before he hit the big time. A couple of joss-sticks burned like props from ‘The Summer of ’67’ in one corner while we talked and Bolan drank a glass of whisky. He is at once an intensely irritating, totally gullible yet strangely likeable fellow.

Doesn’t June ever get jealous of the fans, I ask.

‘No,’ he says. ‘I don’t think any natural, intelligent level-headed person can get jealous of something so impersonal. I mean I don’t screw fifteen groupies a night. Look, I had my first chick when I was ten and once I got over being fifteen I only liked people for their heads. If they have nice bodies that’s very nice, too, but I really don’t want to go around the countryside giving babies to ladies who I don’t care about, and who may then write to the Sunday newspapers.

‘It will be interesting to see if there are any paternity suits. I’d never allow it to happen, and in a way I’m looking forward to someone bringing one – because they always do. But it would be impossible.’

Rarely can a boy have faced his future with such single-minded ambition. Brought up in Hackney (his dad was a lorry driver and his mum had a stall on a market) he was photographed at thirteen by Don McCullin and briefly became known as King of the Mods. The year was 1963.

Educated at a secondary modern school, he left at fifteen and took a two-year sabbatical. He explains: ‘When I was thirteen I was really into clothes as an energy force – the same way that I’m now into music. But by the time the pictures came out (in Town magazine) I was into books. After I left school I stayed at home for about two years learning many things – reading, teaching myself to write and play the guitar.’

Did he mean he stayed at home doing nothing for two years, I asked, wanting to get it quite clear.

‘No,’ he said with a little impatience. ‘I’ve just explained. I grew. I educated myself in the way that I wanted to be educated. I didn’t work in the conventional sense. My mother used to give me five bob a day if I wanted to go out. But I didn’t go out much. I made my first record when I was seventeen. All the record companies had turned me down, then Decca let me record something and chose my name for me. My real name is Feld, but they called me Bowland. I didn’t like that so I later changed it to Bolan.

‘It’s very ironic because among the companies who turned me down was EMI. Now I have my own label – T. Rex Wax Company – with them. They just distribute my records and stick on the labels.’

Had he ever done any conventional work, I wondered.

‘Yes, I worked for a week in a clothes shop in Tooting, and every night I went washing dishes in a Wimpy bar. I never got any sleep so I collapsed at the end of the week. I think I just did it to show my mum that I wasn’t a lazy little boy.

‘And then another time I did a week’s modelling. I got £1000 for that. I worked every day.’

I expressed surprise at the size of his pay and this annoyed him.

‘Ah fuck off! Have you ever done any modelling? It’s hard work. I didn’t think it was a lot of money.’

‘I think it is,’ I said.

‘Well, it may be to you but it’s not to me. All I know is that I worked incredibly hard, and for three months they used the pictures all over the country. It’s all relative. Someone may write a song which earns him a million pounds, but because it only took him five minutes to write it you’re not going to say that because you work harder than he does then he shouldn’t get that money. It just happens that what he does happens to be more commercial or better.’

At this point I began to say something about how justice seemed to be lost sight of now and again, and happened to mention the miners.

And he said, ‘what miners?’, and I said ‘the miners who are on strike now,’ and he said he really didn’t want to talk about that.

So we argued a bit inconclusively about nothing very much and then I asked him about a newspaper report I’d seen in which he claimed to be a millionaire.

‘I’ve never said I’m a millionaire,’ he said. ‘But I am, although I can’t get my hands on it. I’ve only got about £100 in the bank, but my record company, and I own it one hundred per cent, is worth a million pounds. It’s all pieces of paper, anyway. You never get paid for ages. I don’t consider myself over-paid. I give a service, and I get paid for it. I look after all the people around me. There’s not a friend who need want for anything.’

Was it true he’d seen someone levitate?

‘Yes in Paris. He was standing on the floor and he raised himself about eight feet in the air.’

Who else saw it?

‘I was with about five other people. It’s not important who they were,’ he said. Then adding: ‘You have a very downer attitude which I find disconcerting. Do you doubt it?’

‘I never doubt anything,’ I said.

‘I’ve also done magical rites and conjured up demons,’ he went on. ‘But these are things which aren’t really relevant.’

How did he do it?

‘It takes time to learn,’ he confided. ‘I’ve also seen flying saucers. The world is mathematics … I mean it’s based on maths … and I was very bad at maths in school … well, there are certain herbs and incantations which make you invisible … you know, it’s possible to move into another astral plane by mental discipline. But, in fact, you don’t really become invisible, it’s just that you’re not visible to the person watching … you know, you might not be able to see me, but perhaps you could feel me …’

What about the demons?

‘Well, I conjured up a spirit that wasn’t very friendly. It came in the form of a Greek boy. It was just something I wanted to check out to see if it was possible …

‘I believe you can do whatever you want to. You talked about the miners … well, I’m sure that if I were a miner, or I lived in a village with miners and I could see the injustices, then I’d make a point of going to the man to sort it out and I’d convince him into sorting it out …’

By this time I was sorry I’d ever mentioned the miners, but he was in full flow about the ethics of self advancement.

‘I’d no education at school, but I wanted to be a writer so I taught myself to write. And I’d never written a song so I went out and bought a guitar and the same day I wrote three songs.’

What else had he written, I asked.

‘Are you serious … you really don’t know?’ Then slipping from the room he re-appeared with a slim volume of poetry. ‘Here … the best selling book of poetry last year. Sold twenty thousand copies. There’s going to be a book of short stories soon.’

Perhaps flattered by my interest in his literary talents he showed me his most recent piece, which he’d scrawled in a large and hurried childish hand sideways across a foolscap sheet of paper. Then taking it from me he showed me a much neater transcription of it which had been done by his wife. I noticed that she’d corrected all the spelling mistakes.

I read the piece quickly, and I didn’t understand a word of it. But the fault must surely have been mine. Twenty thousand people can’t be wrong.

What of the future then?

‘Well, I’ve no intention of playing rock and roll in three years’ time. I’ll be directing a film later this year … it’s something I think I can do a lot better than a lot of other people.’

Did he ever have doubts about his own ability?

‘Of course. I have doubts about everything. There’s not a day goes by without me thinking I might die or that I won’t be able to play the guitar. There’s so much to doubt … about doing shows … television. I have doubts about this interview.’

POSTSCRIPT Poor Marc Bolan. I suppose he had every reason to have doubts about that interview. After that flying initial start his career began to slide during the seventies. Of course, he never was a millionaire, nor did he direct a film, but I don’t believe he was deliberately lying to me. He was, I suppose, among those sad fantasisers who could never really understand why others were laughing at them. He was killed in a car crash in 1979.

Hullabaloo, May 2010

Sat, 24 Jul 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

Hullabaloo, (Daily Mail, May 2010)

There was a hullabaloo at the end of our road on Friday night. It was so loud I went out take a look, and, as I did, other neighbours were opening windows and peering out in curiosity. And what was going on?

Well, nothing really, just a hundred and fifty or so teenage kids armed with mobile phones, all seeming to be talking and shouting into them at once, and generally having a good time on the first evening of their half term break.

Perhaps it was a flash mob, that modern craze where young people contact each other by email, mobile or Twitter and congregate at some place or other for zany enjoyment. I don’t know. But they weren’t doing any harm and soon dispersed.

So, good luck to them. It was a holiday weekend after all. But I can’t tell you how LOUD they were, or, more interestingly, how oblivious they seemed to be to the racket they were making.

Yet, hasn’t that been an increasing trend over the past few years? I mean, is it just me, or have an awful lot of us got considerably louder in public and less and less thoughtful about the sonic peace of others?

This struck me particularly forcibly at a concert I attended in London last week by the American singer Natalie Merchant. For several years Ms Merchant has been working putting a selection of children’s poems by people like Edward Lear and Gerard Manley Hopkins to music, and, supported by two acoustic guitars and a cello, this was the first night of her British tour

It was, I suppose, not unlike chamber music in its intensity, and was listened to very attentively by a couple of thousand fans of this very clever woman. And it would have been a perfect evening had it not been for an unfortunately plentiful scattering of ill-mannered people in the audience.

Spending much of the two and a half hour concert going in and out of the auditorium to the bars to top up their large polystyrene cups of beer, and then on to the loos where in the end they emptied them, they were like hyper-active children with the attention spans of goldfish and the bladders of babies.

I don’t think they necessarily meant to be rude. It probably never even crossed their minds that they were. But they were behaving in an extraordinarily discourteous way to the singer and musicians who stoically affected not to notice, as well as spoiling the concert for the majority of us who just wanted to sit and listen. And at £35 a seat it seems to me that isn’t a lot to expect.

But that wasn’t the worst of it. A couple of rows behind us were the inevitable loud whisperers who seemed to think that we would all like to hear what they were saying to each other, a couple of mutton-headed young women who, before the evening was over, began shouting out, demanding the singer do something other than the song she was already performing.

Every one of us has had similar experiences, no doubt some of us did over this holiday weekend. In the theatre actors and directors routinely despair of unruly chatterbox audiences, and friends who’ve been recently to the Royal Opera House have had cause to complain about the whispering there, too.

Even church services are no longer free of murmurings, while outings to the cinema can be a nightmare, with people eating, sucking, slurping, coughing, texting, translating, snoring and generally rabbiting on. Recently, unable to stand any more of hearing the young man behind me giving a running commentary on what was happening to the avatar on screen, I turned around and put a finger to my lips.

His response was to call me a…

Actually, I can’t tell you what he called me, other than to say that it involved what is generally regarded as the most offensive word in the English language. Mind you, he did shut up after that, so it was a price worth paying.

But how has this happened? How is it that a very large minority of people have come to assume that it’s perfectly all right for them to chat all the way through concerts, films and plays, apparently unaware that such anti-social behaviour drives the rest of us to distraction?

One guess is that it’s the consequence of people brought up in homes where the television is always left on, so that anyone wishing to make conversation has inevitably to be louder than the TV or else they would never be heard. The end result, though, is that live flesh and blood performances by singers and actors are treated no more respectfully than images on a screen in the corner of the living room.

Mobile phones haven’t helped either, with their users seeming to believe they have to shout to be heard above the ambient sounds of street or train.

Of course, very occasionally this can provide unexpected entertainment. Several years ago a journey I took to Liverpool was much being enlivened by my having to listen to a young woman recount to her boy friend the plot of a film she’d just seen. “It was called Titanic, about a big ship”, she explained as she began going through the plot. “And, you know, it sank. They nearly all died. Honest!”

Such accidental amusement is, however, rarely cited by actors. Once it was members of the audience reciting famous speeches not so sotto voce that sent them mad. Now it’s the careless saboteurs of a performance.

When Kevin Spacey was interrupted by the ringing of a mobile phone while appearing in Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, he famously broke off from his speech, said icily “Tell them we’re busy”, and then continued with the play.

I like to think that the owner of the mobile was chastened, but, I suppose, it’s just as likely that he or she was actually thrilled to have attracted the attention of the great man.

There is, perhaps, another explanation for the increase in general public noisiness and casual rudeness. I call it the “L’Oréal…because I’m worth it” factor, after the television advertisements for hair products.

I don’t know how aware of the wider ramifications the advertising agency that came up with that campaign was, but it seems to me they put their finger right on a current malaise in modern society when they coined the phrase “because I’m worth it.”

Think about it. What is it really saying? That we are a selfish and vain lot with a view of the world that says we’re entitled by our very humanity to have our every whim and desire satisfied ‒ “because we’re worth it”.

And you only have to extend that creed a little bit to understand why some people will, when hungry, eat hamburgers on Underground trains, thus reeking the carriage with the smell of onions, no matter that no other passengers will want that, or casually talk and drink and guzzle their way through a concert.

“It’s a free country, isn’t it,” has long been the doltish default rejoinder to those who’ve dared question behaviour which, while perhaps not necessarily unlawful, upsets others. And since moments of possible confrontation are hardly the best circumstances in which to debate the balance of liberties (“you’re free to talk at a concert, so long as you don’t infringe my freedom to listen”) it seems to me the loud-mouths not only rule, they grow in number. Depressing, isn’t it.

Now I know there are those who will tell me that theatre audiences have traditionally been rowdy places, that Shakespeare’s plays at the Globe could be raucous affairs with the audience joining in, jossing the actors ‒ even chucking vegetables at them when they didn’t like the performance.

And I’m sure that is so. But I’m not living in the sixteenth century. I’m living now. And I want to hear what I pay to listen to, not a vacuous cacophony by the brutally bad mannered.

Back to the top

Ronnie Hawkins 1970

Sat, 24 Jul 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

RONNIE HAWKINS (Evening Standard, February 1970)

They’d told me that Ronnie Hawkins used to hold parties Nero would have been ashamed to attend, so when the invitation came I didn’t need any arm-twisting.

‘We’re in the Penthouse at the Playboy. Come right up,’ were the instructions, and that seemed to be just about Ronnie’s lifestyle all right.

And yes, it was quite a party. God knows who all the people were: record company employees, girlfriends and pick-ups, I imagine. There was a lot of drink around, too, some really dirty picture books from Sweden (and I mean dirty) for those who had no one to talk to, and a lot of low, behind-the-barn humour.

And sitting there right in the middle of it all was Ronnie Hawkins, the host, alternating the shapes of his lips to take sips of brandy, puffs of his cigar and drags on a weedy little home-made cigarette that had a funny smell.

‘I never did get much from marijuana’, he says. ‘Some cats can take a puff and wow! they’re high, gone, faster than a July snow. But it never did nothing much for me, just made me sleepy.

‘I remember one time I went up to this woman’s farm I knew. And she was breeding all kinds of animals there – every kind you ever saw. And I was sitting there having me a smoke and patting this dog’s back and, you know, I began lolling off. And while I was dozing one of my friends replaced this dog for the tiniest little horse you ever saw. Its body was like that of an ordinary horse, but the legs wasn’t longer than eighteen inches. Special bred little thing it was. And when I woke up, there I was looking at this horse when it should have been a dog, and thinking, “Jesus that hash sure is something.” And I turned to a guy who was alongside me and said “For God’s sake tell me that that goddamned horse is standing in a two-foot hole.”’

This is Ronnie Hawkins in his element: boasting, bragging, telling stories, the centre of the party, the man with nothing but friends. Get him going and neither he nor you want him to stop.

‘For eighteen years I’ve been paying my dues playing the skid row bar circuits, and boy I can tell you we’ve played in some pretty tough places. One time I remember particularly. We were playing in one of Jack Ruby’s clubs, the Skyliner in Dallas I think it was, and they had a revue with girls stripping and all that. And we were just sitting watching when we noticed that one of the stripper girls didn’t have but arm. Can you imagine that?’ And Ronnie Hawkins guffaws till it looks as though he’s going to come bursting out of his Levis.

Unless you’re absolutely besotted with nostalgia about the rock music of the fifties, you might be forgiven for having forgotten (if indeed you ever knew) who Ronnie Hawkins is.

One of the very first rock and roll singers to come out of the South, he’s now a very big man, with a neatly clipped beard, military style haircut, straw cowboy hat, and a taste for cigars about the size of Giant Redwoods. He is also generous to the point of absurdity, grateful to an equal degree, and more outspoken than almost any man you’re likely to meet.

This week he has been staying in London on the last stop on a month’s round the world tour. ‘It’s the first vacation I’ve ever had in my life. When we left home in Canada there were seven of us, but one by one all the others dropped out along the way. They couldn’t stand the pace. Now there’s just Ritchie and me.’

Ritchie is Australian freelance journalist, Ritchie Yorke, who put Hawkins back into the big time when he wrote an article about him in the American rock newspaper Rolling Stone. The article brought all kinds of offers from big recording companies and now the two are firm friends.

It was Ritchie, indeed, who arranged for Ronnie to play at being host to the Lennons when they made Hawkins’s home in Streetsville, Ontario, the base for their Christmas peace mission to Canada last Christmas.

That was Ronnie’s second stroke of luck. The resulting publicity was, he figures, the best thing that could possibly have happened to him. When he gets back from his holiday this weekend he’ll be done with the low-class bars for good, he says. He’ll be done with paying his dues.

‘I was born in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and I started out playing with the bands when I was sixteen. I always had a lot of good little bands right through. They may not have been good in comparison with the musicians of today, but they were good for then. I started off by hopping-up country and hillbilly songs, and I was the first in that area to add drums and start playing with electrical instruments in my band. And from that day to this I just been a rockie-roller.

‘One time I had an all negro group, but in them days there just wasn’t any integration, and the only places we could play were army bases, and negro clubs, so eventually we split up. All the guys I played with were much older than me, so I guess they must all be about fifty by now.

‘We played all over the South . Those places were so tough you had to show your razor and puke twice before they’d let you in. Times were so bad we always carried an Arkansas credit card – that was a siphon, a hose and a five-gallon can. You see we didn’t have much money and the only way we could get from one place to the next was by siphoning off somebody else’s petrol from out of their cars while they were inside drinking.

‘I tell you I was the only rock and roll singer in the South who had chapped lips for three years. I was belching up ethyl and regular and even a bit of diesel now and again.

‘We were poor because rock and roll music used to be the lowest form of music in the world, and only the people who couldn’t afford anybody else would hire a rock and roll band. The young people always dug it, but the older ones never could stand it. One cat once called me the abortion of music. If I’d known what abortion meant I would have hit him.’

His anecdotes and stories come rolling out with the ease of a man who has spent the last eighteen years telling them.

I met him first when I stayed at his home with the Lennons a couple of months ago. For the full three days I was there he just stood back from the hustling and hassling that was going on at a frenetic pitch all around, and grinned and laughed, and spoke to his famous guests only when he was spoken to.

He had been married for eight years to a Canadian girl called Wanda, and they have three children. But that doesn’t deter him from telling just about every interviewer he meets of the wild times he has had.

He says: ‘We were just like any band you care to name. They all have these orgies and parties, with pretty little girls and drink and raising hell. Wanda? Well, she knows how I am. I’ve always been this way. I suspect maybe she thinks it’s just me bragging and showing off, and not really meaning none of it. She’s a good woman.

‘But to tell the truth I’m getting so old that I can’t go chasing the girls like I used to. And if I do chase ’em, when I catch ’em I’m fit for nothing. You know them oysters that are supposed to make you passionate. Well, I’m so old that if I take half a dozen, only five of them work.’

Sitting with us, cherishing every moment, are a couple of antiques from a prehistoric age, a couple of London rockers, Wild Willie and friend, they tell me, all done up in their fingertip-length jackets, with velvet collars, drainies tighter than a bark around a tree, and hair greased back and pompadoured like sticky plumes. They’ve been fans for years, and although Ronnie himself didn’t know exactly when he was to arrive in England, they found out and were faithfully there to meet him off the aeroplane.

Elated at having such a ready audience, Ronnie is in full swing about his recent holiday: ‘We had trouble everywhere we went. In Tahiti there was a typhoon out of season; in Hong Kong we crossed into No Man’s Land and were likely to get shot at by the Red Chinese; and in Tokyo I had me one of them baths I’ve always been reading about with them geisha girls and that. I must have been expecting too much, because nothing happened like I thought it would.

‘Bangkok’s the place though. I reckon a man could do just about anything in Bangkok – but I didn’t because we didn’t have no time. When we were there a man comes up to me in the street and says “Ten dollars I can take you to a place where you can see a man making it with a chick.” But I said “Well, looks to me as though for ten dollars I could get my own chick and do it myself.”’

All he wants now, he jokes, is to be a teenage idol all over again. ‘After that article in Rolling Stone about me all the big record companies came offering me money like I’d never heard of. One even flew me out to Hollywood, California, and offered me a quarter of a million dollars front money to sign for them, and they’d never heard me sing a note. But I signed with Atlantic because the way I see it is – if anyone is going to make it at all, he’ll make it with Atlantic. Everything they do is just right.

‘I’ve got my little band practising now so that when I get back I’ll be able to go out again. They’re a great little band.’

And if there’s one thing Ronnie Hawkins knows about it’s bands. Wasn’t it he who hired, put together and trained individually all the members of Dylan’s backing group The Band? ‘We played together for about five years, but we were going nowhere and they got tired of the bars. I can understand that. And they also wanted to start playing more blues and try for the big time. But I couldn’t take the chance. The way I saw it was we had a good regular living in where we were, and I had a wife and kids and couldn’t take the chance. So they left me and joined up with Dylan and went to live in Woodstock, New York.’

What about that blue disfigurement under his beard and along his cheek, I ask. ‘How did I do that? Well let me tell you. I’ve been singing and hollering for so long that I went and burst a god-damned blood vessel.’

And that great big man laughs like a tickled bear, and sips from a large glass of brandy.

‘With a couple of glasses of brandy inside me I just become irresistible – least I figure so. That’s me, the housewives’ companion and the working girls’ friend.’

POSTSCRIPT Ronnie Hawkins is one of those guys who never quite made it. After being lumbered with many of the bills for telephones and house repairs after John and Yoko used his home for their Christmas peace assault in Canada in 1969, he had a few months of some notoriety before slipping back into the semi-obscurity of Toronto night-life.

Dusty Springfield

Sat, 24 Jul 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

DUSTY SPRINGFIELD ( Evening Standard, September 1970)

Dusty Springfield looks as though she’s playing at doctor-during-consulting-hours sitting in a white walled room at Philips Records, meeting the all and sundry members of the musical press.

I’ve never met her before, and the first thing she says is: ‘You’re sinister. Would you mind if I go to the loo before we start?’ And then with her tassles tinkling like summer 1967, she goes off down the corridor in a Mini-Ha-Ha embroidered suit, and wearing a great chunk of fancy iron and brass work around her neck which looks like something she might have pinched off a Russian Orthodox altar.

She’s thirty and hasn’t really had a big hit record for some quite considerable time. It’s a cliché but it’s true. Pop does have an awful lot of obsolescence hanging over it. She’s still singing as well as ever, dreamy and romantic, and I like her very much, but the public aren’t buying her records in the volume they used to.

Her new one is called ‘How Can I Be Sure?’ and was originally a hit in America for the Rascals. She’ll be surprised if it’s a hit for her in Britain.

‘That,’ she says, ‘comes from a backlog of doubts in myself because the last few records have gone wrong. And I’m always a bit surprised to sell records anyway. It would be a souring experience if I were not to have any more hits, but I would survive. It would be a test of character for me. I very seldom think about it, but if it did happen I’d probably get out unless I could find some other direction to go in. I don’t particularly want to be a cabaret type of entertainer. Whether or not I could be defeated into accepting that type of existence I don’t know.’

She’s plumper than I’d expected (‘I’m nine stone and I should be eight-two or eight-four. But I’m too lazy to bother about slimming’), and amazingly she still apparently buys her eyelashes by the yard, and mascara by the hundredweight. Her eyes aren’t as black as they were, she insists, looking short-sightedly through a pinkish coloured Perspex ruler at me.

‘This,’ she squints, ‘is the best colour in the world. It’s really erotic. I supposed I’ve got very erotic tastes. I like purple and magenta and all the tarty colours. I don’t wear them any more. I should go back to them because I’ve become very sedate. I’m all talk and no action. I’ve been very un-newsworthy recently. Haven’t been throwing any custard pies at anyone or anything.’

She was brought up a Catholic but never goes to Mass now. ‘It’s about six years since I made my Easter Duties. My mother’s going to love this. I still think that because I don’t go to confession I’m going to go to hell but I haven’t really done anything evil. I’m just lazy and self-indulgent.’

She’s a strange lady of contradictions. She wants me to send her a copy of an old Maureen Cleave article but she won’t give me her address. She never gives it, she insists, and then in the next breath tells me. She has a pretty, lumpy little face which looks best when she smiles. I notice she has a big shiny grey filling in her pre-molar bottom left. Her hair is the colour of dried leaves.

I think she’s a bit sad, but she says no, not at all. The last thing she wants is to be pitied. Only occasionally, when she needs someone to lean on is she lonely. Much of the time she shares her house with songwriter/painter Norma Tanega.

She is concerned that whatever I may ask her will make her sound conceited. So I suggest that she tells me her little vices, and with an enthusiasm which is almost self-destructive, she sets about it, giggling from time to time at her own ability to rattle me.

‘Well, I don’t pick my nose, but I burp like everyone else. I don’t cut my toe nails, but I pull at them and tear them off. And I’m promiscuous. Not often, but when I am, I really am. I’m not a nymphomaniac. In fact, I could do with a lot more action really. I think my laziness even spreads so far.

‘It’s an effort to be promiscuous. I don’t mean that I leap into bed with someone special every night, but my affections are easily swayed and I can be very unfaithful. It’s fun while it’s happening, but it’s not fun afterwards because I’m filled with self-recriminations. The truth is I’m just very easily flattered by people’s attentions, and after a couple of vodkas I’m even more flattered.’

She’s giggling a lot now. ‘I suppose to say I’m promiscuous is a bit of bravado on my part. I think it’s more in thought than in action. I’ve been that way ever since I discovered the meaning of the word. I used to go to confession and tell all my impure thoughts.’

Suddenly she becomes serious again, and begins to space her words out carefully and thoughtfully. ‘There’s one thing that’s always annoyed me – and I’m going to get into something nasty here. But I’ve got to say it, because so many other people say I’m bent, and I’ve heard it so many times that I’ve almost learned to accept it.

‘I don’t go leaping around to all the gay clubs but I can be very flattered. Girls run after me a lot and it doesn’t upset me. It upsets me when people insinuate things that aren’t true. I couldn’t stand to be thought of as a big butch lady. But I know that I’m as perfectly capable of being swayed by a girl as by a boy. More and more people feel that way and I don’t see why I shouldn’t.

‘There was someone on television the other night who admitted that he swings either way. I suppose he could afford to say it, but I, being a pop singer, shouldn’t even admit that I might think that way. But if the occasion arose I don’t see why I shouldn’t.

‘And yet, I get such a charge out of walking down a street and having a guy who’s digging the road give me a whistle. This business makes me feel very unwomanly sometimes and I love to be admired just for being a woman. I don’t feel masculine. If I did I’d have more drive. But being a woman is very precious to me, and that’s probably why I could never get mixed up in a gay scene because it would be bound to undermine my sense of being a woman.

‘I’ve had this reputation for years, but I don’t know how I got it. I’m always hearing that I’ve been to this gay club and that gay club. But I haven’t. I sometimes wonder if it would be nice to live up to my reputation.

‘I got raided the other day by the police. But they didn’t find any drugs. I’ve hardly ever smoked as a matter of fact. As it happens I think I know who tipped them off, and it relates to what I’ve been saying. There was a rather hysterical lady who was upset because I didn’t fancy her. I think it was her.’

She is not involved with anyone at the moment, and I wonder if she fears that she may never have a family.

‘I don’t know whether I want children or not,’ she says. ‘The urge to reproduce is always there, of course, but then I think “what for?” I probably wouldn’t be a terribly good mother. It would be great spasmodic moods of affection which don’t last and that wouldn’t be very stable.

‘I would like children psychologically and physically, although there’s something which stops me from just reproducing. But there has to be something more than what I do. There just has to be something more for me.’

I offer to take her home and out we go through the doors past the Philips records executives who smile and wave goodbye to their lady star in great hearty fashion.

‘D’you realise,’ she laughs, ‘what I’ve just said could put the final seal to my doom. I don’t know, though. I might attract a whole new audience.’

POSTSCRIPT Dusty Springfield was then, and remains, one of my favourite singers. She was one of the true witty originals of the Sixties with a beautiful voice and I hope she never regretted saying some of the things printed in this piece.

Michael Caine 1971

Sat, 24 Jul 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

MICHAEL CAINE (Evening Standard, March 1971)

Michael Caine can speak fluent French. I bet you didn’t know that. He’s also very good at German. Practically no one knows that either, but he’s quietly proud of the fact. It’s an accomplishment of which no one considers him capable. Sometimes when he’s in a restaurant and he speaks to the waiter in French, the company he’s with just gape in astonishment, because they just know that he ought not to be intelligent enough to have learned a foreign language, he says.

‘And, you know, I just have to go off into the gents and take a good look at myself in the mirror to see if I really look like the dumdum that seems to be my image. I mean it makes you wonder about yourself. Somehow I seem to have got the image of the world’s luckiest half-wit. But in my view I’m not half-witted and I’ve never had an ounce of luck in my life.

‘I’ve never been given any credit as a craftsman, and my whole press image has always been rather frivolous. And, of course, there’s always been the crumpet thing about me.

‘Everyone always assumes that the parts I’ve played have been parts where I haven’t had to think about creating a character. Oh God, it annoys me to death to be written about as though I were the real village-idiot, a real, lazy, stupid, good-for-nothing, like one of those actors in the old days when it was said that the studio electrician used to put the sparkle in his eyes.

‘I suppose the press wanted a Cinderella story and I was it. But Cinderella was lucky.’

I’m being very lucky tonight. I’m gliding along in the polished cream leather back seat of Michael Caine’s metallic blue Rolls (he had it copied from one owned by a Texas millionaire) on the way back from Shepperton Film Studios to his Grosvenor Square apartment.

Caine’s chauffeur drives with a royal grace as though we are a couple of delicate eggs, and the journey has a royal super-suspended elegance to it.

Now and then we pull gently to a halt at an unobliging red light, and Caine chuckles as he watches the cheaper family cars line up for the inevitable racing start.

‘It’s always like a Le Mans start when we’re in the Rolls. As soon as the lights go amber they all start pissing across the road grinding their gears to get away ahead of us. But we’re not speedy or flash. If I were flash I’d have the car number MC 1 but I just took what I was given. I like to think I was born cool.’

So there we are. He is not flash. During the last fourteen weeks he’s been filming X, Y and Zee (Edna O’Brien’s formerly titled screenplay Zee and Co) with Elizabeth Taylor and Susannah York. Whenever Elizabeth Taylor went on the set a caravan of four or five limousines made their way down to Shepperton – His, Hers, and presumably a couple more for the dogs and dogsbodies, I understand. The studio joke is that if only the Burtons’ retinue go to see the film it’ll make money.

Caine’s circle is more tightly knit. Basically it is Peter, friend and chauffeur for five years, and a nice bloke called Johnny Morris. Together they look like three first division footballers – not sharp or hippy or trendy, but honest and scrubbed, neat polo necked shirts and working-class smart, with undandified hair cuts and manicured nails.

If you didn’t know you wouldn’t necessarily guess which one was the star. There’s no air of unapproachability; just an easy chattiness.

‘What I like,’ says Caine, ‘is a very efficient organisation around me. My homes (he has a mill house at Windsor for the weekends) are full of gadgets to make things easier. There are an awful lot of pressures in this business so I surround myself with buffers. Johnny is my main buffer, he sort of manages everything for me – like an aide. Then there’s a secretary and all sorts of cleaners.’

Still more boyish than most men approaching middle age, the freckles now hide a bit among the more deeply-etched lines in his face, while on screen he looks positively beefy.

At thirty-eight he’s going through an upturn in his career. He didn’t make it until he was thirty (‘I thought I was too late’) but after a couple of smashing pictures like Alfie and The Ipcress File his career became a little more chequered.

He admits: ‘I had some real dogs, but I’m doing well now. I got good reviews in America for The Last Valley (yet to be shown here) and think Get Carter will do well.’

By now I imagine it unlikely that anyone living in the greater London area can be unaware that Caine is Carter and that Carter is a villain – a real bastard in fact. The message hollers at you from the front of practically every London bus, black double-breasted raincoat, shot-gun and air of menace. It’s a film of unremitting violence and chilling deadpan dialogue.

‘I modelled that part on an actual hard case,’ he says. ‘I watched everything he did and once saw him put someone in hospital for eighteen months. These guys are very polite, but they act right out of the blue. They’re not conversationalists about violence, they’re professionals. The message is that violence does exist. Most people think it only happens in America, but there’s a creeping brutality everywhere. It’s like ignoring Nazis because they’re just a gang of ruffians in brown shirts.

‘We accept violence here because the way we see it on TV no one really gets hurt. So when we read in the papers about someone getting beaten up in the street we think nothing has happened. In Get Carter we try to show what really does happen, and how innocent people like children can be involved. We’re saying it happens so don’t think it can’t touch you. He’s a real repellent character. Those guys are like that. They’re as likely to kick their old mum down the stairs as be nice to her.’

It has been suggested that the character of Carter is a ‘there-but-for-the grace-of-God-goes-Michael Caine’. But that’s a bit far fetched.

‘My point is that there but for the grace of me goes me. If you are born into that working-class milieu, as I was and as virtually every violent criminal is, then you’re sure to want something different. And if the world treats you violently enough then you will act in a violent way to alter your circumstances. Or you can go another way. I became an actor which was considered a sissy thing, but it does allow you to act out your fantasies.’

And as Marlon Brando pointed out, you can pull birds easier, I say, and he laughs. Yes, there’s a lot of truth in that. It’s wonderful when you grew up not being able to pull birds. He used to have very bad luck indeed, he says. It was always difficult. Probably it still it if you’re seventeen and haven’t yet got the chat.

‘You know blokes come over here and talk about the permissive society, but I think it’s all a bit of a myth. They’re just balling the same couple of hundred girls that everybody else has been having. I’m sure the whole thing is kept going by a couple of hundred ravers.’

His lifestyle (with his investments in antiques and pictures) seems to vary with the whims of the moment. Tonight dinner with Charlton Heston, followed by a party given by a girl in Oh, Calcutta! Tomorrow – well there’s usually something, although he doesn’t always go.
This weekend he is off to New York for the Ali-Frazier fight together with a group of friends and the Burtons. Filming should be finished by Sunday, for which he’ll be thankful, although he’s enjoyed working with both Elizabeth Taylor and Susannah York.

‘I’ve been very lucky with the people I’ve worked with,’ he says. ‘Very few have been a pain in the neck. When we began this film both Elizabeth and I were nervous of each other and it was difficult because we had to go right into fights and love scenes rolling around the bed and we never even knew each other.

‘But after the first couple of days we admitted that we were nervous and I gave her a bit of a hug – you know, not being familiar, but just to make human contact and we were fine after that.’

He is rich, of course, but mention the postal strike and his background shows like an X-ray. Tom Jackson can have few more fervent supporters.

‘If you’re gonna spend the rest of your life tramping round the streets sticking bits of paper through holes in pieces of wood then I reckon you need some decent recompense. These men lead hard lives, and if by going on strike they’re being pushed to lead even harder lives then I reckon there must be something seriously wrong. They’re not fooling, or goofing off to watch football. Their wives and kids are going without.’

What now for him? The stage? No he’d never go back. He spent ten years there learning his business and it was a very hard mistress that did not return his love. Cinema is now wife, mother, mistress and daughter to him.

‘I think some day I’d rather like to be a writer-producer. I’ve written several screenplays, in fact I write a lot, but I never show them to anyone. When I read them again after about six weeks I realise they’re a lot of crap and burn them. But one day I won’t.’

A lovely, leggy girl crosses the road in front of us looking smashing. We all smile: ‘I love to see them walking about like that – all fresh, you know,’ he says.

POSTSCRIPT Somehow the idea of sitting in the back of a Rolls, cruising back to town looking at the pretty, leggy girls in Knightsbridge has always seemed to me one of the most lasting images of London when it was just about to stop swinging. Of all the British actors who moved into films in the sixties, only Michael Caine has become real ‘box office’ and survived totally in that medium. So far as I know he hasn’t yet had any of his screenplays filmed. Perhaps he hasn’t submitted them.

Chicken Nugget TV, June 2010

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

Chicken Nugget TV Daily Mail, June 2010

Have you noticed the promotion the BBC has been running for their niche channel BBC 4 recently? After snippets of what look like enticing, grown-up, forthcoming programmes it ends with the selling pitch “Everyone needs a place to think”.

That’s absolutely right. Everyone does need a place to think and television is exactly the place to encourage fresh ideas and debate. But if the BBC mandarins are of the opinion that BBC 4 is the place for the thinking, does that mean they believe the rest of their TV output is for those who don’t want to think?

It sometimes would appear so, which is why when this week Stephen Fry launched an attack on the standards of the television programmes now being made for adults in this country, describing it as “infantilised” and likening it to “chicken nuggets” ‒ things we all like, but only now and again, he’s dead right.

And I’m very glad he said it because, although I might have had some differences with some of his outbursts in recent years, and I suspect even he might admit he does say some pretty silly things occasionally, it probably takes someone with his broadcasting clout to make his colleagues sit up and listen. Most home-made peak viewing time television is no longer grown-up.

With even BBC 2 schedules stuffed with reality pap about cooking, DIY, frocks, game shows, while BBC 1 and ITV continue with their competition dramas almost invariably ending in tears, it’s nearly all escapist fun; TV you can watch while you’re doing something else ‒ anything else ‒ but not something to sit down and watch seriously
Fry is right, too, when he says how much we all admire Doctor Who.

The recent episode by Four Weddings’ screenwriter Richard Curtis in which the Doctor goes back in time to meet and save Van Gogh will have inspired and encouraged millions of children to look differently at art history. This is TV at its best, being entertaining, educational and extremely creative. It was a brilliant idea.

But as much as you and I might have enjoyed the programme, Doctor Who is aimed mainly at children. Great for them, but where are the programmes for adults, shows which are, in Fry’s words, “savoury, sharp, unusual” which “surprise and astonish”?

They’re still there, defenders of the current BBC faith will tell us, and point at Life On Mars, Ashes to Ashes and Spooks. And, yes, those shows are good, up to a point. Certainly they’re flashy and well-made, but mainly they’re comic caricature television, and they don’t for a second hold up a mirror to real life.

There’s absolutely a place for that kind of drama, but there has to be somewhere, too, for the serious stuff, programmes and dramas that make you stop and think and reflect on your own prejudices or question your beliefs.

For sure there’s nothing like that in the endless soaps of Casualty and Holby City, Coronation Street and Emmerdale. Cheaply made these sponges on TV drama budgets use money which might be better spent elsewhere.

Quickly, often tackily produced, melodramatic and endlessly confrontational and generally lacking in wit or humour, the main dramatic point of soaps seems to be to make sure viewers turn on to the next episode to find out what happens next. It isn’t real drama that these programmes offer us, it’s addiction.

Not too long ago, probably when Stephen Fry was growing up, BBC Television ran two truly great channels that helped glue the nation together. Yes, they were in competition with ITV but standards were amazingly high.

With less broadcasting time to fill then it sometimes seemed that every programme had to be polished and edited down to its tightest, whether it be drama, comedy, sit-com or documentaries. All the jewels had to be squeezed into the smallest space.

Today there are four BBC channels which broadcast from before dawn until deep into the night, deserts of time to be filled, and maybe there just isn’t enough quality material to fill all that space.

Or can it be that the desperate search by executives to be able to report good viewing figures has got in the way of good programming, that interesting material is endlessly being dumbed down and fronted by a celebrity presenter in order to attract the largest possible audience? I think it might be. Every show, it would appear has to have a famous and probably expensive face fronting it. Why?

Faced with this accusation programme makers and schedulers will no doubt point out that they can’t live in the past, and that there wasn’t the competition for viewers when a Dennis Potter or a John Mortimer was writing for television in the Seventies and Eighties.

They have to get good viewing figures to justify their jobs.
Do they? Really? It’s possible to understand that argument from ITV, although it’s now hard to believe that this channel once made brilliant documentaries for World In Action and terrific drama as a matter of course.

But, yes, things have changed. There’s a lot of competition now for them from Sky and other satellite channels, not to mention DVDs. ITV have to make money to survive as a business, and making money is only achieved by satisfying advertisers with big audiences.
So I suppose they have something of an excuse.

But it’s no excuse for the BBC. They don’t have to make money. We give it to them through our licence fee, in my case very happily, because I’m a great BBC fan. But there’s no imperative for them to get huge audiences. Their only imperative surely it to make great television, as the Americans, once mocked as having the worst possible TV, are now doing so very well with their series Six Feet Under, Lost, 24 Hours and The West Wing.

Somehow we don’t do that over here so much any more.
But nor is making great television achieved by aiming specifically at certain demographic groups made up of mainly younger people. Indeed many older viewers who write to me feel that TV is purposely pitched at young adults, and that there’s nothing for them to watch.

I’m sure there’s some truth in this. It may be the result of the ageism which seems endemic among television staff, but it’s certainly a nonsense that so much of TV appears to be made for young audiences, who don’t want to watch because they’re out living their lives, as they should be, while those who do want to watch, namely older people, can’t find anything to suit them.

I used to think that as the number of television channels grew so would the quality. But that hasn’t turned out to be the case, although I know that when viewers get used to seeking out BBC 4 ‒ “the place to think, as the BBC tells us ‒ they might find some very nice surprises.

So, what kind of programmes do I think the heads of drama of all the TV stations should be commissioning? Well, here’s a clue for drama. Some years ago BBC-2, I think, ran a series called Decalogue by a Polish film maker, each episode being a drama concerning a modern look at one of the Ten Commandments. It was stunning, sometimes frightening, moving, and very, very thought provoking.

They could give something like that a go. I think that’s what both Stephen Fry and I would like to see.

Charlie Watts, 1969

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

CHARLIE WATTS ( Evening Standard, July 1969)

There are two brands of Rolling Stones: there are the big, bad ones, who sometimes appear to have been created for the specific benefit of the Sunday newspapers; and there are the others.

Brian Jones appeared, I suppose, to be the baddest of them all, and Mick Jagger and Keith Richard are cast in the same die. But that image doesn’t fit the new Stone, Mick Taylor, or Bill Wyman or Charlie Watts at all.

Bill is a member of the Royal Horticultural Society, has an enormous butterfly collection and is, in effect, a virtual recluse in his Suffolk castle. And Charlie – well, Charlie’s Charlie, the man who commutes to his job as a Rolling Stone on the Southern Region – Lewes to Victoria Station: Charlie, the happy family man (‘although I have my days’), the artist, the jazz fanatic and the obsessional collector.

‘What I like about money,’ says Charlie, in his slow and slightly lugubrious way, ‘is that if I want to buy a pound of peaches I don’t have to buy half a pound. I can have a pound. And that’s nice, isn’t it? I don’t spend a lot really, apart from on things I’m collecting, but it’s just nice to know I can if I want to.’

He is not the most publicity conscious rock and roll star in the world. Rather he is shy and reserved, and it came as a total shock this week when he rang the Rolling Stones’ office and said wasn’t it about time someone interviewed him.

‘He’s never done it before. We can’t think what’s got into him,’ said the Stones’ publicist. ‘Maybe he feels he’s doing his bit for the them, while Mick is away in Australia.’

Charlie and Shirley Watts and their baby Serafina live in what in the thirteenth century was a hunting lodge for the Archbishop of Canterbury. It’s a higgledy-piggledy smallholding of nine hundred years of different architectural styles, one bit having been added as another was knocked down. At the back there are various barns and a cottage and walled gardens so that it’s rather difficult to tell exactly where the house ends and the outbuildings begin. A couple of friends are living in the cottage part of the house.

There are more than forty acres in all, some of it farmed, some of it as pasture for Shirley’s six horses and donkey, and then there’s a very big garden which keeps one man busy full time. It’s an exceptional home, where every day you’re likely to discover something new. If you can imagine a place where a thousand years of English culture and architectural style has all been accumulated on one plot then this is it.

Charlie doesn’t drive so Shirley brought him to meet me at the local pub. Alcohol gives him a headache, so he drank tomato juice, chatting with the landlord and me about the Test score. ‘Fancy the Kiwis doing so well,’ he kept saying over and over all day.

Back at his home he took me on a guided tour. He’s strangely embarrassed by the whole affair of being interviewed because he doesn’t want to appear flash. ‘I suppose I ought to say that Princess Margaret or someone comes to see me,’ he jokes. ‘I always seem to give the wrong impressions. I don’t want people saying, “See what he’s done with his money.” I don’t really think it concerns them. So you won’t write too much about the house, will you?

‘I’m an obsessional collector. If I were Paul Getty I’d just keep buying things. My favourite collection is my guns.’ (They’re mainly from the American Civil War.) ‘But I collect everything.’ And to prove it he takes me off to a sale in Lewes in the afternoon. It’s his first time at a sale as he usually buys from antique shops, and he is mortified about having to share his new experience with a reporter.

In a month or so it will be time for the Rolling Stones to go back on the road after a break of more than two years, performances all over Europe and America having been lined up.

‘Until the last two weeks or so we’d been recording practically every day all this year. I’m not really looking forward to going back on the road because I never ever liked it. I used to enjoy playing in clubs best. When we decided to make our comeback, Mick wanted three hundred thousand in Hyde Park and I wanted to play in Ken Collyer’s to about twelve hundred.

‘I like the actual playing but I hate the living out of suitcases that goes into it. Before the Hyde Park concert I was only nervous that the band would fall apart at some time, not nervous at all about playing in front of all those people. I used to like it when there were riots. We’ve always been a crash and wallop group, and I used to get excited when we weren’t able to carry on after three numbers.’

Before he became a Rolling Stone, he and his wife (who is a sculptor) were at Hornsey Art College, and some years ago he drew and wrote an excellent little book as a tribute to his idol Charlie Parker – Ode to a High Flying Bird. Was he ever sorry, I asked, that he hadn’t continued his career in art?

‘No, never. I can do all that now. We have our own studio here and we can do what we want. I work at it in phases. I’m not doing much now. But I have my drums in the studio, too, and I practise on them just about every day. Being a drummer with the Stones is much more creative than a lot of people think. If Keith writes a song then I can turn it into a samba, maybe, or a waltz or anything. And if he likes it then that’s fine. But in some other types of music if a song is a waltz then you can’t do anything about it. The dots are there on the paper and you just have to play it as it’s written.

‘I suppose I find it difficult to justify to myself everything I have, and because of this I’m at a crossroads between grandeur and straight living. Everything I have means a lot to me, of course, but it’s not really as good as a good laugh, is it?’

Keith Richards, 1969

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

KEITH RICHARDS ( Evening Standard, December 1969)

There were four births and four deaths during the Rolling Stones free concert at Altamont, California, last week. Even the Stones were shocked, said Keith Richards, as he reflected on the events at his Cheyne Walk, Chelsea home yesterday.

‘I thought the show would have been stopped, but hardly anybody seemed to want to take any notice. Oh yes, there were the people selling acid. That’s the way it is at those free concerts.

‘There are so many people there that the police just stay away, you know. They just try to keep the traffic moving ten miles away. In a way those concerts are a complete experiment in social order – everybody has to work out a completely new plan of how to get along.’

The crowds between three hundred thousand and five hundred thousand were policed by Hell’s Angels, the Californian motorcycle gangs, and according to Press reports it was they who were responsible for much of the violence. One boy was stabbed to death by a group of them when he produced a gun.

‘The violence just in front of the stage was incredible. Looking back I don’t think it was a good idea to have Hell’s Angels there, but we had them at the suggestion of the Grateful Dead who’ve organised these shows before, and they thought they were the best people to organise the concert.

‘The trouble is it’s a problem for us either way. If you don’t have them to work for you as stewards, they come anyway and cause trouble. Last week was my first experience of American Hell’s Angels. I believe the alternative would have been the Pink Panthers. I wouldn’t like to say whether they would have been any more vicious.

‘But to be fair, out of the whole three hundred Angels working as stewards, the vast majority did what they were supposed to do, which was to regulate the crowds as much as possible without causing any trouble. But there were about ten or twenty who were completely out of their minds – trying to drive their motorcycles through the middle of the crowds.

‘Really the difference between the open air show we held here in Hyde Park and the one there is amazing. I think it illustrates the difference between the two countries. In Hyde Park everybody had a good time, and there was no trouble. You can put half a million young English people together and they won’t start killing each other. That’s the difference.’

He moved into his Chelsea mansion in August. It cost £50,000 freehold (‘I drive a hard bargain’) and had previously been the home of Anthony Nutting, MP. There’s a blue plaque on the house next door which says that George Eliot lived there, and just a few houses down the road Mick Jagger owns a similar-styled house. I wonder whether there will ever be blue plaques on the homes of Jagger and Richard.

It’s the first house Keith has owned in London and he lives there with his girlfriend, Italian film actress Anita Pallenberg and their four-month old baby Marlon.

He met Anita through Brian Jones. ‘I think she turned up in Munich or something like that,’ he says vaguely. Or did he bump into her in the Scotch (of St James’s) when all the disco scenes were raving. Anyway it was quite a while ago, he thinks. About 1965.

‘Anita was with Brian and then there was a whole scene in Morocco when Anita and I left Brian behind – which didn’t really help matters. It happens to everybody at some time during their lives. I had a chick run off with Jimi Hendrix once. I think he’s a nice cat actually.

‘I have no guilt feelings about Brian. He was completely responsible for himself as we all are. There are some people who you just know aren’t going to get old. There was this friend of ours called Tara Browne who died about three years ago and, at the time, Brian and I agreed that he, Brian, wouldn’t live very long either. I remember saying “you’ll never make thirty, man” and he said “I know”.’

The tour of America has excited him enormously. The generation gap has, he feels, accelerated and polarised enormously quickly in the few years since the Rolling Stones were last there.

‘Sometimes,’ he says, ‘we had to travel on ordinary commercial airlines to get from one town to the next and we’d have middle-aged fellows coming up to us saying “what’s wrong with my son who keeps locking himself in the bathroom and turning on?”

‘But even though I was foolish enough to get caught, and in doing so advertise the fact that I smoked pot, I feel no responsibility for what anybody else may do with their bodies, or what they may put into it.

‘We were down in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, to cut a few tracks last week and you couldn’t even get a can of beer. It’s a dry county. And people there are going through the same thing for a beer that people everywhere else are going through for pot or grass or acid or whatever. And they’re driving about hiding six-packs of beer under their seats. Getting caught with a bottle of whisky is like being caught with a needle in your arm.’

Joni Mitchell, 1970

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

JONI MITCHELL ( Evening Standard, January 1970)

‘The money you get paid as a singer is all out of proportion. In America they pay you to sing – but they don’t pay the birds to sing in the trees. So it really is ridiculous. But I don’t want to give to charity just to appease my conscience. I really want to be sure to do some good with my money – although I do get pangs of conscience when I’m buying jewels and there are children starving in Biafra. Really I’d like to help with the balance of nature. It would be good to help clean up some river or something so the fish could live in it again. I really want to do my part to make the world get better. My music is how I like to help people: with my money I’d like to help the land.’

Joni Mitchell is a poet, a singer and a fervent anti-pollutionist – pollution being the most fashionable thing to be ‘anti’ at this moment. Perhaps that sounds more cynical than I intend it: but it does seem to be that, every few months or so, the whole of that section of society around which youth culture is modelled, takes up some new social evil or phenomenon, preaches platitudes to the converted, and then quickly forgets about it and moves on to something new.

I met Joni Mitchell this week and, when there was a lull in the conversation, she played me what she called a little bit of her Ecology Rock and Roll – a track from her new album where she sings a biting refrain that goes ‘We paved Paradise and put up a parking lot’. (Big Yellow Taxi)

‘That really happened,’ she says. ‘When I was in Hawaii, I arrived at the hotel at night and went straight to bed. When I woke up the next day, I looked out of the window and it was so beautiful, everything was so green and there were white birds flying around, and then I looked down and there was a great big parking lot. That’s what Americans do. They take the most beautiful parts of the continent and build hotels and put up posters and all of that and ruin it completely.’

Joni is twenty-six and responsible for writing what I reckon to be one of the most sensitive songs of the Sixties, Both Sides Now. She wrote it during the period of her marriage break-up three or four years ago, but it didn’t become generally well known until the Judy Collins recording was issued last year.

‘I was brought up in Alberta and while I was at college began singing in small night clubs. When I was twenty, I went back east to Toronto to try to sing for my living. I was working steadily until I met another folk singer from Detroit. We were married and went to live in Detroit, which is really a very decadent and internally decaying city – very unstimulating. And then my marriage was dissolved, mostly because of our separate careers.

‘It’s difficult to maintain a relationship when you’re married to your career, like I was to mine, and he was to his. We tried to work as a duo, but our ideas didn’t go together. We held each other back in our modes of expression by trying to compromise. I was divorced at twenty-two, but really I don’t want to talk about that.

‘My husband and I had an understanding about it, and the people who were most upset were my friends in Canada. In many ways Canada is more like England and they don’t accept divorce and separation as easily as they do in the States.

‘I don’t like talking about my life. It seems to me that when you may say at one time may be quite different from what you might say two weeks later. I hardly ever do interviews at all. I don’t care if I need them for my career or not. I remember when I was about fourteen I was going to a prom and having my hair dried at the hairdressers and they gave me a movie magazine to read. It was all about the marriage of Sandra Dee and Bobby Darin breaking up. And I thought “what a bummer it must be to have a life that is so public, to have people know so many things about you”. To read all those things doesn’t appeal to me personally, so I don’t like to contribute to that kind of reading.’

Her singing voice has a shrill, piercing untrained ring about it, but her imagery is acute and rich. ‘I think I’m both poet and singer,’ she says. ‘My words can stand up by themselves without being sung and I’m working on a book of poetry now which I hope to have finished by the summer.’

Two albums and a series of concert tours of the States have left her quite well off and she now owns a house in Laurel Canyo. But she feels her public life is so full that she has to short-change her friends. Her particular friends at the moment are the members of the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young super-group and she’s knitted scarves for them all.

Sometimes she speaks with a bald naïveté which disarms. Her shyness bothers her because it means that she can’t feel as relaxed at parties as she’d like to, and she gets very nervous before going on stage, but she thinks too, it’s the reason for her gift. ‘My mind isn’t quick and sharp in certain ways. Not on social levels, anyway. And now because of my stature as an artist I tend to intimidate people, and then because of that they try to intimidate me.’

She was an only child and her creative interests were always encouraged. But at nine she spent half a year in hospital with polio (‘I had to learn to walk again’) and passed the time by singing to a captive audience of a little boy of six in the bed across the room. From then on she began to get more interested in writing.

The conversation lags and she makes for her immediate and automatic escape: would I like to hear some more music, she asks. I say I would, and this time I catch the phrase ‘Pull up the trees, put them in a tree museum, and charge the people a dollar and a half to see them.’

POSTSCRIPT: The ecology movement mushroomed overnight at the beginning of 1970 and I suspect I was being less than fair to Joni Mitchell in implying that she was jumping on to a fashionable bandwagon. She and I never really hit it off, due largely to the constant interruptions of her manager. Despite that, I became a very big fan and wrote my first novel to her accompaniment.

David Essex

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

David Essex (2008)

Back in the Seventies film producer David Puttnam asked me to go and see a young, hitherto unknown actor playing Jesus in the show Godspell, which was a surprise hit in London’s West End at the time. The actor’s name was David Essex, and he was, Puttnam was convinced, perfect for the film we were planning---That’ll Be The Day.
Although That’ll Be the Day is remembered now as a cult film about the birth of British rock music, it was also a rather edgy story about a school drop-out who scarcely does a decent thing in the entire story.
We’d been worried that our hero was so unsympathetic audiences wouldn’t empathise with him. And then we saw David Essex. Who wouldn’t love this good looking boy with a cheeky grin? He could get away with murder. Girls adored him and boys identified with him. When released the film was a huge hit for us all, as was its sequel Stardust.
An important storyline thread in That’ll Be The Day was set in a fairground, and now David Essex is heading back to the dodgems in All The Fun Of The Fair, a new stage musical he’ s co-written, which will include several David Essex hits, as well as some of his lesser known songs.
“Even before we did That’ll Be The Day I was always fascinated by funfairs,” he told me this week, the first time we’d met in decades. “I always thought there was an undercurrent of really tangible violence about fairs, while at the same time they were a great place to have a good time. I even worked on one for a couple of weeks when I was about fourteen.
“So a couple of years ago I sat down with writer Jon Conway, whose family had been in circuses, and we came up with the idea of a show set in a funfair. We didn’t want it to be a fluffy thing with girl dancers and it isn’t. It’s very earthy, a story that takes place in the underbelly of the funfair world. To me it’s like a play with music.”
We met in a private room in a West End hotel. Once he was thought of as a pretty boy, but now he’s become a solid, tougher looking man, his once luxuriant black hair sparse and white, a slight beard starting. But the eyes are still blue, the looks and charm are still there.
After the success of That’ll Be The Day and Stardust everyone connected with those films assumed that he would go on to be a very famous movie star. The camera loved him and he had a stillness on film which is rare.
But it didn’t happen. The British film industry shrank in the late Seventies and early Eighties, and the good parts weren’t offered. He could have gone to Hollywood, he says. The choice was there. But in the meantime he’d become a very big rock star in Britain.
“I don’t think any of my career was really planned,” he says. “It was more a case of reacting to what was happening day by day.”
What happened was that he became a juggler with his own career, one minute a rock star and songwriter, then suddenly appearing as Che in the original version of Evita, or Fletcher Christian in the first show he co-wrote, Mutiny!, based on the Mutiny on the Bounty.
“I’ve always liked doing different things, so I’ve always been thinking ‘what’s next?’. I try to satisfy myself and hope that what I do relates to a wider circle.”
Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t, the critical savaging he suffered for Mutiny! still remembered, although he wants me to know that the public enjoyed the show and it ran for a year and a half. “I think I listened to too many people then, thinking they must know better. They don’t always.”
Still the quietly spoken, low-key, self-contained and cautiously private person I first met all those years ago, there’s always been an inner-confidence about him, though his early life hardly seemed promising.
An only child, brought up in an East End prefab and then council flat, he left school at fifteen. “Actually I think it was more like 14. I never used to go. And when I did they’d just send me and Frankie Lampard (the famous father of Chelsea footballer Frank Lampard) off to play football. I played for West Ham Schoolboys. Frankie said I could have made it as a professional if I’d stuck at it, but I think he was just being kind.”
His first job was as an apprentice electrical engineer on a factory floor in Ilford. But then a man who wanted to get into pop management spotted him playing drums in a group.”
The man was called Derek Bowman, and he would spend the next thirty years single-mindedly devoting his life to shaping his protégé’s career, arranging for speech lessons to lose some of the Cockney in Essex’s voice, singing lessons to widen his range, and arranging introductions to anyone he thought might be able to help. Bowman died in 1995.
“He was my mentor. Without Derek I certainly wouldn’t have done what I’ve done. Derek introduced me to the theatre, which as a working class boy I’d never seen. He was the man who taught me what an avocado pear was, too. You’d never have seen me in Godspell if it hadn’t been for Derek.”
And was Bowman possibly in love with him?
“I don’t think so. He was like an older brother, and I’d been an only child. But there was never anything sexual. We never had those sort of discussions. It was just day to day work. And Derek was meticulous. Actually, I think he was asexual. But it was his insistence in persevering despite people’s indifference to me that motivated me and still motivates me.”
That indifference took years to overcome, with flop records, a walk-on moment in a Carry On film and understudying Tommy Steele in pantomime. When finally the part in Godspell arrived, Essex was already married to Maureen, a girl he’d met in the East End. With their daughter Verity on the way, he was unemployed and just about to take a job as a van driver, when the phone call came and in a moment his life was changed for ever.
Suddenly he was a star with the look of the moment. But it was difficult playing a rock star in Stardust, while his real life was mirroring his fictional life in the film. “I was never comfortable with all the hysteria around me,” he says. “The life of a rock star was difficult.”
By most standards, he was, however, a pretty well behaved one. “There were temptations, but drugs never really interested me. Thank God! I think my police force was Verity, and wanting her to respect her dad. I never wanted her to see anything about her dad that she wouldn’t be proud of. So in many ways I have to be grateful to her because I’m not a hundred per cent strong. I’m not perfect. I’m not a monk. But having her in the back of my mind at that time helped me.”
A son, Danny, followed before his first marriage ended. Various other girls came and went, about whom he resolutely won’t talk, before a second marriage in 1991 to American punk singer Carlotta Christy from the group Rash of Stabbings produced twin boys, Kit and Bill. That, too, has now broken up. He won’t say why.
At one point both Kit and Bill played for West Ham Schoolboys, too, but equally like him they gave up football to follow a life in music.
“I was angry at the time because they have so much flair and talent. They played cricket for Surrey schoolboys, as well. Then they hit fourteen and just stopped, like I did. They’re twenty now and building a studio where they live with their mother in Rhode Island. She and I are still good friends. I’ll make my next album there.”
He lives alone in a flat in London’s Covent Garden, although he also has a house in the south of France. It sounds like a lonely life for a grandfather of 61, but if he is lonely, he doesn’t admit it. “I’m very happy,” he insists. “I’m well off. I’ve got everything I need.”
And is he in love?
A hesitation and then. “Er, no!” And the file on his private life snaps shut once again.
The loss of his mother last year affected him badly. “She’d never been ill in her life, never even taken a Lemsip, but went into hospital because she had some swelling on her knee. I was on tour at the time so I wasn’t around as much as I’d like to have been, but when I got back to London I went to see her and discovered that she’d been moved to an isolation ward.
“I asked what was going on and a nurse told me she’d got MRSA. They gave her antibiotics, but then she got pneumonia. I went to see the consultant and I said, ‘This is outrageous. This is a hospital’. He just said: “’Very dangerous places, hospitals’.
“Then she died. It was unexpected and upsetting.”
As a star, though he’s been hugely successful, he’s never been easy to classify because he’s worked in so many different areas. He hasn’t mixed much with any fashionable sets in the theatre or rock music world either, and if he sometimes feels he hasn’t been taken as seriously as he might have, it would be understandable.
“I think it’s possible that when I was young the looks might have got in the way. At the time I didn’t really realise I was good looking, but now I look at old photographs and I can see that I was. Sometimes I’ve thought it might have been quite nice to have had pimples and a great big nose and then perhaps the music would have been taken more seriously.”
What the critical reaction to All The Fun Of The Fair will be he won’t know until after it opens, but this is a key moment in his career. He’ll be playing a middle aged man, with middle aged problems. The errant youth in the show will be his character’s son.
“When I remember the critical reaction to Mutiny! I sometimes think that maybe I was thought to have overstepped my place, in that only Noel Coward, Anthony Newley and I have appeared in West End musicals we’ve also written. So I hope I don’t get that reaction this time.
“It would be nice to do this and then, if the opportunity arose, to rebuild my film career. Actually, I think I’m more castable in films now than ever I was before. I’d like to be cast against type and maybe play someone like an East End gangster, no-one good. I’m not disappointed that I didn’t have a bigger film career, because I never motivated myself to look for it, and most of the parts I’ve been offered weren’t right. But if a good part came along I’d be very interested.”
Which, considering the heavy set middle aged man with the still twinkling eyes that he’s become, might just be a very, very good idea.

back to the top of the page

Tom Stoppard

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

Tom Stoppard (The Sunday Times. January 1980)

It seems to me that you never meet your heroes on equal terms – not even at tea-time in the Texas Pancake House in Charing Cross Road where Tom Stoppard and I deliberated together over the nutritious merits of a Shiloh as opposed to a Louisiana Lemon and eventually settled for a couple of coffees.
            Engaging as he was, and flatteringly well briefed in the vicissitudes of my own career, I could not quite put from my mind the fact that he had not only written but alsounderstood all of the arguments in Jumpers and that he, as much as anybody, had scared me away from ever attempting to write for the theatre. Quit while you’re behind is my motto.
            It therefore came as an agreeable illustration of Stoppard’s own character when he admitted that he had suffered a certain nervousness himself when Otto Preminger had asked him to adapt Graham Greene’s novel The Human Factor for the cinema.
            “To be honest if Otto had said I can’t pay you but you’ll get one or two lunches with Graham Greene I might have done the job,” he says. “I was much more nervous of displeasing Graham Greene than I was of displeasing Otto. One doesn’t want to monkey around with Graham Greene.
            “Ironically that should have been the least of my fears. Graham Greene has now seen the film and he said how surprised he was that I had stayed so close to the novel. He even suggested that should there be a next time I should feel free to take more liberties with the work.”
            There was one slightly sticky moment, though, when Preminger felt that he needed a longer flashback to Africa to explain the love story which is the core of the book. Graham Greene wasn’t keen on this idea; nor was Stoppard.
            In the end Stoppard wrote about 16 pages of his own. It is these scenes he will be most interested in seeing, he says, not having yet seen the finished film although it is opening next week.             “I believe they had a showing the other night but nobody bothered to invite me. It’s always the same with films, isn’t it?” he says and laughs.
            Nor was he present at the filming when a considerable scrum of big names (Gielgud, Attenborough, Jacobi, et al) were queuing up for their marks. “I was not free to be there,” he says. “The best definition of film making I know is John Boorman’s, who said: ‘It is the business of turning money into light and then back into money again.’
            “A film set is also the triumph of all the forces in life which exist to ensure that the maximum number of people are wasting the most time at the biggest cost to the smallest advancement at any given moment.”
            The good thing about Otto Preminger, says Stoppard, is that he does stick to the script. “And The Human Factor isn’t the sort of piece where actors and directors change the dialogue. I remember the only time I encountered Burt Reynolds he was sitting in a smoke-filled caravan with a director and they were scribbling away at a screenplay that someone had clearly been paid a great deal of money to write. And when I was introduced to him he looked up and said: ‘Hello, can you do anything about these last 20 pages?’”
            He finds that very funny. He appears to be amused by most things about film-making. It is, he says, astonishing to him that films are not rehearsed more. He feels very much at home in a rehearsal room working on his plays with actors. And indeed he maintains that until the play has been rehearsed and until he has seen it performed before an audience he cannot be absolutely sure of what are the relative values within any particular two minutes.
            “I’m quite a good counter puncher,” he says, I can look at a scene and think ‘that could be different’. So I often do quite a lot of minor tinkering. In the case of Night and Day I rewrote six pages three months after it had opened because they were inert. Now they are definitely ert. I can’t think of any play I have written that has been the same in the second edition as it was in the first.”
            He is a youthful looking 42, a man who clearly relishes being the most highly praised playwright in the world. When I first met him I thought of the old line about the captain of the school cricket team. But a little later on as I observed him being photographed in the middle of Charing Cross Road, calm, helpful and seemingly unselfconscious while traffic shaved his thighs, left and right, it struck me how enormously he must enjoy being the star.
            I put it to him that his work is now studied for A-levels. At first he tried to make a joke about how worrying it was that standards had dropped so far. But then he dropped the false modesty and added how good it was that the system has loosened up and liberalised itself so much. When he was at school they didn’t even do anything as contemporary as T. S. Eliot.
            At the moment he is writing two lectures which he has to give at Cambridge later this year on the subject of the distinction between theatre as an event and theatre as a text. He promised to write them two years ago and has only now found time to work of them.
            He is also astonishingly prolific but when I asked him what he wanted to do in the future he frowned and said that was a good question and then paused before saying: “When I was 25 or even 32 that question could have been happily answered by what I’ve now done. But it seems to be an ever-receding grail.
            “I’d like to write a play which is as good as the play I think I’m capable of writing. But unfortunately, inevitably, the edge is blunted once one has had a play on. Before I’d had a play performed I couldn’t imagine anything as dreamlike as that. But that was 15 years ago when there seemed to be more excitement about the theatre than there is now.”
            He thought about this for a little while longer and then added: What I’m really saying is that when I started I wrote a play because I wished to be a playwright. Now I write plays because I am a playwright. It’s not quite the same thing.”

back to the top of the page

Sir David Attenborough, 1980

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

David Attenborough (The Sunday Times, January 1980)

David Attenborough has done an awful lot to make copulation respectable during the past quarter of a century. For years now he has been showing us film of all manner of creatures great and small caught in that most intimate of acts, and never a whisper of complaint has there been. As long as you leave sex to the birds, bees and fleas you can’t go wrong – on television.

“Yes, they’re always at it in my programmes, aren’t they?” he says, and then roars with laughter. “I order it in my shopping list now. I write down in my script ‘frogs enter shot, copulate and then exit under leaf,’ and then blow me, six months later some cameraman from Brazil sends me just what I wanted.”

He thinks the millipedes are amongst the most fascinating copulators. “They are a group of animals who have come out of the water relatively recently and aren’t yet used to living on land. When they were in the water it was easy for them because they just had to squirt the various stuff into the water and leave nature to do the rest. But now there’s a terrible business where they’re trying to find their sexual openings.

“A male millipede has his sex pouch on his 11th ring and he takes out the sperm with a feeler-like hand. He then has to bung it all into the female’s genital opening which occurs on her fifth ring, and you can see him counting looking for the opening – one-two-three-four-five. And if he misses he’s got to start all over again. Oh, it’s absolutely fascinating … what … I should say!”

But do they enjoy it?

He laughs again: “The expression on a millipede’s face is not all that easy to construe.”

Attenborough is probably Britain’s best known teacher. His Life On Earth series was watched by 15 million viewers to BBC2 and was sold to “most other countries,” while the book of the series was by far the most successful title of last year with over 850,000 copies sold, and is still top of The Sunday Times best sellers. Was he flattered by this, I asked?

“Yes and no. If you put something of the astonishment of a hummingbird on to the screen with any degree of honesty then you just have to be on to a winner. It is my good fortune that my voice links all of these fascinating things. And it is equally my good fortune that because I was once the head of BBC2 I seem to trail a cloak of papal infallibility about me. People think I must be right when I want to do something because I once told them I liked one of their programmes or something like that.”

He is a man of intense, happy enthusiasm. His home, which is in a quiet Richmond road, is littered with souvenirs from his worldwide expeditions, masks, faces, primitive sculptures, shields, pots and seemingly everywhere female goddesses. Everything he shows is produced with a leap and a bound across the room and then a burst of “Look at this … what … I’ll say!” rather like a schoolboy requesting admiration of his newest cricket bat.

“See these … shark’s teeth … dug them out of a rock in Malta once when we were on holiday with the children. Holidays have to be expeditions, don’t they? Seventy five million years old. What!” (Or was it 250 million years old?) “Or this … fossilised trilobite … perfect, isn’t it? Or this? Shark’s tooth fashioned into a brooch as a fertility symbol for Victorian ladies. A hundred years old. Got it for ten bob in the King’s Road.”

Although he was originally trained as a zoologist and geologist, Attenborough’s expeditions have led him inevitably into the fields of anthropology and archaeology, and for the next two months he can be seen once again as a tele-teacher narrating an eight-part series of films on the art and religions of South East Asia in Michael Macintyre’s series Spirit of Asia.

“You’re right when you say that everything I have seen has been humbling, but I don’t think it has necessarily given me a sense of the religious,” he says. “In fact I’m not even sure what you mean by the term ‘religious experience.’ I’m certainly not a conventional Christian. I suppose I’m an agnostic. One of the philosophical aspects which I find most difficult to take is that the world is man’s oyster. I find that quite foreign.

“It seems to me to be acceptable to say that man is part of the world, but the world doesn’t belong to man. It is certain that I am related to the crocodile, but that doesn’t mean that I can blow his guts out without thought or care so that I can make a nice handbag. That’s an intolerable thought.

“And while since we are part of the world, it is quite justifiable for us to use cowhide to cover a sofa, it wouldn’t be at all justifiable to cover that sofa in hide of a very rare species of whale, for instance.”

For the future he has half formed plans of a trip to the Himalayas to make a film similar to Life on Earth … “but cutting the cake in a different way.” One thing he never wants to do again is run a network.

“I did BBC2 for eight years and at the end I said ‘never again.’ Do you know meetings would go on for full days at a time, and I would find myself thinking ‘what on earth am I doing here?’ It was wonderful to be given the opportunity of starting a new network where ratings weren’t the only thing that mattered. But there are too many other things I want to do with my life.”

back to the top of the page

William Peter Blatty, 1972

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

William Peter Blatty author of The Exorcist (Evening Standard, January 1972)

Before Bill Blatty began to write The Exorcist he was told by a priest friend that merely investigating the occult might lay him open either psychologically or in reality to possession. Undeterred, he wrote, and turned out what has become one of the best-selling novels in years in the United States.

But the priest was partly right: things did begin to happen to Blatty which he was unable to explain. It was a scary period, he says.

The Exorcist is what Blatty likes to call a theological thriller. It’s what I’d call a riveting read, about a young girl who begins to show severe psychological disturbances, which cannot be explained psychiatrically, and which eventually lead her mother to call in a Jesuit priest to perform an exorcism.

The detective work comes on several levels; there’s a murder, so the police begin to get suspicious, and then there’s the much more interesting detection carried out by the priest to find out if the girl really is possessed or simply in a state of hysteria.

It’s the kind of book you pick up (and after a seducingly slow start) find that there’s no way you can put it down again.

On Monday The Exorcist is published in Britain, and in May the film version goes on location, under the direction of William Friedkin, the man who made The French Connection.

Blatty, who was paid a record fee for the novel by a film company of more than a quarter of a million pounds, plus a big percentage, is to co-produce the film. As a screen writer of long standing (he wrote among others the Peter Sellers film A Shot In The Dark and What Did You Do In The War, Daddy?) he wants to make sure that everything goes just perfectly considering the size of his percentage.

He’s 44, the youngest son of a Lebanese couple who emigrated to New York on a cattle boat in 1923. He won a scholarship to a Jesuit school, and then another to the Jesuit Georgetown University in Washington.

Even today, although he describes himself as a relaxed Catholic, and is divorced from his wife, he still has many Jesuit friends.

After a spell in the United States Air Force he joined the U.S. Information Service and worked in the Lebanon for some time. He speaks, what he calls, kitchen Arabic.

After becoming director of publicity at the University of Southern California, he began writing articles and eventually screenplays and novels. For years he had a good and comfortable living, although he recalls that just two years ago he was reduced again to collecting 65 dollars a week as an unemployed writer. And then came The Exorcist.

He’s a tall and very dark and quiet man who looks considerably like King Hussein. And he chooses his words with utmost care.

“The Exorcist is based in part on a case which occurred in 1949 when I was an undergraduate at Georgetown which involved a 14-year-old boy. After a thorough psychiatric observation at a clinic over a period of weeks, it was clear that paranormal phenomena were happening to him that just couldn’t be explained.

“And then, when you realise that these things are happening in your own time you tend to re-examine sinister stories from history which you discredited because the observers at the time lacked psychiatric insights and the people were generally overly credulous.

“It is a fact that as early as 1583 the Catholic Church pointed out to its priests that people who thought they were possessed were usually in far greater need of a doctor than a priest.

“My interest in possession began with that case, and just to satisfy my own interest I read widely on it over the next twenty years.

“Then in 1969, I decided that I wanted to write something other than comedy, just to show that I wasn’t only a funny writer, and I began a thorough study of the subject over about eight months. I’ve now read every single work published in English on possession since 1940, as well as a few earlier things by Freud. And I would estimate that I’m certainly the leading expert on possession in America, possibly even the world. My Jesuit friends don’t know anything like as much as I do.”

But surely the Church still doesn’t admit to people being possessed by demons?

“In the Roman Ritual, large edition, you’ll find not only the ritual for exorcism, but the instructions for the exorcist, too. In fact, I believe there’s a major exorcism going on in the Eastern part of the United States at this very minute.

“In a review of the book recently in a Catholic magazine, a priest pointed out that there were striking similarities between the manifestations I’d written about and a case which he was following day to day. It’s apparently his job to follow these cases.”

Was he not afraid that his book, which is in parts terrifying, might induce people with certain neuroses to imagine that they too were possessed by some demon?

“Yes,” he admitted. “That’s true. We know that possession is at least 90 per cent of the time at least simply auto-suggestion in nature and I expected that there would be an increase in the number of people with these symptoms. And apparently there has been a dramatic rise in the number of people who think they need an exorcist.

“But I really don’t feel guilty about it because in the main these delusions have been present in other forms before the subjects read my book, and only now have they taken the form of possession.

“I had a fascinating letter from a woman who didn’t sound at all like a crank who told me that she had an incubus (a dream demon lover that is invisible: the feminine version is a succubus) and she told me that she’d been to two psychiatrists, one of whom had told her that any woman would give her right arm to have her problem and another who told her that she ought to go home and enjoy it. She didn’t think it was funny though, and had turned to me asking if I knew of anyone who could help her.

“But most of the mail I get is from people who have had some bizarre symptoms of some neurosis syndrome, and now having read about exorcism have decided ‘ah, that’s what I need’.”

Did he ever frighten himself when writing the book?

“Well, I don’t want to sound like a nut but as I was writing the last chapter and the epilogue I did have a series of bizarre experiences. For the first time in my life I got hung up on a Ouija board for 10 days.

“I’d never done it before but I found I couldn’t leave it alone. And I had the most definite feeling that I was communicating with the dead. Yes, I agree an awful lot of it could be auto-suggestion, and I knew all about how Ouija boards worked because I’d researched it so much for the book, but there were certain things which are not susceptible to explanation by the subconscious mind.”

He pauses for a long time here. Wondering. I think, whether to go on and risk ridicule. Then he went on.

“I thought it was my father communicating with me, and I got someone in to help validate the experience. She was a girl who could put herself into a self-imposed hypnotic trance and who would operate the planchette on the Ouija board. I didn’t touch it at all, and asked the questions in Arabic, which she didn’t understand a word of, and I got precisely the right answers.

“But then I thought well maybe subconsciously I was formulating the answers in English and she was picking them up from me telepathically.

“But then there were poltergeist experiences. Doing revision of the book at a friend’s house, the telephone rang and suddenly the receiver leapt off the hook. It happened to him first and then to me. So I asked a friend who did the acoustics for the Kennedy Centre what the possibilities were electrically and he said it was impossible. Then telephone engineers in two states confirmed that it was impossible. But we both saw it happen. That was the culmination of several incidents, but it was the one that in no way could be explained.

“An electric typewriter wrote a line of gibberish, but what do I know about electricity. Maybe there was a short circuit somewhere.
That was possible.”

Does he believe in possession?

“Well,” he looks cautious, “there’s almost nothing in this world that I know to be a fact. I think we make prudent judgments on things.

“Now while 97 or 98 per cent of the reported cases of possession can be explained by either fraud or a mental disturbance there still remains the two or three per cent that can’t. And, concerning these, I have made a prudent judgment that a bodyless, intelligent, non-human entity has somehow managed to take possession of a human being.

“Now whether that is the spirit of something dead, whether it’s a demon, or a devil in the sense of a fallen angel or whether in fact it’s just some kind of pure energy I don’t know.”

The reaction by the Jesuits has been amazing, and his book is, he says, considered as a great apologetic work in defence of Christianity and the supernatural. And in Rochester, New York, The Exorcist appears on the required reading list in the senior class at a Jesuit school. At other schools, however, and in more remote parts of the United States, there have been strong protests about the amount of obscenity in the book.

Did he know when he was writing it that he was on to a major best seller?

“Yes, I knew. I knew from the reaction of my secretary, who was too spooked to work on it when she was alone in the house. And somehow about half way through I realised that I’d achieved much more than I set out to do.”

Already they’re casting for the film version, and an offer has been made to Jane Fonda to take the part of the girl’s mother.

What about the priest, I asked? Isn’t it true that he’s based very much on yourself? “Yes,” he says. “Very much.”

And won’t you admit that you really want to play the part in the film? “Yes. That’s true, too. But how can I? I wrote the novel, the screenplay and I’m producing the film. Unless someone asks me to screen test for the part it would be just too embarrassing to suggest it myself.”

back to the top of the page

Muhammad Ali, 1971

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

MUHAMMAD ALI

Evening Standard (October 1971)

Muhammad Ali, stretched horizontally across the three first-class seats of the train compartment, was either asleep bored or riding on this Ali Special from Euston to Manchester.

Momentarily Ali allowed his eyelids to flicker the tiniest, meanest gesture of welcome, before settling back into the repose of the unconscious. The gentleman who had organised our meeting made some final request that I make it quick, rather as one may ask a hangman to spare the condemned the misery of time, and left us alone.

Muhammad made no sign of waking up to be interviewed. He was off to preach the virtues of Ovaltine to the people of the North and he probably thought he needed his energy for that. Or maybe the rigours of the Nigerian tour he had just completed had been too much for him. Touring Nigeria the Ali way can be very vigorous, they tell me. At any rate, he clearly wasn’t prepared to waste more than the minimal amount of energy on me.

Even General Gowan, political leader of Nigeria, had short shrift from Muhammad. ‘I used to do some boxing,’ said Gowon conversationally. ‘What did you box?’ asked Ali. ‘Apples or oranges?’

Anyway, here I am, with Ali, wondering what he did with the charisma this morning, puzzling about how to even get him to notice that I’m there, and finally, settling for the sleep talker that he turned out to be.

Now thirty, and technically, I suppose, the former heavy-weight champion of the world, he’d still be as pretty as he delighted in telling us all those years ago, if he weren’t so fat around the face these days. But pretty or not, champ or deposed, he remains the super-hero.

To me, boxing is the most bestial of pursuits, and the idea of two heavies clouting each other daft before a crowd of blood-hunters does nothing for my ideas about the innate nobility of man. But with Ali, boxing became almost a sport. Where Sonny Liston or Joe Frazier’s methods were to hack, hack and hack away, rather like a man felling a Giant Redwood, Ali turned boxing into a game of evasion. His idea was not to get hit, and his best moments, for me, were when he was wriggling himself out of some disastrous position against the ropes, or playing tick and pat-a-cake with sixteen-stone leviathans.

Ali was the hero: the cowboy in a white hat who would beat all the bullies, the man who was prepared to resist the draft before it became fashionable – ‘I ain’t got nothin’ against them Vietcong,’ he said, (but who really expected that the Pentagon would have been so inept in its public relations as to make Ali a martyr by sending him as fodder to Vietnam); and the man who was finally canonised by the people when the sportsmen of Madison Square Garden stripped him of his title. He became a hero because he was an individual.

And here I am now, sitting with this super-hero. And being polite and all that, the way you are with super-heroes. And wondering how in hell to wake him up.

Best, I think, to start off with some elementary stuff about boxing, and, like a man feeding a juke box with a shilling, I put a simple, straightforward questions and wait for the record to start spinning its answer.

‘Was Joe Frazier always as inarticulate as he is now?’ I joked (unkindly and wrongly, I admit now).

Ali, neat in his pale blue shirt, dark grey suit and with his calf high boots neatly to attention on the floor beside me, remains motionless. And I wait, until eventually his larynx reaches down for some reserves of strength and the music begins to play.

‘Naw. He was always like that. And one mo’ thing, too. He’s ugly.’

‘I heard he may never fight again.’

‘Yeah, I heard that, too. But I hope he’s all right. I know I have him a good whupping but I hope I didn’t whup him that bad.’

Thinking I’ve heard this tune before, I try for another song, and push home another coin into the soporific Wurlitzer.

Would he ever like any of his children to become boxers?

‘Nah. Doctors, lawyers, scientists, engineers. Never boxers. For me boxing was the best thing I could have done. It was the only way I could get rich. But if I could, I’d have been a great doctor or something like that.’

What will he do after he retires, which he’s promised to do after he regains his title, which will, he thinks, probably be sometime next year.

‘I’ll stay at home, and mow the lawns and spend some time with my family. I’m really tired of fighting, of being a boxer.

‘I’ll retire from the ring and dedicate my life to the freedom of the negroes in America. That’s a great job. I’m a Muslim minister and I’ll go round converting them to Elijah Muhammad. I’ll unite them, and free them mentally. We have to build a whole nation for ourselves. A separate nation. We can’t live with white Americans. It’s impossible. The cultures are too different. We’ve been there six hundred years and it’s time enough to know that we can’t live together. We wanna be free from the white man.’

‘But are you not playing the “white man’s game” by getting up there and fighting another black man in the ring for the white man’s profit?’

‘Nah. We git money, too. And I can use it as a platform to convert the people.

‘I don’t hate the white man. I know the white man. I don’t hate snakes and tigers because I know them. But their natures are different, and so is their singing and dancing. Some white people can’t live together. Some White Russians can’t live with Jewish Russians. White Englishman can’t live with white Turks. White Scotchmens can’t live with white Dutchmens. Black men don’t want to be with nobody but ourselves.’

Wasn’t he very frightened when he refused to be drafted?

‘No. I was frightened of God if I did join the army. I don’t fear no man. But I think the man who goes to war should be more frightened than the man who goes to jail. In jail he eats and sleeps. He dies in war. That makes sense, don’t it? I have a poem about it. Goes like this:

"Better far from all I see
To die fighting to be free
What more fitting end could be.
Better surely than in bed
Where in broken health I’m led
Lingering until I’m dead.
Etc.
Etc."

‘Did you write that by yourself?’

‘I’m not only a great boxer. I’m a genius. I ain’t just a dumb negro boxer. I’m a great writer, too. I’ve got lots more. It’s all being published soon. The biggest book in the history of publishing.’
I turn to the question of money.

‘Well I’m worth about two million dollars right now. I always stay in big suites.’

‘Frazier stayed in a little hotel room when he was here.’

‘Maybe he’s wise. Maybe he’s saving it for the winter. Big suites don’t mean nothin’. Right now I’m investing in real estate. It’s the only way.’

At that moment I was interrupted. ‘Would you mind …?’ asked one of the gentlemen promoters. I would, but what was the point?

For a fraction of a second, Ali’s eyes opened a mere slit, enough for him to lift his arm, and reach hold of my hand, in a dismissal shake.

When we got off the train at Manchester, I purposely mingled with the welcoming crowd to see whether Ali would betray the fact that he had been peeping during our chat and betray some recognition when he saw me. He didn’t. I stood right in front of him, and he smiled as though meeting me for the first time, anxious to wear the right public face.

Back to the top

David Bowie, February 1973

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

DAVID BOWIE (Evening Standard, February 1973)

The singularly most interesting aspect of the development of pop in the last couple of years has had less to do with the music being played than with the presentation of that music. And when it comes to stage acts Bowie is both the best and the most original.

Where Mick Jagger once pampered and teased his audience with the hint of something we used to call unisex, Bowie now treats us to a full-blown parade of sexual ambiguity, complete with make-up, dyed hair bright red and the exaggerated pouts and facial expressions of the mime artist.

The effect he creates is startling – not least, I suspect, because he dares to flout so deliberately the time-honoured law of pop music that rock idols had to appeal to the heterosexual desires of the females in the audience on the one hand, and to be objects with which the boys might identify on the other.

‘I’ve never considered myself anything to do with transvestites or drag acts,’ he told me this week. ‘I think what I’ve done on stage is to create a kind of neuter state. It isn’t unisex either, but it does incorporate both masculine and feminine aspects of sexuality. I think androgynous is the best word to describe us.’

Is he homosexual?

‘No … I’m bisexual. I first realised it when I was about thirteen or fourteen.’

Was he frightened of public scorn when he first realised he was bisexual?

‘No. I was more frightened of football. That makes me sound really fey doesn’t it? Well actually I was bemused by it. I suppose I’ve always been an outsider.’

He was brought up in Brixton where his father was a public relations man for Dr Barnardo’s Homes. After an education at a technical school he joined an advertising agency as a junior visualiser, playing saxophone in the evenings.

‘I only had the job for about six months, because I found I was much better at playing saxophone than selling gabardine macs. I’d already begun to play the guitar a little, but I got tired of playing other people’s material and began to write my own.’

By the time he was nineteen he was supporting himself as a full-time musician, having also been through a period working with a mime company. That, he says, was where he learned a lot of his stage craft, forming his own three-piece group called Feathers, which performed mime, dance, poetry and song. Then in 1969 he had his first hit album ‘Space Oddity.’

‘I suppose I was inspired by the newspaper malarkey about space shots and all that. It just sort of oozed out. There’s never any heavy thought behind much of my material. It just finds its way out. I have very few preconceived ideas about what I’m going to write.

‘Really I’ve always felt like a public warning about what’s going to happen. That’s how I consider myself. If you come right up to date I find that I wrote a lot of songs in America and now when I look at them the strongest thing to come out is the superficiality and decadence which surrounds the rock business at the moment. It seems to me that the kind of feeling generally heralds the coming of some kind of catastrophe – notably wars. I wouldn’t say that was a strong theme going through my next album but it’s definitely there.’

Now twenty-six, he’s married to an American girl called Angie and they have a little boy of eighteen months, Zowie Bowie.

‘Angie’s a writer,’ he says. ‘She writes theses. At the moment she’s writing one on the effects of extra-terrestrials on the human make-up. I haven’t read any of it yet because she’s in Detroit. We met at a dancing club about three years ago, and were married after about three months. Yes, it was quite quick. The main reason for getting married was that she was about to be slung out of the country. It was a good idea at the time. It seemed to be the only way to keep her here. It’s still a good idea. There’s not much I can say about Angie. We spend about fifty per cent of our time together and about fifty per cent apart. No, the absences don’t bother her. She travels, too.’

Why did he wear eye make-up, I wondered, noticing that his lids were heavy with a brightly coloured stage eye-shadow, although he wasn’t performing that day.

‘I’ve always worn make-up. I first began to fool around with it years ago when I was a mod. I was a very heavy mod, and I used to wear ankle swingers (white jeans that only reached the bottom of his calves) and luminous socks. I always wore Clearisil and eye-shadow then and I’ve never got out of it.

‘Really I like to change my appearance a lot. Oh yes, sure it’s narcissistic. My hair has been a variety of colours but I’ve settled on red over the last year. Really it’s a kind of blond colour. Fortunately it takes dyes well.

‘Make-up isn’t a new thing particularly. Elvis wore make-up, although the difference then was that we didn’t know it. I think it became inevitable because of the indifference there is to long hair these days. I mean I think the only possible shock factor to emerge was that guys would begin to wear make-up. I suppose I knew that years ago because I’ve always been involved with shock tactics.’

Why did he think that audiences could identify with him so much?

‘Well, I think they believe I’m a very truthful person. I’ve always been very honest in my approach to things. And because of that they know that they’re safe with me as an artist because I’m not going out of my way to hype them too much. What I try to do is to fantasise for them, because that was one of the main things I got out of any kind of entertainment and theatre when I was young.’

What did he think of the cult that’s grown up around him, and the other rock music acts copying his sexual ambiguity?

‘Well, they’re all part of the great misconception. It worries me because I wonder why all the other bands are doing it. I really don’t think they know why I do it. I am, I think, open to a greater degree of sensitivity, and this illustrates itself in my performance.

‘You see, a lot of my performance comes from the mime thing I went through. The mime artist will wear a white face so that any movement he shows on his face will become accentuated – he doubles the intensity. And as a writer and artist I try to mirror sensitivity.

‘People like to call what I do “glam-rock” or “rock-and-rouge”.’
Wasn’t it difficult being the first major rock star to admit to being bisexual?

‘No,’ he said. ‘Although I’m glad you qualified what you said with the word “admit” – because there have been lots of others and I’ve got names to prove it.’

Does he ever find that he’s becoming a figurehead for Gay Lib?

‘Well I think the Gay Lib people understand me, and I understand them very much, and I have a lot of sympathy of sorts for them. But being an independent I haven’t found a need for group therapy as such, or group togetherness to fight a cause. I don’t want to represent Gay Lib – I know too little about them, although I do know a number of people who are members and as people I find them very charming. But they attract an awful lot of ridicule, which is hard because a lot of them have to hold down very straight jobs.

‘I think being bisexual is a facet of my life, but not necessarily the most important. It certainly isn’t my foundation by any means. In the States it gets into horrendous proportions and it’s “fag-this” and “fag-that” and all the papers call me a “fag” – which is lovely.

‘But I don’t see why it should stop me from being an all-round entertainer. I am an all-round entertainer. My mother comes and sees us, and watches us on the telly and she loves us.’

Back to the top

Ken Kesey, 1969

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

KEN KESEY (Evening Standard May 1969)

You don’t meet too many men with the Stars and Stripes painted in enamel on their false teeth. Truth to tell Ken Kesey is the only one I know. Every time he smiles, which is pretty frequently on a good sunny day, the zip in his mouth breaks apart and his upper right incisor says a pepperminted ‘God Bless America’ in red, white and blue.

We’re rolling and waltzing, and power jerking and swanking and feeling good behind the blue, anti-glare windscreen of his maltreated Cadillac – Kesey and me and a New York girl disciple, all doe eyes and sweeping adoration; round we go along the edges of Hampstead Heath, down the lanes and under the blossom, and Kesey’s telling us how he came to be the one guy we know with an American flag printed on his tooth. And he’s talking in that down-home cowboy way that he does:

‘You see, I was running from the FBI when I crashed into my lawyer and wrecked my car. And somehow I caught my head, so that my tooth was hanging out by the nerves. But I had to keep hiding. So I waited in a Laundromat for a while. It’s funny how you can just sit in a Laundromat and no one ever thinks of looking for you there. But the pain was terrible, so I finally made it over to a dentist I know. But he also happened to be an acid-head. And while he was fixing me he said “Hey, d’you want a tooth with the Stars and Stripes on it?” and I said “Yeh, that’d be nice” and so here it is. You never think these things can really happen.’ And he unplugs his plate with its garish token and waves it around for all to see.

Ken Kesey, the man who began the LSD fascination of hippy California, who believes he invented the word ‘trip’, to describe the sensation, and then introduced psychedelia to provide a form of it; who turned on Hell’s Angels, and went on the first Magical Mystery Tour ever – years before the Beatles, is here in London, in a borrowed flat, en route for Stonehenge, the Wailing Wall and the Great Pyramid.

Here in London with his three children, his wife Faye, his friend Spider, and now some new followers like Dilly Disciple from New York who’s sitting here with us saying how we ought to stop and get some of Dr J. Collis Browne’s Chlorodyne on account of how it has some opium extract, and rabbiting on about his trip and that trip and whatever kind of trip a man can imagine.

And then there’s this other girl, too, who’s staying with the Kesey’s, ‘like she’s a Wasp,’ says Dilly Disciple, ‘with the hair and the turned up nose, and she’s very virginal and all that.’ And I get the idea that there’s no love lost between the Wasp and Dilly Disciple. But what a household it must be.

Kesey is thirty-three, and was born in Oregon. Faye, who is a woman of remarkable yet passive, tranquil beauty, was his childhood sweetheart, and they married in their first year of college. After college they graduated to a beat generation community, where Kesey wrote his first two novels one of which (One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest) was considered brilliant by some reviewers, and sold his body to a local clinic for their experiments into a drug called lysergic acid diethylamide – LSD. Under the surveillance of the white-coated clinic staff Ken Kesey had become the world’s first acid-head guinea pig.

Soon he was turning-on everyone in his community. But when the bulldozers came to remove the community they fixed up ‘an old 1939 International Harvester yellow school bus,’ wired it for the thousands of watts needed to play their rock and roll music, aerosolled it in Day-Glo mandalas, and took themselves off on a long cross-continent acid trek of the United States.

Back in California on various narcotic charges, he faked a suicide to give the FBI the slip, slipped over the border into Mexico, and was eventually captured when, with a degree of contempt bordering on the foolhardy, he went back to San Francisco and appeared on television.

Considering the mischief he and his followers had created in the eyes of the police he was lucky to get off with six months on a work farm. But by this time he was beyond acid.

‘No, I haven’t taken acid in quite some time. We’re now into other things. There’s not a great deal of energy in dope. It’s move now to the occult or militancy,’ he says in his Hampstead flat, pulling on his socks, one bright red, one brighter orange, and snorting up his cold. He had come to the door just in his trousers, big as a bear, chest coated with blond curls, hair almost gone on the top but thick as a rug down the sides and round his ears. He puts on a T-shirt and the inevitable Indian token around his neck and finds a leather jacket: ‘I shot this elk with a bow and arrow myself. And had Mountain Girl make it up into this jacket for me,’ he says.

Since he first came to Britain last December with The Grateful Dead and Hell’s Angels and those Harley Davidsons and egg-nog, he has become quite an Anglophile. England is the holiest place he’s ever been, and Stonehenge is the ‘heaviest’, he says.

‘We’ve traced our way back right from the West Coast to the New England colonies and then back here, and Stonehenge is the oldest place we can find. We’re going down there for the summer solstice, to see the sun come up between those great pillars that are as big as two Buicks.

‘And then we’ll get my bus over here and go off to the cathedral at Chartes and Dachau and the Wailing Wall and the Great Pyramids. I haven’t seen those places but I figure that any place that took so much in human endeavour to build must be a very heavy place to be.’

He goes on rapping: ‘One of the troubles with all that drop-out scene was that at the same time as throwing away all of the bad things of the past and the environment, they also turned loose a lot of the good stuff too.

‘But right now I think that a lot of young people are just sitting around and waiting and waiting and watching. Most people think that whatever’s going to happen will be a bad thing, but I don’t believe that, I think something is going to happen and it will be a good thing.’

Something like the millennium, or cargo cults?

‘Maybe a cataclysm that will sink California and New York by earthquakes and blow out all the old tubes,’ he answers.

He’s also here to make a record in a spoken word series for Apple. But since their economy measures he’s found himself without an office or co-operation. He’s a little bitter about it, but he’s carrying on with making the tapes anyway.

‘I write a lot. I just haven’t written anything that pleases me for a long time. Nothing I’ve done communicates as well as tape does for me.’

He’s a great Peter Pan of a fellow, quick witted and very funny, and driving around London in his cowboy hat and windcheater he looks like some leftover from Bonanza.

And later when Dilly Disciple is still on about her Dr J. Collis Browne’s Chlorodyne we go to find a chemist’s. Down Finchley Road into a side street, and there’s nowhere to park. Without a moment’s hesitation Kesey charges the pavement. The great Cadillac bucks and jumps on its hydraulics and down the pavement we go between shops and lamp-posts, coming to rest half on and half off the road and lodged at a forty-five degree angle to the kerb.

A little old butcher carrying a meat chopper rushes from his shop and makes insane motioning gestures towards the Cadillac’s twin wafer-thin fins. ‘Shall I chop a bit off?’ he says. And Kesey laughs. He always laughs.

Back to the top

Janis Joplin, 1969

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

JANIS JOPLIN ( Evening Standard April 1969)

Janis Joplin is instantly, aggressively friendly. I’m a complete stranger and right away she’s asking me to massage her neck and kissing me ‘hello’ with a scorching cat-lick of my right eyebrow. She wears her sexuality with an arrogance tainted with derision. Yet she’s a woman of little femininity. Her voice is wild, raw and Leadbelly strangulated, and her features are rough and workmanlike. She is a formidable lady.

The Deadwood Stage could have made good use of Janis Joplin. She’s the current American singing idol of the hard-rock-blues era, and does for male rock and roll fans what Hendrix, Jagger and Jim Morrison do for the girls. According to all reports her act is an experience of eroticism.

‘But I’m not as sexy as Hendrix. He’s really something,’ she claims, licking her top lip from left to right, a habit she indulges in each time she mentions men.

Yes, she would make a great calamity Jane or Annie Oakley. Born in Texas, and resembling an only slightly more female Gabby Hayes, she boasts a façade of over-shock – a constant barrage of four-lettered, non-descriptive adjectives.

This week she was to have been the cover story on Newsweek but Eisenhower’s death meant that the feature on her had to be postponed. She had some very un-American things to say about Eisenhower.

I met her this week in her hotel bar. She was holding court with members of her eight-piece band, and the barman was pouting his lips and making those silent sucking motions that are intended as manifestations of shock and disapproval.

She was, she said, feeling very brought down. She’s been drinking all day (she says she drinks every day) and the first thing she’s told when she lands in Britain is that Mick Jagger won’t be going to her concert: ‘If I want to hear black singing,’ Jagger is reputed to have said, ‘then I’ll listen to black singers.’ She’s cut to the quick.

She began her astonishing career at the Monterey pop festival in 1967. Before she went on stage hardly anyone had ever heard of Janis Joplin, but when she opened her mouth the trauma was unforgettable. Janis, it seems, can sing several notes at the same time.

‘I don’t really know how I do it, but I do. It happens when I’m tired and I’m pushing. I now find I can sing all the notes in harmony with each other. I don’t know why. I just open my mouth and it comes out.’

She lives with her friend Linda in a small flat in San Francisco. Linda, who is one of those tall black-haired brown-eyed Americans, has come along for a holiday. She’s twenty-nine, Janis is twenty-six. Her twenty-sixth birthday party has become almost folk lore.

‘How did you hear about my twenty-sixth birthday party? Oh! Well there was Linda and me, and this crate of Southern Comfort, and then these two guys came that we know. So we asked everybody else to leave. And we knew, and they knew … and it was a beautiful party. I didn’t realise until after it that it was my twenty-sixth birthday. That was just pure love ….’

Her parents, she figures, are more proud of her than they ever hoped to be. At Port Arthur, a small Gulf town in Texas, she says she was a problem for them running wild and fooling around. At school she chose the wrong friends and her class mates threw stones at her and called her ‘nigger lover’. But as she got older it became fashionable to be a beatnik, to run wild and to fool around. ‘I don’t know whether it’s fashionable yet to be a nigger-lover in Texas’, she says.

After dropping out of Austin University she went to Los Angeles and eventually ended up in San Francisco when the hippy cult suddenly threw her into national prominence.

For a while she sang with a group called Big Brother and the Holding Company and an album she made with them sold over a million copies on the day it was released. But internal arguments over billing and the size of her name led to the group’s disbanding. She now has her own band. ‘I wanted to call them the Cheap Thrills, but that had been the name of my album. So they’re just “my band”,’ she says.

She sits back in her leather-bound chair and stretches. Then carefully placing her left hand along her jawbone and her right hand on her skull she breathes in and gives the most almighty jerk. Crack! Her neck joints pop as though she had pulled all her fingers out of their sockets at one. My own head nearly falls off in shock.

‘Man, that’s better,’ she cackles. ‘Hey, do you wanna know how I got my fur coat? Southern Comfort! I had the chick in my manager’s office photo-copy every goddam clipping that ever had me mentioning Southern Comfort, and they sent me a whole lot of money. How could anyone in their right mind want me for their image? Can you imagine getting paid for passing out for two years?’

Southern Comfort is a brand of bourbon. On stage she used to boast she could drink a whole bottle during her act. Tonight she is doing her level best to prove she can do the same with Gordon’s gin.

‘Nobody ever asks me about my singing,’ she complains. ‘All anyone ever wants to know is about fellas and booze and sex. I want to be known as a singer.’

‘When I get scared or worried I tell myself “Janis, just have a good time.” So I juice up real good and that’s just what I have. I just live for happiness. You should use everything you’ve got to be happy.

‘My doctor said my liver was a little swollen, and got all melodramatic about me, saying “What’s a good, talented girl like you doing with herself?” and all that …

‘Man, I’d rather have ten years of superhypermost than live to be seventy sitting in some goddam chair watching TV.’

She’s quite a change from the luvvy-duvvy hippy Americans we’re used to receiving. Tonight she looks like Davy Crockett, with her hat of bleached foxes’ tails, boots and purple pants. Only the beads are there as a token of her adopted home town. She says she wants to go out to the Speakeasy or the Revolution and find these English boys she’s hears so much about.

‘Yes, I suppose you could call me promiscuous in one sense of the word. But it’s not really all that superficial. I just don’t have one person. It’s sad. But I couldn’t just stay home baking bread and having babies. I know it’s a fine trip, but I couldn’t do it.’

She’s great rollicking company, a female version of J. P. Donleavy’s Ginger Man. But there’s also the occasional touch of pathos, the sudden hurt innocence. ‘What sign are you? I went out with a Scorpio once. I wanted to marry him, but he turned me around and kicked me about.

‘And you know what I wanted most in the world … I wanted to be on the same bill with Otis Redding. It was all arranged, and then he was killed. He was my idol. I wanted him to tell me I was good.’

But then brightening immediately and grinning like mad, she’s back on her pet subject.

‘I think my interest in men is growing as I get older. It used to be a casual interest but now it’s day and night,’ and her tongue shoots along her lips at the idea of it.

‘Now how’s that going to look in print?’

POSTSCRIPT Janis Joplin died from an overdose of heroin just eighteen months after this interview. Although she had claimed not to touch heroin, her death might almost have been predicted so self-destructive was her life style. What this interview didn’t tell at the time was that throughout our conversation she continually mauled and groped me. In 1979 Bette Midler appeared in a salacious and unpleasant movie, Rose, a fictionalised account of Janis Joplin’s life.

Sam Phillips an interview

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

Sam Phillips Plus Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Roy Orbison
(Radio Times, September 1973)

            “Until rock and roll music came along the grossest of all racial discrimination in America was in music. You had pop music – which was for a certain type of people; you had country and western music, which was supposedly for another class, and you had what we called in those days ‘race’ music. So if you’re talking about segregation there was no better example of it than in music, and I just hope that I played some part in breaking that down in some way.”
            This is Sam Phillips talking: Sam Phillips, the man who discovered Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison and Jerry Lee Lewis, and who, by a unique blending of musical styles in the mid-50s, produced a style which has been copied, restructured and repeatedly built upon to form the variety of types of rock which have dominated American and derivative musical styles over the last 20 years.
            Phillips now leaves the running of Sun studios in the hands of his son Knox. Times and techniques have moved a long way since Phillips first began recording, and he doesn’t try to compete with today’s electronic sophistication.
            But the story of the birth of rock and roll in the mid-50s is very much the story of Sam Phillips. As he saw it pop and country music then were stagnant, and the really exciting sounds were coming from the rhythm and blues artists.
            Now 50, and semi-retired in Memphis, Tennessee, he recalls: “It seemed to me that the young people couldn’t identify with the music the adults liked, and the only music they could identify with was race music. It had a certain abandon, and it was something that parents didn’t particularly dig.
            “I think my own background helped me enormously. I came from a very poor family in the Muscle Shoals area of Alabama and I’d grown up to a large degree with both poor black people and poor whites.
            “I saw an awful lot of fear in the black man’s eyes in those days, and how they had come to think of themselves as something different over the years, so that the only things they could do privately were their music and their religion. And I felt that the way they sang and preached just had to have some merit in it.”
            By the time he was 27 Phillips had become a radio disc jockey and accomplished sound engineer. With some meagre savings he built his own recording studio in a rented one-storey building in a poor area of Memphis. The whole studio wasn’t bigger than a decent sized hotel room.
            “I realised at that time that there was no place in the South that a black man could go to make a record. I knew there was a lot of black talent around, but I also knew that those people had no way of getting to Chicago or New York let alone the West Coast. And I also knew that if they did the major labels weren’t doing that much recording of black artists anyway. So in 1950 I opened up, and to pay the rent I would record weddings and funerals and conventions and such things, at the same time looking for new talent.!
            One of the first artists he recorded was guitarist B. B. King, then Ike Turner, Howling Wolf, Rufus Thomas and Junior Parker, and after a short time the word got around that there was a modest place in Memphis where a man could go to make a record; where he wouldn’t be paid any money so far as royalty advances were concerned, since there wasn’t any money available, but where he would certainly get a good listen.
            “The most difficult thing I had to do was to impress upon them that they were welcome to come and try to do what they did best, but that I didn’t want anyone trying to sound like Nat King Cole or something they weren’t. It wasn’t so much a communication problem, as the fact that they were inhibited, and wanted to play music that they thought would please me.
            “So eventually I’d find myself saying ‘I want some blues. I want your soul poured out on this damn floor’. And one of the first groups I got to recording properly for Sun was Little Junior Parker, who suddenly lit up with a song he hadn’t even finished, but which we called Mystery Train.’ “
By 1954, he still had to record a white singer professionally. “I remember one day I was in the studio and I noticed this young boy walking up and down outside the studio. I thought at first that he was one of the workers from the radiator shop next door, but he eventually came in, and my secretary (who’d spoken to him before) told me that he wanted to cut a record for his mother’s birthday. I said at first that I was too busy that day, but he explained that it was her birthday the next day and he just had to have it.
            “So I thought well if the boy cares so much about his mother’s present then I can take a little time out to record him. Personal records cost three dollars at that time. So he came in, and hung his guitar round his neck, and we talked a little bit, and I gathered that he was called Elvis Presley, was 18 and lived in a very poor area. I saw in his eyes that same look of fear that was in the black man’s eyes, that he might be somewhere off bounds for the likes of him.
            “I tried to put him at ease, and I let him sing a little to practise before I cut the record, and we used a piece of scrap record I had lying around, just so that he could get the confidence.
            “I’ll never forget the look of amazement when he heard himself on record – amazement not at the way he sounded when he sang, but also that someone should be treating him with such respect.
            “I knew then there was something distinctive about him. He liked the same music that I did, good gut-bucket blues, and he really was a student of Arthur Crudup and Leadbelly and people like that, which was amazing in a boy so young. I remember he said he used to practise in his bedroom at night.”
            For months Sam tried the young Elvis out on a series of different sounds with guitarist Scotty Moore and bass player Bill Black. At first nothing went right, and although he realised he’d made a mistake with the first song he’d found, he became increasingly interested with Elvis’s style. Then one night it all clicked into place, when Elvis began singing a blues song he knew.
            ‘He just came out with That’s All Right, Mama, and I just knew we had something different. I remember that night well because we’d spent hours in the studio and Bill Black had been ready to go home to start repairing refrigerators because that was what he did for a living, and had to take his bass out of his case again. We didn’t take no more than three cuts of that song, and we used the second one on the record.
            “I was so delighted I said ‘Y’all have come off fantastic tonight, because if this isn’t good enough then, Lord knows, I don’t know which direction to go in’. I knew we had something that wasn’t fish and wasn’t fowl, but that had tremendous excitement and abandon.” It was in fact the beginning of the Sam Phillips version of rock and roll music, Although he’d had successes with black records, at first Phillips encountered innumerable difficulties in getting his first Elvis record played on any of the stations.
            “I went on the road with that one record, and although I couldn’t actually find anyone who was prepared to play it, I kept getting favourable reactions from both the black disc jockeys and the white ones.”
Eventually, of course, someone did play it, and within three weeks it was a hit all over the South. Eighteen months later Elvis left Sun when RCA Victor paid Phillips a record of 40,000 dollars for him in the autumn on 1955. But Phillips had now broken through, and Sun Records had become a magnet for young white talent from all over the southern states.
            Johnny Cash was one of the first to arrive. Says Cash: “As soon as I got out of the Navy I made up my mind I was going to sing on records and when I heard this boy Presley on the radio I decided to call Sam Phillips. I guess I must have called 20 times before I actually got to speak to him, and he eventually had me in for an audition. He told me he liked what I sang (he did Folsom Prison Blues) and asked me to go home and write some more songs.
            “In a way we all stood in awe of Sam. He was older than us, although still only in his early 30s, but he had great power of concentration and determination. I remember at one of Elvis’s sessions we were all hanging around and Elvis was trying to do a ballad and Sam kept saying to him ‘Do things like That’s All Right and Mystery Train. That’s what the public want to hear from you, Elvis.” And Elvis came over to me and said ‘John, I wish you would tell that man for me that I can sing a ballad as good as anyone’.
            “But I said, ‘I ain’t gonna tell him no way. You tell him yourself’. Poor Elvis was still trying to get Sam to let him record I Was The One”when he left to join RCA Victor. And that was the first song he made for them.”
            Cash thinks that Phillips’s major contribution was that he brought music back to its very rawness, and wouldn’t allow anyone to be other than earthy.
            ‘Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis and myself all became like one big family. We’d all know what days we were recording and we’d go and sit in on each other’s records, usually having jam sessions after the records had been cut. I remember one time in about 1957 when Elvis was already with RCA he came back and the four of us sat around the piano and sang hymns. Elvis was playing and we were harmonising with each other. That record was never released, although Sam turned the tapes on and took two hours of tape.’
            Although Johnny Cash had enormous hits with I Walk The Line, Ballad of A Teenage Queen and Cry, Cry. Cry for Sun Records, he was later to leave to join Columbia.
            Carl Perkins also was attracted to Sun after he heard the first Presley record. For years he’d been playing in small clubs in towns north of Memphis and on hearing about Sun, he decided to drive down and try his luck
            Eventually, he managed to get an audition with Phillips who decided to give him a try, and after three records he came up with the million-selling Blue Suede Shoes, a song which Elvis, by then on RCA, immediately covered. It was Sam Phillips first gold record.
            “When Sam was recording us we’d spend maybe 18 hours in the studio,” he says. “And half the time we’d never know when he actually had the machines on, so that often he’d catch us at our loosest. Often he’d go out through the front door, and just slip back in through the back to turn on the machines. He was really very innovative. There wasn’t a lot of machinery in there but being a brilliant engineer he knew how to get the best sounds out of it. Half of that echo effect he got by just sticking up a piece of board behind the singer and making him face the wall.
            “Sun had really become the place to be recording and I remember going there one day and seeing nine Cadillacs all in a row.”
            Jerry Lee Lewis was first hired as a pianist for Car Perkins’ records, earning 15 dollars a session. It wasn’t until he began singing in between takes one day that anyone realised he could sing.
            “We were recording Matchbox when suddenly Jerry Lee started doing Crazy Arms. His father had brought him down to work with us, and when Sam heard him, he put him under contract, too.”
            After four million-selling singles, however, Jerry Lee’s career was to nosedive when it was discovered by the British press that he had bigamously married his 13-year-old second cousin, and he was hurriedly asked to leave Britain by the Home Secretary.
            While most singers left only for financial reasons, a few just didn’t hit it off with Sam Phillips. Roy Orbison was studying English and History at the University of North Texas in case he didn’t make it as a singer, and he became fascinated to know how Phillips got that peculiarly funky echo on his records.
            That interested him more than Elvis’s singing, he says now. He made three records for Sam (including the small 1958 hit, Ooby Dooby) but isn’t very proud of any of them.
            Whereas Phillips always thought he gave his artists a lot of freedom to play the music that was most honest, Orbison found that he had no freedom at all.
            “Sam wanted me to play those fast blues numbers he’d had Elvis doing, but I was more interested in some of my own songs.” They parted on not particularly amicable terms during a royalties dispute but largely because Orbison’s style of music was not particularly suited to Phillips’s interests.
            Phillips liked basic blues, played in a slightly countrified way. Orbison was best on numbers which required more production and were more intricate in style. Musically the two were certain to be at odds.
            Memphis disc jockey George Klein, a long-time close friend of Presley’s, sums up Sam Phillips’s contribution most aptly when he says: “Sam was the guy who kicked it all off. He took black music and he made white guys sing it.”
            Says Sam: “I didn’t want an imitation. I didn’t want someone trying to sound like a black man, I wanted singers who instinctively had a feel for a song, who’d get that emotion across. You’d never believe the amount of prejudice we ran into early on. You’d better believe that if I’ve ever achieved anything then it’s been to help break down some of that prejudice. And I think that rock and roll music has had more favourable impact on the understanding of people of all races and all nationalities than all of what them diplomats have been doing.
            “The young aren’t so prejudiced as the old, and if I’ve helped stop some of that prejudice from growing up, then I think I’ve done something.”

back to the top of the page

Leonard Cohen

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

Leonard Cohen (Evening Standard, July 1968)

Leonard Cohen is a poet, and a singer, and a novelist. And in a romantically ethereal and almost mystical sense, a gipsy too. In America concert promoters and television producers clamour to pay him thousands of dollars a night but he doesn’t work very often and his manager is distraught at the lost opportunities.

“Money has never been an issue with me,” he says, throwing a careless arm towards the shabby leather bag in which he carries his belongings. “I came here with what I stand up in,” and that must have caused some raised eyebrows at the expensive Mayfair hotel to which his record company treated him during his visit.

He was born in Montreal in 1934 in a family which built, and were apparently pillars of, synagogues, and which had a sense of being destined to lead the Jewish people of Montreal. Before he was very old, he says, he was quite convinced that he was at least the direct descendent of Aaron, the high priest, and had a mystical destiny.

“We weren’t a lavish family, but we must have been quite well off, and I grew up like the Queen believing it was unnecessary to concern myself with the making of money.”
After taking his BA at McGill University he went to Columbia in New York, but was asked to leave when he did a term paper dissertation on his own first book of poems, because it was the only book he had read.

He began writing poetry because he thought it was one of those things that men did as part of the courting process. “I must have looked extremely absurd because I wrote all my poems to ladies thinking that was the way to approach them.

“Anyway, for some reason or other, I put them all together in a book and I was suddenly taken seriously as a poet, when all I was really was a kind of stud – not a very successful one either, because the successful ones don’t have to write poems to make girls.”
He had temperatures of poetry with which to woo the ladies. At the beginning of the courtship he would write:

As the mist leaves no scar
On the dark green hill,
So my body leaves no scar
On you or ever will.

But when he wanted to inflame his love he would write more blatantly … much more blatantly.

He’s a small man in those dark serviceable shirts and slacks that Americans wear so much, and his face is strong and heavy. When he does a concert (and he’s taped two this week for BBC television) his great soft eyes tell his sad stories for him and he looks at once vulnerable and yet self-contained.

He is, he feels, a romantic, and a lecher and a lover of women. “Women,” he says, “are indeed in control. It isn’t necessary to declare a matriarchy but it exists just the same. Everything that a man does is laid at a lady’s feet whether it is a battle or a song, or an amalgamation between two great companies. At some time in the day the man comes home to his woman and says ‘look what I’ve done’.

“I remember one day I was in a very exalted state and I saw a bunch of cows in a field. And I noticed how beautiful they were that I got down on my knees to worship them. And, do you know, those cows were so happy. The more I worshipped them the happier they became. And to make a metaphor out of it, it’s exactly the same with ladies.”

Cohen’s lady is a Norwegian girl called Marianne who lives with him on the Greek island of Hydra. He met her one day when he was sitting outside a store and thought she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.

“She had a three-month-old child and her husband had just fallen in love with an American girl. So I went to him and said if he went off with the other girl I would like to go and live with Marianne. We had a lot of drinks together and talked about it and everything worked out all right.”

The child is now eight and at Summerhill School, and Marianne has learned to accept his need for other women.

“She knows that is what my nature is. I say to her ‘what are your appetites,’ and she knows what I mean because she’s attracted to other men. And I know she’s had that feeling.” He wrote his most successful novel Beautiful Losers, while living in Hydra. He had been staying in a Hampstead room and it kept raining, so he went off to Greece to write. The book sold 350,000 copies in paperback form in America but he couldn’t get it published in Britain because it was considered too obscene for anyone to handle.

“They didn’t realise that I wasn’t turning people on to sex but putting it down,” he says.
But it is in his poetry and his singing (“my songs are poems with a guitar behind them”) that his impact has been fullest. He’s a very measured and lyrical writer which seems curiously unfashionable against the unpunctuated rat-ta-ta-tat of modern verse and there’s an unremitting sense of despair about his lines. When he sings his tone is of a basser Gene Kelly, but he’s manly and melodic and seems in a perpetual private agony.

His first album was hugely successful in America (particularly on the campus belt) and his song Suzanne provided a totally unlikely hit for Noel Harrison (Man from U.N.C.L.E) possibly because it required no great singing effort to perform.

“Suzanne is about a girl I know. She’s great but she’s half crazy. And the other week I was in New York or Los Angeles or somewhere and a guy came up to me and said he liked my song and that he’d lived with Suzanne for a while. And I asked him if he was still with her. And he said no he couldn’t stand it any more. The girl was half crazy.”

back to the top of the page

Jimi Hendrix

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

Jimi Hendrix (London Evening Standard, October 1967)

“Jimi Hendrix,” they told me – lying to a man – “is so sincere about his music that one of these days he will probably make a human torch of himself on stage.” So anxious to meet a man whose friends were prepared to plan such a horrific demise on his behalf, I called to see him over his milk and menthol-tipped breakfast this week.

Everyone with a television set must know who Hendrix is by now. He’s the fellow who looks rather like a black Mick Jagger: the one with the electric hair and fuzz-topped companions. He has made four records and had four hits since coming to Britain from Greenwich Village a year ago, and he calls his trio The Jimi Hendrix Experience. Their first album was called Are You Experienced?

He says he is twenty and lives with his manager and his manager’s wife in a Marble Arch flat. It’s a big apartment – on the fourth floor of a modern block – and apart from the bathroom where there’s a celebrated picture of a naked Frank Zappa of the Mothers of Invention sitting on the loo, it’s just what you’d expect for the average young married couple earning upwards of five or ten thousand a year.

That is, apart from Jimi’s quarters. In a room that looks for all the world like Mephistopheles’ parlour, with crimson curtains, sheets and carpets, the guitarist has collected a fascinating collection of talismans and charms. There’s a giant panda, peacock feathers, a three foot rag doll, magic Rip Van Winkle slippers and a tiny cloaked Swedish Superman. And suspended above the double divan bed are five huge granny shawls which hang like monstrous vivid spiders’ webs and clutch at a candled chandelier straight out of Jane Eyre. The walls are draped in ornate Chinese and Japanese canvases, and there’s an Oriental jar of dead flowers on the sideboard.

“I dig dead flowers,” says Jimi in his great dark-brown voice, crushing one as he speaks between his thumb and forefinger. And he giggles. He’s wearing tight tangerine pants, a blue and white flowered shirt and a black jacket with a patterned pageant of white doves.

“You can learn from dead things, you know,” he says. “In my music I’ve learned from everything, mainly from my life.”

So far his life has been traumatic. He was born in Seattle, Washington, and for much of his childhood spent a great deal of time commuting up to Vancouver to stay with his grandmother, a full-blooded Cherokee Indian. (Ethnically, he’s also part Mexican, but mainly negro.)

“My mother and dad used to fall out a lot, and I always had to be ready to go tippy-toeing off up to Canada. My dad was very level-headed and religious, but my mother used to like having a good time and dressing up. She used to drink a lot and didn’t take care of herself. She died when I was about ten. But she was a groovy mother.”

At fourteen he left high school because his father needed his wage. “Dad was a gardener and it got pretty bad in the winter when there wasn’t any grass to cut,” he says.

By the time he was fifteen he had left home, and he hasn’t been back since.

“I have a half-sister of nearly six called Genevieve who I’ve never seen. There may be more by now. I must call my dad. He’s married again. I sent him some money but he sent it back. Perhaps I’ll call him today.”

After leaving home he had his hair straightened and took up playing guitar and bass with some of the sleek mohair-sheened rhythm and blues groups. For a while he played with Little Richard, and then with the Isley Brothers.

Drafted at seventeen into the 91st Airborne Division of the U.S. army, he left after thirteen months when he hurt his back jumping out of a training aeroplane 10,000ft over Fort Campbell, Kentucky. He then went to Greenwich Village and played in some clubs, and it was there he met Chas Chandler who is now his manager.

It was in New York that the Hendrix guitar style developed as an individualised composite of Muddy Waters, Howling Wolf, Dylan and the Beatles. And there, too, the Hendrix hair-do, which has set a trend for thousands of little ravers all over London, came into its own.

“When I was a little boy I used to hate having my hair cut and would try to avoid my dad whenever it got long. I’d sneak in and out of the house and try not to be noticed, but eventually he’d always spot me and sit me down in the hall under the lamp and shave it all off until I looked like a skinned chicken. And then the next day at school all the kids would laugh at me.

“I guess I’ve always been conscious of my personal appearance because I have big ears. In five years’ time I might be bald.” And he tugs at the tumbleweed of steel wool covering his head. “See how it comes out. That’s because I’ve been overworking.”

At the moment Jimi and his two Experiences are just finishing their second album, Axis – Bold As Love, in which he further demonstrates the highly individual guitar patterns which have won him the top award as the musician of the year in the Melody Maker Pop Poll.

The image that Jimi Hendrix, the pop star, presents to the outside world is strangely at variance with Hendrix at home. On television he can look mean, as though he is deliberately baiting parents, and his act, in which he plays his electric guitar with his teeth, is considered sexy and provocative – not least by the extreme Right Wing American women’s society, the Daughters of the American Revolution, who got him taken out of the Monkees’ tour of the United States last year. But in private he is polite and likeable.

“My dad was very, very strict and taught me that I must respect my elders always. I couldn’t speak unless I was spoken to first by grown-ups. So I’ve always been very quiet. But I saw a lot of things. A fish wouldn’t get into trouble if he kept his mouth shut.’

Back to the top

The Everly Brothers

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

The Everly Brothers (The Radio Times, December 1982)

When the Everly Brothers had their first hits in the late 50s they were both barely more than boys, and the sound of those two late adolescents harmonising about sorrow, pain and the hurts of teenage love, was imprinted on the memories of a generation. So when I finally met them after a London concert I asked them how those songs came to be written and recorded.

Bye Bye Love (1957) was their first hit. “At the time we would have recorded anything just for the studio fee,” Phil explained. “We didn’t even think in terms of it being a hit, and it had already been turned down by quite a few other people.”

Wake Up Little Susie (1957) came next. “There was a lot of tension about because we knew that it was important for the follow-up record to be a hit,” says Phil. ‘We must have listened to about 200 songs before Felice and Boudleaux Bryant came up with this. It was one of their most difficult songs to record, too, because of the tension. We did 14 takes on the first day, and in the end Archie Bleyer (their producer at Cadence Records) walked out of the studio because it wasn’t working. Then the next day we got it in four takes when he wasn’t there. In those days, you were expected to record a single in the three hours they gave you.”

Their next hit was All I Have To Do Is Dream (1958). “The first time I heard it was on an acetate with Boudleaux singing,” says Phil. “They could have put it out just like that. We knew it was an instant hit.”

Don wasn’t so sure about Bird Dog (1958) and they only recorded it because they needed a new single. At one stage producer Archie Bleyer wanted to put a famous ventriloquist who had a talking dog on the track to say “He’s a bird dog”, but they managed to talk him out of it.

Both brothers, however, enjoyed the flip-side Devoted To You which Phil describes as “like an English madrigal”. It was written for them by the Bryants. “It’s a very well-structured piece and it feels good to sing,” he says.

For Take A Message To Mary (1959) Archie Bleyer produced a more elaborate arrangement, including the sound of a coke bottle being hit by a drumstick to get the feeling of a chain gang or prison cell.

Their next hit was Till I Kissed You (1959) which Don wrote on a plane back from Australia to the States. “I’d fallen in love with a French girl there called Lillian and I was afraid I was never going to see her again. In those days Australia seemed like the end of the world.”

Let It Be Me (1960) was noticed first by Don as a guitar instrumental on a Chet Atkins record. “I bought all his records, and I called him about this particular one and he told me there was a beautiful lyric. We went to New York to record it with strings. A lot of people weren’t sure we should do that.”

Cathy’s Clown (1960) was written by both brothers and was probably their biggest hit. “Musically, the inspiration came from the Grand Canyon Suite by Ferde Grofé,” says Don. “There’s a little marching section which was used for a Philip Morris commercial on the radio at the time and I was very taken by it. The lyric came from stories our father (Ike Everly) used to tell us about a kid who would taunt him coming home from school by saying ‘Mary had a little Ike’.”

Phil wrote When Will I Be Loved (1960). “I think I was upset over some girl at the time and I remember sitting in my car at a root beer stand near where I lived and writing the last verse.”

Don wrote their next hit So Sad (1960) although he can’t remember being particularly sad at the time. “The song just seemed to pop up,” he remembers, and it’s still one of his favourites. The flipside was Lucille, a Little Richard song that the Everlys revived.

“We would never have done a cover of anyone else’s hit,” Don explains. “A lot of people wanted us to pick up songs that were just bubbling under the charts and to cover them, but we never did that. They even wanted us to cover The Beatles’ Please Please Me before they happened in the States. When we did cover versions, it was always some time after the original hit, so that we could arrange it in our own way. On Lucille we used all the top session guitarists in Nashville. They all played the riff but each take was tuned slightly out from the other and that gave us a much fatter sound.’

The double-side hits Walk Right Back and Ebony Eyes hit the charts in 1961. Walk Right Back was written by Sonny Curtis,” says Phil. “He came to the apartment I had in Hollywood and sang it. Sony could sing like a humming bird. Ebony Eyes was written by John D. Loudermilk. I remember before we were going to record it Felice Bryant rang the airport in Nashville to make sure there was no Flight 1203. No one would have got on it.”

Although they were prolific writers themselves, the Everlys never insisted upon recording only their own songs, and in 1962 Carole King and Howard Greenfield teamed up for a day and wrote Crying In The Rain for them. “It was,” says Phil, “the only time they ever wrote together.”

By 1963 the Everlys were facing stiff competition in the charts from the English beat boom which had been built, at least in part, by Liverpool groups who were copying their style and harmonies. Their hits dwindled.

The release of Love Hurts, a song written for them by Boudleaux Bryant (and one of their best-ever recordings), was held up by a legal wrangle and Roy Orbison had a hit with it during the delay.

They had to wait until 1965 for the next big hit, The Price Of Love, a song they wrote together and the one that opened their comeback concert. “I still like the lyrics,” says Phil. “It reminds me of touring. While Donald plays to the band a lot, I like to look around and see who’s in the audience and maybe pick up a pretty face … a girl I’ll never meet: “You talk too much, you laugh too loud, You see her face in every crowd …”

back to the top of the page

Jimmy Cliff

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

Jimmy Cliff (London Evening Standard, July 1972)

An interesting new film which has unfortunately been much critically overlooked is now approaching the end of its run at the Brixton Classic. It is The Harder They Come. The choice of such a venue for the first British showing of the movie was no accident, because this is the first truly Jamaican film – a piece so uncompromising in its attempts to depict a section of Caribbean society that sub-titles are necessary to translate the dialects, and in which no attempts have been made to gloss over shanty town poverty.

When shown in Brixton area the whole cinema was, I’m told, jumping with excitement, and after seeing The Harder They Come you can forget about the pretty images of a lazy life in the sun and sea created by Harry Belafonte pictures.

It is in many ways a remarkable film, not least because of the way it takes the old cliché of country-boy-comes-to-the-city-to-make-a-record-and-finds-stardom, and stands it completely on its head in a story that runs through murders, beatings, Rastafarians,, police corruption, and finally, into the lonely death of a man in love with a fantasy.

But another reason for its fascination is the performance given by reggae singer Jimmy Cliff as the hero.

Although a non-actor, Cliff was chosen for the role by director and writer Perry Henzell after seeing a cover of one of his albums. The pictures on the front and back covers were so contrasting in style that he imagined he saw two distinct personalities there. And after screen tests Jimmy Cliff was given the job.

“Much of the film was ad-libbed,” he explained. “We had a script but we didn’t stick to it particularly. I just said what I thought should be said.”

And at some times he was able to bring his own particular beliefs into the parts, which in some sense, at least, reflected his own early struggles as a singer-songwriter.

“There’s one particular scene that I’m particularly pleased with,” he says. “Someone is saying to me I’m a dreamer, but I answer saying she’s a bigger dreamer because she’s religious and always thinking of milk and honey in the sky, when I’m saying it should be right down here on earth.

“So many people, particularly in Jamaica, where there is every sort of church, still have this spooky idea of dying and going to Heaven. It’s like a brainwashing process. I don’t think they should sing hymns in church at all, because they help to excite the emotions – which cause illusions. I used to see them all getting worked up and ‘getting the Spirit’. Getting all spooked up, you know.”

Jimmy Cliff has been well known in both Britain and the West Indies for some years. But with The Harder They Come reputedly doing business like no film has ever done in Jamaica, he’s suddenly become a celebrity in his home island.

We met in London a few days ago, shortly before he left on a promotional trip to New York. He’s a quiet, virtually taciturn man of 25, strikingly handsome, and was, at our meeting, surprisingly relaxed.

I say “surprisingly” because I’d been forewarned that he was in fact going through an anti-white period in his life, but when I put this to him, he denied it completely.

“No. I like it here. After all, I’ve been in England on and off for eight years. When I first came my agent booked me into a bed-sitter, but when the caretaker saw me she said that I oughtn’t to be there. Being just over from Jamaica and very green I didn’t know what she meant. Anyway, she said it was okay that I stayed so long as I didn’t let the landlord see me.

“But after a couple of weeks the landlord came banging on my door and gave me 24 hours to get out. Would you call that prejudice?” Now he avoids such confrontations.

He was brought up in the Jamaican countryside, outside Kingston, one of three sons and two daughters: “My father was a tailor, and we lived in the most desperate state of poverty that you can imagine. But because there is always food available in the country we never went hungry. I could always eat bananas and things like that.”

“When I was about six or seven I used to go and stay with my aunt, who had six sons, all of whom were much paler than me.” (He has a very black skin.) “In Jamaica you’re still made to feel resentment if you’re very black. It doesn’t come from the family, so much as from society in general. It’s much easier to get on if you have a pale skin.

“But while I would be staying with my aunt, my grandmother, who also lived there, would tell me how her grandmother had also been very black and had been a slave and had told her that black meant beautiful. I can remember that very vividly.” He was lucky, he thinks, to have such a grandmother.

At the age of about 14 he moved to Kingston to study radio and television at technical college, but dropped out after a year to begin his career as a singer and songwriter. He’s never done any other kind of work since.

I was desperate at first, and at one point I even conceived the idea of robbing a bank. But I never did it. When I made my first record I was only offered enough expenses to cover my bus fares to and from the studio so I turned it down. I wanted paying the full session fee or nothing at all. It was a matter of pride.”

He was 15 at the time, and although that record didn’t sell very well, his third record became a number one seller in Jamaica.

After another three hits he decided to try his luck in America and it was while he was in the States that he ran into Chris Blackwell, the man who had discovered Millie (My Boy Lollipop – remember?) and who first started the interest in West Indian music in Britain.

At Blackwell’s suggestion he came to England, and began to work from a base in London. So far he’s had two very big hit records here, Wonderful World and Wide World, while several of his songs have been hits for other artists.

In fact it is largely due to the influence of Jimmy Cliff that reggae music has become so popular, with both Bob Dylan and Paul Simon known to be keen admirers of his work.

“Reggae is a happy music. In Jamaica everyone is always smiling, and that is shown in the brightness of the songs. My influences have been calypso and rock and roll. When I was a boy we would sing those Harry Belafonte songs in the fields as folk songs. Then when I grew older the music became known as ska and then reggae.”

The film The Harder They Come has particularly strong political overtones, but so far as I can see there’s little of the militant about Jimmy Cliff. “Education,” he says. “That’s what is needed. That will solve everything.”

back to the top of the page

Pete Townshend

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

Pete Townshend (Evening Standard December 1967)

The Who are the group who smash up their guitars at the end of their act. They’re the boys who pick their noses (only their own) during Top Of The Pops, and they’re the group who tattoo their umbilici and bosoms with bullseyes and girls’ eyes and appear at gigs wearing only half a shirt each and no vests.

When they perform, they somehow manage to make a noise with their ultra-amplified guitars which sounds like a jet raid on Haiphong, their arms go whirling round like windmills out of control, and they sing songs like ‘My Generation’, which explains itself, ‘Pictures of Lily’, which doesn’t but which is actually about sexual fantasy, and ‘Happy Jack’ which is about a donkey on the Isle of Man.

When Radio London first started plugging their records they were mods, which, you’ll remember, were a new kind of rocker two or three years ago. They wore Union Jack jackets and pretty painted T-shirts and were managed by those colour supplement favourites Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp.

Last week their latest album was released. It is called ‘The Who Sell Out’ and is remarkable because they are still unashamedly playing rock and roll music. (Rock and roll is a dirty word among this year’s golliwogged pop sophisticates.)

It is also a remarkable album because it is made up of a selection of songs naming branded goods like Heinz, Medac and Odorono, all tied together with a collection of nostalgic station identification jingles from Radio London. The effect is that the album sounds rather like a pirate radio programme.

There are four Who: Keith Moon, who clouts his drums like a man deranged, John Entwhistle who is married, Pete Townshend who is the clever one and does most of the composing, and Roger Daltrey who has orange hair and who caught mild pneumonia after sitting in a bath full of frozen baked beans during the photo session for the album cover.

If The Who have an architect or prime mover it is Townshend, twenty-two-year-old ex-Ealing Art College student. ‘It’s all because of me hooter,’ says Townshend, who reckons that he earns about £20,000 a year as a composer and £500 a week as a Who.

‘When I was a kid I had this enormous great hooter’ (now it’s only a mere shade grander than the average English nose) ‘and I was always being baited about it. So I used to think “I’ll bloody well show them. I’ll push me huge hooter out at them from every newspaper in England, then they won’t laugh at me.”

‘And when I first started singing with a group I used to go up on stage and forget that I was Pete Townshend who wasn’t a success with the ladies, and all of a sudden I’d become aware that there were little girls giggling and pointing at me nose. And I’d think “Sod ’em, they’re not gonna laugh at me!” And I’d get angrier still.

My whole absurdly demonstrative stage act was worked out to turn myself into a body instead of a face. Most pop singers were pretty, but I wanted people to look at my body, and not to have to bother looking at my head if they didn’t like the look of it.’

It was Townshend’s idea to make an album of commercials. They’d produced an advertisement for Coca Cola in America and the idea to make an LP of them ‘sort of grew’.

There’s one very poignant little song, about a girl who goes for an audition but doesn’t get the part because she smells of perspiration. The song finishes with the line ‘she should have used Odorono’. Apparently Odorono weren’t too happy when they first heard it, because they didn’t want their brand name to be associated with bad smells!

‘We wanted to lighten the load of the pressures which are facing people,’ explains Townshend. ‘On the one side there’s the psychedelia and on the other there’s the boredom of ballad singers. So we came out with an absurd album of melody and humour. Pop music should, we think, be understandable and entertaining.’

By the pretentious pop standards of 1967 The Who are, I suppose, old fashioned. The flowers may have wilted but it’s the luvvy-dovey lot who are still in vogue, not the blatantly aggressive, destructive mob who took to the August Bank Holiday beaches. And when I met Townshend, his fawn linen suit with turn-ups owed more to Brighton 1965 than Chicago 1932.

‘I sometimes feel incredibly out of date, but it’s because the ideas we have are so powerful that they outlive the group. Like pop and op art. Kit Lambert invented the term pop art music for us, but when we were getting sick of it people were only just beginning to wear pop art T-shirts.’

The Who are, says Townshend, a pantomime – but not one you’d take your children to knowingly, and showmanship is what the smashing up of instruments and equipment is all about.

‘It’s traumatic, melodramatic, theatrical – pure basic emotion. We couldn’t get the same crescendo any other way. God knows we’ve tried. We don’t like to smash all the gear up – it costs money. But there really isn’t any other way.

It’s like an auto-destructive ballet, as though every performance we do will be our last, and every audience thinks they’ve seen the last. They can’t believe that it happened the night before and will happen again the night after. When we do an American tour I smash up a $200 guitar during our finale every night. And Keith gets through sets of drums worth about £2000 on every tour. We’re good circus entertainment.

‘I suppose in a way we’re making a gesture to the audience and trying to communicate with them.’
Communication is, in fact, his obsession, but instead of giving dahlias to those with whom he doesn’t see eye to eye, he gets into a right old-fashioned barney.

‘“My Generation” (that’s the one where Roger Daltrey stutters “why don’t you all f-f-fade away”) was originally about anger and communication, but by the time we got it on record it came out as the pilled-up kid who for the first time in his life becomes aware of things, but unfortunately the sheer process of taking purple hearts has incapacitated him and he can hardly speak.

‘He wants to say things but he can’t. It’s like having a big nose. You can’t communicate because of it. That’s what the stutter means.

back to the top of the page

Elvis Presley an interview

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

ELVIS PRESLEY

London Evening Standard (August 1969)

‘Sometimes when I walk into a room at home and see all those gold records hanging round the walls I think they must belong to another person. Not me. I just can’t believe it’s me.' This is Elvis Presley talking: the legend himself. The man who virtually started the rock and roll group as we know it today, who changed the course of pop music, and in so doing helped change the course of social history.

Because that, and absolutely that, has been the influence of Elvis Presley – the boy from Tupelo, Mississipi, who has had more hit records than anyone else in the world.

Elvis is appearing in Las Vegas for the next month in the very grand and brand new International Hotel. This is his comeback to the stage and live performances after nine years of making only films and records. Nine years in which his hits have become fewer, but the devotion has lingered on.

Getting through to Presley is practically impossible. Security guards with guns and walkie-talkie sets shadow him day and night, and it took an interminable amount of dealings with his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, to be given the VIP treatment and meet the man.

But when one does get through, how does one speak to a legend?

He is sprawling on a red Spanish sofa in the sitting-room of his back-stage suite, sipping a soft drink from a bottle. The walls are plastered with good-luck telegrams, including one from the Beatles. He’s wearing the black karate-style suit designed for his season at the hotel, and his hair, dyed pitch-black as always, is swept back off his face in the style he created fourteen years ago. His side-boards are now very long and spiked. He is certainly handsome, with reputedly the best film profile since Rudolf Valentino. Fittingly enough, he would pass for a Las Vegas gambler in a movie. But, he says, he never gambles himself.

He rises to greet guests with an almost athletic enthusiasm, then rubs his great wide rings which are heavily clustered with diamonds against a silver wrist bracelet bearing his name. He looks ever so slightly nervous.

The room is scattered with aides and friends. There are no women present. Priscilla Presley, the girl Elvis married two years ago, is up in their thirtieth floor penthouse suite. Their baby Lisa Marie, eighteen months old, is at one of their homes in California. The Colonel watches his creation like a cautious mother, only interrupting when the question of money arises. There is a story, it may be a myth, that says that he takes fifty per cent of what Elvis earns. If that is true, he must be a multi-millionaire by now.

‘We didn’t decide to come back here for the money, I’ll tell you that,’ laughs Elvis. ‘I’ve been wanting to perform on stage again for the last nine years, and it’s been building up inside of me since 1965 until the strain became intolerable. I got all het up about it, and I don’t think I could have left it much longer.

‘The time is just right. The money – I have no idea at all about that. I just don’t want to know. You can stuff it.’

‘Can we just say this,’ says the Colonel, all homespun, folksy humour. ‘The Colonel has nothing to do with Mr Presley’s finances. That’s all done for him by his father, Mr Vernon Presley, and his accountant.’

Mr Presley Snr, a fatter and greyer version of his son, nods at the formal third person way of speaking and takes another beer from the bar.

‘He can flush all his money away if he wants to. I won’t care,’ the Colonel adds.

Presley’s decision to show himself to his devoted following came as a shock. Most people had given up their idol for lost as a string of crummy, cheaply-made movies came out of Hollywood, always with Presley in the thinnest role. Invariably, the biggest expense on the film budget would be the million dollars requested for Elvis.

‘We’ve now completed all the deals I made when I came out of the army in 1960,’ he says, almost apologetically. ‘And from now on, I’m going to play more serious parts and make fewer films.

‘I wouldn’t be honest with you if I said I wasn’t ashamed of some of the movies and the songs I’ve had to sing in them. I would like to say they were good, but I can’t. I’ve been extremely unhappy with that side of my career for some time. But how can you find twelve good songs for every film when you’re making three films a year? I knew a lot of them were bad songs and they used to bother the heck out of me. But I had to do them. They fitted the situation.

‘I get more pleasure out of performing to an audience than from any of the film songs. How can you enjoy it when you have to sing songs to the guy you’ve just punched up?’

How does he combine marriage and show business? He pauses and smiles: ‘Very carefully – just very carefully.’

Did his wife object to his returning to being a sex symbol?

‘No. We plan a big family. When you’re married you become aware of realities. Becoming a father made me realise a great deal more about life.’

But marriage hasn’t reduced the sexiness of his act. On stage his guitar still becomes a sort of phallic tommy-gun, while occasionally he appears to simulate an act of rape – with the microphone. And then there are his off-the-cuff comments: ‘Don’t pull my cord, lady,’ he says, as a fan reaches for the microphone lead.

On the first night of his performance a woman in the audience began stripping, overcome by excitement. Another took off her panties to mop the sweat from his brow. He gratefully accepted them, buried his face in them, and then tossed them back. It was this threat of sexuality which fourteen years ago promoted clergymen to call for his banning and imprisonment.

His life-story is almost classically American. Born in the South, his twin died at birth and he became the idolised only son of a poor white couple, Gladys and Vernon Presley. At nineteen, when working as a truck driver, he was discovered by a small record company when he asked to make a private recording for his mother’s birthday present. By the time he was twenty-one he had sold millions of records, and created a new-style teenage anti-hero. His suit was of gold, like his Cadillacs, and his image was one of unchained anti-authoritarian youth.

If you want to go any way at all towards understanding the music and corresponding sub-cultures of the under-thirties, you have to know about Elvis Presley. He was the beginning of the rock generation. And after the startling impact he made in 1956, nothing could ever be the same again.

Today, pop music can be dated and categorised neatly into pre-Presley and post-Presley. The rock and roll that Hendrix, The Who, or the Beatles are recording today began in a more primitive form with Presley. He was the one greatest original force that pop had thrown up. And his following still witnesses this.

In England the fans have been particularly avid. ‘I don’t know why they’ve been so loyal,’ he says. ‘They’ve really been fantastic to me. I still can’t believe all the letters that come in after all this time.

‘I know I’ve been saying for years that I must visit Britain, and I will, I promise. But at the moment there are personal reasons why I can’t. I shall be doing more shows in America now. I’m very satisfied with the reaction I’ve had here in Vegas. That’s what the business is all about for me. There will be films, too, but of a more serious nature, and I’ll be making another television show for NBC.’

At thirty-four, he is thinner than he’s been for years and the work-out he does every night on stage is bringing his weight down even more. He looks like a man in his early twenties.

‘I don’t understand it,’ he said, in his slow deep drawl. ‘People keep telling me I look young. I don’t know how I do it, either. I got very heavy at one time when I was in all those movies, but I lose weight very quickly, you know.’

Apparently a shy man, he claims to have few friends in show business. ‘I guess I’m just a boy from the South. I’ve never been connected with show people. I have my own friends.’

POSTSCRIPT This interview is included here not because Elvis said anything remarkable, but because to get to Elvis was remarkable in itself. I would have wished for longer to talk to the man, and he appeared quite willing to answer questions, but the Colonel cut short the interview after a bare twenty minutes. I have to be honest and admit, however, that due to stark terror on my behalf, the questions were not particularly intelligent. I suppose I always regarded this piece as an opportunity thrown away, which is fitting really, since much of Elvis’s mid and later career was a case of talent being thrown away. In 1969 he had such hopes for serious movies and tours of the world, but by 1977 he was dead, a drug-wasted junkie. Who knows, perhaps without the Colonel’s terrible deals and the toadying of his entourage, he might have lived up to our expectations. As it was after 1969 he did little but disappoint.

Back to the top

George Martin and Son and the musical Love

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

"George Martin and Son and the musical Love.” (2006)

When first rumoured it must have sounded like cultural sacrilege. After forty years of the Beatles’ musical heritage being preserved by the strictest controls, the founder of Cirque du Soleil wanted to plunder Beatle archives to re-edit, remix and generally monkey around with their records for a Las Vegas show called Love.

But then came the real surprise. The venture had the eager approval of the late George Harrison, an attitude endorsed by Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and John Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono.

And suddenly three years ago Beatles’ record producer Sir George Martin, was taken back in time nearly four decades, and put back to work at Abbey Road studios in John’s Wood. Accompanied by his son Giles, who is also a producer, he was back on home territory, re-organising a mountain of Beatle music into a new show and a new album. The Beatles’ Love was on its way.

Back in the Sixties when the Beatles were making a new album Abbey Road seemed to me as a young journalist to be the most exciting place in the world. And on first meeting George Martin there he came across as a firm if slightly reserved school teacher.

Watching him work, however, it quickly became clear that he was more than just a manipulator of sound. The Beatles may have written the songs, but George Martin had a voice as loud as any of theirs in getting the best out of those songs.

More than that, by playing various instruments on so many of the tracks, or arranging the strings or brass accompaniments, his talent was the perfect complement to theirs.

They knew everything there was to know about rock and roll, but little else. George, I suspect, didn’t know much about rock then, but he knew an awful lot about many other kinds of music. Together they made a brilliant team. Indeed without him I think it unlikely the Beatles would have become the undisputed musical pioneers of the past half century.

Which is what struck me again most forcibly when, back at Abbey Road this week, I heard a preview of the new album.

Possibly no-one else would have dared take the risks he and Giles Martin have taken in changing such loved music. In fact I think it’s unlikely Paul and Ringo would have trusted anyone else with the project.

Amazingly, knowing some of the egos involved, neither Beatle appears to have interfered other than in an encouraging way. “Ringo said, ‘you’re the boss George, you can do anything you like’,” Giles remembers. “While Paul said ‘you can be more adventurous, you know’. They wanted us to be as far out as we could go. So we tore up the rule book.”

Basically the task given to the father and son producers was to choose seventy minutes of song to best represent the Beatles as a live and living group, but to present it in a different way.

But where to start? Given unlimited access to the band’s canon of work which tracks should they select, because the odds are that, when faced with the complete 250 recordings scarcely any two people would choose the same songs. In the end they selected 27 main songs, but there are fragments from a further 123 edited into the album to create a vast melange of sound.

“We tried to capture the soul of the Beatles,” George said this week. “They were such a great band, but I think people have taken them for granted. You have to remember when they made all his music they were in their twenties, young men.”

Interestingly George’s son Giles wasn’t even a big Beatles fan until he worked on this record. “You can’t be a Beatles fan when your dad is George Martin,” he laughs. “This was Dad’s music, not mine. Before this I would never put on a Beatles album, and actually wasn’t familiar with a lot of their stuff.

“Now I know every single track, of course, and I’m just amazed at the different kinds of music they made, knowing, for instance, that there was just seven months between the recording of Eleanor Rigby and Sergeant Pepper (both of which are on the album in slightly different forms). It’s astonishing”

George, was of course, the boss on the project, but at 80, with his hearing failing, Giles, with his “good pair of ears” and modern digital expertise was essential.

“Giles would spend hours moving bits of music around,” George says, “trial and error, really, building up this new tapestry of sound from the old material.”

“Then,” says Giles, “Dad would come and listen, and suggest something extra. So there we were bit trying to show what we could do. Actually I never thought the project, was going to happen, that it would eventually be put to one side and I’d be fired. So I thought I’d better do something useful and spent the first six months putting all the tracks on to hard disc and cataloguing everything as to what key they were in and what tempo.”

“The result of that,” comes in George, “was that when we came to cut between songs it was a wonderful document to have, to see which one’s fitted together.”

Almost like a couple of boy enthusiasts you sense the shared joy of discovery when chance ideas worked out. But the venture also gave Giles, who wasn’t even born when the Beatles broke up in 1970, a chance to see how his father had worked with the group.

“The original brief was that we could do anything we liked with the tracks but we couldn’t record anything new,” George explains. “But then the director of the show wanted to use a demo George Harrison had made of While My Guitar Gently Weeps and George’s widow Olivia thought it was too raw without some extra accompaniment. So then Giles had his big idea.”

Which was that his father would go away and write a string arrangement, much as he’d done for Yesterday forty years earlier. “It was the only unfinished track we used,” says Giles. “And because Dad works on manuscript paper none of us had actually heard what he’d written until we recorded it.”

“I know I’m going to get slagged off for this,” George laughs. “But I just did the best I could do.”

The best he could do is one of the most exciting moments on the album, a new baroque accompaniment to a well loved song, where violins have replaced electric guitars.

“So to go into the studio that day and hear and really understand what my dad does so well was fantastic for a fan, which I now am, as well as for a son,” Giles admits. “Lots of guys can chop things together like I do. But only Dad can do what he does.”

In that there is, of course, the irony that George Martin, the man who this week was honoured in the UK Music Hall of Fame, cannot now hear certain parts of the music he helped create.

For someone for whom music has been his life he’s amazingly philosophical. “Obviously I miss my hearing desperately, and it’s actually deteriorated while I’ve been working on this show and album. I won’t be doing any more. This is the end of my life in recording.

“But, you know, the human body is an extraordinary thing. You make up for things as you go along. You get compensations all the time.”

“It’s true,” agrees Giles, for a moment not joking with his father. “Sometimes Dad would come into the studio and say he thought we needed a bit more bass or treble or something. And I’d
think we had enough. But then I’d have another listen, and think,
‘My God, he’s right. How did he know that?’ It’s sometimes as though his brain fills in the blanks for what he knows he can’t hear.”

So will Love be another worldwide Beatles number one for Christmas? Or will those who think it sacrilege to even tamper with Beatles’ recordings be proved right? Even worse, what if no-one notices much difference between the original records and the new release, or no-one cares, anyway?

My guess is that despite the title, Love, which suggests to me a soppiness to the Sixties I always thought was bogus, it will be another huge success, with nerdy fans spending years lives trying to find every one of the 150 different records fragmented here.

Inevitably I would have chosen a few different songs. Two thirds of the album is devoted to the last three years of the Beatles’ career, from Sergeant Pepper onwards. But for me the middle period of their career, the time of songs like Here, There and Everywhere, Norwegian Wood and Girl was just as interesting, though probably less elaborate and less easy to visualise in a show.

But as George and Giles agreed, if you’d put those songs in, which would you have taken out? At which point you realise just how much brilliant material the Beatles produced in just seven years, and wonder why no-one does it any more.

back to the top of the page

Ringo Starr, 1968

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

RINGO STARR interview (Evening Standard March 1968)

You step through a large white hoop like an airlock on a submarine to get to Ringo’s play room. It is the top floor of an annexe built on to the dark brown living room end of his home, and it’s a splendid place of flashing lights, panda rugs, a fruit machine, table for snooker and table tennis and miles and miles of taped pop.

It is, in fact, like the last word in youth clubs. Shaped like a Dutch barn, at one end there is a patch of wall on which guests are invited to record their visit (Gerald Scarfe obliged with a caricature of his host) and at the other there’s a panelled-off control room where Ringo keeps the oddments and impedimenta of his latest hobbies.

I went down there this week. Ringo lit some joss sticks and we played pool; and Ringo, prancing around the turquoise felt with his best Paul Newman-in-The-Hustler expression, won. His wife Maureen stayed in bed all day. She had ‘some bug’.

Says Ringo: ‘John just lives up the road. Sometimes I go up there to play with his toys, and sometimes he comes down here to play with mine.’

The Starrs have lived in mock-Tudor country on the side of a Weybridge hill for just over two years. They moved there shortly after Zak, their first son, was born ‘because we were afraid some fan would pinch him and take him home to put in her scrapbook.’

Zak is now a toddler. Their second child, Jason, is nearly eight months. ‘I suppose I’d like a little girl eventually,’ says Ringo. ‘They’re so cuddly.’

They have a nanny who lives in, a chauffeur, a gardener and a lady who does the housework. Since they went to India Maureen’s mother has been staying with them: ‘Maureen’s dad’s at sea. He wouldn’t give it up for anything.’

He’s very proud of his garden which is terraced, has a Wendy house up a tree, and overlooks a golf course, and he’s fond of his nine cats, most of which are Siamese with tabby markings. ‘We get quite a few foxes around here, too. The first night I heard them I thought some girl was getting assaulted down at the end of the road.’

They rarely go out in the evenings nowadays and they watch a great deal of television. There are six sets scattered throughout the house. Ringo likes situation comedy, or a good play and the Cilla Black Show.

Their neighbours, who are mostly hidden by the lush wooded hills, are still mainly strangers although they do send invitations to coffee mornings ‘to meet the Major and all that kind of rubbish.’ And their friends are John and Cynthia, George and Patty and Paul and Jane.

‘Maureen is friendly with some of the girls who work at the hairdressers she goes to, and they come back for tea some days, and I’ve got a friend in Liverpool called Roy.’

He suddenly becomes animated: ‘You know, he’s a joiner, and he’s only got about thirty records but he gets so much pleasure from them.

‘Yet I’ve got a cupboard here with about five hundred LPs and when I want to play one I have to close the cupboard again because I don’t know which one to put on any more.’

He’s pre-eminently the married man nowadays. Beatles’ music publisher Dick James tells a story about when he first met Ringo. They were in a coffee bar in Soho and Ringo was dreadfully shy. After several attempts at conversation which ended in one-sentence answers and some embarrassed silences, Dick asked him if he had a girl. Yes, said Ringo, he had a girl, her name was Maureen and they’d met at the Cavern. She was a hairdresser and he was going to marry her.

‘Suddenly,’ says Dick, ‘Ringo was chatting.’

‘I like the security of marriage and the family,’ says Ringo. ‘In fact, I’m thinking of selling my Facel Vega and getting an ordinary family saloon, something like a Mercedes.’

He has a passion for hobbies and consumes new ones at an enormous rate. At the moment he’s developing his own photographs. A few weeks ago it was taking movie film (‘We used some in Magical Mystery Tour so that gave me an extra push’), and before that it was photography, putting, snooker, making light machines with coloured slides, and painting eight-foot-tall sunflowers on the garden walls. The rain has washed most of them off. Next week it might be fixing up his new fountain by the fishpond or sorting out his favourite records.

‘I’ve always had crazes, but now if I want to do something I go out and buy all the equipment. Then sometimes if there’s a lot of setting up involved I can’t be bothered and go off whatever it is. I don’t stay with one hobby for much more than a couple of weeks at a time. Sometimes I’ll have a week and I’ll just play records; then I might spend a day just playing with my tape recordings; and sometimes I put the video tape machine on and film myself playing snooker.

‘I suppose I get bored like anyone else, but instead of having three hours a night I have all day to get bored in.

‘Even this house was a toy. In Liverpool I’d always lived in a four-roomed house and the height of my ambition was a semi in Aigburth’ (a lower middle class Liverpool suburb).

‘Sometimes I feel I’d like to stop being famous and get back to where I was in Liverpool. There don’t seem to be so many worries in that sort of life, although I thought there were at the time. But I had to come here to realise that they counted for very little.

‘Still the happiest times of my life have been as a Beatle. And you know what I regret most – never being able to see a Beatles’ stage show from the audience. I would have loved that. It isn’t the same when you see it on film later.’

We leave the pool table and go back to the cathedral he calls his living room. Television replaces the constantly jiving records.

Despite his five headlined years (or perhaps because of it) he’s still remarkably touchy about press reports, and constantly surprised that his movements should attract the attention they do.

‘It’s amazing,’ he says, over and over again, ‘they must be barmy. Why everybody had to be against our doing meditation I don’t know. What would have happened if we’d suddenly turned Catholic instead? If we’d been sitting with the Pope every day we’d have been “good old Beatles”.

‘You know I went through a stage of thinking seriously about having plastic surgery on my nose because that was all the papers seemed to write about. I never noticed “my feature” until the press pointed it out. It didn’t hurt me, but I got fed up with reading about it.’

He’s looking very suntanned since he came back from India and he hasn’t shaved for over a fortnight. And the rinse that he had for his part in the film Candy has been almost washed out of his hair so that his grey streak along the right side of his head is beginning to show again. ‘I looked like Jeff Chandler when I had my Tony Curtis hairdo. The mop top covers it up now,’ he says.

He has, he says, no ambition, but rather fancies the idea of himself in comic film roles, because his face makes people laugh. And there’s all that pathos in those great drooping, doggy, Pagliacci eyes.

He’s the supreme fatalist. Nothing ever seems to get on top of him. He has problems, but he can cope. ‘I’ve never really done anything to create what has happened. It creates itself. I’m here because it happened. But I didn’t do anything to make it happen apart from saying “Yes”.’

He never knows the cost of anything: ‘I haven’t had any real money worries since I was eighteen, although I probably only had £10 in the bank then. I could afford never to work again, I suppose, but I’d have to be careful, and I’d probably have to sell this house in about ten years.

‘I’m rich by working-class standards, but not immensely rich, and not by the standards of those who really do have money. I spend money like water, you see. A lot of it went on this house.’

Like all Beatle houses it’s as colourful as a butterfly, and chock-a-block with knick-knacks and ornaments and souvenirs. There are pictures of John, hundreds of last summer’s psychedelic posters and dozens of arty-tarty odds and ends picked up in antique shops. He’s a great hoarder.

When he first moved down to Weybridge he had a bar built because he couldn’t go out to pubs, but these days he hardly drinks. On the aeroplane going out to India he became a vegetarian ‘for health reasons,’ he days. He smokes between twenty and forty American cigarettes a day, and the house is littered with ash trays and squashed filter tips.

He looks very small and vulnerable wandering around his mansion in his purple pants and flowery yellow shirt, and he’s so open and guileless that it is disarming.

‘Do you remember when everyone began analysing Beatle songs, well I don’t think I ever understood what some of them were supposed to be about,’ he says, and it’s good to hear someone admit it. Or he might say: ‘As a drummer I’m fair, that’s all, and I don’t care about being good any more.’ … ‘You know I’m not very good at singing because I haven’t got a great range. So they write songs for me that are pretty low and not too hard.’ … and ‘I didn’t really feel that I was involved with the Beatles for the first couple of years.’

Maureen’s mum calls us for our tea and we move from one television to another. There’s a programme showing about an office party and Ringo becomes reflective. ‘I like England, you know, and I like living down here. But you know the thing I miss most of all – a good “do”.’

Back to the top

Yoko Ono Interview, 1968

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

YOKO ONO on the Two Virgins - interview (Evening Standard October 1968)

‘The idea for our “Two Virgins” album came from John. I know some people may think “ah, that bottoms-girl Yoko has persuaded John into this” but that wasn’t how it was. I don’t think my bottoms film inspired him either. I know some may think that I have a bottoms fetish, but when we made that film I was so embarrassed that I was never in the same room as the filming. I’m very shy. I just set up the camera and allowed the technicians to do it and my friends went before the camera as though they were being x-rayed.

‘John is very shy, too. I don’t think he’s seen the bottoms film He heard one of the tapes of my voice pieces and said this should be an LP record, and that if it were made it should have a picture of me naked on the cover. I don’t know why he said that. I suppose he just thought it would be effective. He didn’t even know me that well at the time. Anyway he sent me a drawing of me naked, and I was terribly embarrassed. But when we decided to make a record we decided that we should both be naked on the cover. He took the photograph with an automatic camera. No – we wouldn’t have had anyone else there to photograph us. And it’s nice. The picture isn’t lewd or anything like that. Basically we’re very shy and square people. We’d be the first to be embarrassed if anyone was to invite us to a nude party.’

Right now Yoko is probably the most enigmatic lady in the world. She came to London in 1966, had a couple of avant-garde exhibitions which met with generally favourable reviews, became a topic for national ribaldry when her film study of bottoms walking was shown in London, and then front page news when she struck up a friendship with John Lennon last spring.

But, somewhere in between the escalating-sized headlines, Yoko Ono, the artist, has lost her real public identity. Her notoriety doesn’t prepare one for the smiling, charming, slightly nervous woman who for months has waited at the recording studios while Lennon worked on the Beatles’ new album.

Of course we know she’s Japanese and very small, but it still comes as a surprise to notice the diminutive hands, with the nag-nailed fingers and that the eternal white tennis shoes she wears, tiny as they are, are actually about one and a half inches too long for her.

She’s thirty-four, twice married, and was brought up in Tokyo and America. Her family were rich (her father was a governor of a bank and she had an uncle who represented Japan at the United Nations) and her childhood was rigidly authoritarian and dedicated to education.

Her mother was Buddhist and her father Christian and, in addition, her school lessons were with a governess who took her in Bible reading and Buddhist scripture, as well as calligraphy, music and Japanese culture. She has a younger brother and sister.

‘I was like a domesticated animal being fed on information’, she says. ‘I hated it. And particularly music. And before my music lessons I used to faint – literally. I suppose it was my way of escape.’

On top of education came a strict moral code. ‘God was always watching, and any misdemeanours or bad thoughts had to be confessed to her mother.

‘I never went so far as to read comics, but I remember when I was about eight sneaking into my father’s library and reading adult books like Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard. Of course, there was nothing improper in them, but I had to confess, and that was a terrible ordeal.

‘When I was older and received letters my mother always read them before I did, and if one was from a man admirer she would blame it upon some loose thoughts I’d been having.’

As a child she thinks she was probably considered precocious: she wrote a diary of poems at nine, and remembers with some pride that her teacher sent a letter to her mother saying that some day she would make a name for herself as a painter or a poet.

In her teens she tried to rebel by running away from home, but never got further than her granny’s home: ‘I always seemed to be very weak. Not just physically, although I was always catching colds, but weak in character too. I just wasn’t able to stand up to my mother, and before I did anything at all I used to ask permission.’

When she was eighteen her family went to live in New York, and, as she couldn’t be left alone in Japan at ‘such a dangerous age’, she went too and enrolled to read philosophy at Sarah Lawrence – ‘a school for girls who thought of nothing but marrying Harvard graduates.’

While at high school in Tokyo she had been very active in writing and dramatics, and it was while she was at Sarah Lawrence that her first book – Grapefruit – was germinating. From this point her obsession became instructional art and communication.

‘I was lying in bed one morning listening to the birds singing and I immediately wanted to put the sound into musical notes. But I found it was too complicated, and thought if I can’t do that perhaps it would be better to use it exactly as it is. So I wrote a one-note flute piece and the accompaniment was to be the sound of the birds singing. And I gave instructions that the one note on the flute should be played in the forest or somewhere while the birds sang.’

Her biggest problem at first was when she discovered that what she wanted to do was so new that there wasn’t anyone who would produce or accept it. So she rented a loft, converted it into a studio, and held happenings every other week. ‘I remember I bought a baby-grand piano and at the first concert I played it with my body, by rolling along the open string part. It snowed that day.

‘Another buzz I got was when we boiled a still of water and listened until it evaporated. One of the men there got so turned on by it that he filmed the whole event – but he found out later he’d forgotten to put any film in his camera.’

She finally gave up the loft when she felt it was becoming too much a part of the establishment. But she left nearly all her possessions behind her: ‘People cherish the idea of having things which belonged to me.’

It isn’t enough for Yoko that an artist present his work to the public. The public have to respond with a dialogue. To Yoko Ono everyone is an artist. Her works are unfinished and instructional.
When she asked people to cut her clothes off at one of her happenings, it was again their reaction which made the event. And the point about her ‘Two Virgins’ LP with Lennon (the cover of which shows them both naked) is not that people listen and say ‘very nice’, but that they add something of their own to it. (It’s sub-titled ‘Unfinished Music Number 1’, and will be followed by other albums.)

‘Most artists work in monologue form,’ she says. ‘I don’t believe in the artist deciding what has aesthetic values, but in letting the painting or music or whatever it is grow – be in a state of process. Everything I do is unfinished, so that you, or somebody else can add something and then pass it on.’

As an artist she’s more of a conceptualist than an actual craftsman. She thinks of an idea, and others perform it.

She was first married in 1957 to a Japanese composer (‘he used to write Stravinsky-type material, but he gradually changed after we met, and now he’s the foremost avant-garde composer in Japan’). After six years she left him, when she felt that they were becoming too much a part of the arts establishment. Her second husband was another artist (now film producer) Tony Cox. They have one daughter of five called Kyoko.

‘Both of my marriages were elopements,’ she says. ‘Basically I’m a romantic and believe in long-lasting relationships, but somehow I’ve failed up to now. I can’t be happy with relationships when communication starts to fail.

‘What is more important to me even than my work now is my relationship with John. Because John, too, is so creative, we can collaborate together.’

Back to the top

The Making of Trick Or Treat? 1976

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

The Making of Trick Or Treat? (The Sunday Times Magazine, September 1976)

One lunchtime last summer, Michael Apted and I walked into a crowded restaurant together, sat down, and without looking at each other considered the menu. After a few moments he put his menu down, screwed up his face, and dropped his head in his hands. ‘Stephan’s gone,’ he said. ‘He left this morning. He told me.’

I didn’t look up: ‘About us?’ I asked finally.

‘Yes.’ He paused. I waited, forcing him to carry on. ‘It doesn’t make any difference … not to you and me. You know that, don’t you?’ I didn’t say anything. ‘I mean … I love you,’ he said finally. A couple at the next table looked round at us.

‘No you don’t.’ I was being petulant.

‘You know I do.’

I shook my head. ‘I don’t know that. I don’t know anything any more. I can’t trust you. I can’t believe anything you tell me. Everything’s just one big game to you … dressing up in those ridiculous clothes all the time … out of your mind on opium … everything’s just one big game for you. I’m tired of all the bullshit … I’m tired of you. Do you understand? It’s just not the same anymore. It’s never the same … last night, it wasn’t the same …’ Gradually I had worked myself up to a point verging on hysteria.

Apted put an arm out towards me: ‘For Christ’s sake, Kathy … ‘
The restaurant was now an audience of ears, alert to the conversation and to my name.

‘Don’t touch me,’ I virtually yelled. ‘I don’t want your hands … your fingers near me.’

‘I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘What’s wrong?’ I shook my head. He persisted. ‘Tell me, darling …’

A waiter hovered over us waiting to take our order. He was looking at us very strangely.

‘I’m pregnant,’ I said. And I began to cry.

For six months, while director Michael Apted and I were preparing our film-that-never-was Trick or Treat?, we improvised scenes like this at every opportunity we got – on aeroplanes, in bars, cafes, taxis and finally in between shots on location. He almost always played Ille, the stronger more determined of the two girls that the film was about, and I was Kathy – the vulnerable one. He didn’t always call me ‘darling’ and I didn’t always cry. Sometimes he would be cold and aloof, and I would be plaintive, simpering and even fawning; and sometimes he would be clever and witty, and I’d be giggly and silly.

Trick or Treat? may not at the end of the day have entertained millions of people at the box office, but in one way and another, the sight of Michael Apted and me acting out the parts of a couple of lesbians must have provided a diverting cabaret to an awful lot of lunches.

For better or worse Trick or Treat? was my idea. I first thought of it in 1969; I wrote it as a novel in 1974; I spent all of 1975 trying to help turn that novel into a film; and so far I’ve spent the first eight months of 1976 trying to recover from that experience. As a film it was, in every sense, a complete disaster; and when it was finally abandoned in January it was estimated that about £400,000 (two thirds of the total budget) had been spent shooting under forty minutes of usable footage.

Nobody sets out to make a disaster, or, in our case, half a disaster: given the right set of circumstances it could happen to anybody. I just wish it hadn’t happened to me. At the start everyone agreed that it was a good and commercial idea; the story of two girls who have a love affair with each other, who decide to have a baby together, and who, in doing so, become tragically involved with a married couple.

It was, in my mind, a love affair between four people, a sort of erotic Chabrol piece about sexual relationships and emotional ambivalences. It was to be set in Europe and to star three Europeans and one American. At a time when English films were unattractive outside Britain, here seemed an opportunity to make a film with international appeal. In fact I’d even gone to Paris to write the novel in the first place.

From my point of view, things began to go wrong right from the start. The first company to show interest in the project was Warner Brothers, but I turned down their very good offer and stayed with Goodtimes Enterprises, the company that had made That’ll Be The Day, Stardust and my documentary on James Dean. There are many advantages in working with an independent production company, but there is one major disadvantage – money. While the major film companies can afford to spend thousands of pounds developing a film in pre-production costs, the resources of a small company cannot realistically be expected to stand an investment of £30,000 in a film which may not get made. I say this now because I think it may help explain some of the pressures upon Goodtimes’ two producers, Sandy Lieberson and David Puttnam, and also upon the film’s director Michael Apted and myself.

I began writing the first draft in March, and by July, had a second draft completed which had attracted the National Film Finance Corporation, EMI Films, and eventually an Italian company called Rizzoli. By then the location had been moved from Paris to Rome and Michael Apted and I found ourselves on a European tour in search of a cast.

At first we hit lucky: Michael Apted’s reputation in Europe is considerable because of his success there with Triple Echo, and Stephane Audrun quickly expressed willingness to play the part of the older married woman. Much more difficult to cast was the sophisticated and intelligent and slightly decadent multi-lingual young woman. All kinds of names were bandied about for the part: Isabelle Adjani, Maria Schneider, Bulle Ogier (my favourite), Charlotte Rampling, Laura Antonelli, Dominique Sanda and Aurore Clement. And then someone suggested Bianca Jagger ….

‘She’d be worth talking to at any rate,’ said Apted. Through a mutual friend in California I tracked her down to Paul Morrisey’s house in Long Island and arranged to meet her in Rome at the end of the week. Ominously enough, she arrived a day late, full of stories about Fellini wanting to see her for a part in Casanova. Unluckily for us the part had, I understand, already been cast. Still, Michael Apted and David Puttnam wanted to meet her, so, when she had read the script I took her to meet them: they were cautiously interested, and it was decided that I should hang around Rome for a few more days finding out how interested she really was.

Whatever qualities Bianca may lack, it cannot be said that she lacks style, and it was that style which interested us. Bitchy people might say that her whole life is a preparation for an entrance, but, we argued to ourselves, that was because no one was ever prepared to risk giving her more than an opportunity for entering. If she performed well in a screen test, and if the financiers were in agreement, it might be that behind that carefully constructed exterior was a natural actress.

She was certainly a natural exhibitionist. One night after visiting a gay bar with her friends Verushka, and Manola Blahnick, cobbler to the famous, Bianca suddenly decided she was bursting to pee. Loos are rare on the Via Veneto at one in the morning so, while I kept watch for the police, paparazzi, or for any people who may have been interested in watching, Bianca squatted down behind a car parked on the pavement and hoisting up her thousand dollar dress, peed a stream that ran down the hill of Rome’s most fashionable street. Then it was Verushka’s turn.

August was spent largely writing another draft of the script, while Puttnam and Lieberson worked at sorting out a budget and the financing of the picture. As expected, everyone wanted to see a screen test of Bianca, and after one abortive effort to persuade her to do one in London, Michael Apted flew to New York to test her. She was surprisingly good. Indeed some people think that she performed better in her screen test than she ever did in the film itself.

By now, however, the sexual nature of the film was
beginning to concern her increasingly, as was the script. Having now read the book, she wanted the script to be more faithful to the book, which was a surprising request since the book was much more sexually explicit than any of the scripts. During the next six months the question of the sex and nudity was to be a point for endless discussions between Bianca and the rest of us; we wanted to make a serious film about a sexual relationship between two women and a man. To us that involved nudity. In Bianca’s mind there was some big bad film baron who wanted us to make a dirty film; that was absurd.

Neither the producers nor the financiers ever put any pressure upon us to make a film other than the one we had always intended to make. Bianca never said she wouldn’t do the nudity – and even signed a contract to say that she would: she just moaned a lot about it. But then she moaned about most things … the costumes, the way the film was lit, the importance of having a say in approving the other girl and the eventual choices of the married couple – Nigel Davenport and Elsa Martinelli (who was cast as a result of Stephane Audran having to drop out because of the delay). But most of all she moaned about the script.

By this time Goodtimes Enterprises had spent a considerable amount of money developing the project. Both EMI and the NFFC liked Bianca’s screen test, but when the NFFC were presented with a revised budget which added a further £50,000 to the cost of the film, they decided to back out. Another source of finance had to be found: that source turned out to be Hugh Hefner’s Playboy film division, but only on condition that the picture was to star Bianca Jagger.

So from being just a bright casting idea a few weeks before, Bianca Jagger had now become the most essential ingredient: without her there would have been no film (not last autumn anyway), and she knew it. And to make matters worse I still hadn’t got the script right.

Rationally we should have postponed the production right there and then in early September of last year. But these things have a momentum of their own. We went on. As Puttnam said, Goodtimes Enterprises couldn’t now afford not to make the film.

Apted now flew to California to choose someone to play the part of Kathy from over a hundred girls: Puttnam was also in Los Angeles clearing up the Playboy deal, and then Bianca joined them to view the short list of potential Kathys. But now having read the book again, and the latest script, Bianca wanted a lady writer on the project, since she felt that a man (me) was pathologically incapable of understanding how two women having a lesbian relationship feel. It was nothing to do with my ability as a writer I was assured: it was, it seems, all to do with my having the wrong balance in my chromosomes.

At this point, as if to underline my sexual unsuitability for the job, my hair began to fall out.

Having been talked out of my first instinct, which was to walk away from the whole project, I joined the centre of activity in California. Apted, whose little boy had recently had a major operation, looked as though the blood was being sucked out of him. Bianca had now made a tape recording giving us her ideas of how the script and the storyline should go.

Unfortunately it bore little relationship to the story of the novel of which she still professed to be a great admirer. She was, so far as I could gather, very impressed with the Cathy/Heathcliff relationship in Wuthering Heights, and she wanted Ille’s brother, who was always dead in the book, to be resurrected. She also wanted her own character to be given more motivation for behaving badly in the story--- which was a good idea.

However she didn’t like her entrance into the film and she thought that it should be the other girl who wanted to get pregnant. I argued, and then gave in, and a couple of nights later found myself at dinner with a psychiatrist while Bianca put the case for transferring the conception to the other girl. As Puttnam said, I was “going to have to learn the realities of film-making”.

The most suitable girl to play Kathy seemed to be a very photogenic Californian called Jan Smithers, who had just missed the part of Cecilia in Elia Kazan’s The Last Tycoon. Clearly Fellini’s and Kazan’s losses were to be our gains. She wasn’t perfect (I said that she reminded me of another girl I knew who was three sheets to the wind) but she was the best. And Bianca liked her.

The only trouble was that she said she had a scar on her breast and before she could be cast someone had to ascertain whether or not that scar would show up on camera. The director had to see her naked, and at the clinical hour of 9.30 one morning she took off her clothes for his approval. Apted was very embarrassed, but later she told me that the only thing that bothered her was the fact that her period had just come that morning.

The next problem to be solved was that of the lady writer with whom I was now to work. We knew someone we liked, so the next step was to see if Bianca liked her. On the following Sunday I picked her up for lunch and drove out of town to an open-air restaurant where a very nervous Apted was waiting with my new partner.

For some reason of her own, Bianca wore dark metallic glasses throughout the lunch and cried, while a very worthy streaming-haired Californian girl, spotting her celebrity, came and sang in a loud Joan Baez voice at our table. Appropriately enough it was a song of doom

On the way home I asked Bianca if she liked the new writer: ‘Darling, it’s your script. If you like her then that’s all that matters.’

Two weeks later in London that wasn’t all that mattered: “It’s shit,” said Bianca upon being shown the new writer’s efforts. A new plan was then made. As Bianca didn’t like what I’d written, or what the new writer had written, then obviously the way to do it was for her to work with me. She agreed.

The next day I cleared my study and waited for her. She never came. When I called the production office to find out what had happened to her I was eventually told that the only time she could see me was the following day at Wiltons for lunch. She was too busy with costume fittings, it seemed.

That night I spoke to Apted who was now in Rome looking at locations. I told him I was going to speak strongly to the lady: “Be very firm with her, Raymond,” he insisted. So the following morning I wrote on my writing pad all the things that I thought she should hear, and went off for lunch. She wasn’t late.

“Listen,” I said, opening my writing pad on the table. “I got you into this so it’s fitting that I talk to you now. You are being employed on this picture as an actress … no more and no less. So far we’ve been indulgent to you to an extraordinary degree. Now these are the facts of life. I am the writer. If the story needs changing … I change it. The myth about a woman writer has been disproved. But I’ll take ideas from anywhere and anyone. If you want to help on the new draft of the script come to my home. You know where I live, and you’re always welcome. But the only rights you have there are consultation rights. We start shooting on November 3. My job is to get the script right by then … “

From time to time she tried to interrupt me but I insisted upon carrying on with my pre-arranged speech. I knew that if we got into an argument she would win. There was no way that I would ever be clever enough to out-debate her.

Eventually I softened a bit: “I know you’re terrified,” I said. “No, I’m not,” she replied. I insisted that I thought she ought to be, and that I could sympathise, and that I was sorry she was worried about the script. But she had much more evidence about the competence of Michael Apted and me, than we did about her. We were, in effect, gambling our careers on her. “You have to put your trust in us,” I said. “The film’s financiers trusted us enough to finance the picture before you were ever mentioned. Trick Or Treat? will get made, don’t doubt that.”

At this point Bianca Jagger decided that she no longer wanted to be in the film, and after exchanging some quite pleasant and incidental chat about mutual friends, our lunch meeting broke up. The bill came to £31.40. I took a taxi home and as I walked through the door the telephone was ringing.

It was one of the producers, Sandy Lieberson. Bianca had telephoned him and was already on her way round to see him. I explained what had happened, and how I had chastised her. He then proceeded to chastise me for jeopardising the whole film without consulting him first. He was right, of course. And it was his company’s money I was jeopardising.

A few nights later Lieberson and Apted saw Bianca in Paris: and this time Lieberson had a go at her. But this time she didn’t walk away from the film. She’d been bluffing. I was later to learn that she thought I was behaving like a woman when I complained to her: my chromosomes were obviously still in with a chance.

October was spent fighting Equity. (I actually got escorted from their offices one day when I sneaked in to one of their Press conferences.) They didn’t want Bianca: we did. If only they’d won we could have gone down with honour. But inevitably a compromise was reached.

By the beginning of November we were all set to go. Apted was in Rome setting his location, Bianca was in London arguing about costumes with Marit Lieberson, Sandy’s wife and costume director, and Jan Smithers was getting tense and catching flu. One night, just before going to Rome, Smithers burst into tears and began to cry hysterically saying that she should never have come to Europe, that it was all her own fault for being greedy, she was homesick and unhappy and that now she was being punished by being ill.

Eventually she decided to telephone her former husband and after talking to him she said she felt better.

On November 11 most of the crew moved to Rome (Jan Smithers still with flu and bearing a whole suitcase full of jars of vitamin pills, yeast and health foods) where Apted and I continued to work on the screenplay (now little more than a suggestion of cards for improvisation) while Bianca stayed in London renegotiating the terms of her contract – upwards.

We had intended to spend a week in Rome rehearsing, but Bianca’s late arrival prevented this. When she did arrive, she was accompanied by a voice coach and a bodyguard. There was, she thought, a danger of her being kidnapped. “Nonsense,” said Gavrik Losey, the associate producer, “who’d want to kidnap you?”

Shooting started on schedule on November 17. Unfortunately Bianca was an hour late in reaching the location, and a rainstorm of hurricane proportions hit the city as the first clapper was about to go down. It was, apparently, the worst storm Rome had seen in years, and the entire morning was spent getting two shots and one line before the unit broke for lunch and moved to the next location. At lunchtime the first in a long series of rows about the costumes broke out.

Clothes are a subject about which Mrs Jagger knows a great deal and when she had announced earlier that hardly any of the clothes made for her in England were suitable, a deal had been done with Valentino in Rome to exclusively dress her for the film. So at lunchtime on the first day she and Jan Smithers went off for what seemed like a disproportionately long fitting session, the results being that when they returned to the new location it was too late in the day to do more than rehearse the next scene.

A couple of days later Apted was to complain: “It seems that Valentino is getting more time with the leading lady than I am.” Bianca seemed to be more interested in frocks than films.

On the second day Bianca was three quarters of an hour late reaching the location and the scene wasn’t completed. By now it had been decided to resurrect the always-dead brother and a young man called Carlo Puri was hired to play the part. At the start Bianca wasn’t too sure about him, and suggested that he be dressed very carefully or he might look like her servant.

Later it became known that Puri belonged to the Pirelli tyre family, and a bit later still, Bianca became quite friendly towards him, even suggesting that we should change the end of the film so that we could make use of his father’s castle. Fortunately neither the producers nor Puri’s father took the suggestion seriously.

The third say started well. It was a mute scene between Jan Smithers and Puri and it went without incident. Bianca wasn’t on call until one fifteen in the afternoon, but through one thing and another, she wasn’t ready to start shooting until twenty past four, and by that time the light was going very quickly. The lighting cameraman, Denis Lewiston, saved the day.

The fourth and fifth days went without incident but on the sixth day Bianca was an hour late in reaching the location, so that her first scene with Elsa Martinelli was not completed. Elsa, who had just arrived from New York that morning, was not amused.

By the second week things began to draw to a head. Sandy Lieberson was doing his best to keep everybody happy and working, but already the tension was beginning to tell heavily, not least upon Jan Smithers, who was never more than an eyelash away from tears. Then on the Tuesday (Day 9) a doctor was called to give Bianca some vitamin shots. She wasn’t feeling well. Most nights since she had arrived in Rome she had been going out to Jacky O, Rome’s top beautiful people meeting place, with the result that she probably wasn’t getting enough sleep. The result was exhausting her bodyguard and putting bags under her eyes.

The following morning, when called at six o’clock, Bianca told the second assistant director that she was too ill to leave her room. The doctor was called again, and influenza and exhaustion were diagnosed.

It was true that she was too ill to work; she looked terrible. She can’t burn the candle at both ends, the doctor told me. Her constitution was too delicate for that. The following day she hadn’t improved: now the trouble seemed to be diarrhoea. Luckily Nigel Davenport had brought an earlier script with him and by shooting scenes since deleted Michael Apted was able to make optimum use of the day.

Now, however, Jan Smithers was breaking into tears with increasing frequency. “You’re the writer, he’s the director and we’re the actors,” she would sob. “Why can’t we just make the film and stop all the bullshitting?”She was also extremely tired by this time, and complained frequently, vociferously and tearfully about the work pressure being put upon her.

Not everyone was sympathetic towards Bianca’s illness. She had not in the week and a half she had so far worked actually drawn the crew to her bosom in loyalty, and when it was heard that she was ill it was suggested that a length of track should be sent up to her suite so that she could rehearse falling over it – a reference to her unfortunate habit of seemingly discovering objects to stumble over during shooting.

On the Friday Bianca was better and returned to work, where she and Jan Smithers were roundly scolded by Elsa Martinelli when they criticised the location. That day, Jan’s former husband arrived to keep her company and Philip Collins, a representative of EMI, arrived to check the film’s progress. We tried to smile: condemned men do. It hardly seemed to matter now that my hair was still falling out.

At 7.30 the next morning Michael Apted threw open the door of my hotel room: “She’s done it again,” he said. He was referring to Bianca. What she had done, in fact, was to drive out to the location with her bodyguard and voice coach, and upon discovering that her caravan had not been changed for a bigger one, had immediately set off back to her hotel.

Apparently she had been promised the best caravan available, and when she saw Elsa Martinelli had a marginally bigger vehicle had decided that that was enough. She was being taken advantage of. What’s more, there seemed to be something wrong with the flush of her caravan’s lavatory, which she found embarrassing to mention and also to use.

Since I was the person she still claimed to be fondest of, it was decided that I should go round to her hotel and to take with me our man from EMI, Philip Collins. Apted and Lieberson went off to the location to rehearse the day’s shooting.

Philip Collins and I arrived at her hotel (the Hassler – former headquarters of the SS in Italy, Puttnam liked to say) just after she had got back from the location. I went in first: she was sitting on her bed, a riding crop in one hand and a copy of her contract in the other.

“So,” she said, “they knew which one to send.” Incredibly, she still believed me to be her one ally against all these people who were trying to do terrible things to her, There was someone to see her, I said, and Philip Collins went in. Whatever he said to her seemed to work, because she was back on location by 10.30. It didn’t, however, work completely, because she wasn’t ready to shoot until four o’clock.

Much of that day was spent waiting for Bianca to get her frock on and discussing whether or not it was possible to replace her. Apted wasn’t far from tears: Jan Smithers was, of course, in tears. We were supposed to be shooting the big set piece of the film, a scene which involved dozens of Italian extras and a very lavish party. But already the delays meant that the food was beginning to go off in the heat of the lamps and a large log fire.
In the middle of the afternoon Marit Lieberson asked me if I could pop in to see Bianca in her costume.

I knew Bianca wanted to be told that she looked wonderful and as always I went through a routine of flattery. She was wearing a black Valentino dress with a hat and a feather. I told her she looked wonderful: I actually thought she looked like the sparrow in the treetop.

There were two important aspects to the scene which was to be performed that day; the two girls were to watch a mime act, and then Bianca was to dance with Elsa Martinelli. This she didn’t want to do, and since it was late in the day anyway, it hardly mattered.

That night, producer Sandy Lieberson, director Miachael Apted together with Philip Collins and Gavrik Losey paid a visit to Mrs Jagger, the gist of Apted’s complaint being that he didn’t feel that Bianca was working to his instruction. The meeting broke up at one o’clock, as the crew had to be up before dawn to film Jan Smithers walking down the Via Veneto in evening dress.

The filming went very well, but Apted was disturbed to hear that Bianca had telephoned Jan Smithers in the middle of the night. For those of us privileged to know Mrs Jagger well, this was not an uncommon occurrence, but since Smithers had to be up at five it was certainly inconsiderate. Jan and Bianca had another long telephone talk that Sunday lunchtime, and when Michael Apted went down to see if Jan was okay at around tea time he was met with floods of tears, accusations that he was making a pornographic film and that everybody was trying to turn her against Bianca.

Apted now decided that there was no way he could carry on knowing the he didn’t have the confidence of either of his leading ladies. Jan Smithers was clearly more influenced by Bianca than by anybody else: she was an emotional girl, it was true, but she was now saying that she had no intention of doing the nude scenes which were scheduled for London. For weeks she’d been complaining that she couldn’t get close to Bianca, now they appeared to have formed an alliance.

Dinner that night was a sober affair: shooting for the next day had been cancelled, and even Nigel Davenport’s valiant attempts to keep us amused weren’t working. Sandy Lieberson, who had quite as much to cry about as the rest of us, came up with most apt and philosophical comments: “For Christ’s sake, you guys, all we’re trying to do is to make a move … it isn’t the end of the world … nobody’s dying … all it is is a movie … moving pictures … just like Donald Duck.” He paused for a moment: “In fact we’ve even got Donald Duck.”

The next day, while I worked with Nigel Davenport polishing a scene to be shot later in the week, Apted and Lieberson went into secret session with the two leading ladies. I was kept out. By now, apparently, the argument about nudity had turned into a full-scale attack on the script led by Jan Smithers (which was strange because when she’d been cast she’d had hardly any criticism at all). Bianca, because she liked me, defended me.

In the meantime, Gavrik Losey calculated that to stop the film now would have cost a quarter of a million pounds at the very least. Apted was still refusing to shoot, and was being supported by Lieberson and Puttnam, who had flown from London to join the sinking ship.

The crew were bemused by the behaviour of the two girls: “I really don’t know what that Bewanker is all about, Ray, I really don’t,” said one of the stand-bys. But now even a nickname was no laughing matter.

Eventually, back at our hotel, Michael Apted said to me: “I don’t think that you and I can carry on and make this film together, Raymond. Not now. One of us has to go.”

I went home that afternoon with Philip Collins. It was, he said, the worst few days of his entire life. “Thank God you’re out of it,” said Plum, my wife, when I arrived home. It was finally my turn to cry.

Shooting was then abandoned in Rome and the crew returned to London to work in the studios. It was considered impossible to replace Bianca. The plan was now for the crew to work until Christmas and then to break for three weeks, during which time it was hoped that my replacement, Kathleen Tynan, would be able to produce a new screenplay to meet with everyone’s satisfaction.

She set to work, and filming resumed. But not for long.
Work went in fits and starts for one week, during which the leading ladies took to censoring the lines in the script of which they didn’t approve, and then at the beginning of the next week Jan Smithers caught flu.

It had now been agreed by the director, the producers and the financiers that some indication of intent on behalf of the leading ladies towards the question of nudity should be ascertained before Christmas. Because of Jan Smither’s illness it was impossible to do this until the Friday---the last possible day. Both girls reported to the studio at ten o’clock in the morning, but it wasn’t until four in the afternoon, after six hours of arguing, cajoling, crying, fighting and threatening that filming could begin.

Even then Michael Apted found that his every request was being questioned. At ten o’clock the scene was completed and the unit broke for Christmas. At last, one of the girls had actually revealed a little bit of nudity: Jan Smithers had bared her breasts. Bianca, for her part, was unmovable. Throughout the whole scene she stayed securely under her sheet.

Over Christmas, Kathleen Tynan and Michael Apted worked on a new draft of the screenplay but it was all to no avail. The Friday before shooting was due to resume, David Puttnam got a message from Los Angeles to say that Jan Smithers would not be coming back. Immediately he left for America with Kathleen Tynan to find out what was going on. Bianca, meanwhile, resorted to her lawyers.

When it was sorted out it seemed that both girls, through their lawyers, were saying that they wanted to considerably alter the terns of their contracts to approval of the final cut of the picture. No director can work in that situation. The picture was cancelled.

The last time I spoke to Bianca was at five minutes to one on the morning of January 14, 1976, a day or two before the end. I was lying in bed, asleep, when the bedside phone rang.

‘Don’t answer it,’ said my wife. ‘It’s that woman again.’

I did. And she was right.

Trick Or Treat? was an education for everybody involved. At £400,000 you could say that we all had a very expensive education.

Footnote: Shortly after the film had been abandoned a miracle occurred. My hair stopped falling out.

back to the top of the page

Ormskirk - My Hometown, 1976

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

Ormskirk - My Hometown (The Sunday Times Magazine, May 1976)

The thing about Ormskirk was the women; they were voluptuous. For 20 years my mother and aunt between them must have clothed more bosoms and more bottoms than any other two persons in the whole town, and I grew up to admire the fulsome forms that carelessly undressed in my mother’s Moor Street clothes shop. There they were, grand, thigh-strong ladies who cared nothing for the gaping view between the fitting-room curtains.

So when I tell you that the average mature Ormskirk female bust is between 38 and 40 inches (C cup), and that hips spread towards 42 very quickly after adolescence, you will appreciate the authority from which I speak. Sadly, however, despite this early familiarity with the glories of the semi-clothed female figure, I must say that I was an unconscionably long time in getting to grips with it.

But then, that was Ormskirk—never a sexy place, as much as a town of romance. Indeed, although I was perpetually in a state of part-time love from puberty until I left to come to London in 1960, I have to say that I remained a virgin in Ormskirk. We all were: all my friends, boys and girls, all neatly uniformed, A-levelled virgins. I don’t believe we ever even thought to become otherwise. Ormskirk bred virgins, I think: fine, pedigree celibates, unaware and consequently unfrustrated. Not that we didn’t mess around a bit now and then.

Liverpool was only half an hour away by train, but it might just as well have been 200 miles distant for all the influence it had upon us. We even spoke a different dialect from Liverpudlians; indeed so great was our disregard for the people of Liverpool that I can remember turning down an invitation as late as 1962 to go to a club called the Cavern to hear a group called the Beatles. They can’t be any good, I remember saying, nothing any good ever came out of Liverpool.

From the age of 11 until I was 19 I lived in a very large house full of women – mother, elder sister, grandmother and aunt – and with another aunt and two girl cousins just round the corner. I suppose with that kind of matriarchal background we should all be thankful that I didn’t start dressing up in bubbly blond wigs and cami-knickers when I reached adolescence. Instead, I was a rustic lad. My partner at that time was John Rimmer of Swanpool Lane, and when we weren’t rearing chickens or watering his tomatoes we were stealing young Scots pine trees from Big Bob’s Wood.

It was all Boys’ Own stuff until one day it struck us both that there might be more fun ways of spending our time. All those boxes in my mother’s shop contained things that women put on. But what went on must come off. So we enrolled at a school of ballroom dancing in nearby Maghull. In those days you had to start somewhere.

It was about this time that I went to my first party which was held in a farmhouse in Bickerstaffe. A couple of sisters had organised the affair, and with the brazenness that young ladies possess, they quickly marshalled us into couples as the lights went out. Now, I wasn’t a complete innocent at this time. I knew a thing or two. I’d heard about nights like this: and I’d heard a lot about necking at parties. The only trouble was no-one had ever actually explained what necking was, and as a plump bottom crushed on to my knees I realised that I didn’t actually know what to do.

Were you supposed to kiss or just cuddle? And why was it called necking? Unfortunately the room was so dark I couldn’t see what any of the other couples were doing, so, deciding that the literal course of action was probably the most suitable, I spent the whole evening straining my head upwards so that I might rub necks like a rather coy giraffe with a succession of bewildered young girls. And never a lip was kissed.

My impressions of Ormskirk from that night on all concern girls, and indeed the whole structure of the town, with its one main street, its twice weekly market, its one coffee bar with Ray Conniff piped music, the two cinemas and the rugby and cricket clubs all seemed to have been purposely laid out for the ritual of promenading and courting. Whatever you did was converted into a purposeful courtship display.

Never a great sportsman, I found myself playing rugby twice on Saturdays in one season, in the morning with the school’s second team where you would attract the girl hockey players who finished first, and then, again, in the afternoon, with the O.R.U.F.C. where among the spectators would be older working girls.

I t was a town of Young Conservatives, blazers and ties and duffle coats; a place where you could borrow your parents’ car once you were 17 for Saturday nights out in Southport or parking in the sandhills at Formby or in the local woods and fields. Everybody knew everybody else, so relationships took on a form of serial petting monogamy (if you were lucky), a state only to be broken at parties when rampant petting polygamy (if you were luckier) would break out thanks to Babycham and pale ale.

There were some wonderful girls in Ormskirk: there was Clare, whom we called Boadicea because she carried all before her in a bra the size of Bootle. I would watch Clare going into confession at St Anne’s, and then strain my ears to try and hear if she had any more interesting sins to confess than I had. Everybody else had. There was Hilde, too, the French au pair I picked up in Alty’s Lane, who had obviously read more grown-up books than I had. And then there was Plum, whom I married because she was the best.

When I go back to Ormskirk now it’s the dialect that surprises me. Somehow Liverpool has spread out along the road towards Preston, and the Lancashire accent that I grew up to speak is fighting a losing battle against the newcomers from the city. A footballer has moved into Swanpool Lane and another has built a house over an old pond in Vicarage Lane. The place is virtually a soccer stars’ colony now. As Beverly Hills is to Hollywood, so Ormskirk is to Anfield.

back to the top of the page

A Funny Thing Happened to me on the way to the Maternity Ward, 1972

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

A Funny Thing Happened To Me On The Way To The Maternity Ward
(London Evening Standard, July 1972)

A couple of weeks ago the gynaecologist suggested that my wife go into hospital a few days early to have her baby induced, as her ankles were beginning to swell and she was losing weight. Great, she thought. No more messing about waiting. Another couple of days and it’ll be all over.

So dutifully at 10 o’clock the next morning I drove her over to the hospital, and left her in the capable hands of those who most enjoy such messy moments in life.

“Come back at two o’clock,” they told me.

So at two o’clock back I was at the reception desk asking, as instructed, for Mrs Connolly. On the first floor, she was, sir. Just up the steps.

On reaching the first floor I found I was in the labour ward. “What do you want?” a student doctor asked me.

“My wife,” I said. “Mrs Connolly.”

“Oh, that’ll be her in the delivery room now,” he said, pointing towards a door.

My God, I thought, they’re quick here. We’ll have to come here more often. There wasn’t a sign that the baby was on the way when I left her this morning.

“The baby should be born within ten minutes to half an hour,” went on the student. “Do you want to watch?”

Oh no, I said quickly. I’ll wait out here. I was hardly the best person to have around in a crisis, and Plum wouldn’t thank me for being there. She’d be much better off by herself. She’d had our first two children without me being present. Why start now?

“She’s not making much noise, is she?” I said surprised at the tranquillity of the ward.

“No. She’s being very good,” the young doctor answered. “No trouble at all.”

That’s my Plum, I thought. Valiant and courageous. No whimperer she.

So I sat down and waited by the door, and watched the nurses darting in and out of the delivery room, white gauze over their noses and mouths, and all busily ignoring me.

Now and again someone would come and take a quick peer through the peep-hole in the door to see how things were progressing, before going back to other jobs. And indeed so matter of fact did the whole situation begin to appear that gradually curiosity began to get the better of me. After all, if Plum wasn’t making any noise, and everything was going very well, maybe it would be nice to see my child born.

So, finally, much to the satisfaction of a student nurse, I looked through the peep-hole. Inside everything was busy industry as doctors and nurses and student doctors and nurses observed the birth. From my position all I could see was an entire length of legs, being held in position by the scrimmage of people while the doctor did his work and a sister repeated constantly: “Push, dear. Push. That’s better. Push.”

It really was all rather fascinating, watching for one’s child to pop out … and so far there wasn’t any mess at all.

“Why don’t you go in?” The student nurse was now smiling at me in the way that nurses are traditionally supposed to smile at fathers-to-be.

“Oh no. I’m fine. I’ll watch from here.”

But I was already beginning to waver. Maybe Plum would like to see me after all, and it was a bit frustrating not being able to see her face or her expression.

Then just as I was about to ask for a white coat and gauze mask an older nurse appeared from the delivery room. Behind her I could see the long legs bent slightly over and held encouragingly by the attendant nurses.

Plum always did have pretty good legs, I thought…

“It’s all right if this gentleman goes in to see his wife, isn’t it?” the student nurse asked, and I steeled myself for the occasion.

For a second the other nurse looked puzzled. “But the husband’s already in there,” she said.

There was a long pause and all eyes turned on me. I looked back at the long legs on the delivery table.

“Isn’t that Mrs Connolly?”

“No. It’s Mrs Elliott.”

Suddenly I felt like a Peeping Tom. Unknowingly I’d been watching another man’s wife in a situation of some intimacy.

“I think you’d better come along with me,” said the student nurse, and hurried my prying little eyes away from the peep-hole. Like a voyeur caught in some extraordinary fetish I scurried meekly after her.

Two stories down in the ante-natal ward I found Plum, lying in a bed reading Cosmopolitan and eating grapes.

“You’re late,” she said. “Where’ve you been?”

“Watching you have the baby,” I said. And pinched a grape.

FOOTNOTE: Four days later exactly the right baby, Kieron Connolly, arrived. Again I was in the labour ward, but this time I didn’t dare look through the peep-hole. After all, you never know what you’re going to see … or who …

back to the top of the page

A W...word In Your Ear, 1980

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

A W-word In Your Ear (Observer Magazine, July 1980)

Poor old Elvis couldn’t help it: his eyes glazed over when I started to speak and an expression of strained patience settled across his features. It was the same with James Baldwin and even Georgie Best, while Muhammad Ali solved the problem by steadfastly keeping his eyes closed during the whole of our meeting. Supermen with closed eyes can’t be embarrassed.

You see, I’m a stammerer, a PhD of a stammerer sometimes when I’m at home and supposedly relaxed, and even on a good day I still have moments of tongue twistedness which would get me an E grade at O level. I’ve stammered all over the place and before the most distinguished people. I’ve stammered in bed and I’ve stammered in the bath.

Not all eyes become frozen in embarrassment as soon as a stammerer begins to ply his handicap. Some people try to help by finishing words which he was not going to say in the first place; others look at him as though he’s a bit barmy and either try humouring him in case he should happen to be carrying an axe in his raincoat pocket, or speak in a VERY LOUD VOICE, imagining him to be also afflicted with deafness.

Then, of course, there are the comedians who are so besotted with the fluidity of their own vocal chords that they cannot resist mimicking the staccato rhythms of the less gifted. That happened to me quite a lot at school: one Latin teacher called me C-C-C-Connolly for years.

To be a child stammerer is a bit like being invisible: no one ever asks you any questions, and I was at university before I was expected or even encouraged to participate in discussions. Yet, like the person who is small and feels big, I don’t feel like a stammerer. With my looks, wit and intelligence I feel like a star, and I spend many happy hours dreaming up the rapier-like-witticisms I will deliver when I’m invited to be the star guest on Parkinson.

I read somewhere recently that something like two per cent of the population (usually men) have some kind of speech impediment. But I am beginning to think that there is a conspiracy of secrecy against us. Nobody ever discusses stammering on television, and nobody ever writes about it in the newspapers? Are they trying to suppress us? If we were dyslexic, or impotent, or battered brides there would be no end of documentaries on us and The Guardian women’s pages would be full of us. But here we are, stammering away at a hundred and thirty three and a third to the dozen and no-one even gives us the time of day. That’s why I’m writing this. I’m redressing the balance a bit.

I didn’t always stammer, but when I got going I made up for lost time. As a child I went to elocutionists, speech therapists and psychiatrists. It didn’t do my speech much good, but the speech therapist used to feel me all over in efforts to get me to relax. I was 13 and she was 23. It was almost wonderful.

Then when I was at university my psychology tutor thought I should see the college shrink. ‘When do you stammer most of all, Mr Connolly?’ he asked. Since I stammered most of all on every conceivable occasion I was a bit stumped for an answer, until I mentioned my difficulties in projecting my voice through the hole in the glass window at the tube station.

The psychiatrist beamed. I’d obviously said the right thing. ‘Do you think this fear of projection might in some way be due to a sexual problem?’ he asked, demonstrating graphically with his hands where he thought the problem might lie.

‘Absolutely not,’ I thought. How could I have a sexual problem when I hadn’t even had sex.

Getting a job wasn’t that easy either. In New York I was told I couldn’t be a cash clerk in a hamburger joint, and in London they wouldn’t even take me on as a bank counter clerk in case I should upset the customers with my impediment. (I didn’t want the job anyway, and had only gone along for the interview because they promised to pay my rail fare from Lancashire when I was actually living in Kensington.)

But then I discovered writing. A very wise man at the London Evening Standard gave me a job going around interviewing people, and in no time I was off and pedaling fast. I couldn’t be invisible any more. And the more questions I asked, the less I seemed to stammer, until here I am at the age of 39, not fluent enough to read the news (as a man from ITN once told me), but then I never wanted to, anyway.

Writing was my salvation. No one can tell that I stammer when I write. If they could this article would need two pages because I’ve been stammering away all the time I’ve been writing it, and all those fractioned consonants take up an awful lot of space. I stammer most now when I am at home with the children and feeling relaxed and lazy. It’s the true me, you see.

Nobody ever wrote pieces like this when I was growing up. I wish they had done. So if you know of any stammerers or parents of stammerers who are on the point of despair it is your duty to cut out this article and show it to them.

All right?

back to the top of the page

Christmas Carols, 2008

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

Christmas Carols (December 2008)

We’re hardly the best choir in London. We never rehearse and we only ever meet once a year when we sing Christmas carols in a shopping mall. And although we’re all English, we’re not exclusively Christian.

This year, for instance, although we had three lapsed Catholics, a former Methodist, a chap who vaguely thought he might be Church of England and an unchristened Christadelphian, we also included a Sunni Muslim who provided a beautiful descant and a Hindu who is now wavering between atheism and agnosticism. And, oh yes, there’s our leader, too. She’s Jewish.

What’s more, because we perform in a part of West London where there is a sizeable Middle Eastern population, it’s clear that a fair proportion of those who hear us sing about Baby Jesus and the Three Wise Men, and who then dip ever generously into their pockets, are Arabic, and therefore unlikely to be Christians.

Indeed the man who made the biggest donation this year, in the form of a twenty pound note, was Algerian.

So what’s going on? This is hardly a hundred per cent case of “good Christian men rejoice”. Yet I suspect that our little ensemble may well represent hundreds of thousands of other choirs around the country who, during these weeks of Advent, will be sharing with those who hear them the real spirit of Christmas. In other words, the season of goodwill and giving.

Because, be it Handel’s Messiah at the Royal Albert Hall or Hark The Herald Angels as sung by a gang of grinning teenagers at our front doors, Christmas music is a magical accompaniment that somehow helps promote and encourage that goodwill.

Our choir sings to raise funds for research at London’s Royal Marsden Hospital following the death from leukaemia of one of our friends, an actor called David Adams, a number years ago. Other choirs support other good causes.

And what is fascinating, even life affirming, to see is how extraordinarily generous people are when those familiar carols begin. Even this Christmas with recession on everyone’s doorsteps people were giving.

There we sang, watching shoppers of all ethnicities as they passed by dropping their coins into our collection tins. Most people were smiling. Some who knew the words joined in momentarily as they walked by. Few frowned or ignored us, while little children, as always, wanted to stop and listen.

So what is it about Christmas carols that so quickly embraces nearly everyone, that actually makes people want to give? Were we to sing Slade’s Merry Xmas Everybody, would whole throngs stop and listen and then move so readily towards our collection boxes?

I don’t think so. It wouldn’t be the same. Slade might be all very well for the office party---well, they might---but people respond differently to carols because they represent an innocence that unites us all, whether or not we are Christians. And, in doing this, carols are not only the most enduring of Christmas decorations, they are also the most useful.

Be it at the pre-school carol service when young parents weep joyfully as four year olds innocently mangle the lyrics of Good King Wenceslas; or at the supermarket check-out as Bing Crosby croons Silent Night while our money is carried away on that conveyor belt of credit; or perhaps when we’re waiting in the rain or sleet for the bus, laden with shopping, as a Salvation Army brass band brings us Oh Come All Ye Faithful, traditional Christmas music, as much as anything, helps make Christmas what it is----a time when generosity and smiles triumph over differences.

So when I read, as I do almost every year, about some local authority killjoy, who, decides to ban municipal carol singing, usually because the lyrics might offend those of other religions, I want to invite him or her to come to our little sing-song to show just how wrong they are, how carols unite rather than divide.

In Britain carols are the music of the people, all the people. They always were. Originally they were folk songs which celebrated the mid-winter festival, which is why we still sing songs about holly and ivy without so much as a mention of the ox and the ass in the stable. It was only in the early Middle Ages that they took on a Christmas significance when the two festivals merged into one.

For some mad, fundamentalist reason Cromwell and the Puritans in the Seventeenth Century didn’t think carols were appropriate music for singing in church, and an act of parliament was passed deeming that the singers had to stand outside the church. From there developed the tradition of carollers going from house to house entertaining each other.

And in this way was a tradition born which would end, among a million other places, in our West London shopping mall. Indeed it wasn’t until the nineteenth century that carols became part of church services again, which is why the lyrics of so many sound so very Victorian—providing images that last a lifetime.

In our mind’s eye newly fallen snow is forever “deep and crisp and even”, while Christina Rossetti’s poem, In The Bleak Midwinter, later put to music and just voted the best carol by a BBC poll of British and American choirmasters, has been the inspiration for thousands of newspaper headlines and Christmas cards. And who can forget the little mice who come singing carols outside Moley’s modest home in The Wind In The Willows?

In the First World War it was famously said to be the sound of German soldiers singing Stille Nacht (Silent Night) in the opposite trenches that provoked the Christmas ceasefire of 1915, when groups of the opposing armies played football in no-man’s land. While in World War II prisoners of war held carol services in their camps.

Today only one person in fifteen will go to church at Christmas, and Yuletide, as it is often hideously called, is very largely a festival of consumption. But the glossy commercials, the exhortations to spend and spend on perfumes and Playstations, booze and vanity, don’t capture the whole human picture. They miss the spirituality completely.

The traditional Christmas story of birth, innocence and good triumphing over infanticide and evil, and its spirit of peace and goodwill, is more potent than any passing TV commercial, and, put to music, is central to the ethos of what some miseries would now like to call the Winter Holiday.

I know there are those who say that carols in this modern age are unfashionable, just historical tosh, and that our reaction to them is purely sentimental. But I would disagree. The sentiments that carols invoke, those of charity and generosity, are never out of fashion.

They are what Christmas is about, whether or not you are a practising Christian. They are what hope is about. And, though we may scarcely realise it, it’s that sense of universal goodwill that we learned in childhood that we are responding to as we smile inwardly when from somewhere in the shopping distance we hear: “Away in a manger, no crib for a bed…”

And if you think the sound of carol singing makes Christmas shopping that much more bearable, let me tell you, it’s a hundred times better when you’re doing the singing.

back to the top of the page

Elvis by the Presleys, 2006

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

Elvis by the Presleys (Daily Mail, 2006)

Priscilla Beaulieu must have thought she'd gone to live with the Beverly Hillbillies when Elvis Presley talked her parents into letting her leave their home in Germany and join him at Graceland in Memphis in 1962. He might have been the most famous star in the world, but he still lived, as he always would, with his father and grandmother, and with four cooks working around the clock so that fried bacon could be served day or night.

Then there was Auntie Delta and her dog, "the dog out of the movie Omen, the dog from hell", as Elvis's daughter Lisa Marie remembers. While grandma would sit in her ruffled dress watching TV, dipping a hickory stick into her little snuff box, always without her false teeth which she'd misplace around the mansion, Delta, in her nightdress and curlers, would be at the gate, "cursing like a sailor" and insulting the fans.

Only the blue jeans of the Hillbillies were missing. To Elvis, who'd grown up poor, blue jeans were the uniform of poverty. After he became successful he only ever wore them when playing a part in a movie.

We learn all this in an extraordinarily candid book, Elvis by the Presleys, in which Elvis's ex-wife Priscilla and Lisa Marie lift the lid on what it was like to live with the King in his sometimes mad-hatters castle in Tennessee.

And although it's a book which paints Elvis as a mass of contradictions, a cross between a recklessly over-generous tyrant and religiously obsessed sex symbol, the image it leaves most strongly is that of a tragically lonely man who by the end had no-one to whom he could turn.

How Priscilla came to meet Elvis in 1959 is puzzling. There she was, a fourteen year old schoolgirl living with her parents (her step-father being a US Air Force officer stationed in Germany) when suddenly she's asked by a complete stranger on the base if she'd like to go with him and his wife to meet Elvis Presley.

At the height of his early fame, Elvis was then serving with the US Army in Germany. He liked his girls young and his pals knew it.

Priscilla's parents were naturally mystified and worried when she told them, but amazingly they gave their permission and off she went to the star's house in her blue and white sailor suit dress.

Elvis was instantly hooked, and, still missing his mother who had died the previous year, he told her how much it hurt him that his father was already dating another woman.

Desperately homesick, he fretted about how worried and nervous he was that his fans would have forgotten him by the time he got back to the States. Priscilla sat and listened like a beautiful doll. He called her Little One.

A few days later he phoned her, and kept on phoning. Her parents, wondering what a 24 year old superstar was up to with their under-age daughter, insisted on meeting him, but were soon charmed into submission. Elvis had a lot of charm, and Priscilla insisted that he had "behaved like a perfect gentleman".

Had her parents known that the second time Elvis met Priscilla he quickly got her upstairs into his bedroom, they might not have been so easily placated. Priscilla, who is now 60, doesn't mention that in this book, but she did in an earlier autobiography.

All the same she insists that their relationship remained chaste, though the nocturnal Elvis did give her a pep pill to help her stay awake when she went to his house after school and homework. She says she didn't swallow it, but clearly Elvis was already dabbling with the cocktail of pills which would eventually kill him. "He swallowed them like candy," she recounts.

Early in 1960 Elvis was demobbed and returned to the US to resume his career, denying in interviews any big relationship with the girl he left behind. Her heart sank.
Her mother said: " Forget him, honey. It was a lovely chapter in your life, but it's over. Now you've got to focus on school."

But soon he was back on the phone, assuring Priscilla he wasn't going out with Nancy Sinatra, telling her he still loved her and sending her all the records he thought she might like---Bryan Hyland's Sealed With A Kiss and the Drifters' Save The Last Dance For Me, as well as his own Fever.

No matter how many women threw themselves at him, and in his life he would sample the delights of legions, Priscilla was the one he wanted. He liked the fact that she was a normal girl from a normal family and that she was a virgin.

Her parents, now a genial elderly couple, admit to being astonished. They'd assumed the relationship would quickly fizzle out and that their daughter would have a normal teenage.

It wasn't to be. After two years the long distance telephone courting wasn't enough. Elvis wanted Priscilla with him. He sent her airline tickets for her to join him for a holiday in Los Angeles.

"Let me look at you," he said in amazement when she arrived. "You're all grown up." She was actually sixteen.

He looked different, too. "In Germany his hair had been blondish," she remembers. "Now it was dyed black. He looked great. He was thin and vibrant. He seemed overjoyed to see me. "They were soon in his bedroom.

"I was ready. He wasn't. He was glad that I'd saved myself but was still committed to my purity. What could I say? What could I do? I wanted him. I know he wanted me, but, according to him, the time wasn't right."

Instead they went shopping in Las Vegas, where he chose all her dresses and shoes. As beautiful as she was he wanted to change the way she looked. And now he wanted her with him permanently.

First she had to return to Germany where her parents resisted the idea. Her stepfather says: "I was worried. We were all confused by her friendship with Elvis." But by that Christmas, Elvis and Priscilla had broken down the resistance. She joined him in Memphis. This time for good.

For Priscilla it was the beginning of a bizarre life. Kept a deadly secret from the Press and the fans she was officially in the care of his grandmother while attending a local girls Catholic high school. But all the time Elvis was moulding this schoolgirl for what he most wanted in a woman.

"Like a sculptor he would shape my image and design my demeanour in ways which that would bring him delight," she says. "He felt my desire to please him, my lack of ego, my need to live a life devoted to bringing him pleasure. Our pledge was unsigned, but it was nonetheless clear. He would bring me into his world and keep me in his world as long as I understood that my place was to honour him and to satisfy his many needs. I bought that arrangement and for many years devoted myself to making it work.

"It was a double life. I was the prim and proper schoolgirl by day and Elvis's girl-friend by night."

It was also an extraordinary world for a girl to grow up in. Already Elvis's lifestyle had been set and he was constantly surrounded by his minders and bodyguards, known as the Memphis Mafia, who used Graceland as their base. Elvis always liked having an entourage around him, and they went everywhere together.

Nor was Priscilla encouraged to have friends of her own age. Only Elvis's cousin, Patsy, was deemed safe.

For two years Priscilla had been left behind in Germany, but no sooner was she ensconced in Graceland than Elvis was back in Hollywood making movies. Wandering around the house one dark, thundery afternoon she ventured up into the attic which had always been kept closed.

"I slowly opened the door. It creaked like it hadn’t been opened in years. It was pitch dark inside. I took a couple of steps forward and found the light switch. The yellow bulb lit a long line of clothing racks. They were Elvis's mother's clothes. Elvis had saved everything. All her precious belongings were there. One by one I examined her blouses, skirts and dresses…" She tried some of them on.

Elvis may have been an easy man with whom to fall in love, but living with him was different. As much as he loved Priscilla, as much as he showered her with expensive gifts, everything had to be the way he wanted it.

He even decided how she did her hair. "In the Sixties with hair-do's piled high to the sky, Elvis wanted mine piled highest," she says. "Think Marge Simpson! He wanted my skirts shorter, my eyeliner darker, my make-up thicker, and my hair dyed the same jet back as his."

And when she innocently criticised his choice of songs, saying that she preferred him in rockier style, he flew into a rage. She didn't make that mistake again.

For four years in the mid-Sixties while Priscilla stayed in Memphis, Elvis made a string of movies, flying backwards and forwards to Hollywood. She suspected he had affairs with Ann-Margret, possibly Ursula Andress and many more, but he always denied it, turning defence into offence.

"He'd say I was just jealous," says Priscilla, "that I was inventing things, confusing his simple friendliness with flirting. His accusations were made with such skill that I'd wind up apologising to him." It was a pattern that was to be often repeated. Meanwhile their relationship "remained chaste, though we came awfully close to consummation. I was frustrated, but Elvis was adamant."

At Graceland Elvis was a film buff who watched old black and white classic films all the time, and he'd begun a promising career in films with movies like Loving You and King Creole. But by the Sixties he hated the way his Hollywood life had turned out, and the dreadful songs he found himself singing in cheap beach movies.

Nor, says Priscilla, out of all the actors and directors he worked with, did he have any close movie friends. He didn't trust Hollywood. He thought the people there were phoneys. "I feel like a fool out there," he would say, bitterly aware that he was being laughed at by the film community. And when she eventually persuaded him to take her out to Los Angeles she found he avoided the big parties, the charity balls and fancy restaurants.

"Our at-home routine seldom varied. I'd be coiffed before he arrived for dinner at six. Dinner was usually the same--meatloaf, mashed potatoes, gravy and peas." If they went out in the evening it was usually to ride their motorcycles around the nearby hills behind Malibu.

Priscilla knows Elvis should have stood up to his short sighted manager, the self-styled Colonel Tom Parker and demanded better scripts and better songs. But, hopelessly extravagant, he had an endless need for money, throwing himself totally into mad crazes and insisting that all his Memphis Mafia join in.

One year it was horses, so he bought himself a ranch and then a horse each for all his pals and their wives, whether they wanted one or not. Then it was pick-up trucks. He bought forty on one spending spree alone. Elvis's attitude was: "I don't want to be one of those guys who hoards up millions of dollars. I want to share it with my family and friends."

Ironically, says Priscilla, as much as he earned and as quickly as his money flew out to friends, employees, over fifty charities at Christmas, his in-laws and anyone around who seemed hard up, he liked the simple life. One of the Memphis Mafia, for whom he bought a house in Los Angeles, puts it this way. "He was the sort of guy who'd like to help you, but didn't want you to help him."

The car salesmen in Memphis loved him, but to pay for all this he had to earn quick money. And without intelligent advice from an out of touch manager more bad films were the easy answer. When he read the screenplay for the beach movie Clambake he held his nose. But he still did it.
Lisa Marie has a shrewd view of what her father was doing. "He spent more on other people than he did on himself," she says. "He got a great joy out of giving. It was sort of a relief for him to give."

Ultra religious since childhood, Elvis had always liked to entertain by quoting from the Bible. But at the lowest point in his career in the mid-Sixties, when he could see himself being eclipsed by the Beatles and Bob Dylan, stars with talent whom he admired, he fell under the influence of a hairdresser who became his guru. Soon he began reading dozens of books on world religions, talking of forming a commune or even going into a monastery to regain spiritual balance.

"My father's library of religious books is amazing," says Lisa Marie. "I've been through them. They're covered in his notes. He wrote on the top of the page, on the bottom, in the margins, everywhere."

His position in the world confused him, says Priscilla: "He wanted to know why it was given to him, why he was the object of so much adulation. 'Why me?' he asked over and over. He was convinced his purpose went well beyond music and movies."

The Colonel wasn't impressed. And after Elvis had an accident which scared everyone a bonfire was made of many of his religious books, the hairdresser told to keep to cutting hair, and Elvis sent back to Hollywood to make more money.

Then in 1967, when Priscilla was 21, Elvis suddenly proposed. The rumours were that her father threatened him, saying he had to make an honest woman of her. But both father and daughter laugh at that suggestion.

According to Priscilla the long delayed consummation of their relationship didn't occur until their honeymoon in Palm Springs, and when they got back to Graceland Elvis carried her over the threshold singing Hawaiian Wedding Song, as he had in the movie Blue Hawaii.

It was a time of changes. Elvis's career was shortly to soar again, but after a happy honeymoon he became restless. Then when Priscilla was seven months pregnant he suddenly, without explanation, suggested a trial separation, then never mentioned it again. She was upset and puzzled.

Lisa Marie was born in 1968, but not before Elvis had taken his time finding a box of cigars that he could pass out at the hospital as Priscilla's contractions grew ever more severe and more alarming.

Priscilla had expected that the birth of Lisa Marie would bring her and Elvis closer together. The opposite was the case. He avoided intimacy with her. "I remembered him telling me some time in the past that he just couldn't have sex with a woman who had had a child," she says. "I felt shut out."

Quickly Lisa Marie became the new centre of attention at Graceland, a "holy terror" of a spoiled child in a crazy house, a place which turned night into day because Elvis just couldn’t sleep.

"The whole house--his friends, the maids, the cooks, his dad, everyone, was always waiting for my father's next move," remembers Lisa Marie. "You never knew when that would be. I remember mentioning one time how much I wanted a puppy. The next I knew it was 3 a.m. and my father had organised a caravan of cars and we were rolling past the gates of Graceland to some pet store where the owner opens up in the middle of the night for this crew of twenty people. That night all twenty got puppies."

By 1970 Elvis's career was back at the top again. After his television Comeback Special in 1968, he'd recorded in Memphis again for the first time in fourteen years and been rewarded with two of the biggest hits of his life, In the Ghetto and Suspicious Minds. But now all was not well at home.

For Priscilla the fun of life in the gilded cage was crumbling quickly as she grew into her twenties. Fired by drugs and the new pressures of almost constant performing and rowing with his father about his manager, whom he wanted to fire, Elvis's behaviour became increasingly eccentric. On one occasion he even flew to Washington and talked his way into not only seeing President Nixon at the White House but having Nixon give him the badge of a federal agent. His charm never left him, but it didn't work on Priscilla any more.

"At the start of the Seventies my story and Elvis's story began moving in different directions. The enormity of his career and talent was inevitably the agenda of the day, but when Lisa Marie was born, my agenda shifted. In some ways I felt freer than ever before. I began developing my own interests--in dance for example--and a new sense of self-expression. I was growing and changing."

And as Elvis spent more and more time either appearing in sell-out seasons in Las Vegas or on tour across America, she began meeting other people outside the group. Eventually she realised she wanted a life of her own. She began an affair with Elvis's karate instructor.

In 1973 they were divorced. "It was an amazing day," says Priscilla, "because as we sat in the judge's chambers and signed the final decree we held hands. There was nothing hostile about it. Elvis was tender and sweet with me."

But she noticed something that worried her. "His hands, always smooth, were puffy and swollen. I knew something was different, something was wrong. I could see it in his eyes. I could feel it in his hands."

Lisa Marie now divided her time between Priscilla in Los Angeles and Elvis in Memphis. Life in Graceland seems to have been madder than ever.

One night she says she "was woken in the early hours by an incredible noise coming from my father's bedroom. I got out of bed and saw the guys buzz-sawing down his door so that they could move a grand piano in." Elvis had apparently felt like playing and singing some gospel songs in his bedroom.

He wasn't, however, always singing. "His temper was scary. It could give Darth Vader a run for his money," she says. "The times he reprimanded me were devastating, but then in the middle of the night he'd come into my room and, with a puppet in his hand, sing me a song like Can't Help Falling In Love With You."

He remained insecure, too, and jealous of other performers. One Christmas Lisa Marie remembers asking for Elton John albums. "Well, my father wouldn't get them. But Aunt Delta, who couldn't care less what her nephew thought, went out and got them. So there we all were on Christmas morning, sitting under the tree and opening presents. But as soon as I unwrap my Elton John records my father grabs them and says, 'Who is this guy? Why should my daughter be listening to him and not me?'

"The truth was I did listen to his records all the time, and I loved them. It was just that this new guy's music caught my ear. It wasn't long after that, though, that my father came around and started listening to Elton himself. He even went to an Elton John concert."

The final downward spiral of Elvis Presley, however, was beginning. As Priscilla began a new life Elvis couldn't let go. He begged her parents, to whom he still remained close, to intercede on his behalf and convince her to go back to him. They tried, but it was too late. All the same he would turn up at Priscilla's home in Los Angeles and talk for hours.

"It might be 2 a.m. Time didn't matter to him. Elvis was always calling, saying he was on his way over with a song for me to hear or a new book for me to read. He was deep into numerology and wanted to explain its meaning. But basically he was lonely and needed company. He needed to reconnect with his family. We talked more after we were divorced than before. But nothing had changed."

There was to be no reconciliation. Priscilla worried about the endless diet of pills he was taking, but neither she nor anyone else was able to intervene. Elvis was frightened of street drugs and hateful of drug pushers, but because he only took prescription drugs he never believed he was an addict. Now, however, those drugs began to take over his life.

Depressed, he retreated further and further into himself, most of the best new songs he sang being, like Always On My Mind, about the break-up of his marriage. At Graceland his bedroom was once again stuffed with books on religion. In one he'd written some advice he'd been given by a member of a New Age cult. It read. "God loves you. But he loves you best when you sing."

Guns began to play an ever bigger part in his life. On stage he always carried one down his boot in case he was attacked, and if he didn't like a programme on television he would casually put a bullet through the screen.

One afternoon at Graceland when Lisa Marie was watching Sesame Street on television she heard a shot. Running outside she found Elvis sunbathing on a chair holding a smoking gun. "Don't worry, baby," he said. "A snake crawled out of the tree but it's not going to bother anyone now."

His behaviour became increasingly erratic, sometimes leading to long rambling monologues on stage. Occasionally he could be funny, such as the occasions he would attach a blue police light on the top of his car, pull over a driver, and show off one of his many badges. "Son," he'd say, "you were speeding. I just want to warn you to slow down," just so that he could see the expression on the face of the driver when he realised who'd stopped him.

But there was little joy left in his life. Alone in his Las Vegas hotel room after concerts he would sit wide awake through the night. "I feel so alone sometimes, the night is so quiet for me. I would love to be able to sleep. I'm glad is everyone is gone now. I will probably not rest tonight. I have no need for all of this. Help me, Lord," he wrote one night on a scrap of paper.

The end came suddenly. Lisa Marie was staying with her father in Memphis. She was nine but she could sense the state Elvis was in. "I could see he was struggling. I could feel that he was very sad. He'd come into my room walking so unsteadily that sometimes he'd start to fall and I’d have to catch him. He had his own chair in my bedroom where he would sit, watch my TV and smoke cigars."

On August 16, 1977, finding her still awake at 4 a.m., he told her to go to bed. Then he went in to see her and kissed her good night.

He died in his bathroom early the following afternoon, aged 42, just four years after his divorce, a bloated wreck of an unhappy man.

Of his end Priscilla says: "He was misunderstood by all those around him. We underestimated his emotional pain. And he lacked the means to fully express that pain."
Fittingly one of the last songs he'd sung, sitting at his piano in the middle of the night, had been a gospel hymn. On the turntable of his record player that day was a new album by a favourite gospel quartet.

"I don't know who I can talk to anymore," read another note he'd written to himself. "I only have myself and the Lord. Help me, Lord, to know the right thing."

back to the top of the page

A sunny May morning in Lymington, 2006

Mon, 1 May 2006 -1:00:00 GMT

Daily Mail, 2006

I wore my Elvis socks the day my mother died. Made of black cotton with the name Elvis embroidered in silver thread across the ankles, I showed them to her when, waking on the morning of her death, she found me at her bedside. The sight of them made her smile through the pain. Elvis was a joke we’d shared for fifty years since she’d pretended to despair of me as a teenager.

It was a sunny May morning in Lymington, Hampshire, and as a nurse opened a window behind her she looked out and saw white apple blossom on a tree in the hospital garden. “It looks as if it’s going to be a nice day,” she said, as the morphine gave her some moments’ respite.

Actually, it was a terrible day. “Am I dying?” she asked me a couple of hours later. Hiding my tears, I told her I didn’t think so, that she’d been ill, but that the doctors had given her some Lazarus pills, so she would soon be better. That was my last joke, the last time I made her smile. Then I went to phone the priest.

I’d like to be able to write that it was a pain-free death. It wasn’t. But the presence of the priest gave a comfort I would never have thought possible. After lying speechless for long periods, a silence broken only by gasps of agony, suddenly my mother was making the responses as the priest gave her the last rites, reciting the Lord’s Prayer with him.

I don’t believe in God. I wish I did. I wanted to then. But she believed. And that faith made the pain and the departing so much more bearable.

Suddenly opening her eyes some time after the priest had left she saw me and called out, “John! John!”

John was the name of my father who was lost at sea in 1944. Did she think she’d already died and gone to heaven and was meeting him again? Was she disappointed when it was pointed out by Maureen, her wonderful carer, that it wasn’t John, just Ray? I don’t know.

My sister and niece arrived from Geneva to share her last hour. As our mother was slipping away the nurse suggested we both say something to her. My sister did, comforting her, but I couldn’t think of anything to say. I just held her hand, my mind numb. Then she was gone.

Later that night I wished I’d told her about the best day of my life, another May day, when I was seven and she’d taken us to a place called bluebell wood where she used to go as a girl. I’d never seen anywhere so beautiful. We picked armfull’s of bluebells that day and then sat, a little family of three, on the top of a hill, and had blackcurrant jam sandwiches, gazing out across the Lancashire plain to the faraway glimmer of the Irish Sea.

She was nearly 92 when she died, so I’d known the end would come fairly soon, but somehow I hadn’t expected it. She’d had so many bits and pieces of illnesses over the years, but she just seemed to go on and on, living alone, refusing to go into a home, struggling through everything as she and her entire generation had always struggled.

The dream life she’d anticipated in 1936, when she’d married and bought a brand new home with a big garden outside St Helens in Lancashire had been ended in 1944 with a telegram from the War Office. From that day she’d had two young children to bring up alone. There was never another man, never even a date.

Not many mums worked in those days, but after my father’s death she always did. In her early forties she opened a dress shop. She was very successful, but I, with the selfishness of youth, took it all for granted. Only after she’d died and I was going through her old papers, did I realise how brave and businesslike she’d been, how hard she’d worked to make everything possible for my sister and me.

I realised, too, her faith in me, when, discovering a school report she’d saved, I remembered that at 14 I’d got 6 per cent in arithmetic, 2 per cent in algebra and nothing at all in geometry. She must have been worried stiff, but she never showed it. Instead she encouraged me in subjects I was better at. I learned a lesson there. Don’t nag, encourage.

Her death changed me. I’d witnessed first hand the power of faith, and, though not reconverted I now find myself irritated by the modern sneer of fundamentalist atheists who mock believers of all faiths, particularly Christians.

I also learned that it’s possible to be more generous if you’re thrifty. In her later years she didn’t want for anything, but didn’t buy much either. She preferred to save her money so that she could give it away, either to her family, and you had to fight not to take it, or to the various children’s charities she supported.

Looking back I find I admire her now more than I realised when she was alive, when her obstinacy could irritate. Many people from her narrow background might have had some latent prejudice towards those of another complexion. But if she did once, she lost it. By the end she just didn’t see colour, admiring immigrants for their ambition to improve their lives and those of their children.

And I know this may sound trite, but I do think that her generation, men and women whose lives were forged by the adversity of two world wars and the Depression, were honed into grittier stuff than my own. My mother was just one of millions of ordinary people who took on what life threw at them and got on with making the best of it. Then they gave that best to us.

Christmas is a time for miracles, they tell us, and already, in this first Christmas without her, a small miracle seems to be happening to me. In my memory she's already no longer the gasping, dying old lady I watched last May. Suddenly she's young again, running after me up the road as she taught me to ride a bike, cycling with me to the farm to see the horses or go blackberrying, and laughing at me as I played Heartbreak Hotel again and again and again...

back to the top of the page

Mick Jagger

Fri, 1 Dec 1967 -1:00:00 GMT

Mick Jagger - London Evening Standard, December 1967

For three years he’s been a kaleidoscope personality, and the best feed-man for tired comics in the business. Two years ago Maureen Cleave worried whether you’d let your daughter marry him – although there’s such a thing as chance. Then last summer he was Mick the Martyr, when Judge Block sent him down for three months for possessing cannabis – before becoming Mick the Championed when the Lord Chief Justice brought him back up again.

And in between, he’s been variously Mick the Dirty, Mick the Dandy, always Mick the Sexy – but mainly Mick the Provocative.

He’s now twenty-four, and as uncompromising and arrogant as ever. his hair, always the arch-provocation, hanging ironically like a judge’s wig on to his shoulders, so that he looks rather like a camped-up Robespierre.

And this week, when two of the national daily newspapers were discovering for the twenty-third time since 1962 that the old moral order is taking a knocking from Britain’s 4,000,000 or so teenagers, I visited him at his vast fourth-floor Marylebone Road flat.

Actually, it isn’t so much a flat as an Indian bazaar, with a very good line in numdah rugs and French wood-wormed eighteenth century high chairs. He lives there alone, apart from when his younger brother, Chris, goes to stay. (‘I don’t think he resents me, although it may get to be a bit of a drag sometimes.’) And he has a Spanish maid who goes in to look after him every day.

We sit on an island of violently coloured Dunlopillo cushions. Mick, when he isn’t fidgeting and wriggling, is cross-legged and shoeless.

He is in his knocking-about-the-house gear – puce pants with clown’s cravat to match, and a cosmic cotton shirt with stars and moons and other celestial objects printed on it. Round his waist is a sequined, tasselled belt which he bought in the King’s Road. He bought his socks at Marks and Spencer.

So far there are no signs that he is thinking about marrying anybody’s daughter. He believes, in fact, that marriage is becoming outdated, and, in Western society, is going into a gradual decline. He says: ‘It’s just one form of social behaviour. We’re all animals really. And marriage is just a primitive institution which we still have. Personally, I like the idea of two people living together. It’s better than ten people living together.

‘I can understand women wanting to get married, because they know that their man can always run off with another woman. And, as they’re dependent on him, they have to make it that bit harder for him to get out of his obligations. But I don’t really see why men want to get married. I don’t fancy getting married at all, but I can see that I would if I ever met anyone that I really loved and who wanted to marry me. Marianne? Well, she doesn’t want to get married, and anyways she’s already married to someone else. So she doesn’t come into it.’

He’s confident that society in general will eventually catch up with him, and that his mode of behaviour will become the norm. It will, however, be a slow process. ‘We can only go as fast as the slowest member of society, so there’ll be no moral chaos, but a gradual breaking down of traditions.

‘In a small society the pressures to conform are immense, but in a big city like this, and especially when you’re mixing with people who don’t care, it’s very easy to do exactly as you like. In the year 2000, no one will be arrested for drugs and that sort of thing. It will be laughable, just like it would be laughable if people were still hanged for stealing sheep.

These things have to be changed, but it takes maniacs obsessed with individual microcosmic issues to bring it about. I could get ever so obsessed about the drugs thing, and if I really worked hard at it I might speed up the process of reform by perhaps ten years, or five years, or perhaps only six months. But I don’t feel that it’s important enough.’

At the moment the most important thing to him is the success of his new album – perversely titled ‘Their Satanic Majesties Request’ In three-and-a-half years the Rolling Stones have sold over forty-two million pounds’ worth of records, but this is the first one they’ve produced entirely by themselves since parting from their ‘creative manager’, Andrew Oldham.

On the cover, which is reputed to have cost over £10,000 for the design by Sergeant Pepper man, Michael Cooper, is a 3-D photograph of Mick and friends in pantomime outfits. Mick is wearing a wizard’s hat. Apart from a couple of ominous death-rattles which sound as though someone had passed away on the session, there’s nothing on the record to which anyone could take exception – unless of course you find it pretentious. Said Mick, ‘I don’t think we’re becoming alienated from the fans. In America, over half our fans are between the ages of twenty and thirty.’

What about moral responsibility to fans? I asked. ‘If any moral responsibility exists at all for the artist, it is to turn everybody on to what he thinks and what he’s doing. When judges talk about moral responsibility they mean “Be cool. Don’t say anything.” In America they told us, “Don’t tell people to take LSD, and don’t tell people not to go to Vietnam!”

That’s what they think moral responsibility is – kow-towing to their scene. But it’s really the complete opposite. What this country needs now is a new moral direction. If we had that, the economic thing would follow automatically. Britain doesn’t know where her moral destiny lies any more. All we hear is compromise and mismanagement – because a socialist government can’t work in a capitalist system.

‘They should really lay it down instead of grovelling at the feet of de Gaulle and Johnson. They keep coming out with moral justifications for their actions, when everybody knows that the real reasons are economic. What use is Britain to mankind today? The only role she can play is that of a moral leader.’

He has no regrets about leaving university to become a rock and roll singer – ‘Well that’s what I used to be, didn’t I?’ He says the question should be: ‘Have I any regrets about ever going to the London School of Economics? But, you know, I often wonder what all the other people who were there with me are doing now. I haven’t seen any of them for years.’

He’d clearly never even noticed me.

back to the top of the page