Over the Moon Read online

  There was only one place to go from here: the bar. ‘Would you like a drink?’ I asked, and led her by the hand across the dance floor to a serving hatch, where I bought us two Cokes. After we chatted for a while, I posed the all-important question: ‘Can I walk you home?’ Certain of rejection, I could hardly believe my ears when Carol said, ‘Yeah, all right.’

  We wended our way through the throng and towards the door with me doing my best to ignore Brian’s lairy ‘Give her one from me!’ thumbs-up and wink as he watched us go. Out in the night air, we did our best to make self-conscious conversation but the words faded awkwardly to nothingness, so we turned into an alleyway and kissed.

  It was wonderful. There were no noses in the way, no banging of teeth, no slobbering tongues: just a warm, gentle kiss. We hardly said another word as we walked slowly, our arms around each other, back to Carol’s door, where we shared another lingering goodnight kiss. I could hardly believe it. I had a girlfriend.

  I floated back home on a cloud of happiness, even at one point jumping in the air and clicking my heels Charlie Chaplin-style. Mum and Dad were just going to bed. Dad asked me his usual question: ‘Have a good night?’ ‘Brilliant!’ I told him, went to bed and replayed my big romantic scene in my head, over and over again.

  The next day was Saturday and my parents were coming to see the Everons play a gig in Bermondsey in the evening. I woke up early, greeted them in the kitchen with a smile and broke my big news: ‘I’ve got a girlfriend. She’s really nice. Can she come with us tonight?’

  ‘That’ll be all right, won’t it, Albert?’ asked Mum. ‘OK by me,’ said Dad, picking up his crash helmet and heading off for the docks. There we were, then. We had our first date.

  Carol didn’t know this yet, of course, so I donned my snazziest gear – I believe pink jeans were involved – and walked over to her house. On the way, nerves kicked in again. Maybe our kiss had been a one-off and meant nothing to her? Maybe she had a boyfriend already? I was reassured when her younger brother opened the door and called Carol, who greeted me with a kiss on the lips and invited me in to meet her parents.

  It went OK. Carol’s dad had a moustache and was fairly quiet. Her mum was pretty glamorous and looked like she wore the trousers. They gave me a cuppa and asked me a few questions about myself before agreeing that, yes, Carol could come with me to Bermondsey that night.

  As I left in the late afternoon, Carol told me she was nervous about meeting my parents. ‘They’ll really like you,’ I assured her. ‘I do.’ ‘I really like you too,’ she said. Her words rang in my ears like music.

  That evening, Carol and I, Mum and Dad and my Slingerland drum kit headed off to Bermondsey in the Ford Popular. They seemed to get on fine, and I was delighted to see Carol up and dancing with my mum during the Everons’ set. The band went down pretty well – as we always did in that particular pub as long as we stuck to chart hits and went nowhere near the blues.

  My life now settled into a new, fairly satisfying routine. I was setting up the lathes and presses in Plessey’s from Monday to Friday, rehearsing and playing gigs with the band and seeing a lot of Carol. We got on great, and I felt sure we would stay together for ever and eventually get married.

  In fact, we followed the trajectory of almost every first teenage romance. Initially, we were inseparable, devoted young lovers keen to explore each other in every way. Our romantic fumbling and fondling got more intimate, and often my heart was beating not only with passion but also because her parents were sitting the other side of a council-house door.

  Carol and I also had plenty of days out on the Lambretta that I had bought from a workmate at the factory, which proved to be a complete disaster. It virtually never made a bank holiday run to Brighton or Clacton without breaking down, leaving the two of us stranded in a lay-by. I spent way too many hours glumly pushing that bloody thing down the road in my Mod parka and beret.

  Actually, the parka and beret were the least of it. As my interest in clothes and fashion grew, I took to sporting a mohair suit, tab collar shirts, knitted ties and chisel shoes. There was even a bizarre short-lived craze involving Pac-a-Macs and Hush Puppies, although I am glad to say I drew the line at blue hair, as sported by one of my more sartorially daring mates.

  Apart from my recalcitrant Lambretta, there was nothing too wrong with my life in the summer of 1964 – though it maybe lacked a touch of glamour. Happily, this was to arrive courtesy of Ted, the father of Brian and Sandra from the Everons, who helped to get bookings for the band. We were gobsmacked when he told us that he had possibly secured us a new gig – in Cattolica, Italy!

  The plan was for us to fly out on a package holiday, attend an audition at the club Ted had spoken to, and hopefully impress them enough to get a mini-residency. Mum and Dad didn’t just give me permission to go: they said they’d come with me.

  This was a huge deal. It would be my first time on an aero-plane – in fact the first time abroad for all three of us – so Mum started to make detailed inquiries about what we needed to pack. She asked important questions of the very few people we knew who had been as far as France, or even the Isle of Man: could you buy things like teabags, milk and soap, you know, abroad?

  For Carol and me, it would be our first time apart. We had now been going steady for more than a year, and while things were essentially OK between us, the odd niggle and argument had crept in. Maybe I subconsciously felt that we were slipping into a bit of a cosy routine the night that I suggested to her that she should dye her black hair blonde.

  My fortnight’s break from Plessey’s began. The Cooks and the Everons were flying to Cattolica on a Saturday morning, so after work on Friday I called for Carol and we sat outside a pub with a pint of brown and mild (my drink of choice at the time) and a Babycham. She was sorry I was going away. I figured I would miss her, but my main feeling was of rising excitement at the next day’s big adventure.

  There are some rite-of-passage moments that you never forget: your first day at school; your first kiss; driving your first car; losing your virginity. Your first trip abroad is definitely one of them, and I will always remember walking down the steps of the plane in Italy.

  The very air was different. It felt warm, sultry and, well, foreign. The sun seemed somehow hotter, more intense, and the artfully dilapidated buildings appeared impossibly exotic, as did the whiff of coffee that pervaded the air. Cattolica is arguably the Italian equivalent of Blackpool, but to me it appeared the most glamorous place on earth.

  Likewise, our bog-standard package hotel seemed like The Ritz to me, accustomed as I was to cramped council flats. Brian’s dad, Ted, a more cosmopolitan soul who had seen a bit of the world, took it all in his stride. He wasn’t even fazed by the bidet in the bathroom: the Arabs used them instead of loo roll, he informed us.

  My parents hit the beach, although my normally easy-going dad was put out by what he perceived as the Continental racket of charging sunbathers for loungers and parasols. They wouldn’t get away with that in Clacton, he would grumble, fiddling in his pocket for some spare lira.

  Brian and I spent some time on the beach but more cruising around the town and soaking up the sights. We were surprised to find we were quite a hit with the local girls, who regarded us as dapper emissaries from swinging London. Brian loved the female attention, but I was far too gawky and awkward to do much with it – plus, of course, I had Carol waiting at home.

  Even I couldn’t deny the chemistry with one dark-haired signorina, though. One afternoon, a gorgeous brunette served me an ice cream in a bar. She spoke no English, and Italian had not been big on the curriculum at Shipman County, but there was a strong frisson as I held out my hand for her to take the money for the gelato. Our eyes met.

  ‘David,’ I told her.

  ‘Margarita,’ she replied.

  We smiled at each other. Subconsciously, I thought: to be continued.

  First, though, I had to kickstart my international music career. The Everons heade
d down to the audition that Brian’s dad had arranged for us. The club consisted of a giant circus tent with a stage holding the resident band’s gear, which luckily included a drum kit.

  We set to tuning our borrowed equipment and hit the genial club manager with two of our best shots: the Motown hit ‘Money’ and the Isley Brothers/Beatles song ‘Twist and Shout’. He seemed impressed, and we were hired to play a forty-five-minute set the following night, after a magician’s turn but before the resident band’s headline show.

  It was hardly the Beatles in Hamburg but we were all elated at this success and, possibly getting ahead of ourselves, spent the hotel-buffet dinner discussing learning Italian and maybe even emigrating en masse to Italy. Yet a thought was distracting me: I wondered if Margarita would like to witness the Everons’ triumph?

  After eating, I slipped away from the rest of the party and went back to her café. She was frothing up cappuccinos and waiting tables and I ordered and worked my way through three Pepsis before gathering the courage to talk to her. Did she like music?

  ‘Si, molto!’ she said, smiling. It was a promising start, but my halting attempts to invite her to see the band foundered on the language barrier, and our ‘conversation’ was going nowhere fast until a waiter who spoke a bit of English interceded. It turned out he wasn’t just a waiter: he was also Margarita’s older brother.

  The brother did a bit of rudimentary translation between us and then firmly informed me that Margarita was allowed neither to go to clubs nor to miss a night at work. Eventually, however, we reached a compromise: she could meet me after the bar closed at 11.30 the next night.

  ‘Great!’ I said.

  ‘I come too,’ added the brother. ‘Chaperone.’

  So there were to be three people in this relationship! Even so, I smiled my agreement and arranged to return the next night. Back at the hotel, I lay in bed full of anticipation but also wondering what I was playing at, and feeling guilty about Carol.

  We spent the next day on the beach, where Dad continued to fume at the extortionate umbrella-rental system and I played football with the locals. I was delighted when my shaggy hair and ball skills led them to christen me George Best, but less so at ending the day with typical English-abroad lobster-red shoulders.

  The evening brought our debut gig, with the Everons under strict instructions to start up once the magician had finished his plate-spinning trick. As the conjuror wandered off, the compère nodded at us: ‘Ladeez and gentlemen, all the way from Engerland – the Everons!’

  Our opening shot, Chuck Berry’s ‘Johnny B. Goode’, triggered some dancing but also some pained expressions, and the compère appeared behind my shoulder, ordering us to turn the volume down. Otherwise, the gig went well, and at the end the manager confirmed our booking for the rest of our holiday.

  There were jubilant scenes backstage, but I once again made my excuses and left, heading off with a spring in my step – and butterflies in my stomach – for my bizarre three-way date. I had no idea how it would work, but we took a stroll along the beach and her brother allowed Margarita and I to go ahead as he kept a wary eye from a polite distance.

  Margarita was shy and pretty and I was flushed and tongue-tied, and the lack of a shared language was a definite hindrance. But it was thrilling to be holding hands and walking by the crashing sea under the starry night sky, and I ended our enchanting evening with a kiss on the cheek for Margarita, a handshake for her brother, and a promise to do it all again the next evening.

  What a night! I had played a cool rock ’n’ roll gig and wooed a beautiful stranger in a glamorous land. As I wandered back to the hotel through Cattolica’s dark and deserted streets, I felt like the star of my own private, dramatic European movie.

  The holiday played out in the same vein. The days were fun, the gigs went well, and after our third date, Margarita’s brother decided I could be trusted and abandoned his chaperone post. On our last night, she and I swapped kisses and addresses and I wondered if our holiday romance would survive any longer.

  I had told Margarita I had a girlfriend in England but had not been sure she had understood: I think she might have thought I was saying I had a sister. On the plane home, I pondered the problem of her and Carol and quietly worried over what would happen next.

  The answer was a development that I certainly hadn’t predicted. Arriving home, I went straight round to Carol’s to tell her most – but not all – of my holiday adventures. I knocked on her door, she opened it and I took an involuntary sharp intake of breath. Carol had a yellow head.

  ‘Do you like it?’ she asked me.

  ‘Yes,’ I lied. ‘I think so.’ It seemed that while I was away, Carol had resolved to follow my suggestion about dying her hair blonde, but I hadn’t envisaged it turning out such a grisly shade of orangey-yellow. I decided to keep quiet and hope it would grow on me, or, better, grow out.

  I gave Carol and her parents my judiciously edited version of the Italian holiday. Over the next few weeks, she and I looked to fall back into our set routine, but something had changed, and to me, her orange hair seemed to symbolise the problems that were besetting our relationship.

  We started seeing less of each other, and arguing more. When she also got a job at Plessey’s, it made our periodic bouts of not talking to each other decidedly awkward. Nevertheless, she was still my girlfriend, I wasn’t trying to ditch her, and when I caught her on the factory roof, snogging the face off another of the apprentices, I was deeply hurt and upset. Although, in the circumstances, I suppose I had no right to be.

  Margarita and I had become pen pals, but her letters – clearly written with the heavy assistance of an English/Italian dictionary – were difficult to decipher, and eventually the lira dropped for both of us that our holiday fling would go no further. As the months passed the letters dwindled, then stopped completely.

  So both of my romantic interests had exited stage left and I was stuck ticking over in my dead-end job, desperate to forward my musical career without the first idea of how to do it. I was badly in need of some guidance. Luckily, it was just about to arrive.

  4

  THE SMASHING OF THE CHINA PLATES

  SOME PEOPLE IN show business see artist managers as essentially exploitative figures. If things are going well, they are parasites creaming off 10 per cent of their earnings for doing very little; if they are going badly, they’re the natural scapegoat. I don’t doubt that rogues like that exist, but a good manager is worth his weight in gold, and I reckon I owe almost everything to the visionary who took the reins of my career – and life – in 1964.

  Ted was doing his best, and to give credit to Brian and Sandra’s dad, he had got the Everons a fair few bookings and even helped us to conquer Italy (!) but we were hitting the wall. If the band was ever to progress from weddings and pub residencies, we felt we needed a manager.

  Brian had a day job as a cooper and his boss in the barrel world was a man called Stan Murray. Stan’s son, Martin, had been in the original line-up of the Honeycombs, who had had a number-one hit earlier that year with ‘Have I the Right?’ and this tenuous connection was enough for Brian to ask Stan to manage us.

  Stan freely admitted that he didn’t know enough about the pop world to be of much help – but he knew a man who did. He was friends with a show business writer and critic named Derek Bowman, and he agreed to bring him down to watch the Everons rehearse in a pub called the Eagle in Stratford.

  Stan and Derek turned up the following Wednesday night. Stan was a small, friendly guy with a passing resemblance to Sid James, but Derek cut a more sophisticated figure, standing out a mile in the rough-edged East End boozer. Dapper in a grey mohair suit and smoking Peter Stuyvesant cigarettes, he looked every inch the part of a sharp, worldly-wise band manager.

  Fondly imagining that this audition could be our passage to the big time, the band were all extremely nervous. After attempting some awkward small talk in the bar downstairs, we invited Derek and Stan up to hear
us do our thing.

  We had decided to play a mix of our usual covers and a song or two that I had written. This was a fairly new development, and although I didn’t really know what I was doing, I figured it was important for the Everons that we developed our own identity rather than just rehashing more successful bands’ stuff.

  The first song I had written had been distinctly autobiographical and was called ‘Carol-Anne’. It was basically a white East End teenager trying to write a heartbroken Mississippi blues classic: the chorus proclaimed, ‘Oh Carol-Anne, the day that you leave me, girl, I’ll be a dying man.’ It had been rather overtaken by recent events in my life that had proven it to be both misguided and, well, wrong.

  The hall over the Eagle was poky and smelled of stale beer but we had carefully laid out a table and two chairs in front of the stage for Derek and Stan, and John made a short speech before we fired into a Memphis Slim song. The rock ’n’ roll soon got rid of our nerves and by the third song we were even smiling (except for Sandra, who never smiled, but that was cool in itself).

  Derek was scrutinising us very intently and clearly liked what he saw and heard, because after we had run through our set, he and Stan agreed to manage us. Stan would finance us, because he had a few bob, and Derek would make use of his knowledge of the entertainment scene to plot our masterplan for world domination. The Everons had managers and we could not have been more delighted.

  There could be no doubt that Derek was well connected because over the next few weeks he brought a string of showbiz A-listers down to the Eagle to show them his new charges and try to get a word-of-mouth thing going. The saloon-bar regulars must have been utterly gobsmacked to see Peter O’Toole, Lionel Bart, Ian McShane, Vidal Sassoon and Susan Hampshire swanning through the pub and up the stairs.

  They were a stellar crew, but our celebrity guests didn’t mean a lot to me. A shy, typical teenager who found it hard to string a sentence together, I mostly hid behind my drums as Derek’s famous friends came to have a butchers at us. I spoke to Mary Quant, who was very posh and wide-eyed and, well, quaint, but often I simply had no idea who our star visitors were. If Howlin’ Wolf or Muddy Waters had come down, it would have been a different matter.