Over the Moon Read online

  The second-hand Ford Transit that I finished up with was slightly more roadworthy than the Lambretta (although that’s not saying much) but it still had its moments. I was happily driving the band down the North Circular one day when a wheel went shooting past the van and smashed through a garden wall. A second later the Transit dropped on one side: it was our wheel. The woman whose wall I had to retrieve it from was not best pleased.

  Yet it usually got us from A to B, and we were doing plenty of that. David Essex and Mood Indigo would often play three gigs in one night. We roamed up and down the country and I also got to play the iconic London venues where I had devoured gigs as a kid: the Marquee, Eel Pie Island and, yes, the Flamingo.

  At this stage I still wasn’t that confident as a front man, but after weeks of tap-dancing and acting lessons, it felt great to be back in the game and paying my dues with a band. As a fixture on the pub and club circuit, we also bumped into plenty of other young tyros striving for the big time.

  David Bowie hadn’t yet changed his name, painted his face or invented Ziggy Stardust back then. He was just the polite young singer in Davy Jones and the Locker, who were playing R&B and copying American stars the same as we were. We also shared bills with Bluesology, and their quiet, non-singing keyboardist, Elton John.

  Steampacket clearly had something, with three vocalists in Long John Baldry, Julie Driscoll and a really impressive young singer with a fantastic voice named Rod Stewart. Yet normally we’d be turning up just as these bands were leaving, or vice versa, so we never got a chance to do much more than nod a quick hello.

  I was now young, free and single and singing in a rock ’n’ roll band so theoretically my love life ought to have been decidedly lively but it never seemed to work out like that. For our treks out of London, Mood Indigo had a band rule that everybody slept in the van unless they pulled a girl, in which case they could dip into the communal kitty for a B&B for the night.

  Very occasionally I got lucky, but normally my natural shyness and reticence meant that I ended the night helping to pack away the gear before bunking down in the back of the van in a pool of petrol for the night, listening to Pete or Paddy’s axle-rattling snoring. I wonder if Rod Stewart was doing the same?

  Around this time I did have a chance encounter that was to have rather more significance for my romantic life, although I didn’t know it at the time. On a night off from the band, I headed down to meet my mate Frank at his club in Ilford: it may well have been the night that I pulled up outside El Grotto in time to see Frank bashing a troublesome punter with a temporary bus stop.

  Frank and I sat at the bar chatting about our beloved Hammers and clocked two pretty girls who came in wearing mini-skirts. I thought one of them was gorgeous: Frank told me that her name was Maureen Neal, her mate was Kath, and they had been in before.

  A local Lothario called Phil the Greek joined them at their table but Frank didn’t think either of them was involved with him. We chatted on, but later that evening, as I decided to head home, Maureen caught my eye and gave me a wave. I gave her a wave back. Again: to be continued.

  Derek had no objection to me singing with Mood Indigo but the band was going nowhere fast and I was getting tired of the long drives to Stevenage to rehearse. My manager suggested that we reconvene with dear old Bunny to make another attempt to get my solo career moving.

  Bunny had had a brainwave and it was one I was very excited about. For my next single, he decided to hook me up with a new producer – J J Jackson, a larger-than-life soul and R&B singer and songwriter. J J was black and American, which ticked a lot of boxes for me.

  A massive man dripping with jewellery, J J had written his own hits in the States but decided that I should cover a Ray Charles song, an upbeat jazz-blues number called ‘This Little Girl of Mine’. J J was very charismatic and persuasive and I loved the tune, but the record-buying public didn’t share my enthusiasm and I had another flop single under my belt.

  Mood Indigo didn’t seem to be playing so many gigs and I was getting tired of bumping around in the Ford Transit van (it was hardly a girl magnet) so I decided to upgrade to a car. My love for all things American saw me plump for a Nash Metropolitan, a small Yank car introduced to Britain in the late fifties by American servicemen stationed over here. Without getting all Top Gear on you, it was two-tone blue with white-wall tyres, a bench seat and column gear-change, and I loved it.

  The Nash was my transport when I went to the 100 Club in Oxford Street one night after my eighteenth birthday to see a mate play a blues gig. Getting to the venue early, I fell into conversation with a Swedish girl named Beth, pronounced Bet. In the sixties, Swedish girls had a reputation for free love that I desperately hoped was true, but Beth wasn’t the stereotypical six-foot-tall Scandinavian stunner: she was an elfin tomboy with short brown hair and a very masculine dress sense.

  Beth was the daughter of a university professor, spoke perfect English and was working as an au pair for an American family living in posh Highgate in north London. After the gig I gave her a lift back to their sprawling mansion and for the next six months we became inseparable, even if our idea of a hot date was Wimpy’s or the Golden Egg.

  It was good that Beth had given my personal life a boost as work-wise things looked somewhat bleak. Mood Indigo were winding down, Bunny had gone incommunicado and, skint again, I had no choice but to work my way through a motley selection of part-time jobs.

  If you want to see all aspects of humanity – but mainly the darker ones – then you should try driving a taxi. As I waited for Derek to get things moving again, I spent a few months as part of a team of drivers working for a very eccentric owner of a small mini-cab company.

  The guy was basically a complete chancer but inadvertently extremely entertaining. He was a bald man who kept a wig on his desk, which he would whip on to his head whenever a punter walked in the door. He’d also try to fabricate an air of busy-ness by constantly being on the radio at the base, despite the fact that only one of the cars actually had a radio in it.

  ‘Where are you, Rod?’ he would ask, seeking to impress a credulous customer.

  ‘I’m just around the corner.’

  ‘Where are you now?’ he’d ask him, five seconds later.

  ‘I’m still around the f****** corner!’

  It went on all night. Poor Rod must have been tempted to rip the radio out.

  I got put on the nightmare shift from around 11 p.m. to 5 a.m. the next morning. No two evenings were the same and they were usually dreadful. The start of the shift would coincide with the pubs chucking out, which meant drunks fighting over, or in, your cab, trying to avoid paying the fare, threatening you and now and then, just for good measure, throwing up down the back of your neck.

  The early hours were mellower and were when the freaks and weirdoes came out to play. One regular customer, who was a nice guy, was a hopeless insomniac who would pay me just to drive him around aimlessly in his pyjamas for an hour.

  Another time, a very drunk middle-aged woman asked me to take her south of the river. We pulled up at the destination, I asked her for the fare, and she pulled down her knickers and invited me to ‘take it out of that’. I was absolutely horrified, as well as having no idea what she would give me for a tip.

  Even more disturbing was the night that I picked up a man named Michael in Hornchurch, who asked to be taken to a place called Warley Hospital. As we drove through the dark country lanes of Essex, I figured there was something amiss as Michael suddenly tried to scramble from the back of the car into the front seat, using my head as a lever.

  I managed to push Michael back into the rear of the car and all became clear as we swung into the grounds of the Warley: it was a mental hospital. Michael was a patient on weekend leave. Locking him in the car, I walked up to the towering Gothic building, silhouetted in the moonlight, to announce his arrival.

  Ringing the bell, I was greeted by a man in a white coat who snapped that Michael was ‘Very late!’
and accompanied me back to the car. Michael was by now in the front passenger seat and attempting to climb through a tiny crack in the window, and looked alarmed when he saw my escort.

  Back inside the hospital, I asked Michael for my fare. The poor guy opened a sad little tobacco tin and offered me the sixpence that lay inside. I saw his terrified eyes and told him, ‘It’s OK. Forget it,’ but the orderly was less forgiving and began yelling at him and berating him. I slunk back to the car, leaving sorry, wretched Michael to his nightmare of a life. The mini-cab driving came to an end soon afterwards, when Wiggy’s office was petrol-bombed and burned to the ground by a competitor.

  After this, window cleaning was straightforward. I worked as part of a small team under a wide-boy Cockney foreman called Tommy. In theory, we cleaned office buildings under contract, but Tommy had perfected a system whereby we identified the office of the bloke who signed the payment dockets, did a great job on his window and ignored the rest of the building. This opportunistic labour-saving device meant we were often done for the day by lunchtime and could bunk off for the afternoon.

  I was more conscientious in a job painting factories, although a lunchtime pint one day was nearly the death of me. Returning to the roof from the pub, I put my foot on the wrong piece of scaffolding and crashed through the roof to the concrete floor twenty feet below.

  As I fell through the air head first, I managed to twist my body around to land on my side but still smashed my head fairly hard on the floor. A trip to the A&E department followed, where they kept me in for a few hours for concussion.

  My already varied CV also expanded to include a fortnight in a hardware shop working for one of the most unpleasant men I have ever met. A severe sergeant-major type, he regarded my fashionably shoulder-length hair with huge disapproval and took great pleasure in barking orders at me, and doling out physically impossible tasks for me to perform.

  The worst job he gave me was helping to unload our deliveries of gas canisters, which meant standing beneath the lorries as two burly workmen dropped ridiculously heavy metal bottles down for me to catch. My hands would be bleeding by the end, and next to this torture, my spell peeling spuds in a fish and chip shop and my week in a factory making tent parts were a doddle.

  It was a relief when Bunny reappeared on the radar and hooked Derek and me up with J J again, but J J’s next decision was an unmitigated disaster. He had written a song especially for me to sing, which was flattering, but my heart sank when I heard it: it was a tribute to every man’s favourite female garment, the mini-skirt, called ‘Thigh High’.

  The chorus, to be sung in a lecherous growl, ran: ‘Oh my, thigh high, dig dem dimples on dem knees!’ With hindsight, I should never have recorded it but I was slightly in awe of J J and so I went along with the fiasco. The single died a death (‘Ugh!’ said the Daily Mirror review, correctly), which at least stopped J J from turning me into some kind of novelty-act precursor of Black Lace.

  Everything seemed to be coming to an end. Bunny had lost a few thousand pounds trying to kickstart my career, and decided to cut his losses. I also parted ways with Mood Indigo, after our final tour, arranged by a berserk booking agent – we would be in Sunderland one night, Bournemouth the next – ended with me poleaxed with pneumonia in Manchester. The band had been great fun, but it felt like it was over.

  Even worse, Beth’s six-month spell in London finished and she had to return to university in Sweden. This really upset me and I missed her a lot, but a trip to Scandinavia to attempt to rekindle things didn’t work out: I arrived out-of-sorts after an exhausting journey, Beth was a bit aloof, and her university-professor father gave the distinct impression that he didn’t feel I was worthy of his daughter.

  When love affairs come to an end, it helps to be able to throw yourself into your work, but the way my music career was going down the plughole, I didn’t have any work to throw myself into. Undeterred, the eternal optimist Derek decided to switch to plan B. It was time for me to tread the boards.

  6

  LUVVIES, GANGSTERS AND SNOGGING BROWN BEARS

  WITH HIS ACADEMIC career and newspaper critic connections, Derek was really more steeped in the world of theatre than in music, and with my pop career resolutely refusing to take off, he began to point me more towards the acting side of things. I still had my reservations but, as usual, I went along with it.

  He secured me an audition with a touring repertory company run by a husband-and-wife couple, Zack Matalon and Elizabeth Searle. Zack was a very outgoing, larger-than-life American, while the quieter Elizabeth was a successful musical actress who had starred in The Pyjama Game.

  I felt fairly clueless at the audition – I remember trying to appear cool and suave, which I really wasn’t, by rather preposterously sprawling all over a church spire that was part of the scenery – but to my amazement, I got the job. The money was rubbish but Mum and Dad, who had been understandably worried about me, were very proud, and as rehearsals neared I looked forward to becoming a stage actor.

  The rehearsals were to be held in a church hall in Bayswater, west London, and on the first day the booming, very thespian Zack introduced me to the rest of the company. It took me no time to realise that they were all notably more upper crust and well spoken than I was. It seemed a fairly safe bet that none of them had been to Canning Town in their life.

  In quick succession, I met a classical actor type named Roy who had a bald head, glasses and an immaculate speaking voice; a posh, miserable young actress called Susanne; two nice, friendly character actors; a female musical director; a black-clad, ginger-haired female stage manager and a very white girl who looked as if she lived under a toadstool. Only one cast member really stood out: a huge, imposing Zulu called Dambuza.

  The company tended to learn three or four productions and take them out on tour, and Zack ran us through our schedule. Over the next three weeks we were to rehearse the first show, a long-running Broadway musical called The Fantasticks, to performance levels before learning two other offerings on the road.

  The musical director, a petite American girl in her thirties with glasses and a lot of hair, played us the score to The Fanta-sticks, in which I was to play the juvenile lead, Matt. There were elements of West Side Story in its plot of two star-crossed young lovers from warring families and it had some good songs, with ‘Soon It’s Gonna Rain’ and ‘Try to Remember’ standing out.

  Oh, Kay! was also a musical, a George and Ira Gershwin offering that in truth I thought was a load of bollocks, and in which I was hopelessly miscast as a duke. The repertoire was completed by a drama, To Dorothy a Son, in which I was to have the happily non-onerous role of an off-stage phone voice.

  I crammed my part in The Fantasticks at home and on the long tube journeys from Newbury Park to Bayswater, and was pleased to discover that learning lines came pretty easily to me. Zack even gave me some drumming to do when he learned of my musical background. We began our tour in Paignton in Devon and on the first night I didn’t feel at all nervous until I heard the audience applaud the overture.

  That was when the adrenaline kicked in. There was a slight out-of-body air to my stage debut, with my mind racing and the action appearing at times to be in slow motion. Was this really happening? Was it going well? Happily, the audience appeared to think so, giving us a generous ovation at the final curtain. Derek, who had travelled down for the opening night, seemed very pleased and also gave me a few useful tips.

  We quickly settled into a routine of seaside digs and end-of-the-pier theatre shows, learning the other plays as we went along. I even got to make use of my tap dancing in Oh, Kay!, although for obvious reasons I didn’t feel terribly convincing as a blue-blooded aristocrat.

  I normally roomed with Dambuza, who was a fascinating man. He had fled South Africa during the apartheid regime, playing the lead role of a boxer in a West End show named King Kong and then securing asylum to stay in Britain. We would talk for hours into the night and I would sit transfixed as
Dambuza regaled me in his rich baritone with tales of Africa and his fight for freedom.

  The company was fairly closely knit but while it was a bit more civilised than sleeping in a pool of petrol in Mood Indigo’s van, there were similarities. The same attitude prevailed of what happens on the road stays on the road, and I had flings with both the ginger-haired stage manager (I wore her down) and the American musical director (she wore me down). Zack, for his part, tried his luck with any female around.

  As Derek had predicted, I learned a lot from my first repertory tour, but as it drew to an end I was hankering to return to music, as usual. Fortunately Derek had been busy on that score, securing the interest of Mike Leander, an upcoming record producer who had been working with a singer called Paul Raven (who, incidentally, was later to become Gary Glitter).

  We met up and Mike suggested that I should record a cover of ‘She’s Leaving Home’, a song that he had arranged on the album of the moment, the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Due to a deal that Mike had with a label called Uni Records, an offshoot of Universal Pictures, my version would be released in America only.

  I was impressed with Mike, a confident and flamboyant figure who, unlike Bunny, seemed music industry through and through and was the epitome of a top record producer. In the studio, I was taken with his foppish air, his meticulous professionalism and, most of all, his orange suit as we tackled ‘She’s Leaving Home’ and a song that Mike had written for the B-side, ‘He’s a Better Man Than Me’.

  Mike told me to sing the latter song in a very English accent, as the Beatles and the British invasion meant that Americans could not get enough of swinging London. His idea was vindicated. When the single was released in the States in summer 1967, DJs flipped it over and played ‘He’s a Better Man Than Me’. It even squeezed into the Billboard chart at number seventy-eight.