Andrew
Still crazy after all these years
Des Watson made me a crystal radio. Well, I use the word radio fairly loosely as I cannot recall ever getting much out of it but it was my first ‘transistor’. He was good at making those sorts of things and I was impressed with this piece of brown circuit board featuring a tuning device and a large shiny thing that he told me was a transistor with a lump of metal nearby to dissipate the heat he said it would generate. I’d been fascinated by the idea of listening to BBC TV’s sound broadcast which he’d found on a short wave frequency. That meant that I might be able to listen to Top of The Pops without having to squirm with embarrassment at my Dad’s comments while watching it in the living room! Even though it didn’t actually achieve what I had hoped it represented my first step away from St Albans School choir and towards pop music.
My very, very earliest musical memory was Looking High, High, High, High; Looking Low, Low, Low by some American guy. Mum and Dad were very impressed with my rendition which I presume was in treble voice then! I also recall The Story Of My Life by another American. My brother, Rupert, had a 78 of this by a sound-alike and this got played on a wind-up player of 1940 vintage. Both the player and a box of 78s now reside somewhere in my loft. I used to watch Top of The Pops with him and remember giving the girls marks out of ten as the camera swung round through the audience (which it did a lot in those days). None of the music from those programmes made any impression at the time, however. I must have been about 12.
At 14, I went to my first parties and pop music entered my life. The parties were always in Radlett and we’d watch The Monkees at 6 o’clock. Great programmes and even better party games with the girls. But back to the music . . . I’d cycle from Frogmore, about half way between St Albans and Radlett, along the A5. That was a pretty major trunk road, even then, but I have this very clear memory of coming home one evening in the middle of the road, cycling between the double white lines that were painted at the crest of one of the hills! I was singing out loud, as happy as I guess I’d ever be. I’d got a real girl friend, I’d kissed her and I was A Believer! The Monkees I’m A Believer was just the right song at the right time and I was hooked. Couple that with the Beach Boys Then I Kissed Her and I was totally addicted to pop.
The school band were called DRAX and Des Watson was heavily involved. They were good, too good for me to be part of, but there was a lesser band with no name who did invite me to practice sessions. I wasn’t much good. I couldn’t play any instruments and my voice didn’t seem to have broken properly. I’d start off in one octave and finish in another. There was a range of crucial notes somewhere between the two that I just couldn’t do. I also sang like a St Albans School choir boy, sounded all the letters and even Yeah, Yeah, Yeah didn’t come naturally. Kim O’Connor was a sort of Micky Dolenz lookalike and I was really jealous. We did attempt some Monkees tracks together and it was fun.
I hadn’t got a record player so I didn’t buy any disks in 66. I did have a really good transistor radio, though. Dad probably took pity on me with the crystal set and bought a smashing HMV set, quite small and square, with a good speaker. In particular, it had an earphone which plugged into the side and cut out the main speaker. This meant I could listen to 208 – Radio Luxembourg – at night without them telling me off. 208 had disc jockeys and adverts, hour-long programmes devoted to one group or a certain style. Their Top 20 was absolutely required listening and my fascination with charts began.
I had, until then, been getting the Children’s Newspaper, or some similar title, every week but I persuaded Mum to change the subscription to NME. Later I switched to the Record Mirror. I followed the charts at home and in the USA assiduously. I even started to keep notes of which positions records jumped from or fell to. I had always loved working with numbers so to combine pop music with numbers was like a dream to me. I would also keep detailed records of how many weeks various artists had been in the charts and compile my own year-end overall chart based on some complicated points system.
From Radio Luxembourg, I graduated to the Alan Freeman Show on Sundays. It wasn’t Radio One at that time. I guess it was still the Home Service! Anyway, Fluff Freeman was famous for playing the whole of every record in the Top 20 as well as a selection of Climbers. I loved this show because you could try and predict what was coming and it was also the show to record from. I didn’t need to buy singles. I had acquired a reel-to-reel tape recorder. The first was a tiny portable affair that only took 3” reels and the recording quality was poor. The tape was pulled through by the take-up reel on the right hand side and as this got fuller it pulled the tape through faster. playback was OK for tapes recorded on that machine but anything recorded on someone else’s sounded silly as did my tapes on another machine. By Autumn 1966 I had a proper, huge, tape recorder which had three speeds and took reels up to 8” diameter – an hour or more of music at the normal speed.
Having a tape recorder meant I could share music with friends. Not having any albums or singles had meant I’d missed out on earlier exchange opportunities and I never even dreamt of paying the full price for singles, never mind albums. My richer friends, however, had no such problems and the Radlett parties introduced me to Rubber Soul, the Beatles album preceding Sgt Pepper. Listening to Nowhere Man and Norweigan Wood in a friend’s bedroom is probably my first ‘album’ experience. We must have played it 20 times.
I was so lucky to be the age I was. The Summer of 1967 was a wonderful experience. Great music and I was becoming the Class Vi expert in all things Pop. I had also bought a single or two and even a couple of albums. Possibly the most important event of all came when I was on holiday with my parents at Walcott, Norfolk in, I guess, 1966. I had the transistor radio with me, of course, and one evening I was twiddling the knob in search of a station. I found Radio Caroline. This was quite brilliant stuff. The DJs sounded fun and somehow freer in what they could say and play than 208. BBC had never had anything other than the Top 20 show to offer. The adverts were good too and reception much better than 208. Moreover, shows ran through the day and night. There was a Breakfast Show. This was really quite original to me in those days and if I could have found a way to be a DJ on a pirate radio station I surely would.
From Radio Caroline I switched to Radio London and that station, its presenters and its music were fantastic for me then. Kenny Everett had a fabulous show every weekend which was quite unmissable. Johnnie Walker on Caroline displayed an impeccable taste for music (in my view) and I wanted that voice. They were rebellious but intelligent programmes. I understood little of why they were called Pirate radio stations at the beginning but learned quickly and the closure of Radio London in 1967 was a sad, very sad, moment. I listened to the final show. Kenny Everett was the DJ and I recorded the whole thing. I left the tape running at the end and can even now, nearly 40 years later, hear the click from the central grooves of the Beatles’ Day In The Life, the softer fuzzy on-air noise and then the dreadful final click and incredible silence as the station shut down. I think I had expected to get the static noise, a crackle or something. That amazing silence was so appropriate but also so very, very sad. I still have that tape. I really must get it out and copied onto some more durable and usable format. I often wonder whether anyone else would have recorded those final hours and whether I have the sole copy of that click and silence. I must get that copy organised. [You can now hear Radio London, as it was but without the fade or hiss, courtesy of the brilliantly wonderful Oldies Project.]
That very first tuning in to Caroline led to what I think was my first single purchase at full price. The Beeb had banned a record by Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsborough. I’d read something about it in the record papers but not much. The pirate radio stations played Je T’aime, Moi Non Plus. I heard it at Walcott in Norfolk and bought it as soon as I got back. My copy was on the original dark blue Fontana label. I think I lost it a few years ago in a fire but still keep a faint hope of finding it in the loft one day where some singles were kept. It is a faint hope and if I find a copy I’ll buy it, regardless of price, again. This record coincided marvellously with my coming aware of sex and more than kissing. Perfect timing! It also led to a fascinating encounter and some degree of fame amongst my peers.
The record was in French and whilst everybody could take a fair guess at what the words meant, I was determined to come up with a translation. My determination was particularly enhanced by Katerina Kubrick. She went to St Albans Girls High School and I was, for a while, her boyfriend on the 321 bus from St Albans to Radlett. I would even stay on the bus to stay with her and then have to get another bus back from Radlett home! She and her friends somehow got me talking about the banned record and wanted to know what the words meant. I was pretty good at French and agreed, somewhat rashly, to provide them with a translation. I must have spent all the following weekend on it! I struggled with my tiny Collins Gem French Dictionary and eventually completed a damn good effort. I never really figured out the Moi Non Plus bit but that was not as significant as entre mes reins. I became a star on that bus and Katerina was duly impressed. She used to talk about some film called 2001 that her Dad was doing and invited me to visit the set. I never did and a family move to Kings Langley severed my Radlett connection. Despite having the nickname 2001 at school for several months I didn’t appreciated just what I had missed out on until Mr Stanley Kubrick released the film years later.
The heavier rock side of pop had some appeal too. I liked The Rolling Stones and The Who but the stuff I played when I was on my own was mostly fairly commercial, tending towards folk rock and I began to appreciate oldies more too. My Hemel period meant that the people I associated with influenced the style and Phil Gibbon introduced me to The Doors. Brian Peach came along with some new directions and had the only recording of The Electric Prunes’ Get Me To The World On Time that I knew. The Animals were a favourite then too but I was never a big fan of The Beatles. I respected them but the Stones, the Beach Boys and, still, The Monkees were my favourites. Brian was totally addicted to The Moody Blues. I had loved Nights In White Satin and liked the odd track here and there but never really caught the same bug. I spent many an hour suffering the effects of too much tobacco in my room with Brian, staring at a Bob Dylan poster and agreeing how lovely Carole Young and Gill Moore were. 1968 was a very good year and 1969 was even better. I was earning real money in the summer holidays and starting to socialise in a meaningful way. Despite having some sort of income, I still didn’t buy many records. I bought reels of tape – and recorded everything I wanted from the radio. I had a real girlfriend but she wasn’t a particular fan of any group or singer so my tastes tended to be a combination of what I wanted to listen to in my room, now equipped with big speakers in each end of a bookcase my Dad had made and painted white, and what I thought other friends, all male, would like. The personal favourites were singles like Scott MacKenzie’s San Francisco, Procul Harum’s A Whiter Shade of Pale, Pink Floyd’s Arnold Layne, Different Drum by the Stone Poneys and Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit. The tracks which I genuinely liked from albums influenced by friends were things like the Doors’ The End, America by the Nice, Hey Joe by Jimi Hendrix, White Room by Cream and my school band’s incredible performance of 21st Century Schizoid Man at the last school concert headed me in the direction of King Crimson’s first album. I bought Deep Purple’s Deep Purple In Rock but I’m not really sure I ever really liked it. Brian did, though.
Other tracks which hit me then were items like Hang On Sloopy and Baby Let’s Wait by The Royal Guardsmen, a record I bought after Tony Blackburn raved about it on the newly launched Radio One. I was there when The Move’s I Can Hear The Grass Grow was the first disc played by Tony on the launch of Radio One but I stayed loyal to the pirates and spent most hours listening to the continuing Radio Caroline until the BBC had attracted all the best pirate DJs and the pirates finally ceased to be a major force and Radio One was reasonably groovy.
Neil Diamond was a major artist I grew to respect as a writer and performer. His early tracks like Solitary Man and Girl, You’ll Be A Woman Soon I liked a lot but I admired him most at the time for the fact that he had written several of the Monkees hits. The Monkees released what remains in my all time top several in their Pleasant Valley Sunday and life was good. Lulu’s To Sir With Love was a B-side in the UK but far preferable in my view to The Boat That I Row, despite the eminent Neil Diamond’s writing.
Then came my Creedence Clearwater Revival period. It was Fortunate Son which grabbed me first. I bought Willy And The Poor Boys and discovered some brilliant tracks like Effigy and Who’ll Stop The Rain on Cosmo’s Factory. I felt a bit odd buying their LPs – they were an ugly bunch – and it was a type of music I hadn’t previously experienced but I really loved practically everything they did. My least favourites were probably the hits! I bought their two previous albums, which had not been big sellers here, Green River and Bayou Country and anyone viewing my album collection would have seen little but CCR. I later found their first album, Creedence Clearwater Revival, to complete the collection. Helen Watson, my girlfriend from Autumn 1969, bought me Pendulum when it was released as a birthday present in 1970. This was the first album anyone had bought me as a present. It was particularly sweet as I am sure she didn’t actually like the record but had to put up with me playing it every time I visited her!
In the summer of 1970, I had a place at St Andrews University and took a holiday with a schoolfriend, Ian Golds, to the Glen Trool area of South West Scotland. He played a guitar quite well and strummed for most of the long journey in my Ford Popular. He was not as well-versed in pop as I was but we sang along whatever we found we both knew. My only public singing performance took place on that holiday when we did a Simon & Garfunkel act at the campsite we stayed at. Some people had heard us strumming and singing in our tent one night and asked us to take the stage at the hall nearby the next evening. It can’t have been a stunning performance and I can only remember having a go at two tracks but we got appreciative rather than simply polite applause which was nice. We did Sloop John B and The Boxer. Strange days.