by Mike Read
‘Rubber! Old friend of our pappy’s, right?’
‘Yeah.’
Things were going well until they caught sight of me in the back of the car. ‘Who’s he?’
‘Friend of mine. He’s cool, man. He’s a cool guy.’
I’m not certain whether ‘cool’ was the best description of me at that moment, but I tried to live up to it as best I could. I affected nonchalance. I probably looked like Johnny English in a tight corner. The brace of big lads looked as if they were making up their minds about me. ‘OK,’ they said at length, ‘no trouble.’
I wasn’t looking for any. I was looking for a steel pan.
Mangy dogs and an assortment of inexplicable odours followed us through a very run-down assortment of cramped buildings until we reached what was apparently our goal. The man sitting on the step was gimlet eyed. He surveyed me in particular. Freddie saved the day. ‘Hey man, you remember me … it’s Rubber.’
The man was now wide eyed with delight. ‘Rubber!’
‘Yeah.’
‘Can you still shake it like you used to?’
Uncertain of what exactly, if anything, either or both of them were about to shake, I respectfully semi-averted my gaze. The hut’s incumbent was sporting nothing but a leather thong on his manhood.
The shaking done, the conversation resumed, this time in the local patois. The request for a steel pan resulted in much shaking of the head. It looked a lost cause until Freddie started to plead in earnest. I – well, Freddie – was given a small, highly decorated pan, the sort of thing you’d find in a souvenir shop. I began to tell him that wasn’t what I had in mind, when I was encouraged to say goodbye and follow my leader. Out of earshot, Freddie told me that the man didn’t have any and wouldn’t sell me one even if he had, because I was white. I couldn’t do much about that.
As we passed an old shed, I could see shafts of sharp sunlight bouncing off dozens of steel pans. ‘Freddie,’ I hissed, ‘look.’
‘You haven’t seen them. Come on quick now.’
After getting a similar reaction on three other islands, I eventually struck lucky in Tobago. After kicking an imaginary football around the Dwight Yorke Stadium, I headed to a music shop to further my quest.
‘You a musician?’ said the owner.
‘Yes.’
‘Whaddya play?’
‘Guitar.’
He handed me an acoustic. ‘Play.’
I did and he was impressed enough to recommend me to someone who made the elusive percussion. I’d clearly come on a bit since Aigues-Mortes. It was another slightly dodgy area, but I got in, got my steel pan and got out. I have it still, but where the beaters are, heaven knows. I can see I’m going to have to go through the rigmarole again to get replacements.
My sojourns weren’t always of the lecturing variety. There were also pretty decent broadcasting trips too. I broadcast from my hotel balcony in Bermuda, surrounded by tea and breakfast, from where I could gaze down on the sea, golf course and tennis courts. A living hell, you’ll agree, but I soldiered on, even forcing myself to play a few hours’ tennis each day. Saints have been martyred for less.
In Bermuda I got to be a mod. My father would never let me have a scooter, so of course the injustice has burned within me ever since. I wanted the chrome, the symmetrical lights and, on the whippy aerial at the back, the obligatory squirrel’s tail. In fact I’d have been happy with any tail: vole, badger, weasel … actually I’m not certain how many of those have proper tails. Maybe because the mods had them all. Before I’m accosted by animal rights activists, let me point out that I am an animal lover myself and would only have used the tails of fauna on my imaginary Lambretta or Vespa had they expired naturally after a long and happy life (the fauna, not the scooters). With a 30 mph speed limit on the island, scooters were the order of the day. Singing a few choruses of ‘We Are the Mods’ from Quadrophenia, I made my way eagerly to the hotel’s hire shop.
Only once had I driven a scooter. I was fifteen. It was a private, gated road and the friend who owned the Lambretta in question assured me that it was quite legal on a private estate. After just twenty seconds in the saddle I discovered that he was wrong and the two policemen that emerged from a side road were right. It wasn’t a heinous crime, so the superintendent, who knew my Pa, gave him the nod. ‘Needn’t take it any further. Not serious.’
My father, it seems, had other ideas. ‘No, let him go to court, it’ll teach him a lesson.’
So I went, nervous, apprehensive and unsure of what to expect. Despite being in school uniform of course and putting on my best ‘shining morning face’, I was told off and crept away ‘unwillingly to school’. Now, here I was on only my second venture on a scooter.
‘I assume you’re ridden one before?’
‘Yes, absolutely.’ Nothing but the truth, to which you will attest, but the man who I was trying to convince wasn’t convinced.
‘Do you need me to show you anything?’
‘Everything.’
‘Everything?’
‘Well, you know, they vary a bit. I’ve only ridden in England.’
‘These are English.’
‘Are they? Oh yes, I can see that now.’ After a little more blustering I was allowed a couple of practice laps around the hotel.
Within ten minutes I hit the highway. ‘I’m free! Look at me! I’m a mod! I’m a mod! Let’s go to Bognor and see Bluesology at the Shoreline Club!’ With a head full of soul anthems I cruised ‘Beautiful, Beautiful Bermuda’, a classic song by local heroes the Merrymen. The sea was the deepest blue I’d ever seen. Really, it made me gasp.
I also love Jamaica. I know Noel Coward, Errol Flynn, Ian Fleming and co. beat me to it by many years, but I did sample the echoes of that post-war atmosphere by visiting their homes. Although Flynn died back in 1959, his wife Patrice, who has just died at the age of eighty-seven. I scaled the dizzy heights to Firefly, Coward’s house some 6 miles east of Orcabessa on the north coast of the island. The view is so spectacular that it is no surprise that Sir Henry Morgan, one-time governor of Jamaica and sometime pirate, made this lofty viewpoint his home in the 1600s. He may have gone, but Noel remains, for he is buried here and a statue of the self-styled ‘Master’, seated, stares nonchalantly out to sea, cigarette dangling languidly from his hand, clearly waiting for my selfie with him.
The mid ’50s house is very basic, almost Spartan, considering that this is where he entertained the Queen, the Queen Mother, Sir Winston Churchill and numerous luminaries from the acting fraternity. Firefly is intriguing because it is just how he left it. The monogrammed towels hang from the rails in a rather cramped bathroom and a wall of the unprepossessing bedroom still has books from the period on the bookshelves. Downstairs, the gramophone sits patiently by a pile of vinyl LPs, waiting for the next party of revellers to arrive. Perhaps it might include Sophia Loren, Elizabeth Taylor or Vivien Leigh; they were all here in this room at one time or another. So was Charlie Chaplin. The ghosts of the greats are all around. By a strange coincidence, the LP on top of the pile when I visited was by Olivia Breeze, the daughter of our one-time neighbours Alan and Renee Breeze, friends of my folks. Alan had been a featured vocalist on TV’s Billy Cotton Band Show. Outside, the old swimming pool, where the likes of Laurence Olivier, Audrey Hepburn and Marlene Dietrich once frolicked, is now filled in and film stars frolic no longer.
Taking as his basis the Keats poem ‘When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be’, Coward wrote a few lines that never fail to move me. If you ever make it to Firefly look out for them on one of the walls:
When I have fears, as Keats had fears,
Of the moment I’ll cease to be,
I console myself with vanished years,
Remembered laughter, remembered tears,
And the peace of the changing sea.
When I feel sad as Keats felt sad
That my life is so nearly done,
It gives me comfort to dwell upon
Remembered friends who are dead and gone
And the jokes we had and the fun.
How happy they are I cannot know
But happy I am who loved them so.
Every time I read those words, the Master reaches out across the years and tweaks the tear-ducts. Now that’s powerful writing.
I also visited Goldeneye, Ian Fleming’s house where he wrote his James Bond novels. It occupies an idyllic spot with the garden dropping dramatically away to the sea and boasts unusual ablutionary arrangements. Each of the three bedrooms has an outside wash basin and a yard further along, a shower. OK as long as the weather holds, or maybe they just don’t shower when it rains. At the bottom of each section of private garden is a fully plumbed old-style bath. One might imagine a summer’s night, with Fleming, Coward and Flynn holding forth at volume from their respective tubs, Fleming’s lover Lady Rothermere tut-tutting in the house that ‘boys will be boys’. Many of the trees in the garden were given and planted by Fleming’s guests, among the most notable being healthy specimens from Princess Margaret and Sir Anthony and Lady Eden. Ian Fleming invited the then Prime Minister for a holiday to escape the stress he was under from the Suez Crisis and the impending failure of the government’s Middle East policy. I suppose planting the tree might have afforded a cathartic moment, away from the enormous pressure under which he found himself. His premiership lasted less than two years, but the tree still grows with the plaque to the Edens at its base. So now you know, the Garden of Eden is in Jamaica.
I couldn’t miss out the ranch of Johnny Cash and June Carter up the hill from Rose Hall, home of the ‘white witch’, more of whom in a moment. Like Noel Coward’s retreat from the world, the Cashes’ ranch, when I saw it, was just as they left it, little knowing they wouldn’t be coming back as they would both pass away in the States. There was toothpaste in the bathroom, books they were reading by the bed and Johnny’s boots behind the door. The house was once owned by the family of the poet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and was part of the Rose Hall estate.
They say the ghost of Annie Palmer still haunts the great house at Rose Hall and having spent some time there, it’s not a place I’d like to stay the night. Many have tried but virtually all have failed to last the course. Legend has it that she was versed in the ways of witchcraft and voodoo by her adopted nanny on the island of Haiti. Said to be a beauty, she married plantation owner John Palmer, who she murdered. She married twice more and murdered them as well. It was also said that she took slave lovers from the plantation. Maybe we’ll never know the real story, but the place is pretty spooky and the imagination can run riot. Johnny Cash wrote a song about her, ‘The Ballad of Annie Palmer’.
One of the few waterfalls in the world that tumbles straight into the sea is the Dunn’s River Falls. It rises (or falls, depending on which way you’re heading) 180 feet in a series of terraces 600 feet long and empties into the Caribbean. Bursting with powerful cascades and dotted with micro-lagoons, it’s a fascinating climb. The normal practice recommended to tourists is that they hold hands in a chain and are guided by tour guides, but where’s the excitement in that? I went alone and it was exhilarating. The force of the water is so powerful you need to keep your base low and your wits sharp. You have no idea of the depth of your next step. What an obstacle course.
I had to do the tourist thing with the dolphins of course, and have the photograph of one of the creatures kissing me to prove it. But as for having an affinity with humans, forget it. I have the happy snap of our tender moment, but she never wrote. Not a postcard or a phone call. Not even a text. Dolphins, eh?
A more dramatic escapade was the ‘cool runnings’ afternoon. No snow of course, but they had the dogs, all rescue dogs, and the sleds were on wheels. The tricky bit was choosing the pack. The dogs knew. They sensed a good run. They all wanted some action: ‘Pick me, pick me.’ (I speak fluent canine.) I knew if they could they’d all have had their paws in the air.
Harnessed in twos, the dogs couldn’t wait to get started. This was going to be one hell of a ‘walkies’ and at 40 mph I could hardly be community minded and stop to pick anything up in a plastic bag. I was given the commands that I had to use, in patois. So not only was my life in the hands of a dozen unruly curs, but I had to learn a new language in under two minutes. I had no idea how ‘dogpower’ would feel. They went off at a hell of a lick, with me groping at the Jamaican for ‘right’ and ‘left’. Not easy when you’re being bounced around on a buckboard and fighting to keep your balance. My team and I came through like heroes. The hounds got a thorough hosing down and gallons of water, while I made a quick getaway for a tennis match with one of the top Jamaican players. I slept well that night. Mind you, I sleep well every night.
Don’t run away with the idea that I only work in countries with an average winter temperature of 75 degrees. I’ve done my share of the Arctic Circle and nights that last under an hour. I’ve sat with reindeer, watched the sun decide to rise again when we know, by rights, it should be sinking, and stood with arms outstretched Leonardo DiCaprio style at North Cape. I’ve stared towards that moveable feast the North Pole and gazed over the Barents Sea. Why do I feel strangely English in this Norwegian landscape that is the northernmost tip of Europe? Because North Cape was named by Steven Borough, skipper of the Edward Bonaventure, which came this way in the mid-1500s looking for the Northeast Passage. Those were the days, when you could scoot around the globe in ships, naming places on a whim. Many egotistically named towns, mountains and waterways after themselves, not considering for a moment that the people who lived there probably already had names for them. Then there were the nautical toadies, who named anything they saw after their monarch, in the hope of some tawdry title or an acre or two in Wiltshire. North Cape was where the Scharnhorst was sunk in 1943, by the British and Norwegian navies.
Closer to home, I did tours of Northern Ireland, where many refused to venture. I found everyone charming, friendly and welcoming. Of course the Troubles were rife, but people were still going about their everyday lives. Yes, there were soldiers on patrol, and no, everything wasn’t ideal, but things carried on and folk wanted entertainment to give them a lift. Before my first trip crossing the border, I’d imagined it would be a blaze of light and a flurry of activity. It was no such thing. Complete darkness was the order of the day with shapes approaching from the shadows to check your identity. I would end up with a pocketful of requests for the radio, from both checkpoints. Saracen tanks were also fairly common on the streets and were often present at non-border checkpoints, where the only signal for you to stop was a small red light swung by a soldier as your car approached. You ignored or missed it at your peril. It was always slightly disconcerting to have a 76 mm gun pointing at your windscreen. In Belfast I avoided staying at the Europa Hotel, ‘the most bombed hotel in the world’, and usually managed to get checked in at the Everglades in Derry/Londonderry, with commanding views over the river Foyle to the far hills of Donegal.
The hospitality was so good in Northern Ireland that there were times when it was necessary to accept a spare bed. On one such occasion I woke up to an empty house. There was no clue in the place as to where I was so I wandered into the street, where my question, ‘Where am I?’, elicited a few odd responses and narrowing of eyes. Or if they’d had a night like I’d had, maybe their eyes were naturally narrow. It turned out that I was in Portrush, right up on the coast some 30 miles north east of my hotel. How the hell had I got there? I had no idea, and the identity of my hosts remained a mystery.
I arrived early in Belfast for one gig as it was snowing fairly heavily. An arms cache had been discovered in the city. The Army presence and sealed-off roads meant that those that were already in the club stayed there and those that had planned to come couldn’t. Instead of 300 or 400 that night, there were no more than a dozen, so we sang songs, had a few drinks and made an intimate evening of it. The Falls Road area was often at the heart of the Troubles, but I was invited to someone’s
house there for tea, duly trotted along and was given a splendid welcome. It’s well known that I’d even tiptoe gingerly through a minefield for a decent afternoon tea, with or without buttered buns.
The island of Malta is a delightful retreat, a part of the British Empire from 1814 until its independence in 1964. Always a strategic island, it fought alongside us during World War Two and was quite rightly awarded the George Cross for the bravery of its population during the siege of 1940–42. I spent some time out there with Robin Gibb when we both received International Music Awards. It was time that Robin remembered fondly and we spoke of it often. His favourite moment was away from the studios and the interviews when we spent a few hours at an outdoor café in Valletta, drinking tea and waffling about music and life. I remember him admitting that ‘Telstar’ was a major influence on him. ‘Listen to the end of “Words”,’ he said.
‘Can’t see the similarity.’ I was normally good on stuff like that.
He sang the last sixteen notes of the Bee Gees hit, then sang it again, speeded up, but without the words. He was right, it was ‘Telstar’.
In May 2011 I was back in Malta to receive the country’s most prestigious award. Cliff Richard and I were knighted together and given the most fantastic ceremony. We were flown out, with a group of supportive friends for a few days, and learned about the incredible thousand-year history of the Order of St John of Jerusalem, stretching back to 1070. This was the oldest knighthood in the world. On the day, some 100 Brothers and Sisters of the Order were there to watch the ceremony, while we were given our black robes emblazoned with the Maltese cross, and later our beautifully crafted silver crosses to be worn on suitable occasions. Our hands were symbolically tied with cord at one point, prayers were said and singers praised in song, until the moment arrived for the ancient sword to fall on the shoulders. What a moment.