by Mike Read
In another interview I was holding forth with such earth-shattering comments as ‘A deadline can work wonders and we play much better under pressure’. The only pressure I remember is that Jake’s family lived in the Bahamas and he got to the studio half an hour late. The producer was also quoted in an interview, inspiring all and sundry with his aperçu that ‘the harpsichord is an essential gimmick and without it the song will never get off the ground’, which was good to know. Another of his quoted classics, this time regarding the microphones was, ‘It all depends on strategic positioning. It’s this that will make or break you.’ Nothing to do with our songs, haircuts or youthful good looks then? How very disappointing. One interview ended with a flash of visionary brilliance from ‘Just Plain Mic’, as they insisted on calling me: ‘Even if the record doesn’t make the chart, I don’t think we’ve wasted our time.’ The jury is still out.
The record actually got some airplay: Emperor Rosko spun it a couple of times and Bill Heath’s incessant and terrier-like campaigning bagged us a spot on Radio One Club. I hoofed up to Leicester, although I was still bearing the final scars from a horrific car crash a few weeks earlier. The axle sheared on my friend Roger Tallack’s Triumph Herald and as the car somersaulted I apparently went through the gap where the windscreen had been and ended up unconscious with battery acid pouring over me. How we survived goodness only knows. There was petrol everywhere. If either of us had been smoking (luckily neither of us smoked) we’d have been engulfed in a ball of flame. I remember briefly coming to in the ambulance and muttering ‘We can get some press out of this for the single’. A trouper through and through. Having done my PR I passed out again, coming round in A&E. I was naked except for a piece of elastic around my waist and a few tatters hanging down Robinson Crusoe style. Not realising that the battery acid had eaten my underpants I entered the realms of somnolent apologia: ‘Oh no, my mother always told me to wear clean underwear in case I had an accident.’ I couldn’t see a thing for the first three days in hospital as the petrol had burned my eyes and soaked into the dozens of lacerations on my face and head. Apart from the severe pain I had no idea what state I was in. I was still semi-conscious during first visiting hours when I heard my mother say to my father, ‘My God, I hope they don’t let him look in a mirror.’ I wasn’t sure how my new Quasimodo look would fit into the image of a young pop group. Maybe I could go solo. Maybe I’d have to. My mother at that point, not yet aware of my total lack of sight, didn’t know that they could have held up every mirror in the place and I wouldn’t have known.
After my honourable discharge some three weeks later and a few more weeks convalescing in the sun, I bore my remaining scars with youthful embarrassment as I appeared on Radio One Club, alongside Jeff Lynne’s underrated Idle Race and Bobby Vee. According to the music press, there was much talk of servicemen from Walton-on-Thames taking a copy of ‘February’s Child’ with them to the Far East, where it was copied and pressed illegally, reaching number ten in the Malaysian chart. You can’t beat a good rumour.
I did a one-off gig around this time, forming a trio with two other young hopefuls to play at the Dorchester Hotel. The occasion was the second wedding of property magnate Sefton Myers, who’d recently formed a management company with showbiz agent David Land. The guests included Sefton’s daughter Judie, later to find fame as Judie Tzuke. The three lads who took to the stage to entertain (I use the word loosely) were also looking for appreciation of their musical abilities and as such were still on the very shaky first rung. I played guitar and sang, my fellow vocalist just sang and our third member pounded the piano. My confederates were keen to make an impression, as they’d not long been signed to Sefton and David’s management company, New Ventures. I was on board too, not as an artist, but as the young lad attempting to do their PR from their office in Mayfair, at 1 Charles Street. I had no experience of course, but the singer of our trio had rather recklessly recommended me in what must have been an unguarded moment. Had you wanted to interview Tim and Andrew and be the first to spot their global potential, you only had to call me on 01-629 **** and you would have been on a winner, or rather two winners. Too late now.
I have no idea what we served up that night. I don’t remember any rehearsals. I don’t remember any soundcheck. I’m not even sure that I remember any applause. We certainly weren’t approached by anyone else in the room eager to book a rather odd trio. It was a case of three men in a boat without a paddle … actually, no, make that without the boat.
‘Tim and Andrew’ were Rice and Lloyd Webber respectively. Their big project at the time, post-Joseph and pre-Jesus Christ Superstar, was a musical based on Richard the Lionheart, with the rather lengthy working title of Come Back, Richard, Your Country Needs You. They wrote some of it on a barge on the Thames and recorded the songs at Chappell’s in Bond Street, where I added my dulcet and not unharmonious backing vocals to some of the tracks. The two I can recall were ‘Come Back Richard’ and ‘Roll On over the Atlantic’. Now if only it had been Superstar.
Many artists and musicians lived locally, but I was always more interested in the songwriters. I’d heard a whisper that Barry Mason had bought George Harrison’s old house, Kinfauns in Claremont Park, Esher. I knew where it was as we’d played several times for Claremont School dances. The invitations (black tie or military uniform) were always worded by the headmistress as being from ‘Miss Doran & the Claremont Seniors’, which I thought was a cracking name for a doo-wop band. Miss Doran would utter cries of anguish at the volume of our amplifiers, in sympathy for ‘Queen Victoria’s ceiling’, but we were sure that the Old Queen was past caring about the coved cornices, decorative roses and plaster icing over our heads. Barry had co-written many classic hits, including ‘The Last Waltz’, ‘Delilah’, and ‘Everybody Knows’ for the Dave Clark Five. I had it all worked out. I’d cycle down, knock on the door and offer to play him a few songs; he’d like them and my songwriting career would take off. Well, I did the cycling and the knocking, but expected little else. I hadn’t counted on being invited in, being given a cup of tea and having my rough demoes played. That’s when they stop sounding as good as you’d imagined. Barry listened, offered to record them in better quality if I brought my guitar round the following week and was genuinely encouraging. I cycled home on a wee bit of a high.
He was as good as his word and remained encouraging at odd times over the next few years to a hungry, eager songwriter with nothing to offer in return. He was convinced I’d make it. In the early ’80s, when we were booking guests for Pop Quiz, then pulling in ten million viewers every Saturday evening, I suggested Barry. He was wonderfully emotional. ‘I remember when you came and knocked on my door with your songs and now I’m on your TV show.’ Yes, there were a few tears. Why not? Even in 2013 I had him as a guest on my BBC radio show and we walked together for the best part of a day, broadcasting along the Thames. Our industry is a wonderful family.
Common sense might dictate that, following a modicum of media exposure (as it wasn’t called then), we might have stuck with the same name for our follow-up single, admittedly two years later. Or, if we were going to change our name, we might have gone in an entirely different direction. In fact we did neither of those things, rather indecisively changing it to Just Plain Jones. We may well have discussed Just Plain Brown for a third release. This way of doing things could have taken some little time. By the time we got to our millionth Russian release as Just Plain Zvorykin the Earth would have been a cold, virtually lifeless desert inhabited by baby amoebae asking silly questions like ‘Who were the Beatles?’
My old Walton pal Dave Ballantyne became a member of Just Plain Jones, with Bill Heath and myself hanging on in there as well. I’m not sure who else played on the track, ‘Crazy, Crazy’, but the publicity shot was simply of Dave, me and bass player Barney Tomes. We got even less publicity on that song. As I said, local bands are fluid, organic and sometimes socially difficult animals. Who comes? Who goes? Who plays what? Who
falls out with who? In the end, those who are dedicated and mean to see it through come hell and high water do so, and those for whom it was a short but fun ride drift back to their more sensible jobs. Ballantyne and I slid rather effortlessly into a situation with the experienced Dave Mindel from Noel Gay publishing, putting together a non-performing group initially called Saturday. The idea was that the three of us individually wrote enough songs for an album and we’d record it at Sarm Studios in London. I’m struggling to recall all my songs, but ‘If She’s a Day’ and ‘Love Is Over’ were two of them, while Dave B. came up some pretty diverse stuff, one being a clever anti-Johnny Cash parody called ‘12 Bore Blues’. Another had no title, so Mindel, imagining Ballantyne to be a Lothario, said, ‘Oh just call it after any bird you know.’ So Dave called it ‘Chaffinch’.
From this diverse and unreleased album (no surprises there) came the single ‘If (Would It Turn Out Wrong)’, with Saturday becoming Esprit de Corps. Tony Blackburn made the track his record of the week on Radio One. What foresight and good taste he had … oh, and still has of course – there may be future singles. With Junior Campbell pulling out of that week’s Top of the Pops, the vacancy was quickly filled by … yes, TB’s record of the week. This was it! The third single and we were there. Well, not quite. Mindel and Ballantyne along with musicians Barney Tomes and Bill Pitt performed, while I sat disconsolate in the dressing room. I wasn’t a member of the Musicians’ Union. It hadn’t even crossed my mind. It did then. It crossed, criss-crossed and double-crossed. This was the big moment, the one that would lead to a string of hits and tours of Britain and the States, and I was missing it. If I’m completely honest there was also an unspoken undercurrent of hostility, as happens in groups. With the impatience and intolerance of guitar-toting youth come the differences of opinion over song policy and musical direction. As it turned out, there was no UK tour, no US tour and no hit. The Top of the Pops performance hadn’t cut it. Maybe it wasn’t that, maybe the masses had been deterred from buying it because, being on the Jam label, there was a large pot of jam on the record sleeve, or maybe they knew somehow that it would in the distant future appear on the Rubble compilation series and they could buy it then. I consoled myself with imagining that my presence would have made a difference. Rubbish, of course, but it was a much-needed temporary boost as I bemoaned the loss of my only chance to be on Top of the Pops, or so it seemed at the time.
As I had since college, I continued to perform live at as many venues as would book me. OK, the pubs and tennis clubs of Surrey may not have been the Roundhouse or the Marquee, but they paid for tins of beans and sausages and Vesta curries. To be fair, there was the odd London gig, including one at the Pocock Arms in the Caledonian Road and another at a pub in Shepherd’s Bush that was subsequently pulled down. As far as I could see, there was no connection. Sometimes the gigs were solo, sometimes as a duo. My most frequent partner was Big Stan (Colin Standring), although I did many with ex-Gracious frontman Sandy Davis or Dave Ballantyne and the occasional one with Rod Roach. In 1973 I got my first cover, when Henry Hadaway’s Satril label released Jon Lukas singing a song I’d written the year before, ‘Summer Sun’. Not a hit, but what a thrill. My version was quite gentle, and he gave it a bit more oomph.
My next recordings came via Sandy’s home studio and somehow found their way into the hands of David Bryce, who worked closely with Cliff Richard. David played them to Cliff’s manager, Peter Gormley, who invited me to the organisation’s office at Harley House. The walls were lined with gold discs by Cliff, the Shadows, Olivia Newton-John, the New Seekers and John Rowles; these guys had really shifted some records. Surely I was motoring now. Peter informed me that he probably had a deal for me with EMI after playing the demos to Roy Featherstone, one of their top executives. Peter put me with Tony Cole, who’d written great songs for both Cliff and the New Seekers, but I found him rather scary. Older, wiser, bearded, more talented, at least that’s what he implied, and, I gathered, not overly happy about being given a new boy to work with. I found him so intimidating that I didn’t really give my best in the studio, despite being given Cliff’s musicians to back me. The confidence has a habit of slipping away when the producer and engineer switch the intercom off and talk between themselves. You interpret every shake of the head and grimace as being a negative and imagine (with good reason) they’re despairing of having to dig deep into your well of meagre talent to salvage something half-decent. Of course if you’re a great singer, you rise above it with the arrogance of youth. But it was becoming clear that I was a better writer than a singer.
The three songs that emerged from the session at RG Jones studio were ‘Have You Seen Your Daughter Mrs Jones’, ‘Beatles Lullaby’ and ‘Girls Were Made to Be Loved’. Sadly ‘Captain Noah’s Floating Zoo’, a song I felt had a lot of potential, didn’t make the cut, so I only have a rather thin-sounding demo of it, recorded on cassette on a boat at Maidenhead an hour after I wrote it. Although I remained part of the extended family at Peter Gormley’s office, the deal with EMI fell through for various reasons, thankfully nothing to do with the performance or the songs. ‘Mrs Jones’ came out as a single on the Rainbow label in 1975, complete with a talkie bit which has made me (and others) wince ever since. Bad image too. We came up with the name Micky Manchester and they put me in a rather ghastly striped jacket. Not destined for the chart then? I still find the B-side, ‘Chamberlain Said’, quite listenable. It was a musical representation of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s return to Heston Aerodrome after his 1938 meeting with Hitler in Munich and his subsequent assurance to the people of Britain. I wrote of a yet unchanged Britain, with blacksmiths and district nurses still content pottering about in herbaceous borders and playing cricket! It was backed primarily by bass and mandolin. A little heavier and it would have been prog rock, a little lighter and it would have been a poem. For some obscure reason ‘Mrs Jones’ escaped for a second time in 1975, this time on the Satril label. Were no lessons learned from the first release? ‘Chamberlain Said’ popped up again as the B-side of ‘Are You Ready’, a raucous little number that took about ten minutes to write, if ‘write’ is not too elevated a word for it. The UK clearly wasn’t ready for this 7-inch chunk of fun, recorded in Sandy Davis’s studio with more than a dozen fairly well-lubricated mates on sound effects and backing vocals, all vying to get their individual voices heard over the cacophony of sound. It was wisely released in Belgium on the Biac label. I suppose I could pretend it went to number one, as I doubt whether you’d find a Belgian that would argue the point, but it didn’t. It didn’t get to number anything. No taste. That was my first and last Belgian release. The single was re-released on Satril after I joined Radio Luxembourg. The cover shot for the sleeve was taken outside the old Roxy in London in a vague and ill-conceived idea to make me look punkish. I didn’t, I looked like Nick Drake with a mild perm. The B-side this time was ‘London Town’, the song I’d written in the Blue Room in John Lennon’s old house, Kenwood.
When I joined Radio One late in 1978, the station was about to change its wavelength from 247 metres to 275 and 285, and to that end, a single was being recorded as part of the awareness drive. My very first job at Radio One was to be part of the group of station DJs that were adding their voices to a song co-written by Peter Powell and Showaddywaddy, who provided the backing and the better-sounding vocals. ‘New Wave Band’ by Jock Swon & the Meters (you couldn’t make it up … although somebody must have done) was released in November on the BEEB label to a wave of apathy. I don’t remember it being played on the station, but maybe it was. Showaddywaddy were probably press-ganged into it, but it was fun to be a part of, and it was a little piece of history. It was the only ‘New Wave Band,’ that was emphatically not New Wave.
By the time the next single came out I had been at Radio One for six months and was presenting the evening programme before John Peel came on air. I had a batch of new songs that I’d played to friends and thought a couple of them quite com
mercial, but they all went for one I hadn’t considered, ‘High Rise’. The song was inspired by the block of flats in Walton in which Sham 69’s Jimmy Pursey lived. He was on the eighth, and top, storey. Keith West of ‘Excerpt from a Teenage Opera’ and ‘Tomorrow’ fame had once lived in another of the flats and Martin Briley from Mandrake Paddle Steamer and Greenslade had lived in yet another. The block was on the site of the old Nettlefold Studios, one of the UK’s pioneering film studios, where they shot the Adventures of Robin Hood TV series with Richard Greene. It was also where I fell 60 feet out of a tree, when the area was heavily wooded, miraculously grabbing the last branch before I would have hit the ground at a speed from which it would have been tricky to get up. Backed by the Stadium Dogs, I went back to RG Jones to record ‘High Rise’ under the name of the Trainspotters, and it was picked up by Arista, who released it as a single in May 1979. Produced by Colin Giffin, who as it happens had been at Woking Grammar School a few years before me, the single was incredibly well received and even got Radio One airplay, until the powers that be thought it a bit close to home and it was quietly dropped. Though not before I’d made personalised jingles from the backing track for many of the DJs. Even though they all used them, it was mine that seemed to catch on and find a life of its own. I was in Leeds doing a show from the university when I first heard someone singing it in the street. I was actually shocked. They sang the whole thing, unwieldy as it was. This was no snappy two-second soundbite; it was a gruelling marathon that almost rivalled Wagner’s Ring cycle: ‘Mike Read, Mike Read, 275 and 285, Mike Read, Mike Read, National Radio One.’