Seize the Day

by Mike Read

  Gene had recorded the vocal in the States, calling me up every twenty minutes so that he could get his head around Betjeman words that belonged to a time long gone. Much of the lyric would have baffled many Englishmen, let alone a boy from Connecticut. I explained more lines with every call. What a professional: not for him just singing them, he needed to understand them. At last he felt that he’d cottoned on to ’20s Oxford-speak. ‘Hey Mike, I got one. I worked it out. You ready?

  I was indeed, ready.

  ‘The line “Tom and his 101 at nine”.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s a cricket score, right?’

  I had to disappoint him. I felt bad. He’d been so sure of it. I guess I could have pretended, but that’s not my way. ‘Sorry, Gene, it’s not.’

  ‘I was so certain. What the heck is it then?’

  ‘Well, the Tom in the poem is Great Tom in St Aldate’s in Oxford, which is the main entrance to Christ Church. The bell is rung 101 times for the 100 original scholars at the college, plus one, which was added in 1663. It’s rung at five past nine every night, corresponding with what was nine o’clock in old Oxford time.’

  ‘You sure it’s not a cricket score?’

  Another wonderful singer taken far too soon.

  One of the most atmospheric tracks on the album turned out to be ‘Youth and Age’. We pitched the demo very high as I felt that’s where it should be, so my thoughts strayed to counter-tenors and one of the finest at the time in my book, Andreas Scholl. The young German singer had recorded a stunning version of the old ballad ‘Barbara Allen’, which I’d been playing a lot on the Classic FM breakfast show. I then decided that a classically trained singer might make it too rigid, but how many pop singers had a voice in that range? I didn’t exactly smite my head with the palm of my hand Homer Simpson style and shout ‘D’oh!’, but suddenly I knew exactly who I wanted. I’d always loved Yes and the unique voice of their singer, Jon Anderson. I was given an address in the States for Jon and duly, with little hope to be honest, sent him a demo of the track. A week or two later a note from Jon snaked out of my fax machine (what sweet old-fashioned things they seem now) saying that he loved the song and would record it next time he was in England. That time came round and he arrived at the studio, full of apologies that he wouldn’t be able to sing it as the key was too high, but if I lowered it he’d come back next week and do it. I wasn’t going to let him go. He might not come back. I thought with the speed of a good guy in a radio serial trussed up by the villain with little chance of escape. ‘It would help…’ I began, not exactly sure where I was going. ‘It would help … if … you … er … that is, it’d help me … if … er, you could possibly … just go through the vocal in the current key so that I can see how much I need to lower it.’ Genius. We ran through it once, the key was perfect and Jon sounded fantastic. He surely couldn’t have doubted himself.

  Jon Sweet thought we should get his vocal down quickly in case there was some sort of problem we didn’t know about. The purity of his tone gave us goose-bumps. I heard what was needed. ‘We must get him to do a trademark three-part harmony in the B section.’

  ‘No, we’ll put that on later.’

  ‘It won’t sound the same. Jon harmonising with himself will have a magic we won’t be able to get.’

  ‘Best not to ask him, it might be pushing him too far.’

  I was about to ask anyway and pressed the talkback button to speak to him, but he got in first. ‘Mike, I think it’d sound good if I did a three-part harmony in the B section.’

  Another result, especially as ‘Survival’ by Yes, with Jon on vocals of course, is my all-time favourite song.

  I was very surprised that Don McLean agreed to sing one of the songs on the album. His own songs were of such a high standard that he rarely recorded other people’s numbers, but he was up for it and I was delighted. We had to fit in with his UK tour schedule which meant taking the Stones Mobile to Liverpool. Don’s agent, Malcolm Feld, did warn me that Don was very much his own man and we might or might not get a recording from him that day. The latter began to look very much more likely. He didn’t appear to be leaving his hotel. Apparently he was watching TV.

  ‘What do we do?’

  ‘You could call him,’ said Malcolm, with some hesitation.

  I tried to interpret the hesitation part. Then I called Don. ‘Hi Don, How’s it going?’

  ‘Hi Mike, yeah, good, just hanging out looking at some TV.’

  Had he forgotten? Had he changed his mind? Maybe he just wasn’t in the mood.

  ‘Nothing much on in the afternoon, Don.’

  It wasn’t a lie: even fifteen years back, there wasn’t the choice there is now.

  ‘No kidding? What kinda stuff do they show?’

  ‘Oh, children’s shows, cartoons for the very young and probably a chunk of horseracing from some distant course like Kelso.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound too good. What else is happening?’

  ‘Well, we’ve got the Rolling Stones Mobile here, we could always record that song you wanted to do, “Farewell”. Better than being influenced by sub-standard TV.’

  ‘Too right. I’m on my way.’

  Don treated the song as if it were his own. He made it appear effortless. And to think we nearly lost him to the 3.30 maiden handicap at Kelso. It doesn’t bear thinking about.

  The remaining song, ‘Distant View’, I ended up singing by default, as we couldn’t find a singer that really fitted it. I think I got away with it.

  This second album faced an early and enormous hurdle, unwittingly brought about by the second Betjeman charity evening, in aid of the Children with Leukaemia Trust (see Chapter 9). I’d already had one or two very pleasant meetings with Betjeman’s agent, Desmond Elliott, over tea at Fortnum and Mason at which I kept him abreast of the album’s progress. We would discuss his early connection with Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber and their first attempt at a musical with The Likes of Us, nibble on a few splendid gateaux, and get outside several pots of Earl Grey. OK so far, but the invitations to the charity evening went out while I was away at a tennis centre for a few days and by a complete oversight Desmond failed to receive his. When I returned from pounding tennis balls for a few hours a day I was too busy with the show to check that everybody had received their invitations. We’d got the great news that some twenty radio stations would be featuring the album and that many of those had even made it album of the week. Everyone involved felt that this was going to be a major success. Then the sky fell in. Desmond Elliott had stopped the album he’d been so keen on a week or two earlier dead in its tracks. My baffled and bemused solicitor was contacted and the project slithered to a halt. Toys were not only thrown out of the pram, they were thrown in my direction. At first he refused to take my calls, despite an apology for the oversight with regard to his invitation. When I did speak to him, he was sharp and bad tempered, insisting that I should stop calling him Desmond and refer to him in the future as ‘Mr Elliott’.

  I wanted the album out, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to grovel. If a man can’t accept an honest apology in good faith he’s not much of a man in my book. His unreasonable and intransigent stance made the release of the album impossible at that time, despite a year’s hard work, creativity, time, money and an opportunity for John Betjeman’s wonderful poems to reach younger generations. By the time the album was released, much later, the momentum had been lost. I feel I should balance my opinion by stating that he was very highly thought of in the industry but we can’t all see eye to eye.

  From poetic rock I lurched headily again into clergy rock as my musical settings of Rupert Brooke’s war sonnets were featured along with Elgar, Parry and Betjeman during an Armistice evening at the church of St Andrew and St Mary in Grantchester. Never commercially released, they’ve certainly had live airings from four or five choirs.

  In 2002 I worked with five really talented Russian girls, two of whom were gifted classical pianists
. They were here doing some shows and recorded three of my songs, ‘City to City’, ‘Moscow Nights’ and ‘The House of Usher’. Great tracks but as they weren’t in the UK permanently it was tricky to know what to do with both the songs and the girls. I recorded them under the name of Russia, with the ‘R’ turned backwards. I guess I must have misguidedly thought that it looked vaguely Russian. It did to me, but probably not to Russians. They performed at both of Cliff Richard’s Christmas shows that year, the Tennis Foundation dinner at Hampton Court and the big bash with tennis and music at the Indoor Arena at Birmingham.

  Early in 2004, while still languishing in Australia following I’m a Celebrity and enjoying summer barbecues at Peter Andre’s family home, I thought it might be an idea to record something with a jungle feel. I didn’t recall anything similar from previous series and wondered why no one had thought of it. Now when you’re watching I’m a Celebrity from the relative safety of your sofa, it’s not uncommon for the sound to be muted and an apology to slide along the bottom of the screen. ‘Smut,’ you might think, ‘scandal.’ There is clearly a dark, unfathomable reason why this deeply personal conversation is not fit for transmission. Not so, say I. It’s usually because the happy campers have launched into a campfire sing-song and no one wants to pay for the right to broadcast the music. Simple as that. It was during these quiet moments that Razor Ruddock would trawl the Gilbert O’Sullivan songbook and treat us to his gruff but passable bass rendition of something like ‘Alone Again’. This was a man who’d accidentally floored the odd referee and broken the occasional leg… Who was I to argue with his impeccable taste? One of Razor’s ambitions was to be on Top of the Pops, and Charlie Brocket concurred, with something along the lines of ‘I say, what a spiffing idea.’ How could I deny my two new acquaintances?

  The idea didn’t exactly come to me in the Versace Hotel bathtub, but I seem to remember that I was within feet of it, which almost makes it a ‘Eureka’ moment. Hank Mizell’s ‘Jungle Rock!’ I could re-write the lyric to include a bunch of indigenous Australian animals and do a deal with a record label. I was sure they’d bite (a record company, that is, not the animals). I called Woolworths (and no, it wasn’t our fault they went under) and they went for it, with the promise of a follow-up. I found a studio, got the track down and the song was ready for release by the time we touched down in Blighty, with our version of ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’ as a second track and the I’m a Celebrity theme as a third. Top value! When we first performed it on This Morning, Peter Andre was part of the gang, but his label also planned a release so he had to put all his marketing and PR into that.

  We got plenty of TV, including a morning show that Terry Wogan was presenting and Top of the Pops, and a bucketload of radio plays. Our studio performance for This Morning was brilliantly edited into a video for the single, complete with odd creatures … yes, and animals from the jungle. I took to the road doing signing sessions, being joined at some by Charlie. We were delighted when it made the top thirty and I was able to inform Charlie that he was now the second most successful peer of the realm in the history of the singles chart, sandwiched between (Lord) David Dundas and Spinal Tap’s Nigel Tufnel, Christopher Guest (Baron Haden-Guest). The single loitered on the listings for a heady five weeks, before sliding off to the great archive in the ether.

  We performed at various charity events, including the Chase Children’s Hospice, CLIC Sergeant Cancer Charity and the Cliff Richard Tennis Foundation. We also performed at the Roy Castle Foundation Dinner in London, where, much to the delight of Razor, Cliff joined us on stage for the performance, while former jungle boy Uri Geller swelled our ranks for yet another charity gig. Of course Uri played spoons, promising to bend them at the end of the song and also to break one of my guitar strings simply by staring at it. On cue, the spoons bent and the string broke.

  For the follow-up we recorded our version of Mungo Jerry’s ‘In the Summertime’. No new lyrics needed here, apart from amending the line, ‘Have a drink, have a drive’ and changing ‘We’re not dirty people’ to ‘We are jungle people’. OK, it may not be Byron or Keats, but it worked. We had a riot making the video at Brighton (see YouTube to gauge levels of riotousness) and the CD slipped into the chart at number seventy-two. It slipped out again the following week. At least it charted, gave us a second hit, pushed the Jungle Boys’ number of weeks on chart up to six and gave the song its first appearance on the chart since 1970. It also appeared briefly in the ringtone top twenty. Listen, all charts count, trust me. There was no third single. Jungle Boy mania, if it ever existed outside our own minds, was over. The screams subsided and lovers of good music were blissfully unaware of the group’s passing.

  In the spring of 2004 I appeared in a short run of the stage musical American Patrol, alongside John Altman as Glenn Miller, but of course wrote none of the music. Later that year I found myself directing, rather than writing, a stage musical. I’d been asked by Mike Bennett, one-time member of the Fall and a damned fine actor, if I’d take the wheel of his satirical musical play, White Wedding, a look back at the ’80s. It was certainly different and received many plaudits, Blues & Soul magazine calling it ‘a comic triumph!’ Thank goodness it was meant to be funny. I wasn’t absolutely sure that I understood it, despite getting good reviews, including plaudits from, of all periodicals, Lloyd’s List: ‘More power to the elbow of such companies when they allow full rein to the skills of directors like the prolific Mike Read.’ ‘Mr Newsagent,’ I said, marching into my local shop, ‘add Lloyd’s List to my regular order as well as the Beano. It’s a ripping good read.’

  In 2003 I teamed up with my pal Trevor Payne, the singer/director behind the phenomenally successful show That’ll Be the Day, to put together a musical on Cliff Richard. It would feature a wagonload of hits woven together by a fictional story. In this case the storyline was based around the eve of Cliff’s eightieth birthday, as he and his butler, (Bruce) Welch, plan the festivities and go through a list of songs for possible inclusion in the celebrations. As Cliff muses over various highlights of his long career, the story goes back in time to include scenes from Summer Holiday, Oh Boy!, Eurovision, Blind Date, Sunday Night at the London Palladium, Wimbledon and more. The action, apart from the retrospective scenes, took place at Cliff’s residence, the Keith Richards Health Farm.

  We featured four Cliffs with me playing Lord Cliff, initially in a platinum wig, until the heat forced the producers to march me to the hairdressers to have dozens of streaks put into my own hair. We did a lot of TV, radio and press, but even more rehearsing, under the eagle eye of Trevor Payne and the pitch-perfect ear of our musical director, Steve Etherington. The dancing was the worst. I’ve never been a natural dancer. I’ve not even been an unnatural dancer. It took weeks of gruelling, cruel and agonising dance routines until I could get away with it.

  I’d had plenty of amateur dramatic experience as a kid with audiences that were not too discerning as they comprised friends, relatives, schoolmates, local burghers and those enforced by a three-line whip or press gang. We’d generally be playing to about sixty-seven people and a few rows of empty chairs. We’ll find our way back to Cliff the Musical in a moment. Even while at Radio One and Classic FM, I was still treading the odd board. I once played Pharaoh in a production of Joseph at Dauntsey’s School in Wiltshire, dressed in giant blue suede shoes, an unfeasibly large fake quiff, a drape jacket and other extraordinary garb. Despite being in this insane outfit I was still working while not on stage. During rehearsals I dodged off to interview legendary rock & roll songwriters Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman down the line. With Potiphar and co. bashing out a song over and over again, the quietest spot I could find was in the middle of the cricket square. Trying to conduct a sensible interview with a 2-foot plastic quiff dangling in front of you and 2-foot-long clown shoes making you look incredibly foolish was pretty tricky. The weird thing was that Pharaoh was based on Elvis and here was I as Pharaoh, talking to two guys who’d written countless classi
cs for the King. Cliff also recorded some of their songs and my next stage appearance would be Cliff the Musical playing to theatres that could hold 1,000 or 1,500, and those that turned up would have forked out serious money.

  We did our press/dress opening night at Blackpool Opera House. Now that place was cavernous and could seat almost 3,000 happy holidaymakers. The history of the place was daunting. This stage had been graced by the likes of George Formby, Arthur Askey, Morecambe & Wise and the Beatles. As I stood in the wings trying to give an impression of a relaxed thespian, for this was only the dress run and surely just a handful would turn up, Colin, one of the show’s producers sidled up and whispered, ‘About a thousand in already.’ Thanks, Colin. Five minutes later he was back. ‘Well over a thousand now.’ Stop it, Colin. He’s clearly on a roll. ‘Quite a few famous faces in.’ Colin, this may get physical. He can’t keep away now. ‘Shane Richie and his family are in.’ At that moment, the stage manager announced ‘Curtain up in five minutes’ and bloodshed was narrowly avoided.

  I was nervous but there were no hitches and I got away with it. We moved on to play a week at the Liverpool Empire. More history. More to live up to. More stars from yesteryear who’ve trodden these boards: not surprisingly George Formby and the Beatles again, but also Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, Laurel & Hardy and even Roy Rogers & Trigger. I knew I wasn’t yet on top of the part – if only a small amount of their confidence lurked in the drapes, footlights and dressing room I’d be fine. Maybe it did. After two or three performances I settled into the role and began to feel comfortable. I reasoned that most people had come, not to be critical, but for a fun night out. I also realised that sometimes even the costumes were getting a laugh, so I let the part breathe. There was no rush to deliver the lines if they were chortling at my blue velvet Eurovision suit with the white ruffled shirt. I started adding lines. All my radio work was ad-libbed and that’s what the audience were used to, so why not? I let them laugh at the suit for a few seconds and then came out with a random one-liner. ‘I think you’ll find it’s called fashion’, ‘We even have one in your size, sir’ or ‘What’s funny … is it the wrong colour?’ Not side-splitting stuff I grant you, but right for the occasion.