Seize the Day

by Mike Read

  On one occasion, probably when things started to look seriously good, Henri took me, his son and his son’s girlfriend out to dinner. We discussed the project at length and Henri became so animated, in the Gallic style, at one point that he got to his feet and, gesticulating in my direction, shouted, ‘Mike, you must fuck us … you must fuck us…’ The other diners, intrigued by whatever Parisian perversion was on offer in this ménage à quatre, stopped their conversations and swivelled their heads, only to be bitterly disappointed by Henri’s son’s swift rejoinder, ‘Dad, the pronunciation is “focus”.’

  The project floundered after the production companies we approached felt that the Village People hadn’t had enough hits to make the show viable. Just because the Queen, Abba and Madness musicals were full of hits didn’t mean that this one wouldn’t work. It was theatrical and colourful, it featured some great songs, and the audience would have dressed as members of the group.

  I was recently approached by a UK producer who loved the script, the whole presentation, and wanted to tour it. He offered Henri £500,000, but he turned it down. Crazy in my opinion. No point in having a shelf full of dreams.

  There was another single in 2006 when ‘England My England’ was released to coincide with the FIFA World Cup. W. E. Henley had written the magnificently stirring words in 1892 and I’d added the music over 110 years later. It had been at Jeremy Beadle’s insistence that it came out, after he attended one of the Dead Poets shows (see below). He thought it was a wonderfully patriotic marriage of words and music and deserved to be heard. I grafted on some anthemic Elgarian chants and a soupçon of the old Elgar/Parry classic for good measure and the press picked up on the song. They also picked up on the other fifty-three artists and writers who’d had a similar idea for a football anthem. Elliott Frisby handled the lead, with him, Steve Etherington and me doing the backing vocals. I’m sure the rather nifty video that we made, which included some classic footage from old Wembley matches, helped ease the song into the all-time top twenty football songs as featured on Sky TV. Let me tell you, it’s good to be in any chart! The Daily Mail quoted odds of 100/1 on it reaching number one, making it a far more inviting bet than the Cumbria Tourist Board’s single, ‘Baarmy Sheep’ at 50/1 or Leicester City FC’s ‘Swinging For England’ at 33/1. The Daily Star printed the lyrics to ‘England My England’ with the comment ‘What the FA want us to sing’. A little premature perhaps, but it was to point up the Englishness, as the other half of the story was Germany asking the Kaiser Chiefs to record an anthem for their team. We were deemed to have a better chance of topping the chart, though, than Showaddywaddy at a grossly unfair 125/1.

  I’d met Elliott on a ship in the Caribbean in the early 2000s. He was performing and I was giving talks. Elliott’s voice was exceptional and after chatting one evening on deck we wrote a couple of songs. Now you can’t just write songs with anyone, it doesn’t work like that, but with us it did. There were many cruises and we wrote a new song most evenings. They seemed to come very naturally, they were unusually varied and there was hardly any friction. In fact there was usually a wagonload of humour in the mix.

  I guess we have about forty or so pretty strong songs that so far haven’t seen the light of day, although a new female singer has recorded ‘Just a Little Bit Crazy’. The idea for the song came from a story I’d remembered about Nelson’s youth. In his mid-teens while serving as a midshipman, he had an encounter with a polar bear at Spitzbergen and was lucky to escape with his life. The ship’s captain described him as being, ‘just a little bit crazy’. The song isn’t about Nelson, but about a fictitious relationship; ideas, however, can come from anywhere. Two of our collaborations were released on a charity single for the Shooting Star Children’s Hospice, now Shooting Star Chase. Elliott and I had been discussing Christmas singles over a pot of tea and came to the conclusion that every title and angle had been covered, but on a journey to Hull later that day I had time to reflect on the fact that Christmas cards had somehow become less important than they were when I was a lad. Then there was the excitement of the cards dropping through the letterbox, the anticipation, the opening, the revelation (who was it from?) the reading of the message and the decision where to put each one. All part of a festive ritual that was fast disappearing. For many, the thrill of the Christmas card has ceased to exist. Cards have been largely eclipsed by presents and group emails, Skype or texts. I mused on the fact that Christmas Eve was no longer represented by sleigh bells ringing, but by mobiles pinging. So why not send a song, I thought. Forget robins, snow scenes, and shepherds with their flocks … let a song be the Christmas card. I worked on it all the way to the banks of the Humber, stopping periodically to update Elliott … or ‘Slacker’, as I perversely call him, because he works so hard. Within a few days we had the song finished and demoed. I couldn’t help feeling that part of the verse was reminiscent of something. I was sure it was one of Wizzard’s songs, so I emailed the demo to Roy Wood, who’d written them all. It did indeed turn out to be similar to ‘Angel Fingers’. He was delighted to be credited as co-writer, confessing that I’d rounded the verse off in a way that he hadn’t managed to back in the ’70s. What a gracious man, and one of our great British songwriters in my opinion.

  Karen Sugarman, who headed up Shooting Star, was delighted for us to release the song for the children’s hospice, so I started to think of ideas for a video. In the end, Andy Park, known to all as Mr Christmas, came to the rescue with an offer that we couldn’t refuse. His house looks like Christmas Day all the year round; decorations and cards are displayed for 365 days and his larder groans with foodstuffs that would be the envy of Billy Bunter and Mr Toad. Elliott and I were joined by Mr Christmas, in a starring role of course, Dave Hill from Slade, my fellow DJ David Hamilton and Scott Ottoway, who is now drumming with the Searchers. We tipped our hats to the charity by calling ourselves the Shooting Stars and the single picked up a fair amount of airplay as well as notching up almost 20,000 hits on YouTube. The Slacker and I wrote a second seasonal song as a bonus track for the CD, ‘Christmas Day’. We agreed that we didn’t need a third, but we wrote one anyway. Unlike Henry I with his surfeit of lampreys, we overindulged and survived. Our festive song count is now five and rising. We struggle to determine our favourite.

  I also worked on stage with Elliott between 2006 and 2008 on The Dead Poets’ Society, a piece on which I’d collaborated with many great wordsmiths, including Byron, Kipling, Shakespeare, Auden, Masefield and Wordsworth. It’s terrific working with these legends: no arguments, no contrary moments, no hissy fits. I used two narrators (me and an available actor) with Elliott singing and playing guitar and Steve Etherington on keyboards. I staged it at the Gatehouse Theatre, Highgate, the Frinton Library Festival and Home House, London.

  I once asked Neil Sedaka which of his songs were his favourites. ‘Oh Mike,’ he beamed, ‘they’re all my little babies. I send them out into the world and they send me money home.’ I thought of that recently when the contract came through from Cherry Red for the inclusion of ‘What the Dickens’, a song I wrote between O-levels and A-levels, which was being released on the compilation album Love, Poetry & Revolution. Far out, man, peace and love, power to the people and let’s light another joss-stick. Coolly juxtaposed with the likes of the Spencer Davis Group, the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, the Alan Bown!, John’s Children and Fat Mattress, I’m joined on drums by future Atomic Rooster and Spinal Tap drummer Ric Parnell with Virgin Sleep’s Keith Purnell on lead guitar. A song I’d started work on at school is still sending me money home. Not as much as Neil Sedaka’s send him, of course, but the same principle applies.

  I was thrilled to write a song with my old friend Robin Gibb near the end of his life and I’m very moved that it’s appearing on a posthumous album later this year. I never discussed Robin’s illness with him. It wasn’t what he wanted to talk about. He wanted to make plans, discuss the future and pretend that everything was fine. He was still planning tours of
places like Australia for goodness sake, but what a positive mental approach. I understood that. He also liked to imagine that Maurice, his twin, hadn’t actually died but was living on some vague island somewhere overseas. That was how he dealt with it, and as John Lennon said, ‘Whatever gets you through the night, it’s all right, it’s all right.’ We talked about and watched documentaries on the US Civil War, discussed English history and politics, swapped books and sometimes sang classic songs. He dragged me off one afternoon to look at a disused aerodrome that had last been used to land planes bringing soldiers back from World War Two and wandered round in wonderment gazing at rusting fuel pipes and worn markings. We had the same sense of what was a great song, a good song or simply an average song. Robin was adamant that one should never aim to write a number two, always a number one. It worked for the Bee Gees. In not wanting his illness to become public, his team often had to come up with some wild tales to disguise the truth, but Robin battled on relentlessly whenever he could. I directed the video for a re-working of ‘I’ve Gotta Get a Message to You’, which he had recorded for the Official Poppy Appeal 2011 with a trio of serving Army soldiers known simply as the Soldiers. The day of the shoot, Robin made a herculean effort to get out of his sick bed, dress and give 100 per cent for me, the Soldiers, the camera crew and the press.

  If his positive approach appeared to wane, I sometimes gave him a gentle kick up the backside. We were due to talk to Peter Andre about the song we’d written that he was going to record but Robin’s wife Dwina said he was very tired and probably wouldn’t make the trip. I decided he might need a little incentive, so I wandered into the garden, stood underneath his bedroom window and shouted, ‘Gibb, get your backside down here now, the bus is leaving.’ There was no bus of course, we were going in his Range Rover, but there’s nothing wrong with a hint of weak humour if you’re ailing. The terminology wasn’t along my usual eloquent lines, but I felt it might hit the mark for that reason. He was downstairs within ten minutes.

  ‘I didn’t sleep much last night, there was a fly in my room,’ he said.

  ‘Why didn’t you swat it?’

  ‘I shouted at it.’

  Brilliant. ‘Get dressed and we’ll head off.’

  ‘I’m still tired, let me have another hour’s sleep and then we’ll go.’

  ‘Half an hour.’

  ‘Forty minutes.’

  ‘OK, forty minutes.’

  Within ten minutes he was back down, dressed in a roll neck and jacket and ready to go.

  ‘That was a quick forty minutes.’

  ‘The fly was back.’

  All the way there and back Robin was in fine form; we sang, the surreal humour flew, we discussed the world in general and I’m sure that was far better medicine than lying in bed, being crowded from all sides by unbidden and unwanted thoughts. When we went back to record the demo with Peter, Robin was very impressed with his voice. I think Peter’s range and interpretation surprised him. Peter in turn was, I think, a little apprehensive at having to record in front of Robin. I was pleased to be able to introduce them and that mutual admiration and respect was the result. Peter came to Robin’s funeral to pay his respects and later we erected a blue plaque on the gatehouse of Robin and Dwina’s home, The Prebendel, in a small ceremony with Tim Rice and me offering a few words.

  When the news from the clinic started to look pretty grim, I began to write a little song, which was my personal way of saying what I wanted to say. It was really a letter to Robin. Songs are how we do it. Taking Robin’s way of dealing with bereavement, I wrote ‘This Is Not Goodbye’. There was one verse that hit my tear ducts every time and I couldn’t get past it, which was about his favourite dog, Ollie, waiting patiently for his return and the empty chair outside the studio where he’d sit in the sun. Sunny days seemed to cheer him. I was still concerned about being able to sing those lines when I demoed it at Elliott’s studio, but I got through it. A few days before he went into the clinic for the final time, Robin had asked me to film him in the garden. He instructed me how to use the machine and I attempted a few atmospheric sequences while he posed in his frock coat and trademark blue glasses and looked moody. I used that final footage, in slow motion, to go with ‘This Is Not Goodbye’ when we put it on YouTube.

  The night he died I’d only been in bed for half an hour when I had the call. There would be a taxi at the door sometime after midnight to take me to London. Dwina was happy for me to do the interviews as she felt that I would be able delicately to handle questions on personal issues, the Bee Gees’ career, Robin’s career and his enormous capacity for charitable causes, including the Bomber Command Memorial, of which more below. It was a harrowing two days of interviews with hardly any sleep, so sometimes it verged on the emotional. One interviewer asked me, ‘All this media coverage. What do you think Robin would say if he could see it?’

  I said, ‘He’d say, “I’m bloody annoyed because I want to be down there, living my life and writing songs.”’

  Robin was fiercely loyal to people that he felt had been supportive and even wrote and recorded a moving song about one of the early champions of both the Bee Gees’ songs and his own solo material, Alan Freeman. He went to visit Alan at Brinsworth House, a nursing home for people in the entertainment industry, and secretly wrote a very large cheque for the charity that runs it.

  Robin could also be sharp and on the offensive if he felt he hadn’t been treated correctly. When the edition of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire on which he and I appeared wasn’t transmitted on the day we’d been told it would, he was on the phone demanding the tapes back, insisting that they were biked down that minute. He calmed down when it was re-scheduled, although we didn’t do too well. During the run-through in the afternoon, which is played as if for real, we notched up £250,000, but cometh the hour, where were the men? We couldn’t answer that. We did get to £20,000, but then we blew it and didn’t make as much for Shooting Star Chase as we’d hoped. We weren’t sure whether to stick at £20,000, I seem to recall, although I could be wrong, but I do remember trying to catch the eye of the tireless Karen Sugarman for a ‘thumbs up’ or a ‘thumbs down’. I couldn’t work out why I didn’t know who’d won that year’s FA Cup Final. Nor could a bewildered John Inverdale, who thought he might be called up on ‘phone a friend’ for something a little more challenging than saying ‘Chelsea’. It was only later that I realised I’d been in Jamaica at the time.

  In 2012 I was drafted onto the Lords and Commons Entertainment Committee, working with Macmillan Cancer Support to raise money for cancer care. This long-running institution meets every month in preparation for an annual show each March in which the participants are all MPs or peers. For the 2013 event, I wrote and directed a show titled 100 Years of Prime Ministers and Prime Music, with Margaret Jay, Jeremy Hunt, Danny Alexander and me narrating. I became chairman of the committee that spring and put together and directed the 2014 show, Best of British, celebrating our music, poetry, art, literature, architecture and sport. The narrators included Michael Fabricant, who decided to do his own thing, which rather threw the timing and created a slightly anarchic and unwelcome twist to the evening. I feel rather privileged at being the only person that’s not a member of the Lords or Commons to perform. You may surmise, and you’d be correct, that putting words into the mouths of politicians isn’t that easy, nor is asking them to learn new material so that the shows have some degree of variation from year to year. Yet somehow, after weeks of writing and hundreds of phone calls, emails and texts, it comes together. Shows always do, but it’s often a close-run thing. My maxim has always been to wait at the spot where the rollercoaster will inevitably come to a stop and then deal with the situation, rather than taking the white-knuckle ride, screaming and shouting en route while fellow passengers’ minds are otherwise engaged. I’m in and out of Parliament so often that that the gatekeepers have suggested that I should have my own peg in the Lords cloakroom now! As one of the policemen of the door put it,
‘Are you sure you’re not a Lord? You’re in here more than they are.’ Measure me for my ermine.

  In May 2013 I undertook my first solo gig for a long time, appearing at Paul Clerehugh’s prestigious Crooked Billet, near Henley-on-Thames, and performing several of my own songs in the set, including ‘Grief Never Grows Old’, ‘In Flanders Fields’ (from Dead Poets’ Society) and ‘Myfanwy’. Fortified by an enthusiastic response I played an entire two-hour show of my songs and poetry as the final night of the Wantage Literary Festival.

  Uncertain of being able to hold a sell-out crowd with material they might well not know, I landed on stage with a certain amount of trepidation. It worked so well that is was decreed one of the most popular events of the festival. A dangerous pronouncement. A year later there was a UK tour … two nights at the Crooked Billet (with Elliott Frisby) playing all my own songs and a return to the Wantage Festival as well an appearance at the Fawley Festival. At Fawley I played and sang with Chas McDevitt and Sam Brown in Chas’s skiffle group, the personnel for ‘Freight Train’ having changed a tad since he performed it to a US TV audience of forty million back in the summer of 1957 on The Ed Sullivan Show.

  There was a further flurry of activity at the end of 2013, with Santa (Alan Williams from the Rubettes) and his Christmas Crackers recording ‘Christmas Day’, another festive offering I’d written with Elliott. Another track that escaped over Christmas 2013 is a single written by my first radio boss, Neil ffrench Blake, coupled with a rocky version of ‘Good King Wenceslas’. Neil is far from well but facing what future is left with fortitude. It was fun working with him again.

  In 2014 I went back into the studio to record a new album, with John Mitchell, the lead singer with It Bites, producing. As I’d written music to the words of various World War One poets and with the hundredth anniversary looming I thought I might put together an album along those lines. I already had collaborations with Rupert Brooke, John McCrae, Alan Seeger and Siegfried Sassoon, but found myself veering away from World War One specifically and bringing in other conflicts as well, including World War Two and the American Civil War. Alan Seeger was the uncle of Pete Seeger, the pioneering folk singer, civil rights campaigner and champion of international disarmament, and one of the first US soldiers to be killed in World War One. Only after presenting an obituary on the BBC for Pete Seeger, who died in January 2014, did I think that maybe I should have sent him a copy of my setting of his uncle’s poetry. Not for any commercial reason, except that it would have been a good thing to do. It’s always too late, isn’t it?