Don't Stop Believin'

by Olivia Newton-John

  Eventually the ‘Dear John’ came when he wrote: Liv, you’re not back, so I started seeing someone. The truth was, Ian wanted a wife and a family and I wasn’t ready for either of those commitments. At one point, I asked him to come to London, but he refused to leave Australia. I wanted to stay in England, which was a huge turning point. I found out in that moment I wanted my career more than I realised.

  Now, as a mother myself, I understand that Mum was doing the right thing by moving me to London. She wanted me to explore my talent, and gave me every opportunity. And yes, Ian eventually married the lovely Jan and it was the perfect relationship for him. I like Jan very much and we all remained friends until his untimely death a few years ago.

  In 1966, on Decca Records, I recorded my first single called ‘Till You Say You’ll Be Mine’ (with the B-side ‘For-Ever’). I met these young guys who were producers and they wanted to do a track with me. Unfortunately, the song sounded like it was cut in someone’s bathroom. One of the reviews said I should ‘stick with a career as an airline hostess’. It wasn’t exactly a great production, but it was a start.

  You have to learn to deal with criticism, and I was learning. It was hard at that time, though, because I didn’t have the success to balance out the harsh words, so they would linger.

  Our saving grace – mine and Mum’s – came in the form of Pat Carroll, who had just arrived in London. I’d worked with Pat back in Australia on The Go Show, a teenage pop show hosted by Ian and featuring up-and-coming greats including the Bee Gees. ‘We became great friends straight away,’ Pat remembers.

  Pat was a well-known singer and dancer and during our brief time on the show, she had helped me with a few pointers when it came to stage presence. She was also a lovely human being and we’d kept in touch. I was so excited when she won a radio award that got her to England in a major way. She’d signed a contract with a top agent, the Bernard Delfont Agency, and they had already booked her into several local clubs.

  I met her at Heathrow Airport on a cold winter’s day with the idea that I’d help her move into the flat her agent rented for her. Snow swirled through the frigid air as we took the bus to an incredibly sleazy part of town where the two of us walked a few dangerous blocks to a dilapidated apartment building. It could have defined the word ‘depressing’. Inside, it was worse. We quickly left and stood on the street staring up at the gloom.

  ‘You can’t stay here – even for one night,’ I said. ‘C’mon, you’re staying with us.’

  Pat didn’t need much convincing. ‘The original place was horrendous!’ she said. We turned around and left immediately. Grateful beyond words, she moved into our tiny one-bedroom flat where she slept on the floor on a blow-up mattress for the next year and all three of us shared a bathroom you could barely turn around in. We didn’t have much space, but Mum was ecstatic because Pat seemed to be the grounding force that I needed to establish a new life in London.

  Mum was right – it was wonderful having Pat there with us. We quickly got into the swing of things with our hairpieces, false eyelashes, fake nails and big black-rimmed eyes highlighted with liner and gallons of mascara (black, of course). We wore fantastic paisley patterned dresses and very short miniskirts and my cream patent-leather boots were my favourites because I had to save up for them. All the London girls or girly birds flashed their legs and didn’t apologise for it.

  At first, I went with Pat to her club dates around England as moral support, but it wasn’t long before there were other ideas of how we could combine our mutual dreams.

  Athol Guy, who played bass and sang with the extremely popular Australian pop quartet The Seekers, was a friend of ours and took us under his wing. One day he suggested, ‘Why don’t you two join up as a double act? You can travel together.’

  ‘I was lonely working alone,’ Pat remembers now. ‘When a duo was suggested, it was perfect. One blonde. One brunette.’

  ‘What will your agents say?’ I asked Pat.

  They loved the idea, but there was one twist. They couldn’t wrangle any more money, but that didn’t matter: we’d split the fees, cut the expenses and begin to conquer the world.

  The billing: ‘Pat and Olivia’.

  A duo was born.

  Years later, Pat would jokingly say to me, ‘Well, I split my fee with you back then. How about you share yours with me now?’

  I believe in the power of now.

  Our rehearsal studio was that cramped flat located in a pretty cobblestoned area of Hampstead. During the daytime, when Mum was at work, we’d practise, followed by an early dinner and then out the door to perform each night. Pat was a fantastic seamstress and made all of our costumes like she was tailoring a major rock show. I was hopeless in this domestic art and was quickly tasked with the chore of hemming, which I happily did while I listened to my favourites on the radio.

  It turns out clothing was the least of our issues.

  Our first night at one of the local London clubs, we forgot that we had actual dance moves, which meant moving, and in those days microphones were attached to thick, black cords. During the middle of one of our sets on stage – in front of an audience at one in the morning – Pat went left and I went right. The cords tangled and we were hopelessly entwined in each other to the point where neither of us could move. There is nothing like singing and suddenly hearing the audience burst into loud laughter. Little did we know that we were actually doing a comedy show! If I’d added a pratfall, I think we would have had a standing ovation from the ten people at the bar who were half listening.

  Transportation also became an issue, and so Pat and I bought a car even though I didn’t know how to drive and was too young to get a licence in England. Two years older, Pat had a licence, so we bought this beat-up old thing, a Mini-Minor van, that cost us a whopping forty pounds. It was all we could afford.

  Pat’s father had always handled her business affairs, but we didn’t tell him about the wheels because we were quite mature and certainly worldly enough to handle the negotiations – or so we thought.

  There we were, two innocent young girls handing an older guy a wad of cold hard cash and then catching the car keys from him as he tossed them into the air. We took off with no inspection, no pink slip, no registration, no insurance, basically no nothing. What did we know? We were just two birds with wheels until a couple of very cute young English policemen stopped us and asked, ‘Can I see your registration?’

  ‘What registration?’ we stammered.

  ‘Step out of the car, ladies.’

  Our first major investment would soon meet a cruel fate. The car was sent to an impoundment lot, while those helpful and handsome bobbies drove us home. Just to be nice. And then for some reason, the bobbies kept showing up at our flat to ask questions about the car incident. They were huge flirts and so were we. They even ended up selling the car for us despite the lack of paperwork.

  Small favours from strangers were the tiny breaks that we needed to survive in those lean days. Eventually, we took off on a ‘tour’ of England – a series of small club dates, with fifty pounds to our names. That was a ridiculously low budget given that we needed to use that money for the two of us to eat, find lodging and figure out transportation.

  We lived on our dreams, once even taking a boat across the Irish Sea in the bitter cold to vacation in Ireland, where we got terribly lost. Whenever we asked one of the locals where something was located, they would twirl a hand in the air and say, ‘Oh, it’s just a little bit down the road.’ Twenty miles later, we were still riding our bikes.

  We did find a very special, sacred place and kissed the Blarney Stone for good luck. According to legend, kissing the stone not only bestows the kisser with the gift of the gab, but also increases their humour and wit. The only problem was the way you had to kiss the stone. You had to climb to a castle’s peak, lean over backwards on the parapet’s edge, tilt your head and then place your lips on the stone. And this wasn’t my only concern. Ewwww, my brain was
screaming. I thought about putting a tissue between my lips and the rock, because God only knows who had kissed it before me.

  Our trip was wonderful, even if a little frustrating for Pat, who expected to eat the leftovers of a delicious dinner for breakfast. I remember her frowning when I fed the entire contents of our bag to a needy horse. (And I would do it again today, and I do!)

  On the old boat back to London, we had the cheapest tickets, plus Pat was feeling a little seasick, so we sat outside on the deck with the harsh, damp English winds slapping our red-raw faces. The captain saw that we were about to (literally) freeze in place, took pity on us and let us sit inside his cabin where we chattered our teeth and thawed out. Somehow, we stayed in one piece.

  We weren’t exactly the most experienced travellers, but we always survived by the grace of God.

  Our budget jaunts included going to Zurich where we met two charming American boys on the train. We knew they were American because they had such perfect white teeth! They invited us to have dinner with them, and of course we said yes because it was nice to have their companionship – plus, in reality, it was a free meal.

  The guys took us to a fancy hotel restaurant overlooking a beautiful, crystal-clear lake. We had a gorgeous meal and even stuffed a few dinner rolls in our purses for breakfast. Meanwhile, the men were hoping that our evening could continue with drinks at another location and . . . Well, that ‘and’ part really frightened us!

  Nervously, we piled into a cab with the men who gave the driver the address of a local hotel. In a panic now, I kept glancing at Pat; she gazed back at me and looked like she wanted to jump out a window. We needed to make a quick move before this got out of hand. While the guys were paying the cabbie, we just ran for it, as fast as our feet could carry us, disappearing into the big and crowded hotel before the men could even figure out what had happened. It was as if we evaporated into thin air.

  We didn’t want to be dessert.

  By the way, if these men are reading this now, we apologise – and thanks for dinner!

  Once, when we had a week without work and twenty pounds spare each, we decided to take the train through Europe, ending up in Paris. We had yesterday’s bread for breakfast while we collected our loose change to buy two pieces of fruit for lunch and something for dinner (or not). On many days, we just had the bread and the fruit and considered it a nutritionally balanced day.

  We stayed in places with hard, old beds that were ready for the rubbish tip, thin, worn blankets, and horribly rough toilet paper. Maybe it was sandpaper because that was cheaper! There was very little heat on frigid nights and I remember the freezing cold tiles that instantly turned your feet into ice if you dared to get up in the middle of the night to make a run to the loo. But we didn’t mind one little bit. We were young, free, singing for our suppers and having the time of our nomad lives.

  Sometimes we’d go to afternoon movies in Paris and sleep through them because it was cheaper than getting a room for just half a day before our train left the station. We had somewhere warm to snooze, and occasionally the movie wasn’t half bad even if we didn’t understand it.

  When Pat and I got back to London, we continued to get club gigs and made enough money to live on. This was despite the fact that we were booked at some very strange places that were dangerous at worst and questionable at best.

  I’ll never forget the night we were booked somewhere we had never heard of called Raymond’s Revuebar. Pat and I arrived in our best pale blue minidresses with stylish marabou feathers along the edges that Pat had created and I had hand-hemmed to perfection. One last look in the backstage mirror and I smiled because my little flicked-up hairdo was perfectly sprayed. Not a wisp was out of place.

  As an accompanist, the club gave us their piano player who pounded out a few notes as we came on stage. I did think it was a little odd that behind the stage, there was an enormous fish tank without a single fish in it. It was occupied by a half-naked girl!

  The audience of all men – eight in number including the cook and the waiter – looked at us strangely as we, in all our innocent youth, made our way to centre stage. It turns out girls who looked like us rarely walked through that door. My eyes popped when I noted that more than a few of the men at tables were wearing raincoats – and it wasn’t raining outside.

  We sang ‘Soon It’s Going to Rain’, which turned out to be a tribute to the kind of club it actually was and the uniform of those lusty men. We had our sweet little choreography going – little moves right and left – while the men seemed a bit confused, as if they were waiting for something.

  But the feathers stayed on us, as did all of our clothing. Even my hair stayed secure, not one piece out of place.

  A few numbers later and the owner of the club, Paul Raymond, met us backstage shaking his head, but he wasn’t really mad.

  ‘Girls,’ he said, ‘I just don’t think this is going to work out. Your agent misunderstood.’

  To his credit, he paid us off for the entire week. As we left, I glanced one more time back at the girl in the fish tank, hoping she didn’t drown.

  Even though we were working the nightclub scene, I never noticed any really bad stuff, or anything that would leave scars on my psyche. I never saw people do drugs or anything else that was illegal. Maybe I didn’t see it because I wasn’t into that scene and I wasn’t really interested.

  Or maybe it was the music.

  We were constantly practising our act and perfecting it. We saw ourselves on TV once and noted that I was in the habit of staring while Pat blinked naturally all the time. I was too robot-like, but Pat came to the rescue and tried to teach me how to dance. At home in front of Mum when we were in London, we used hairbrushes for microphones. Then I learned the moves:

  One, two, three, four.

  Cross, two, three, four.

  Back, two, three, four.

  Turn, two, three, four.

  It was a sixties version of So You Think You Can Dance!

  Soon we were performing for the troops, with a show that took us to American army bases in Germany and Cyprus. Those audiences of soldiers were incredible, warm and welcoming. Once we flew to Libya where a few American GIs asked Pat and me if we wanted to have a ride with them in their tanks. A tank – in the Libyan desert – a pretty incredible memory.

  This could have proven dangerous, but it wasn’t. We wore camouflage and hard hats, and had a wonderful time with the guys, who were very sweet and respectful. I think being somewhat naive actually saved us from bad things, plus there was power in numbers. Pat and I always had each other’s backs.

  As time moved us along, I was always meeting new people, which would inevitably lead to new love. I met Bruce Welch, part of a very successful instrumental group called The Shadows, who were Cliff Richard’s backing band for many years. They were a big deal in England, and Pat and I were fortunate to have a gig opening for them, which was a thrill.

  We had shared a manager with Cliff in Peter Gormley, who also guided the early careers of artists including Frank Ifield, The Seekers, Marvin Welch and John Farrar. Peter also founded Festival Records, where I would soon release my original studio albums in Australia.

  Pat and I toured with Cliff on The Cliff Richard Show. We were hired as backup singers – although we didn’t always stay strictly in the background.

  ‘When Olivia and Pat were backing me, I did notice a little phenomenon happening. All the men in the audience were looking past my left shoulder. One night during a performance, I looked over my shoulder and saw that Pat and Olivia were no longer their normal six or seven feet behind me. They’d moved up and were almost level with me. And they were doing these sexy little dances!

  ‘The next night, I said to Peter, our manager, “Do me a favour. Set the girls up behind the piano.” Then when I came out on stage, I had someone put the piano lid up so no one could see them at all! They knew I was just joking. We had such fun together then and later when we would sing duets together.

/>   ‘You have to fall in love a little bit with the other singer in a duet and that was so easy with Livvy,’ Sir Cliff says.

  By age nineteen, I had long hair and a fringe and wore little cotton shirts and tartan skirts that came from the children’s department of Marks and Spencer. My clothes had to make it through several seasons, and usually did. It was lucky I was good at economising because Pat and I were breaking out on our own. I loved Mum but we needed more space, and she even encouraged us to get our own flat.

  My first home out on my own was in a section of Central London in the borough of Kensington and Chelsea known as Earl’s Court. It was also known as a home-away-from-home Aussie hangout. Freedom was expensive, so Pat and I roomed with two other Aussie girls, Geraldine and Gail.

  Our living conditions weren’t much more spacious than in the Hampstead flat with Mum: Pat and I shared a room while sisters Gail and Geraldine had the other one. They were both talented actresses trying to make their way in London. Pat would later do a stage production of Bye Bye Birdie with Gail. We had single beds with a curtain across for some privacy, plus a little living room and tiny kitchen. Still, it was so much fun to be on our own without any rules. There was also an excitement of surviving by our own wits.

  We were jolly dolly birds!

  Frankly, we were lucky to get from one day to the next because Pat had never even boiled an egg and I couldn’t cook anything either. All we could do was navigate the local market to find food. I remember eating a lot of mashed potatoes and sausages for dinner. Our first Christmas together, we cooked the giblets inside the turkey inside that nice plastic bag that they came in.

  Rona, who had a new husband named Graeme, was told about our cooking adventures and couldn’t stop laughing as we begged her to please feed us dinner the next night.