My British Invasion

by Harold Bronson

  For me, I think it was taking the fantasy of gesturing in front of the mirror in imitation of my favorite rockers to the next step. Even though I knew my limitations as a singer, I failed to consider that I could improve by paying for singing lessons. I don’t think any of us seriously thought we could make it. By the same token, I think we had potential. We had our own, identifiable sound, and the promising songs Mark and I were writing, but nobody recognized it because our British Invasion–inspired sound was out of time.

  Now that I’d graduated, I wanted to work for one of the major labels, preferably CBS Records. Among the areas with which I was familiar, I didn’t think I would be good in sales or in radio promotion. The department I dealt with mostly was publicity. Publicists, by their nature, were friendly with big smiles. When I visited their offices, they made me feel welcome, would always have time for a chat, and gave me copies of their new releases.

  Considering they had the same job in the same business, they were not from the same cookie-cutter. The ones I dealt with were as disparate as characters in an Agatha Christie book, like Murder On the Orient Express: Judy Paynter (Columbia), from Texas, looked like an ex–beauty queen; Sharon Lawrence (Rogers & Cowan), once a good friend of Jimi Hendrix, had a pasty face and wore tent-like dresses that made her look like a dowager; Andy Meyer (college program head at A&M) affected a rumpled college professor look, complete with smoking pipe; Bob Garcia (A&M), short-haired Latino on the outside, hip on the inside; Judy Sims (Warner Brothers) cherubic ex-teen magazine writer and ex-school teacher; Pete Senoff (Atlantic), bodybuilder; Grelun Landon, (RCA) older, country fan. United Artists’ Michelle Straubing was the only one who dressed in a rock fashion, but with her shag hairstyle, hot pants, and laced-up boots, she looked more like a groupie. I liked them all.

  I wanted to work in publicity. I knew this department best, and I was familiar with most of the music writers. As I visited the publicists on a regular basis, I felt like they were my friends, but none helped me get a job.

  The other area I thought I could do well in was A&R, which was an abbreviation for artists and repertoire. In previous decades, an A&R man would sign talent, find them songs, hire a producer, and book the sessions. Though, with artists writing their own material, and with many producers operating independently, their duties diminished. I felt I could evaluate talent—and relate to it—and recognize good material. Columbia’s Allan Rinde was the first A&R man I got to know. He was in favor at his label because he had signed Ten Years After, whose debut album for Columbia was a big seller.

  Paul thought it would be a good idea if I went to New York to show the people who were head of the college department how much I wanted a full-time job. Frank Shargo, whom I had known in LA, gave me a brief tour. Although there was no job opening, he did ask me if I would be willing to relocate to New York. I told him I wouldn’t. During the tour I ran into Sandy Pearlman, the comanager and coproducer of Blue Oyster Cult, who were signed to Columbia. Sandy was happy to see me and invited me to visit.

  Junior high had been three years, high school three, and college another four. During my last year at UCLA, I had been restless. I felt it was time for me to make my way in the world. I couldn’t relate to those underclassmen who delayed graduating until they had completed a fifth year. I was primed to get a job in the music business: I’d done a stellar job for CBS, I was involved in putting on concerts at UCLA, and I was writing for the Daily Bruin, Rolling Stone, and the rock magazines.

  Nobody saw the potential I thought I had. I enjoyed my summer, but it was time to focus on getting a job. I checked the UCLA placement bungalow, but got no leads. I went to the Brown employment agency on Wilshire and La Brea because they didn’t charge a fee. A line on the form asked for my ideal job. For clarification, I asked my counselor, who told me to state my ideal job regardless of how feasible it would be. I wrote in “Record Company President.” He sent me on two job interviews, both to be a financial loan officer. At the second company, the man who interviewed me spoke for both of us when he questioned why they had sent me. I read through the LA Times classified section, and the best I could come up with was training to be a night manager at a Jack-in-the-Box fast food restaurant. I thought I would be unhappy in such a job.

  When I dropped off my review of the new T. Rex album to the Daily Bruin, I picked up a letter that had been mailed to me from Peter Noone in England. He thanked me for the article I had written earlier in the year on his group Herman’s Hermits, and suggested meeting when he next came to Los Angeles. I hadn’t previously received a written response from any of the subjects I had covered, so getting this letter from one of my rock heroes provided a boost to my flagging spirits.

  On the turntable: Rod Stewart’s Never A Dull Moment, T. Rex’s Slider, National Lampoon’s Radio Dinner.

  Herman’s Hermits

  Next to The Beatles, I bought more 45s by Herman’s Hermits than by any other artist. I liked their first record, “I’m Into Something Good,” and their second, the more vibrant “Can’t You Hear My Heartbeat,” even better. Lead singer Peter Noone exuded a boyish charm that was easy for me to identify with because he was two-and-a-half years older than me, much closer in age than the other performers of the era.

  One function of the arts—music, books, art—is to provide an escape from the drudgery and monotony of daily life. Rock ’n’ roll provided such an escape in its first ten years. By the mid-sixties, the influences of the blues and the protest movement introduced heavier concerns. Consider these three hits, all on the charts in the summer of 1965: The Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” The Animals’ “We Gotta Get Out of This Place,” and Herman’s Hermits’ “I’m Henry VIII, I Am.” The first is a frustrated complaint and the second an expression of despair. The third may be silly, but it’s fun. It’s a record that will bring a smile to your face and lift your spirits. Herman’s Hermits’ hits were well crafted and always delivered artistically. I liked them. They made me feel good.

  As the senior music writer at the UCLA Daily Bruin I could write about (mostly) whatever I wanted to, and for an issue in January 1972 I composed a lengthy appreciation of the band. Many months later I was thrilled to receive a letter in the mail from Peter, thanking me, and suggesting we meet when he was in LA next year.

  Richard Nader, a promoter who had staged successful oldies shows in New York, had an ambitious plan for a “British Invasion Revisited” tour. Herman’s Hermits (four of the five original guys) headlined over The Searchers (three of the four originals) and these familiar lead singers fronting non-original groups: Gerry Marsden and The Pacemakers, Billy J. Kramer with the Dakotas, Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders. I wrangled an assignment from Rolling Stone to write the story. The show did well in New York and in other cities, but advance ticket sales in Los Angeles and San Francisco were poor, so those shows were cancelled. By mid-July the tour arrived in LA anyway, to tape a Midnight Special TV show. As much as I was disappointed that The Forum date had been cancelled, I was at least able to attend the taping and see highlights of the show.

  The day before, I met Peter and his wife, Mireille, in the coffee shop at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. We had an easy rapport, and I conducted an interview with Peter in their room upstairs. He was scintillating, funny, and a delightful storyteller. It was a revelation hearing about the early years of the band and how they were transformed by success. He invited me to visit him when I was in London in the fall. It was the beginning of a lasting friendship.

  Peter grew up in Davyhulme, a district of Manchester, in a musical family. He loved rock ’n’ roll and was an avid record buyer and listener of the American Forces Network. He was attracted to humor and dialects. “I became an altar boy and learned to sing in Latin,” he said, “making up most of the words and mimicking the Irish priests who spoke with a Dún Laoghaire accent.” He studied acting and music at the Manchester School of Music, and at thirteen was plucked the
refrom to act in a TV show. Peter became a minor TV celebrity when cast as Stanley Fairclough, the son of a popular character on Coronation Street.

  “After my character was shipped off to Australia, no work came in for two years,” Peter said, “so I had odd jobs: I played records at parties, I had a window-cleaning business, I’d sell programs at Old Trafford during Manchester United football games, and on Saturday nights I’d sell newspapers.” (Throughout this chapter, unattributed quotes are Peter’s.)

  At a youth club, Peter was asked to sing with a group whose regular vocalist had failed to show. They liked him better than the other guy, and he joined the group, which included Karl Green on guitar. “I bought a silver lamé suit that didn’t fit. It was advertised in the paper by a singer who wasn’t making it. It cost me about twelve dollars. I thought, ‘Great! I’m gonna be a rock ’n’ roll star!’ We did ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’ by Gene Vincent and ‘Well I Ask You’ by Eden Kane. I tried to be a tough rocker and hated it because it wasn’t me. I was fifteen at the time and I wasn’t turning anyone on.

  “There was another band around that was doing comedy impressions, and they were going down incredibly well. I thought, ‘Great, let’s be like them.’ We did Buddy Holly songs with the ‘a-ho-hoes.’ I thought we did really well. I got rid of that suit and got a red one. I was buying loads of records at the time. I wanted to be a disc jockey more than a singer. So, I had access to a lot of music. We did Bobby Rydell’s ‘I’ll Never Dance Again,’ and musically were supplying a sound that was different from the other bands that were mostly into Chuck Berry and R&B.

  “Between numbers we used to tune up for five minutes, and while at first I was self-conscious, I found that I could talk to the people and tell jokes effectively. Like, we played Manchester and learned all the new jokes there, and then when we played in our home of Bolton, no one knew any of the jokes.”

  Sometime later, the other guitarist left and Keith Hopwood replaced him. The group was big on Buddy Holly and named themselves Pete Novac (after Peter’s favorite actress, blonde bombshell Kim Novack) and the Heartbeats (after Holly’s song “Heartbeat”). “Sometimes we’d open the show with one of the members saying, ‘I’m sorry ladies and gentlemen, Pete Novac can’t make it tonight.’ They’d all cheer because they didn’t like me. ‘But, fortunately, we have the biggest star around, here’s Millie!’ And I’d come out in a dress with balloons for the boobs, and I sang ‘My Boy Lollipop’ [a hit by Millie Small]. The people peed in their pants. Al Rigley, the bass player, popped the balloons at the end of the number. There were no fag overtones. I never realized until I was twenty-three that people must’ve thought I was bent.”

  Peter wasn’t visually impaired, but wore black, plastic-framed glasses to approximate Holly’s look. While rehearsing a Buddy Holly number at a local pub, the publican asked Peter why he was wearing those glasses. When he replied, the publican laughed, telling him he looked more like “Herman” (actually Sherman) on the “Mr. Peabody” cartoon from The Bullwinkle Show. His mates made fun of this new name, which led to the band renaming itself Herman & The Hermits. The band even wore hermit-like costumes made out of potato sacks—for one performance before they were abandoned. Remarkably, in February 1964 this early lineup was filmed for the regional TV show Scene at 6:30 rendering “Fortune Teller” at Liverpool’s Cavern.

  “All the groups that were making it had Jewish managers, like The Beatles, so that’s what we figured we needed. We were all Protestants and Catholics. Get a Jewish manager and win the world! We thought Helen Shapiro had a hit, not because she was particularly talented, but because she was Jewish. It was an incredible mentality.” Harvey Lisberg and Charlie Silverman, appropriately, became the group’s managers.

  The band worked almost every night, but they hadn’t interested a record company. EMI label manager Derek Everett (who later signed them to EMI’s Columbia Records) suggested that Harvey Lisberg try to interest budding producer Mickie Most. The Hermits felt good about Most because in October 1963, at the Manchester Odeon, they had seen him on a bill with The Everly Brothers and The Rolling Stones and thought he was a good performer. Peter noticed that few people seemed to like The Stones.

  From a picture postcard of the group, Mickie thought Peter Noone could appeal to the American market as he resembled a young John F. Kennedy. He was also intrigued with his name because he thought it was pronounced “Peter No One.”

  “There was an R&B scene, which we were into as well. Manfred Mann had Paul Jones as a singer and he was cool and sexy. I wasn’t, but I used to look like him, so I’d send him up perfectly. They had a B-side, ‘Without You,’ a Bo Diddley thing that I used to fumble on the harmonica, and I never did get it to my mouth. On ballads, like ‘The End of the World,’ I would camp it up with an exaggerated monologue in the middle, like doing Shakespeare.

  “Mickie thought this was the most incredible act he’d ever seen. Mickie took us into the studio but we failed the audition. We were having success so we didn’t notice it, but we were unrecordable. He offered to sign only me, but I looked upon myself as the leader of the band and wasn’t interested. He wanted me to kick two guys out of the band, which occurred, typically enough, in a Chinese restaurant. They took it great and I took it bad.”

  Lisberg and Silverman auditioned a local trio, The Wailers, who impressed them with a vibrant rendition of “Hava Nagila.” Guitarist Derek “Lek” Leckenby and drummer Barry Whitwam were game, but the bassist’s father wouldn’t permit him to go professional. As Lek was a better guitarist than Karl Green, Karl agreed to switch to bass. With this new lineup in place, April 1, 1964, the name was shortened to Herman’s Hermits.

  Derek Everett suggested Mickie consider “I’m Into Somethin’ Good,” a Goffin-King song, for The Hermits’ debut. A record had been released in April in the US by Earl-Jean of New York girl group , but it struggled to get airplay. The Hermits learned the song and on July 26 returned to London to make a recording—like most of The Hermits’ subsequent records—at Kingsway Recording, which was located above a Midland Bank branch.

  “Mickie Most didn’t like the record and didn’t want to release it. We were heartbroken. I knew it was good. We told all our fans and our mums that we were gonna have a record out, and then he wouldn’t release it. We drove back to Manchester and were gonna break up the group, ‘It’s not worth it. We’re not getting anywhere.’ Fortunately, he took it home and played it for his wife and she said that it was the best record she’d ever heard. ‘Okay, I’ll release it, but I won’t spend any money on it,’ Mickie said. We called every record store and ordered three, which is illegal. We told our mums to tell the people they worked with to order it. Nothing happened for a week. Then, out of the blue, we did a Ready Steady Go! TV show on a Friday night. On Saturday it sold forty thousand and it was number one in three weeks.”

  The key to understanding Herman’s Hermits’ appeal and popularity was how naturally they projected their own identity, that of cute, fresh-faced schoolboys. Their newly acquired matching suits looked like school uniforms without the crests. Peter and his mates were able to attract younger kids. “I’m Into Something Good” shares a similar innocence with The Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” Other Hermits’ songs, like “Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter,” fit right in. And a song about being in school, a cover of “Wonderful World” (recorded as a tribute to the recently departed Sam Cooke) was more convincingly rendered by seventeen-year-old Peter than twenty-eight-year-old Cooke.

  The Beatles ranged in age from twenty-one to twenty-four. Freddie Garrity of The Dreamers was twenty-three and Gerry Marsden of The Pacemakers was nearly twenty-two. Both singers were similar to Peter, with big personalities and excellent voices. So The Hermits—Peter was sixteen, Karl and Keith seventeen, Barry eighteen, Lek twenty-one—looked the part. Other artists forged identities far removed from who they were. For example, The Animals’ Eric Burdon, a budding graphic a
rtist and film buff, cast himself as a black American blues singer.

  Peter was cute, a good singer, but he wasn’t cool. At times he acted like a goofy kid, and his smile revealed the retention of a baby tooth partially pushed out by a permanent one. His immaturity made it easy for the group’s young fans to relate to him. He was just like them. “I didn’t know what I was doing. My stage persona was a shy little boy, which is basically what I was.” As he developed, he became more polished, more confident, and handsome. As a band The Hermits were certainly competent, looked cute, and their gently sung harmonies were spot on.

  “I was an audio freak as a kid. I was trying to record directly into my Telefunken tape recorder from the television speaker when a play, The Lads, with Tom Courtenay, came on. Throughout they kept playing a new song, ‘Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter.’ I listened to that tape and thought, ‘Boy, that’s a real fun song.’ I was into twenties and thirties English music hall songs because of the sexual innuendo, and it sounded like one of those. Live, we played it with an introduction: ‘My girlfriend’s just given me the elbow, and I’ve just been ’round to her mother’s house...’ We set up each song and made them comical, because if the people danced and didn’t watch you, you’d lose the contract. The people could just as easily dance to records. I was actually a window cleaner during the day, and we played ‘When I’m Cleaning Windows’ [George Formby, from 1936]. We’d make up our own lyrics. The humor was raw, very basic. After the song I’d give out my phone number: ‘I go for six shillings and am the best window cleaner around.’