My British Invasion

by Harold Bronson

  Given that basketball wasn’t that well known in Britain, I couldn’t fathom why Cheech and Chong’s comedic “Basketball Jones” was receiving airplay. And then I heard a song that was familiar to me, “I’m a Gambler.” It sounded like a rough demo compared to Peter’s new version. The announcer said it was by Red Herring. I thought it was probably the original version as it, too, could have benefitted from a bridge.

  In Andrew Lauder’s office, he had artwork for an upcoming new Man album pinned to his wall. As a fan of psychedelic posters that advertised sixties rock concerts, Andrew commissioned one of those artists, Rick Griffin, to paint a cover featuring Mad magazine’s Alfred E. Newman, splashed by water, holding a large fish. United Artists’ lawyers objected to using the art because it infringed the magazine’s trademark.

  On October 11, the Thursday before I was to fly home, I was fortunate to be able to see 10cc who were performing their fourth concert at Greenwich Borough Hall. I took the train to Greenwich in southeast London. It’s best known for providing the standard for setting time, as in Greenwich Mean Time. As I arrived at night, I wasn’t able to partake of the tourist attractions. Before the show, I met the members of the band backstage, actually one floor below the stage.

  The members of 10cc were from Manchester, and three of the four were Jewish. In the mid-sixties, guitarist Eric Stewart had had two big hits as a member of The Mindbenders, and bassist Graham Gouldman, as a songwriter, scored more than a handful of hits for The Yardbirds, The Hollies and Herman’s Hermits. With fellow musicians drummer Kevin Godley and guitarist Lol Creme, they built a recording studio in Manchester as a new business venture. A recording to test the acoustics of the new studio became a fluke hit in the summer of 1970. “Neanderthal Man” by Hotlegs hit number two in the UK and advanced into the Top 20 in the US. In 1972 Neil Sedaka, hoping to revive his career, hired them to record his Solitaire album. Creme, Godley, and Gouldman provided the backing; Stewart engineered. Sedaka was so impressed with them that he suggested they form a band, a thought that hadn’t occurred to them.

  Gouldman confirmed the band’s fascination with American culture and the sound of American phrases, and even admitted the band’s preference for Schlitz over English beer. Unlike most English rockers of their age—they were all twenty-eight—who profess to have been inspired by 1950s rockers or bluesmen, they cited American records of the early sixties, particularly those of The Beach Boys, as prime influences. The band’s current hit, “The Dean and I,” was sparked by a love of Hollywood musicals.

  Both Godley and Creme had been trained in graphic design, quite atypical for rock musicians. The band’s visual sense was obvious on record. Kevin referenced cartoons as an influence for their songs, and Eric mentioned comic books.

  Live, they were enjoyable, but not as dynamic as on record. As a hit singles act, their audience was rather young, and responded with enthusiastic shrieks. Blackfoot Sue, whose English hit from the previous summer, “Standing in the Road,” was a favorite of mine, preceded them onstage. They played well, and a highlight was “1812,” which made use of drum-like canon explosions. Teenybopper Ricky Wilde opened.

  The next night I was invited to have dinner with a Jewish family in the north of London. A month earlier, a girl Mark had met in England was in Los Angeles with a girlfriend of hers and we took them out for an evening. I took a shine to the girlfriend and got her phone number in London. She was supposed to arrive that evening from the States, and I was looking forward to seeing her again, at dinner.

  I was well appointed in my new white suit, but being unfamiliar with the area, arrived almost an hour late. They welcomed me, but the girl’s flight had been delayed, and wouldn’t arrive until much later that evening. My disappointment transitioned into extreme discomfort. I was flustered from my effort to get to the house. They served a Shabbat dinner, which including reading prayers in Hebrew, which I hadn’t retained since my bar mitzvah. They were all reading aloud, and I could barely join in. In the course of the evening, they had me confused with somebody else. They were expecting the son of a rabbi. The meal was good, but it was an evening I could have done without. I left a note for the girl, but never heard from her.

  The records I bought included the first albums by Love Affair and Los Bravos. I picked up a Top of the Pops album, mostly for its curiosity value. The producers of the series of albums recorded the hits of the day with studio musicians and singers trying to come as close as they could to sounding like the recent hit record. The budget price was an enticement. I bought Volume 31, which included covers of “You Are the Sunshine of My Life,” “Walk On the Wild Side,” and “Rubber Bullets.” Like all the other albums in the series, it featured an attractive model on the cover.

  Andrew Lauder gave me ex–Bonzo Dog Band member Neil Innes’ How Sweet to Be an Idiot. From CBS Records I got two singles, both on the Epic label. Steve Ellis had been the lead singer of Love Affair, which had had a few hits in Britain in the sixties, but were unknown in America. I liked “El Doomo,” from his new band Ellis. “Much Too Young” was a heavy pop record performed by Vulcan, a German band—or studio group—that tried to sound like Sweet. They succeeded, in a good way.

  London 1976

  I had met Todd Schneider when we both worked as sackers at Fedco, a discount department store, in the summer of 1969. We both loved rock music, and became fast friends. On the last day we worked together, when I changed my nametag to read “Pete Townshend,” he was the only one who noticed.

  Since I’d last visited London, I’d worked for two solid years at the Rhino store without a vacation break. As Todd had never been to London, I thought it would be fun for us to go together. I had enjoyed my two previous trips, but as music styles had changed, I had less desire to go on my own. I also thought I could do business for the store that I now managed.

  I made a reservation at the Sandringham Hotel, solely because The Move booked rooms there when they came down from Birmingham. Even after The Move, in the early seventies, Roy Wood and Jeff Lynne stayed there.

  We arrived on Wednesday, September 1, to find that England was in the midst of a drought. As it had been three years since I was last in London, my familiarity with the city had diminished. We took a train from Gatwick Airport, and then a taxi to the hotel, but the trip seemed much longer than I thought it would be. When the taxi driver left us at the hotel, it didn’t appear familiar, nor did the woman who received us have our reservation. After a few minutes, she offered that there was another Sandringham hotel, not affiliated with hers, closer to the West End. That was the one we wanted.

  In that part of northwest London, as we walked down the high street, we didn’t see a taxi, so we schlepped our luggage down the steps into the Underground Station and onto a train. Being jetlagged, I was far from my sharpest, and angry that I had wasted money on an expensive taxi trip, and that the driver did not ask me which of the two hotels I wanted. I also felt I had let Todd down, as I was his guide to the city. Todd, as usual, was unruffled.

  We checked in at the proper hotel, and they did have a room with a shower reserved for us. The lobby was more modest than I remembered. Our room was acceptable, but I thought a hit group of the stature of The Move would have lodged at a better place. Still, it was a step up from the fleabags in the Paddington area where I had boarded on my previous trip.

  I made an effort to stay awake to try to adjust to the new time. Todd fell asleep, and later, when he awoke, thought he was dreaming because he heard me speaking with a French accent. Peter Noone was living with his French wife in the south of France. Thinking of flying over to visit, I’d called his house, and spoken with his mother-in-law, who didn’t understand much English. I didn’t speak French, but thought speaking English with a French accent might make me more understandable. She said that Peter and Mireille were in Paris, but she didn’t know at which hotel.

  That night we didn’t want to stray too far from our o
wn hotel, so we dined at the nearby McDonald’s, which had opened in London less than two years ago. The experience of going to a McDonald’s, seeing what menu items were different from those in the States, paying in English currency, and being asked for our order in English accents appealed to our jetlagged sensibilities. Afterward, we watched TV in the lounge. I’d heard good things about Fawlty Towers, which starred Monty Python’s John Cleese, but it was never shown in the States. We found it hysterical.

  The next day we were up and running. Jeff Gold, from the Rhino store, had set me up with Larry Debay, whose Bizarre Records was the primary distributor for the burgeoning punk scene. Larry, flaunting long ginger-hennaed hair and a dyed-green beard, greeted us in his Praed Street office in the Paddington area. He raved about the Ramones, the New York punk band that had toured England earlier that summer. Larry gave me their English pressing of “Blitzkrieg Bop,” which came with a picture sleeve. Maybe because the cover of the album I produced of my band, Mogan David and his Winos, featured us all wearing leather jackets—just like Ramones—Larry ordered a box. I was there to deliver it, and pick up extra spending money for our visit.

  I had an appointment to see Colin Walkdon, a buyer for the Virgin Records retail chain. I met him at Virgin’s warehouse, and we rode in the van to S. P. & S. Distributors, which sold records that were deleted from their respective catalogues. I bought a couple of hundred records for the Rhino store. I loved getting English imports for a low price, but the shipping to the States was still expensive.

  On his recommendation, Todd and I saw Chas and Dave that evening at the Bishop Bonner, a boxing-themed pub in the East End. Colin met us. I was familiar with Chas Hodges, as I had seen him play as a member of Heads, Hands and Feet. They displayed a fondness for pre-Beatles rock ’n’ roll and music hall humor. Afterward, we went to a small fish ’n’ chips shop. The fried food was handed to us in pages from a newspaper folded into a cone to absorb the grease. Colin encouraged me to try the jellied eel, which wasn’t to my liking.

  On Friday, September 3, we checked in at a few of the record companies to see what was happening. I always looked forward to visiting Andrew Lauder, the head of A&R for United Artists. While we were in his office, he introduced us to Jake Riviera (real name: Andrew Jakeman). Jake had been a manager of pub rock acts, and he and fellow manager Dave Robinson had recently started a new label, Stiff Records. I loved the name and the sense of humor behind it. In record business parlance, “a stiff” was a record that failed to become a hit. I related to the name, knowing the difficulty an independent label has competing against the majors in trying to get a hit record—regardless of how good the music is.

  Andrew Lauder played us their first single, by Nick Lowe, which had been released three weeks earlier. Lowe’s band, Brinsley Schwarz, had broken up the previous year. Robinson had managed them, and Andrew had released their records on UA. I thought the two sides, “The Heart of the City” and “So It Goes,” were terrific. I told Jake I wanted to buy a quantity to sell at the Rhino store.

  The hottest new group in town was Eddie and the Hot Rods, who were at the vanguard of the developing punk rock scene. In the evening we saw them perform at the Marquee Club. The capacity was five hundred, but it seemed that there were twice as many fans, predominantly guys, squeezed in. The Hot Rods’ engaging sound, with its fast, throbbing rhythms and choppy guitars, was similar to Dr. Feelgood’s. (Guitarist Dave Higgs had roadied for the Feelgoods.) Barrie Masters, the band’s capable, boyish, good-looking singer, led the band through a set of promising, teen-angst originals mixed with 1960s hits “The Kids Are Alright” (The Who), “Gloria” (Them), and “Wooly Bully” (Sam the Sham & The Pharaohs). We went backstage—a narrow room directly behind the stage—to say hello before the set. It looked like they were popping amyl nitrate. I guess that explained why they played so fast.

  On Saturday, we went to the King’s Road to see the latest in hip British fashion, which, unlike in my previous visits, was nowhere to be seen. The flashy velvet suits, the quintessence of male pop fashion, had given way to American styles. The popular movie Bugsy Malone had sparked a revival of American 1930s-cut gangster suits, double-breasted with wide lapels and pinstripes. Tweed and checkered patterns were also on view. There was a much higher percentage of jeans and leather worn than in the States, and even an occasional rocker walking down the street flaunting a long, felt-trimmed coat and ducktail haircut. Let It Rock, a clothing store I had visited before, was now named Sex and sold bondage gear in addition to leather jackets. In the window of one of the boutiques, we were amused to see a male mannequin that looked a lot like Fee Waybill, the singer of the Tubes.

  Bugsy Malone was indeed the hot new movie. Produced in England, it was a Prohibition-themed musical, with kid actors assuming the adult parts. We enjoyed it, and thought Paul Williams’ songs were wonderful. Todd was surprised that the tickets indicated specific seats to occupy, and that there was no open seating, as in the States. Stimulated by the kids shooting custard from sub-machine guns in the movie, Todd bought a cup of ice cream. He loved the taste and the smooth texture until he read the label and discovered that it contained lard.

  I had met Jeffrey Levinson through David Berson in Los Angeles. Levinson, originally from New York, made a living in England contracting musicians for recording sessions. He lived in the village of Jordans, a train ride north of London in Buckinghamshire. I looked upon the opportunity to get out of town and experience a night in the country, so I accepted his invitation to visit on Sunday.

  It was a low-key visit. Not much was happening, and the village didn’t have much charm. Not far from his house was an appealing little forest that seemed typical of England to me. Walking through it reminded me of the woodsy area The Rolling Stones were photographed in on their High Tide and Green Grass album. That night we drove to the neighborhood pub for dinner. Because of restrictions on water use, Jeff hadn’t washed his car in a couple of months.

  Back at the house, he played records. I was most taken with “Hi! It’s Herbie Flowers,” one of the most joyful records I’d ever heard. Flowers was an in-demand session musician, having most notably played bass on Lou Reed’s “Walk On the Wild Side” and David Bowie’s “Space Oddity.” I liked the song so much that Jeff gave me the single.

  Todd had a more rewarding Sunday. He saw Kursaal Flyers headline at the Roundhouse, but was also impressed by the support band, The Clash. He reported that they were like a “Cockney Ramones,” true punks with good songs, but with one too many guitars causing them to sound cluttered. They had yet to record, but elicited an impressive response from the audience. Second-billed Crazy Cavan and his Rhythm Rockers were a 1950s revival band that channeled songs by Eddie Cochrane, Buddy Holly, and others from the era, and inspired their fans to dress as those stars had.

  We visited Stiff Records in a storefront at 32 Alexander Street in Notting Hill. As we had issued a handful of singles at Rhino, I identified with and took interest in what Stiff was doing. Jake introduced us to his partner, Dave Robinson. We also met two friendly guys from Clover, a band from the San Francisco area that had relocated to London: Alex Call, the lead singer, and Huey Lewis, the harmonica player. While I talked to Jake and Dave, Alex expressed his frustration to Todd, of the difficulty he had in meeting reserved English girls. We heard the other Stiff releases, by Pink Fairies, Roogalator, and Sean Tyler. I wasn’t impressed. I bought a box of twenty-five Nick Lowe singles, and three copies each of the others.

  We were hipped to the Hard Rock Café, which we soon found served the best hamburgers in London. Unlike those offered by the Wimpy restaurant chain, these were thick, like those in the States. The cafe had a 1950s American rock ’n’ roll theme as hits from the era—by Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Buddy Holly, and others—played on the sound system. The inside had a rustic look, like somebody’s garage. Concert posters, sports pennants, cigarette advertisements, and license plates were mounted on the dark b
rown walls. The waitresses dressed like carhops from American drive-in restaurants. We had to wait in line before a table opened up, but it was worth it. We went back a couple more times and observed that we could circumvent the line by either arriving well before the lunch crowd, or taking a seat at the counter.

  We loved Tom Stoppard’s new play, Dirty Linen and New-Found-Land, which we took in at the Arts Theatre, a small venue near Leicester Square. Dirty Linen was a pun-filled sexual farce involving Members of Parliament and predatory newspaper writers looking to boost their circulations. It bookended New-Found-Land, during which one Member of Parliament delivered an appreciation of America in a clever monologue as a means of justifying an American’s application for British citizenship.

  On Tuesday, we took the train to tour Windsor Castle. Queen Elizabeth II wasn’t in residence when we were there, but we were impressed nonetheless. On another day we saw the Tower of London and the Crown Jewels, my favorite historical site in the country.

  AC/DC, a new band from Australia, were on tour in England, with a number of dates scheduled for the Marquee. They were highly recommended, but when we arrived at the club, a posted sign indicated that they had cancelled, much to our disappointment. We couldn’t return the next night because we were going to see The Count Bishops.