by Greg Tesser
In stature Gunnell was broad – he had boxed as an amateur in his youth – and he always donned tinted spectacles, which only added to his Hollywood gangster hard man image. Born in Germany, he and his British father (who feared internment if war was declared) settled in London in 1937.
After a series of dead-end jobs in the early 1950s, which included that of a bouncer at the Studio 51 jazz club, specialising in the modish bebop sound of Charlie Parker, he opened his own club, the 2-Way, headlining such diverse home grown talents as Johnny Dankworth and George Melly.
His second excursion into club ownership, the Blue Room, was a financial failure. Typically, he skipped the scene, later to reappear telling all and sundry that he’d been living in Paris, ‘The City of Light’, hustling around and promoting low-level fights.
Later he bought the Flamingo Club in Wardour Street; at first glance it seemed to be just another seedy-looking Soho venue, but in reality it was a citadel – a temple at which, every weekend, worshippers would arrive en masse to pray and affirm their belief in this new religion of unadulterated ‘having a good time – for tomorrow will never come’.
It was at the Flamingo that Georgie Fame (with his Blue Flames) morphed from utility backing bloke for Billy Fury to coolness and cult. His jazz-inspired blues, with serious Mose Allison overtones, entranced the cosmopolitan crowd that flocked to Gunnell’s club. Here was a heady mixture of Mods and gangsters and pimps and prostitutes and American servicemen; where black faces were as common as white, and any thoughts of colour were washed away in this swathe of sweat and smoke. Fame later recalled his early days at the Flamingo: ‘There were only a handful of hip young white people that used to go to the club. When I first went there as a punter I was scared. Once I started to play there, it was no problem.’
Friday nights were dance ’til dawn nights. At 6 a.m. the Mods and cool dudes would meander slowly out of the club, all bleary-eyed and zoned-out, having had their fix of Georgie Fame, or the other Gunnell headliner, Zoot Money and his Big Roll Band.
I first met Georgie Fame face-to-face in a pub on Old Compton Street with an EMI publicity bod in attendance. I was nervous and a bit tongue-tied, but managed to get on pretty well with the cool Lancastrian, who didn’t say very much.
Much later, I organised all the PR folderol for Georgie’s twenty-first birthday party, held at Rik Gunnell’s Gerrard Street office in Chinatown. It was 12 June 1964, and the sun shone and Soho glistened like some vibrant lipstick worn by a voluptuous vamp on the prowl.
Chris Farlowe was there and Elkie Brooks added a touch of authentic female glamour. There was a cake and I had made sure the press and all the in-snappers were there in force. It went extremely well, and despite always feeling uneasy in Gunnell’s company – his stare was enough to give you the heebie-jeebies – I found myself chatting to Georgie’s uncle. He was a lovely little chap, all gnarled and folksy. He seemed incredibly old – almost wizened in fact – and he had this thin fag permanently glued to his top lip. In build there was something of the Wilfrid Brambell (in his father Steptoe role) about him.
Now Fame’s real name was Clive Powell, so his uncle, who was a miner by the way, obviously spoke of ‘Clive this’ and ‘Clive that’. He asked me how much Clive made on average each week. I told him – I cannot remember the actual figure I gave – and his sparse eyebrows were raised as he said to me in his thin Lancashire accent: ‘That’s more than you get for a whole year down the pits.’
Now I was getting a bit restless, what with Bob Baker disappearing all over the place, so when I learned that he had this fantasy of opening some kind of cool nightclub for kids in Colchester, roping in a load of media people and getting them to fork out the folding stuff as well, I thought it was about time I became recognised as these bands’ publicity manager. But I needed something that would make them all sit up. And it was then that Lord Ted Willis made a speech in the House of Lords.
Ted Willis was a dedicated Labour Party man and a Spurs supporter. He had been ennobled just twelve months before, thanks in part to the pulling of strings by pragmatic party leader Harold Wilson. A talented writer of film scripts and TV plays, he is best remembered as the creator of Dixon of Dock Green, undoubtedly the most successful BBC series of the 1950s and early ’60s. Starring the evergreen Jack Warner, it portrayed the London copper as a thoroughly decent bloke, brimful of homespun philosophy and genuine compassion. A bit wishy-washy for some, it was usurped in the early 1960s by the earthier Z Cars.
At the Palace of Westminster, politicians of all hues continued to gripe about the moral lassitude of modern youth. Their world essentially remained as it had in the 1930s – one of extreme conformity and deference. London was beginning to swing, but in their opinion, this ‘new music’ was but an extension of a dangerous hedonistic lifestyle; they neither appreciated nor understood.
One spring day in 1964, Lord Willis stood up and started to speak – it may well have been his maiden speech. During this oration, he launched an attack on pop culture, rubbishing the music of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, describing it as ‘candyfloss culture’. To paraphrase George Orwell from his classic fable Animal Farm, ‘Classical music good, pop music bad’.
Later back in Soho, I bought an Evening Standard from the toothless newspaper seller on the corner of Tottenham Court Road and Charing Cross Road. Lighting a Lucky Strike, I inhaled deeply, and as I did so, my eyes were drawn like a magnet to the Ted Willis speech. It was then that this outrageous idea came to me. Talking to myself like some demented drunk, I said: ‘Why not take The Yardbirds to Willis’ house and get them to play the blues on his lawn!’
Dashing back Usain Bolt-style to Denmark Street, I got Giorgio Gomelsky on the blower and sounded him out. ‘Knock out! Knock out!’ he boomed. As always when excited by something, his response was always over-the-top. I could see him in my mind’s eye, waving his hands around with his fingers pointing in several directions at once, in the manner of someone suffering from Saint Vitus Dance.
Now I have to be honest, luck was on my side with this stunt. My father, and indeed my mother, had been pally with Willis for donkey’s years. They were all young political animals together in the 1930s, demonstrating against General Franco in Spain as well as actively supporting the International Brigade (that gallant mixture of idealistic humanity, including the likes of Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell that travelled to Spain to fight the Fascist Franco and his troops). So knowing where Willis lived was no problem. All that remained was for me to bombard every single national paper with my ‘story’ and hopefully reap the rewards – in the words of C.C. Baxter in the movie The Apartment – publicity-wise.
It was a balmy Whitsun Bank Holiday, and the Mods and Rockers were getting restless on Brighton Beach. Meanwhile, down in the leafy stockbroker belt of Chislehurst in Kent (the home these days of rapper and West Ham fan Dizzee Rascal), a horde of men and some women arrived at the Willis house, many armed with cameras. My father was there, of course – his friendship with Willis was to prove invaluable. In fact he had chauffeured Gomelsky (with me sitting nervously on the back seat) in his brand-new Bond Equipe to the Willis residence.
Throughout the journey to the Kent border, Gomelsky griped and groaned about the quality of my father’s driving. All he kept saying was ‘incredible, incredible’. To say my father was (no pun intended) driven to distraction was an understatement!
Lord Ted’s daughter Sally answered the door, looking somewhat nonplussed. As for Willis, at first he wasn’t at all happy. Sally, then in her early teens, remembers the day well.
‘I thought it was going to be the usual very boring day, and suddenly there was this knock at the door. Dad wanted to turn everyone away, as he felt it was just a stunt – which we all knew it was – but I begged him to let the band and their entourage in.’
Willis then saw my father, and smiling ruefully, he said something like, ‘you rascal, you’. My father smiled back, finding it somewhat difficult hiding hi
s embarrassment.
Sally then showed the band where to plug in, and without the semblance of a sound balance check, they bashed out the blues, and in so doing woke up much of the neighbourhood. These people weren’t happy, and with more than a touch of irony considering Lord Ted’s TV creation, several of their number threatened to call the police!
‘The group played several songs,’ said Sally. ‘Then a neighbour actually did telephone the police, but when they turned up, and realised it was my father, and that he had created Dixon of Dock Green, they allowed it to continue for a little while before it had to stop.’
Despite being reserved and withdrawn, Eric Clapton was the only member of the band to ask for a grand tour of the Willis abode. Lady Willis was his guide, and a visit to the bedchamber gave her the opportunity in years to come to boast that she ‘had had Eric Clapton in my bedroom’.
Okay, so Lord Ted was irritated at first, but he soon recovered his smiling demeanour – after all, he was more than adept at publicity himself – and he even seemed to start to enjoy himself. He certainly lapped up all the compliments paid to him by Giorgio Gomelsky, and they got on like a couple of soulmates. He went on to say to Giorgio that he hadn’t realised how good this form of music could be – you could say ‘the Candyfloss culture’ merchants had won hands down.
The next day, the national newspapers were full of Lord Ted Willis and The Yardbirds. Apart from The Beatles, no group – not even Andrew Oldham’s The Rolling Stones – had garnered so much countrywide exposure in one hit. The Daily Mirror in particular went overboard for the story – photos, the lot. Even the Conservative Daily Telegraph found room, complete with photo. Mind you, the paper’s sub-editor had transformed the band’s name into ‘The Yardsticks’!
By this time, my forays down the Fulham Road to watch ‘Docherty’s Diamonds’ were few-and-far-between. The FA Cup replay victory over Spurs in early January ’64 was the highlight, with the 2–1 loss to Huddersfield in the next round a real low ebb, but by the spring Chelsea were bidding for a Fairs Cup spot. A 1–0 win over Everton saw them finish in a very satisfactory 5th slot, just 7 points shy of champions Liverpool.
Sleep was in short supply, as I seemed to be living in a parallel universe of hyper people dashing hither and thither, often going nowhere fast, without contemplation or rest. Even my trips to the Bridge were not as life enhancing as they had once been. Life was all about The Flamingo, The Marquee and conflabs with Giorgio Gomelsky, Rik Gunnell and other 1960s pop culture luminaries.
There was also renewed contact with Andrew Oldham. Now, Oldham was a Chelsea fan, and by a quirky set of circumstances I not only visited his pad (Ivor Court, in Gloucester Place near Baker Street), but I also renewed a friendship with an old family friend, Stanley Moore.
Stanley was a solicitor, specialising in assisting what he termed ‘society’s underdogs’. There was definitely a touch of the Horace Rumpole about him. He had a set of chambers in Smithfield, all musty smell and Victorian furniture. You half-expected to see a row of clerks perched at high desks in wing collars, writing in huge leather-bound ledgers with quill pens. Somehow the ambience of the place didn’t quite match Stanley’s persona, which was all about NOW and progress and rebellion and ridding the country of what he regarded as bigoted, old-fashioned values.
He was also a fanatical Chelsea supporter and season-ticket holder for many years. He died on 1 May 1992, aged seventy-seven, and his ashes were scattered on his beloved Stamford Bridge turf. His father ran a watering hole in Soho, the Old Coffee House, which was regularly frequented by the Chelsea stars of the pre-war era.
His son, Stephen, is an actor often seen treading the boards at the National Theatre. Now aged seventy-five, he has had an eclectic career, with roles in such hits as Rock Follies. However, to some people he is best known as the long-suffering father of Harry Enfield’s brilliant TV comic creation Kevin. Like his father, he is a confirmed True Blue.
‘I’ve supported Chelsea since the ’50s,’ he once told me. ‘Charlie Cooke is my own personal number one player, but I also remember watching in awe as Jimmy Greaves banged in the goals.
‘I don’t get to Stamford Bridge much these days because of my theatre commitments, but when I did go regularly, that star of British film, John Mills, used to sit very near me. Michael Crawford, who is a real Blues devotee, lives upstairs from me.’
The Puppets were a group managed by the enigmatic Joe Meek, but we looked after their publicity. They had not yet achieved the success in the charts compared to other members of Meek’s stable, but they had already built up a considerable reputation backing such rock superstars as Billy Fury, Brenda Lee, and the ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’ man Gene Vincent.
Now, preventing cupboard skeletons from hitting the press was, in those more strait-laced days, one of the prime briefs of any self-respecting PR man. These days, whether or not a singer is gay (or ‘queer’ as we would have said), or has or has not fathered kids all over the place wouldn’t matter one iota. But in ’64, it was imperative to keep this stuff away from prying press people.
Anyway, this Puppets band member called me and told me that a paternity suit was out against him; could I help. I immediately contacted Stanley Moore – the case was just up his street – and handed the whole mess over to him. Needless to say, Stanley, who always relished a good fight, won the day. The Puppets were happy and I was happy, as indeed were the main men at Press Presentations, including the guy who actually owned the joint, leading showbiz agent Terry King.
Exactly why the members of the Puppets were all staying at Oldham’s flat, I never did discover, and having to act as some kind of chaperone for these Lancashire lads was certainly a novel experience for an eighteen-year-old. Another ‘novel experience’ was meeting their guru, Joe Meek.
Meek was a legend. He lived like a hermit, and many people believed and still believe passionately that he was a genius. His home was a flat on the Holloway Road. Despite producing some of the most iconic pop records of the late 1950s and early ’60s, he had a reputation for frugality. In fact, his lifestyle was that of someone counting pennies on a daily basis. He often recorded his artists in his bathroom or in his kitchen – in fact anywhere where he felt the sound would be more original. My memory of him is that he spoke little and that he had brooding eyes and a face locked into permanent sadness.
His biggest smash was in 1962 with The Tornados’ ‘Telstar’ – the first US number one by a British band. Britain’s answer to James Dean, John Leyton – he was even mobbed more than once by teenagers thinking the Rebel Without a Cause icon ‘had returned from the dead’ – was another one of his artists, with ‘Johnny Remember Me’ hitting the UK number one spot in 1961. And even by 1964 when the whole scene was dominated by the likes of The Beatles (in Meek’s words ‘just another bunch of noise, copying other people’s music’) and The Rolling Stones, he was still having hits, with The Honeycombe’s ‘Have I The Right?’ topping the British charts.
It was surreal in the extreme; this whole Meek set-up in just a few badly furnished rooms above a leather goods shop. I once saw him smile; it came out of the blue and, somewhat rudely, I stared at him, noticing his hair and its homage to the 1950s and the Teddy Boy for the first time. Andrew Oldham once said of him, ‘He looks like a real mean-queen Teddy Boy and his eyes were riveting.’
Later, his depression and paranoia (exacerbated by drug use), plus the pressures of being a homosexual in a society which still imprisoned gay men, led to a complete nervous breakdown. And on 3 February 1967, he killed his landlady Violet Shenton and then himself with a single-barrelled shotgun.
Three gay men – The Beatles manager Brian Epstein, Joe Meek and playwright Joe Orton – all died in 1967, and all in tragic circumstances. Ironically, by 1 August 1967 the Labour Government had repealed the 1885 Act, decriminalising homosexuality and allowing gay relationships, removing forever the once ever-present threat of blackmail.
One particular artist that Meek recorded, bu
t who never made it into the charts despite a huge cult following, was Screaming Lord Sutch. At Press Presentations we were handed the brief of publicising the launch of his pirate radio station, ‘Radio Sutch’.
So, having pointed the media crew in the right direction, we all congregated by the Thames. There he was, David Sutch, arriving in an ostentatious American automobile, all chrome and fins and bad taste. Photos were taken of Sutch with his band, The Savages, hanging precariously from the mast of a flimsy-looking craft. Later Sutch and his cronies set up shop on a Second World War army fort on the splendidly named Shivering Sands in the Thames Estuary – boy did it look creepy!
‘Radio Sutch’ eventually became ‘Radio City’, and the Screaming Lord soon lost interest in the whole madcap scheme, selling it to his manager Reg Calvert for about £5,000.
On 20 June 1966, the whole thing took a dramatic and tragic turn when Major Oliver Smedley, an erstwhile business colleague of Calvert, organised a band of men to take control of Shivering Sands. Later, that same day, Calvert turned up at Smedley’s house, and in a frenetic scuffle, Smedley shot and killed Calvert. Smedley was charged with murder, but he claimed it was self-defence, and was subsequently acquitted. The following year, the station made its final broadcast.
Talking of pirate radio stations brings to mind a ‘Radio Caroline’ party in Mayfair. The Rolling Stones’ manager Andrew Loog Oldham was there, as was his discovery Marianne Faithfull, whom he described later as ‘an angel with big tits’. It was there that I was introduced to one-time Elvis double and now hit performer P.J. Proby. Caroline was the premier Pirate, and their parties, laid on by station owner Ronan O’Rahilly, were real happening events.
Now, having laced down a few too many drinks of dubious content, I suddenly realised that for some reason my wallet was empty. Where my money had gone was a mystery. Now, in those days, credit cards were limited to a few ultra-rich Americans and the odd tycoon or three this side of the pond. Remember, this is a world without debit cards or ATMs; it seemed I was stuffed.