by Greg Tesser
It was now the wee small hours, and things were beginning to really hot up. I asked around for a lift, but everyone who was leaving was going to some out-of-London place such as Richmond or Kingston or Twickenham or just around the corner to some pad in Chelsea. They didn’t really care about little old me. So I just left this salubrious Mayfair penthouse, and trudged all the way back to North West London and the green swathes of Hampstead.
It took me hours, and it was well past dawn when I eventually turned the key in my front door. But no sleep for me! I showered, fuelled up on a nice greasy spoon-like fry-up and lashings of coffee, and prepared myself for yet another trip to Stamford Bridge. You see, despite being overwhelmed by the star-studded Caroline party, watching Chelsea was still a priority. The game itself, by the way, was nothing to write home about, but the Blues did manage to eke out a 1–0 victory over Burnley.
FIVE
MORE SOHO ADVENTURES
AND CHELSEA’S TREBLE-CHASE
St Anne’s Court, by the side of Foyle’s Bookshop.It was then a dingy alleyway, reeking of all things Charles Dickens; however, I found it an ideal shortcut into the heart of Soho.
Little delis with drab-looking faded fascias; even drabber doorways offering you Italian lessons on the second floor; these were everywhere in ’60s Soho. It was all about sound and smell and night, and after midnight in particular when tongues loosened and responsibility evaporated in a sea of pungent booze and swirling cigarette smoke and that sweet, almost sickly, aroma of marijuana. Now it’s too clean, too sanitised. Back then it was a dream world – a heady mixture of continental Europe and the USA. And the heart of this ‘dream world’ was now my base.
Having won over Gomelsky with my Lord Ted Willis coup, I was now operating on my own as a publicity manager. Much to the chagrin of the powers that be at Press Presentations, I had made the big decision to go out and fend for myself, taking the likes of Georgie Fame, Zoot Money and The Yardbirds with me.
One of Giorgio Gomelsky’s newest recruits was Gary Farr & The T Bones. Having wowed them in Brighton, Giorgio was hell bent on exposing them to the blues aficionados at The Marquee – all those young hipsters in their Mod suits who dug anything that sounded like John Lee Hooker or Muddy Waters or Sonny Boy Williamson.
Gary Farr, who sadly died in 1994, was a striking character, with a mop of beautiful blond hair. He was the son of boxing legend and Welsh hero Tommy Farr, who on 30 August 1937 fought Joe Louis at the Yankee Stadium in New York for the World Heavyweight title.
‘The Tonypandy Terror’ as he was known took champion Louis the full distance of 15 rounds, and the majority of the 50,000 fans were of the opinion that the Welshman had outgunned the seemingly unbeatable American, but referee Arthur Donovan had other ideas and awarded the fight to the American. There was a chorus of boos following the decision, and some seven years later the beleaguered ref actually apologised in print for his mistake.
Farr did something no other boxer managed to achieve; he lived with the legend that was Louis. Later, life dealt Farr some cruel blows, which led to bankruptcy. He did have somewhat of a revival in the 1940s as a singer – in fact he made several recordings with the legendary George Formby – but by 1964 he displayed all the characteristics of man embittered by life’s dirty tricks.
As a young PR operator, I wanted to really tap into this father/son relationship, so I gave Tommy a ring. Before I could plead my case, he told me to ‘F*** off!’
I even got a freelance journalist I knew, Ian Gilchrist (he’d once shared a flat with Mick Jagger and the other Stones in Edith Grove) to give it a go. But the answer was the same, only this time with even more vehemence and even more expletives.
Tommy seemed to hate everything about Gary’s lifestyle, but even though he failed to co-operate we did manage to exploit the relationship to good PR effect; cynical maybe, but Gomelsky liked it.
One incident really stands out. It was 11 June 1964 and an eighteen-year-old Harvey Goldsmith, he of Live Aid and so much more, had put on a show at the Brighton Dome. The headliners were The Animals, The Yardbirds and The Cheynes.
Now, as it happened, the gig was a success, but it was no thanks to The Animals. The Brighton Mods were there in force, and just a few minutes before the start of the show, Giorgio Gomelsky stood like a statue on the stage to announce that The Animals would not be appearing as a whole because two members of the band had been involved in a car accident. The fans accepted this lame excuse, but we all knew the real reason: a couple of them had got well and truly smashed. Not in a car crash, but by numerous bottles of booze.
Later we sampled the delights of one of Brighton’s many excellent Italian restaurants, and after copious amounts of Barolo or chianti, Giorgio managed to convince me that Gary Farr and his T-Bones would be the ‘next big thing’, so a contract was drawn up on the back of a paper napkin for me to sign. The fact that it was a paltry £5 per week didn’t seem to matter to me, as the bonhomie created by the booze made life seem just right.
We then made our way back to Gomelsky’s apartment in Lexham Gardens. Giorgio was on fire, all his Mille Miglia background erupting as he climbed into his Ferrari or Maserati or whatever it was – no doubt fuelled by the wine – and we made it back to London W8 in just over 29 minutes!
Georgie Fame’s birthday party, which as I have already noted was held on 12 June, was more an orchestrated press reception than anything else, but press receptions were my business. One other such event stood out, which involved the ‘Fab Four’ themselves, The Beatles.
On 3 June, Ringo Starr collapsed with tonsillitis and was ferried to hospital. It was the eve of the group’s big Australasian tour. A class drummer was needed and fast, which is where I came in. Jimmie Nicol was Fame’s drummer. He was experienced, having cut his rock ’n’ roll teeth back in 1957 at the 2i’s Coffee Bar in Old Compton Street. But despite both Beatles manager Brian Epstein and George Martin being adamant that the group needed a replacement drummer, it proved a difficult job convincing George Harrison in particular. He was all for cancelling the tour, but eventually everything was ironed out, and Rik Gunnell, who was as sharp as flint, knew that there was loads of publicity mileage for his man with this.
Jimmie was unveiled at EMI’s headquarters in Manchester Square, and my brief was to make sure that the press were sweet-talked and pointed in the direction of Georgie Fame. Boy, it was a daunting task for a callow youth, but Bob Baker loved thrusting these googlies at me, probably hoping I’d be bamboozled and hit my wicket, but I managed to pull it off.
So everyone was happy. Gunnell grinned like some self-satisfied Buddha and I even managed to say ‘how do you do?’ to John Lennon. The Beatles got a load of print, as indeed did Georgie Fame and The Blue Flames. Mentally I was exhausted, but it was another hurdle crossed, albeit with the odd slip or two.
Another obstacle was Larry Page. During the 1950s he had strutted his stuff as a British rocker complete with massive spectacles. Known then as Larry Page The Teenage Rage, his teenage rebellion seemed all spent out by the time the Mods were rocking at the Marquee; in fact to my eighteen-year-old eyes he looked as conventional and as typical an example of corporate man you could ever meet – all smiles and insincerity and cut-throat ambition.
His is a story of ambition coupled with overt dedication. Initially it is a tale very much of the monochrome 1950s, but he soon realised that his talents lay not as a rocker, but more in terms of promotion.
Born Leonard Davies just round the corner from the massive EMI factory in Hayes, Middlesex, it was almost mapped out for him that upon leaving school, he would end up working for the international record conglomerate like so many of his contemporaries.
However, the teenage Leonard, enthralled with the new sensation Elvis Presley, had ambitions of his own to be a rock singer; he managed to get an audition with EMI, which he passed with flying colours. A record followed, and despite this new-found fame, he continued to work at the EMI factory.
H
aving been dubbed ‘The Teenage Rage’ by Sunday Mirror showbiz columnist Jack Bentley, the precocious youngster did his utmost to live up to the name with a variety of publicity stunts. These included a whirlwind romance and marriage to a teenage fan, and appearing on stage with blue-rinsed hair, which was actually the result of an accident following some overeager work by a TV make-up department. His ridiculously large glasses also added to his aura of unconventionality.
Another record followed, which in the words of Page himself ‘… was the biggest load of crap you ever heard’. His record producer had come up with the idea of the song, which he had told Page would never be released in Britain ‘because it’s terrible’. Needless to say it wasn’t a hit. It is also worth noting that the song was Buddy Holly’s ‘That’ll Be The Day’!
Fast forward a few years; this is where I came in. By 1964 Larry was a rock manager and promoter, and one of his charges was a group called The Pickwicks. To be honest, they were nothing to write home about – in fact they were lousy. Dressed as Dickensian dandies, or to use the Victorian vernacular, ‘Mashers’, their version of ‘Apple Blossom Time’ was released at about the same time as the musical ‘Pickwick’, starring Harry Secombe, was packing them in in London’s West End.
The obvious is very often the only way. So, it came as no surprise that Page wanted his band to be photographed on the stage of the Saville Theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue with ex-Goon Secombe. The necessary phone calls were made, and I arranged for our own snapper Julian Hann to be on site to take as many photos as Secombe would put up with.
It all went down a treat with the print media, and Larry was as happy as a lamb! A bonus for me was a visit to the theatre to see the show, in the company of Larry and a lady. Later Julian Hann (his stage name at the time) or Jeremy Fletcher, to give him his real identity, joined me for a gratis dinner at The Pickwick Club in Great Newport Street in Leicester Square, all paid for by the grateful Page, where we sampled such delights as ‘Mrs Bardell’s fruit pie’. Having consumed a cellar-full of best claret, we climbed into Jeremy’s Maigret-style Citroen and he drove me somewhat erratically back to Hampstead Way – talk about footloose and fancy-free!
Jeremy was (and indeed is, as he is still going strong) a photographer of talent, but apart from his obvious skill with a camera, here was, amongst all the back-stabbers and sell-their-grandmother-for-a-few bob merchants, a thoroughly decent bloke.
His colourful and interesting father, Ronald, a man so famous during the 1950s that an irreverent reference to him during the course of radio show could result in a tumult of guffaws.
It was during an episode of The Goon Show in 1955 – ‘The Greenslade Story’ – which purported to tell of announcer Wallace Greenslade’s defection to a better-paid job, that John Snagge, whose eccentric Boat Race commentaries became legend, intoned in the manner of a newsreader announcing the death of a monarch over the music of ‘The Last Post’: ‘So this, then, is the end of the once great BBC announcing staff. Where are they now, that noble band? Andrew Timothy – missing. Alvar Liddell – went down with his lift. And, finally, Ronald Fletcher – gone to the dogs.’ The last was an in-joke reference to Fletcher’s well-known gambling habit.
Having joined the BBC after the Second World War, his rise up the BBC newsreader ladder was meteoric. By 1947, his was the voice on the Home Service that announced the engagement of Princess Elizabeth to Philip Mountbatten.
A Wodehouseian character, during the 1950s he reached a wider audience with his witty appearances on Bernard Braden’s shows Breakfast With Braden and Bedtime With Braden.
The 1960s saw him branch out into television with shows like Twice a Fortnight and Braden’s Week.
Then in 1975, John Lloyd and Nigel Rees selected him to read the quotations on the long-running Radio 4 programme Quote, Unquote, which he did for 200 shows before ill health forced him to retire in 1994. He died in 1996, and Rees described his voice as having a ‘suggestion of an earlier, more carefree age’.
Now, please remember that I was young and full of myself, and thought I was God’s gift to women; to my eyes the ‘Teenage Rage’ was ugly. But his ugliness didn’t seem to put off the girls, as accompanying him to the theatre was his sexy girlfriend/secretary. She was really friendly and had a smile that lit up her whole face. There was a reference in the show to the female bosom, which she seemed to like and she laughed and smiled at me. I was captivated!
I must admit I didn’t find Larry easy to relate to. I remember that he insisted that I wore a particular type of suit. It is amazing to think that some years later he was the man who not only signed The Kinks (they later had a serious legal wrangle, but that’s another story) but also managed The Troggs, who in 1966 reached number two in the UK charts with the classic ‘Wild Thing’ (in America it did one better).
Six years later, Page was the producer behind the Chelsea song ‘Blue Is The Colour’, released to celebrate the club reaching the 1972 League Cup Final. Surprisingly, they lost 2–1to ‘the old men’ of Stoke City, in a final that in so many ways encapsulated the dying embers of that flamboyant side lit up by the likes of Cooke, Hudson and Osgood et al. The disc proved popular with the record-buying public, reaching number five in the charts in March 1972.
The Ted Willis stunt had allowed me more freedom of expression. It also gave me confidence to confront the many middle-aged wheeler-dealers, who were often the bane of my life. The time had come to move on, and I did, to a new office all of my very own: above a strip club in Old Compton Street. I was now on my own – GT Publicity was born.
I was pretty gung-ho as far as rent was concerned, and after visiting just a handful of estate agents, I found just the right premises in the heart of Soho. Climbing the stairs and doing your best to avoid popping in for a quick eyeful in the strip club, you came to a mini-suite with one office on its own. There was also a large area adjacent to it that was ideal as a reception. No deposit was required, no credit or identity checks – it was all so easy in those days.
My next task was to buy some suitable furniture, another simple task. I just walked into a West End store specialising in modernist office paraphernalia, chose what I wanted, handed over a cheque (no guarantee card or identity check required) and delivery was made the following day – several days before my cheque had actually cleared!
GT Publicity had a small, but exciting list of clients: The Yardbirds, Georgie Fame & The Blue Flames, Gary Farr & The T-Bones and Zoot Money’s Big Roll Band.
Zoot Money’s personal manager, Bob Hind, had the adjacent office. Later, Libby, his – well I never quite worked out what she was – joined us as receptionist/secretary, working in tandem with the Sandie Shaw-look-alike Ursula.
I didn’t really like Libby. And as for Bob Hind, well he seemed dodgy, to say the least. He was also meant to be an architect, but what he actually designed, remained one of those unsolved mysteries.
He had a fawning gofer – a sort of tall version of Oscar Wilde’s Bosie with cockney overtones. I cannot remember his name, but he was very blonde. I thought maybe Bob was queer, as we termed it then. But then I rationalised. I pointed out to myself that a guy who was forever waxing lyrical over female breasts couldn’t be gay. Then I thought maybe all this bosom-thing was just show.
Bob kept prattling on about his life preserver. I hadn’t a clue what he meant. Initially, I thought he was talking about sweets – you know those things you bought on the way home from school when you were a kid. Only later did I realise that he was referring to the long leather stick he carried, purchased from a leading gentlemen’s emporium in St James’s, to protect himself against any potential assailants. As I have said, the word ‘dodgy’ oozed from every pore of his body.
He fancied himself big time, as a sort of amalgam of James Bond and Simon Templar. What spoilt this image was his thin high-pitched Thames Estuary accent. He always wore tweeds, but gentry he was not.
I have already mentioned the strip club downstairs. It was by no means t
he worst place of its type – in fact by the Soho standards of the day it was pretty neat and tidy. It was owned by a Maltese chap, who despite a smile that generated contentment, also had a haunted look around the eyes, caused no doubt by the fact that he was in hoc to the Mafia. He was forever asking me to be his guest at one of the shows, and I’d be lying if I said I never succumbed.
Deep in the bowels of the building was a clip joint. You know the sort of thing, rubbishy booze or ‘champagne’ that was really apple juice costing a small fortune, a sit-down at one of the tables with a voluptuous hostess, and then paid-for sex later.
It is important to remember that these were the days when various Mafia offshoots ruled so much of Soho’s nightlife, and one morning when I arrived early at my new office I witnessed the fruits of their labours. Outside our premises were a whole load of police cars and guys in less-than-clean trench coats. Later, some newspaper hacks turned up, dressed like the plainclothes men, but all with fags stuck to their lips. The clip joint had been firebombed. The only cocktail served that night was courtesy of Mr Molotov!
As for Zoot Money, he was proving to be a wow at the Flamingo. It was now my job to promote his first record: a disc with the unattractive title of ‘The Uncle Willie’. An idea was mooted that we should produce a load of pound notes to promote the disc, but this caused us more headaches as legal objections were made to Zoot having his fizzog on a banknote – so they had to be withdrawn. The record was not a hit, even though I managed to get it played on the BBC Light Programme’s Housewives’ Choice show by posting off literally hundreds of postcards with fictitious names and addresses. Believe it nor not, the name that was chosen by the presenter – it could have been Kenneth Horne at the time, he of Round the Horne fame – was probably my most unlikely, Gregory Turnstile!