by Will Birch
Ian had now turned thirty and had decided that music, not painting, was where his future lay. He reckoned that Davey, Terry, Russell, Keith and Charlie Hart, who had quietly rejoined the Kilburns following Humphrey’s most recent departure, comprised the band with which he would conquer the world. They sat up late into the night at Wingrave, listening to Ian selling them the idea that they would play a few clubs to begin with, before swiftly transferring to the Royal Albert Hall. ‘The first million we get,’ Ian announced semi-seriously, ‘I’ll split with you guys. We won’t have a manager and we won’t give the publisher more than twenty per cent.’ Ian had been swotting up. ‘He was absorbed in it,’ says Charlie Hart. ‘He was envisaging a point where he had made it. Today, it would be like a beggar on the street, prophesying his first Porsche.’
Ian found the group an agent, but only one booking (at Luton Airport Social Club) transpired. Despite frenetic inactivity, the Kilburns were mildly encouraged after a ‘works outing’ to see Roxy Music at Friars Club in Aylesbury. Humphrey went along too. ‘They were an art school band with a few quiffs,’ he recalls. ‘The verdict was that there were slightly too many quiffs, but we convinced ourselves that Roxy Music were no opposition whatsoever, and were sort of on our side. The arrogance! We also liked Slade. I remember Ian saying, “What I like about them is they’re not art school boys. If they were, they’d never in a million years call themselves Slade!”’
Kilburn and the High Roads, much like the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band – captained by Ian’s old Walthamstow contemporary Vivian Stanshall – were a classic art school combo, made up of enthusiastic amateurs and the odd pro, strong on in-humour and sartorial flair. But with just half-a-dozen gigs under their belts, the Kilburns were square pegs unlikely to find favour in the round hole of UK pop, either musically or visually. Their eclectic mix of rock ’n’ roll, reggae and calypso was quite a challenge for audiences. A look at the 1972 music scene underlines their incongruity. Glam Rock was the big noise; Marc Bolan was already established, and David Bowie was poised for stardom. Old warhorses like Gary Glitter and Roy Wood had reinvented themselves and become regulars on Top of the Pops, decked out in outlandish attire and make-up. The Kilburns, on the other hand, looked like a bunch of musical misfits who had just been refused entry to a tramps’ convention. But in Ian’s mind the Kilburns possessed an alternative kind of glamour that went way beyond the superficiality of early 1970s pop.
7
The Sacking of Charlie Hart
Margaret Street, London, 1972. On a sunny October afternoon, Ian popped into the Speakeasy, a West End music biz hangout, accompanied by Keith and Russell. Frequented by roadies and record company dogsbodies, very few of whom were interested in live music per se, ‘the Speak’ was a tough gig for an unknown act, but Kilburn and the High Roads would be grateful for anything. As they entered the club, Leo Sayer and his band were rehearsing the Lovin’ Spoonful hit ‘Summer in the City’, providing Ian with some light entertainment while he waited for club manager Laurie O’Leary – a former associate of the Kray twins – to emerge from his office. When O’Leary eventually appeared, Ian made his impassioned pitch, and the Kilburns were immediately booked to appear there on 11 November.
Ian didn’t yet know that an alternative to venues like the Speakeasy existed, namely the London pub rock circuit, then in its infancy. ‘We knew we would die a death down there,’ said Ian, recalling his London debut, ‘but after the first set, they all clapped. We thought: “Fucking hell!”’ By an amazing stroke of luck, the night the Kilburns made their isolated Speakeasy appearance, two of pub rock’s leading lights were in the audience – Nick Lowe, the singer, songwriter and bass player with Brinsley Schwarz, and his manager, Dave ‘Robbo’ Robinson, a buccaneering thirty-year-old Irishman who had cut his teeth road-managing Jimi Hendrix in 1967.
It was Robinson who, in 1970, masterminded the preposterous launch of Brinsley Schwarz by flying a plane load of UK journalists to New York to witness the group’s US debut, supporting Van Morrison at the Fillmore East. It was a PR disaster, not least because a series of logistical nightmares resulted in the press contingent’s arrival in the Big Apple being delayed by twelve hours and the fact that ‘the Brinsleys’ were somewhat ill-equipped to impress a stoned-out New York crowd. But there was an upside. As a reaction to the failure of ‘The Hype’, as it became known, the group took a strong anti-commercial stance. They simplified their music and retreated to the pubs of north London, where they played snappy sets with minimal equipment – the start in fact of the ‘pub rock’ movement, from which Ian and the Kilburns would mightily benefit.
‘I think that I discovered the Kilburns,’ says Nick Lowe. ‘They were unbelievable, but Robbo wasn’t having it.’ Interestingly, Dave Robinson’s own version of events contradicts Lowe’s. ‘I couldn’t take my eyes off the Kilburns,’ he says. ‘I thought, “Geronimo!”’ Robinson made a point of capturing Ian’s telephone number and was in touch within a matter of days, swiftly followed by a visit to the Dury home at Wingrave, where he stressed that pub rock was ‘all about taking music out of the hands of the music business and its sharp operators and bringing it back to the people’. Ian recalled, ‘Dave sat on the floor, had a bowl of rice and said he thought that music would grow by word-of-mouth, if you had an environment where it could develop in one locality. He said we’d get a reputation in a locality that would sustain us. Dave made it sound very logical. I wasn’t thinking of a career thing at all, although it had started occupying a great deal of the time. I had no idea of making a living out of it. No plot whatsoever.’
In truth, Ian had been formulating his master plan for months, his ideal venue for the Kilburns being a large concert hall with unencumbered access. The prospect of playing pubs unnerved him, but Robinson presented a strong case for the grass-roots approach. Dave’s intervention also brought about a further personnel change; when he casually described the group’s rhythm section as ‘wobbly’, Ian took this to be a criticism of Terry Day’s jazz-tinged drumming and sacked his friend of ten years. Ian’s ruthless streak was starting to emerge. ‘As soon as Dave Robinson came in, I was out,’ says Terry Day. ‘When Terry got the boot it really affected me,’ adds Charlie Hart. ‘I felt it wasn’t right and I became less tolerant of the whole thing after that.’
As one might expect, Ian already had Terry’s replacement in mind – an unlikely candidate by the name of David Newton Rohoman. Ian had always craved a black drummer but not necessarily one who was unable to walk without the aid of crutches. Born in Guyana, South America in 1948, Rohoman had been disabled since birth and came to England as a teenager. He took up the drums initially as a form of exercise and eventually joined the group Kripple Vision and later the Magic Rock Band, who had appeared on the bill with the Kilburns at Canterbury. It was after that show that Ian first met Rohoman. ‘He was sitting on cases putting his drums away,’ recalled Ian. ‘I had no idea he was disabled. I asked him for his number and tried to find out what he was up to ’cos I thought he’d be a great guy to have in the band. I said I’d give David a ring in the New Year. Then he stood up and he was on fucking crutches, then I thought, “Oh God, I won’t phone him, two cripples in the same band is fucking stretching it a bit.” It would have looked like it was on purpose. Anyway, that’s how I met Rohoman. He was sitting down, otherwise I wouldn’t have asked him.’
Rohoman’s light, swinging style suited the Kilburns, and after a few rehearsals at Wingrave, Dave Robinson arranged for the group to play the Tally Ho, a prominent pub rock venue in Kentish Town, where they made their debut on 10 January 1973. It was a cold night, and the entire group wore overcoats on stage. London listings magazine Time Out had trouble with their unusual name, billing them as ‘Kilburn High Road’. The following week, matters improved a little when readers were informed that they could see ‘Kilburn and the High Road’.
‘Dave made it sound very logical,’ said Ian. ‘The pubs . . . it was free to get in, thruppence on a pint, yo
u’d have local radio supporting it, which had just started up then, plus this vibe you’d create, and the most important thing – playing three hours a night – an excellent way of learning your trade. That appealed. Up to point, what Dave said was true. It didn’t go into the realms of, “Yee-ha, here we go! We’re all on one!” It was harder than that, but it had the potential and doing six a week, not feeling like a band that said [snide voice], “Hello, this is our new one written by Ron our guitar player, it’s called ‘Wintry Day’.” I saw a geezer in Canterbury with a bouffant barnet say that. I said, “Fucking hell, I’m going home in a minute!”’
Ian kept it snappy. Rock ’n’ roll classics were interspersed with original compositions and the odd novelty song, such as Alma Cogan‘s ‘Twenty Tiny Fingers’. The audience was sparse, but a handful of zealots positioned themselves in front of the stage and made approving noises. ‘Ian was very clever at having a layer of cheerleaders, a couple of mates in the front row going bananas,’ says Charlie Hart. ‘Really, he was very vulnerable and always needed people to tell him he was great.’ Ian loved it when members of the audience heckled him, recalling, ‘There used to be these two girls in rolled-up trousers and seaman’s jerseys, shouting “Sexist!” when I sang “I’ll have you . . . girl of fifteen . . .” I used to say, “This is for all you fifteen-year-old-girls hanging round the toilets.” They shouted back, “You fucking cunt, I’m eighteen, not fifteen.” There was a Caribbean geezer called Jerry, at the Tally Ho. He used to put his head in the bass drum. He said, “Ian, Gary Sobers was born with a cricket ball in his hand, you were born singing.” Jerry! He was lovely.’
The Kilburns hammered the pub rock circuit throughout the spring of 1973, with frequent appearances at the Tally Ho, the Kensington near Olympia and the Hope and Anchor in Islington. None of these venues offered much in the way of facilities for the musicians, and the money was always meagre, but working these London venues made Ian feel important. As he recalled, ‘The dressing room facilities were somewhat . . . fourteen-year-old junkies shooting up and you’re three inches deep in piss and water . . . but we still pretended we were at the Albert Hall even though it was the Tally Ho. It was possible to feel ambitious, not that I was that ambitious, but it wasn’t just some old pub gig. We played all our own gear, plus Bill Haley and obscure b-sides. I wanted each song to be unlike the song that went before it and came after it, stylistically. It was a deliberate policy not to play all the same kind of music. Reggae, calypso, the rhythms and the colours of the keys would change. It was hard to pin it down. Mostly to make it interesting so I wouldn’t get bored.’
Gradually, the music press began to take notice of the Kilburns, with an early article appearing in Time Out, written by John Collis, the journalist credited with coining the term ‘pub rock’. The Collis review was encouraging, but the group’s next piece of press forecasted great things. Written by a London-based American student named Stephen Nugent, the article appeared in Let It Rock bearing the caption: ‘Taking The Low Road – a potential supergroup have so far chosen the path of righteousness and small rewards.’ In his article, Nugent predicted that before long the pubs would be too small to comfortably hold the number of people that wanted to hear Kilburn and the High Roads. ‘The pub rock scene was not extraordinary to me,’ says Nugent. ‘In America, it had been going on for years. I didn’t have any sense of what the path of a successful musician would be in London, but the place was packed and they weren’t just there to have a drink. They were definitely there to see what was happening on stage.’
Ian had his own ideas about pub rock: ‘The bands I saw in the pubs were all good musicians, but it was a bit samey. ‘The Ducks had a certain rocking element; the Bees were pretty mellow; the Brinsleys had that organ-dominated Band sound, but a sameness about their tunes. Mostly, it helped to get those gigs if you played in that style, mellow, then you ended up doing “Brown Sugar”. It was a little too mellow for my taste in music. We wanted to be a little more brittle than that, plus most of us had been to art school, and we thought of ourselves as being a bit snappy. It was actually second-hand gear, but we thought we were well turned out. My idea about being in a band has always been a little bit of Tommy Cooper, a little bit of Chuck Berry.’
It was Dave Robinson’s custom on Monday mornings to systematically telephone every contact in his address book. ‘What’s happening?’ he would enquire, with seemingly genuine interest. Acting as the Kilburns’ unofficial manager, he spread the word and alighted upon thirty-one-year-old writer and broadcaster Charlie Gillett, who was then preparing to launch his own independent label, Oval Records. Gillett and his business partner, Gordon Nelki – a dentist by profession – had recently been to Louisiana and come back with a suitcase full of records including Johnnie Allen’s ‘Promised Land’, but were not averse to the idea of also working with home-grown talent. Robinson encouraged Gillett to go see the Kilburns at the Tally Ho, and the next week Gillett mentioned the band on his BBC radio show Honky Tonk. ‘I said, “There’s this amazing bunch of anarchic musicians you should see,”’ recalls Gillett. ‘Three weeks later at the Tally Ho the singer limped up to me and said, “You keep going on about how good we are on the radio, why don’t you come and fucking manage us?”’
Charlie and Gordon were sufficiently flattered and bemused. Having checked out the Kilburns, they both recognized that Davey Payne was a musician of the highest level and that pianist Russell Hardy had ‘an amazing range of references, from Charlie Kunz to Fats Waller and everything in between’. They also considered Ian to be a unique entertainer and clever lyricist. ‘For better or for worse, Charlie and Gordon became our managers,’ said Ian. ‘I’d seen Charlie’s reviews in Rolling Stone magazine. He was a pretty cool geezer. He knew what he was on about. He played us Dr John and “Small Town Talk” by Bobby Charles . . . a lot of records he played I would really dig. He knew I liked jazz. I may have turned him onto some of it, but I loved that New Orleans stuff he played that I’d never heard. A good vibe was coming from him and Gordon. They helped us a lot. It was very logical and sensible, we had meetings and everything. I think we even had our VAT sorted out at one point.’
The modest success of Kilburn and the High Roads during their initial foray into the pubs had taken the group by surprise. After all, their presentation was a shambles and the motley assortment of musicians defied the prevalent trends in music – glam, progressive rock, larger-than-life stadium shows and absurd posturing. Ian’s oddball crew subscribed to none of this, but at a time when musical proficiency was a key ingredient, Ian’s singing was way off key. According to Paul Tonkin, ‘Ian was practising his scales in a Kentish country lane one dark night, and a farmer’s wife emerged from her cottage asking, “Is there a pig out?”’
‘I used to apologize for singing out of tune,’ said Ian. ‘I’d say, “Sorry about that, I’ll try harder on the next one, ladies and gentlemen.” Charlie Hart used to get the hump with me for apologizing. He said, “Don’t apologize, the only people who know you’re out of tune are other musicians, and they don’t even pay to get in.” But I apologized anyway because it was making me wince. It was pretty far off the mark occasionally. Charlie Hart thought it all came out of the heart, which is probably true. He’d say, “If your heart’s in tune, you’ll be in tune.”’
Charlie Hart was actually becoming exasperated with Ian’s refusal to acquire some musical skills, telling Ian: ‘Look, you’re trying to be a singer. Do you want to be a singer or don’t you? Sit down at a keyboard and learn the notes of the fucking scale.’ Ian told Hart that he didn’t want to learn any notes. ‘He really didn’t want to know about it,’ says Hart. ‘Why? Well, there’s a lot of mystique around what makes a great musician. People think it’s not something you can learn, like carpentry. That’s a myth, and Ian was heavily affected by it. He had his gods like Little Richard or the Rolling Stones and he thought it was an insult to them to start unravelling it, to see how it worked.’
Knowing
he would never be a great vocalist in the traditional sense, Ian compensated with his commanding physical presence. It was a trick he had developed at art school, hyper-aware of the magic he could generate with a limp and a glower. Charlie Gillett remembers, ‘It was a slouch and a glare and a stare, and it did look as if he might be angry about something. He would scowl at the musicians, and the whole place would be under a certain amount of tension. The musicians really didn’t know if he was suddenly going to throw a wobbler.’
Confident that he could hold an audience’s attention, Ian avoided eye contact and exaggerated his condition whenever the need arose. It worked! Nothing compared with the high drama of his stage entrance. The band members would saunter on and commence a slow-burning riff, then Ian would cut a mysterious figure in the full thirty seconds it took him to reach the microphone. An audience would gather in front of the stage, its curiosity aroused. Then, rooted to the spot, Ian would hold the crowd’s attention with smaller gestures such as a contorted facial expression or the deployment of some bizarre prop. Still hungry for attention and without uttering a word, Ian would exploit the more sinister aspects of his appearance, cleverly converting his disability into a solid gold asset.
Ian certainly enjoyed his heightened status on the pub rock scene and now felt that stardom was within reach. And anyway, as a disabled former grammar school boy with modest qualifications, whose teaching post at Canterbury was about to be terminated due to frequent absence, he had little choice but to try and mould the Kilburns into a working unit that would generate some income and fulfil his unique rock ’n’ roll vision. ‘I got the sack from Canterbury, where I was supposed to be teaching two days a week,’ said Ian. ‘That was where the old wedge was coming from. It was quite well paid, teaching in art school, but it all sort of exploded.’