by Will Birch
Another letter and several long-distance phone calls later, the love-struck Ms Bayley was on her way back to London. ‘We had no money and it was bleak,’ recalls Roberta. ‘I didn’t know much about Ian, but somehow we’d hit it off. After a couple of months and going to a few shows, Ian introduced me to people like Peter Blake and Chris Killip. He may have been giving money to Betty, but there was no salary, and he wasn’t in a position to woo me. His personality was strong, although he had a big chip on his shoulder. He didn’t ever speak about it, but I feel he just wanted to be tall and handsome, a matinee idol, like a seventies Tony Curtis.’
The CBS deal was vetoed by the company’s business affairs department, but Charlie and Gordon were able to capitalize on the Tony Ashton connection and secure a recording contract for the Kilburns with Raft Records, a subsidiary label of Warner Brothers run by former Soft Machine manager Sean Murphy. Ashton was hired as producer, and recording sessions were booked to take place at Apple Studios in Savile Row during February and March. It was the era of the ‘three-day week’, and Britain was enduring a period of political crises, miners’ strikes and power cuts, from which recording studios were not immune. Many hours were lost at Apple, but the Kilburns and Tony Ashton were happy to repair to the Thistle public house and drink Pils lager under candlelight until electricity was restored. Roberta Bayley notes that Ian had never really been in a big studio before and recalls, ‘When he was singing one of his love songs, he wanted me to be in the booth with him so he could look down at me and get that emotion.’
Denise Roudette had returned to college shortly after meeting Ian the previous autumn, but she saw him whenever the Kilburns played in the Bristol area, much to the annoyance of Roberta: ‘I found out about it and I wasn’t happy about him going back with Denise because I was nuts about him. I went back to America and settled in New York. Then the letters really started.’
Over the next five years, Ian would correspond with Roberta, telling her his frustrations, confessing his innermost worries and sharing his dreams. His letters were often long and rambling, but always fastidiously written, rapidograph on foolscap, or occasionally typed with use of the red ribbon for emphasis. The more vulnerable Ian felt, the smaller his handwriting would become, but if he was on a winning streak, his writing would get bigger as the word count decreased. Throughout the entire period he would fantasize about relocating to America (while making clear his reservations about the country) and sharing Roberta’s Manhattan apartment. As an alternative, he pleaded with her to return to London but he knew it was impossible, not least for financial reasons. ‘His modus operandi,’ says Roberta, ‘was that mad passionate thing that can never happen.’
Ian’s mail to Roberta was often posted in secret. If she wished to reply, she was instructed by Ian to mail her correspondence to an appointed member of the Kilburns’ entourage who would then discreetly pass the letters to him, usually in the group van on the way to gigs. It’s probable that Ian’s subterfuge was designed to avoid bringing his intimate writings to the attention of Denise, who in the spring of 1974 quit college and headed back to London. When she arrived, Ian had his head in Penthouse magazine, which in its April 1974 edition published Steven Fuller’s article under the title: ‘You Don’t Have to Have a Leg Iron but It Helps’. Fuller’s piece contained a profile of the Kilburns and an in-depth interview with Ian. It was his first major outpouring in the media and in many ways his most honest, confessing that he’d been ‘a right little cunt’ at grammar school.
The Kilburns’ album for Raft was now completed and much to Ian’s delight, the legendary Nesuhi Ertegun, president of Warners International, would be flying in from New York, but not, it transpired, to toast Kilburn and the High Roads. Within days of Ertegun’s visit, the Raft label was unceremoniously closed down. At the end of March, a press release stated that all Raft artistes would be invited to join another label in their group. For the ailing Kilburns, this would require the approval of Warners’ US label chief, Joe Smith. On 16 April, a jet-lagged Smith popped into the 100 Club to check the group out, but was not impressed. After the show, the Kilburns were taken out to dinner by Warners and apparently invited to attend ‘an orgy’ at the Swiss Cottage Holiday Inn with ‘twenty hookers’. Ian feigned disgust, saying he did not wish to partake of such ‘Hefneresque pleasures’.
Joe Smith returned to Los Angeles, recommending that Kilburn and the High Roads be dropped, but the company exercised its option for another album, and the group remained contractually tied to Warners, even though there was little prospect of going back into the studio. Ian wrote to Roberta, observing that his bitter missives were ‘beginning to look like Robinson Crusoe’s diary during the pirate season . . . record company creeps are so fucking stupid and loud and used to their own shit-arseing that they fail to notice when others are not convinced,’ he complained. The situation was dire, but Ian was not going to give up yet and there would soon be cause to celebrate.
9
Rough Kids
South London, 1974. After many years of wishing to depart the capital, journalist Clive Davies was preparing to quit his lodgings at Oval Mansions on the Kennington Park Estate. Via mutual friend Geoff Rigden, he knew that Ian was in the market for accommodation. Davies was urbane, eloquent and more than a match for Ian when it came to philosophical debate. Rigden had been wary about introducing them to each other as long ago as 1963. ‘You know that old cliché,’ says Rigden, ‘never introduce your best friend to your new best friend? You hope they’ll like each other, but usually it doesn’t work. When they first met, Ian was unusually reticent. He would always go a bit quiet when Clive was around. Clive was a proper writer, which Ian respected, so he wouldn’t try it on.’
The tenancy of number 40 Oval Mansions was transferred to Ian, and on 22 April he and Denise Roudette moved into the tiny flat. It had limited plumbing and was dominated by the nearby gasworks, but it overlooked the Oval cricket ground and for three pounds a week was a steal. The building itself was part of the estate of the Duchy of Cornwall, who employed two ageing spinsters, Miss Piall and Miss Utin, to collect the rent. Three flights of stairs – fifty-one steps in total – were no problem for Ian, who had become fit and lean through tireless gigging with the Kilburns.
Ian told friends that he now lived at ‘Catshit Mansions’, lest anyone should presume his new address was some grand dwelling. Shortly after taking up residency he encountered one Fred Rowe, who lived on the first floor at number 37 and worked as a glazier for the council. Fred, who was in his late thirties, was balding, wiry and muscular and insisted on giving Ian a hand with carrying various items upstairs. He struck Ian as the sort of man one shouldn’t argue with, and Ian’s instincts were quickly proven sound. ‘Ian wasn’t keen on him initially,’ says Denise. ‘All he could hear from their flat were endless arguments between Fred and his girlfriend, Val. Sometimes Fred would open his window and shout: “Sorry neighbours!” One day I struck up a conversation with him and he said, “Oh, do you live upstairs with the little guy? You must come down for a chat.”’
Over cups of tea, Ian sat in rapt attention as Rowe related details of his criminal past. As a child in wartime Battersea, he’d been forced to steal food from bombed-out shops to keep his family alive and, from there, he drifted into crime. He had been in and out of prison throughout his adult life for his involvement with south London’s most notorious safe-cracking gang, under the stewardship of the infamous Johnny Pyatt. Fred’s party trick, Ian learnt, was shinning up a drainpipe to enter a warehouse building through a top-floor window, earning him the nickname ‘Spider’. He would then disable the alarm, allowing the rest of the gang to break in. On his last fateful job, Fred slipped on a drainpipe collar and fell three storeys, only to be discovered by police the next morning, unconscious with multiple fractures.
Fred still dabbled in crime, but he was at a crossroads; either he had to go straight or face the prospect of interminable porridge. A ten-year stretch in Parkhurst
had gone some way to curtailing his love of heights, but meeting Ian was Fred’s true ‘road to Damascus’. ‘I’ll never forget the day Fred got some legitimate money,’ recalls Denise. He felt really strange about it. He and Val needed a fridge, and he talked to Ian about it. Fred said, “I’ve got a mate who can get me a fridge,” and Ian said, “Why don’t you go and buy a fridge, Fred?” Fred said, “What do you mean, buy a fridge?” We’d bought a cooker on hire purchase and suggested this method to him. When Fred bought his fridge he had tears in his eyes. Going straight was a real struggle because he had to re-educate himself. He was suffering from withdrawal symptoms, but Ian was amazing support.’
Ian was gripped by Fred’s underworld tales, and Fred was equally taken with Ian’s artistic talents. ‘Artists have always been a source of amazement to me,’ says Fred. ‘Ian could get a bit of paper and out of it an image would appear. Amazing, isn’t it? He told me he had a band called Kilburn and the High Roads and the oddments he had, the dwarf and the crippled drummer. I was amazed, because he didn’t look like a band bloke. He invited me to some of his gigs, but I never got round to it until the day he knocked on my door and said, “Our van’s broken down, can you take us to Peckham?”’
Ensconced in his third-floor flat, Ian bolstered his spirits by confiding in Roberta Bayley. Just three days after moving in he wrote: ‘My love is warm in my skinny chest and your little tits will find it just the same. I’ve dropped half a stone and am decorating this joint when I get time . . . my new leg came and it lies there and waits to be walked about with, but the suede bootees are not ready. I’ve seen the half-finished items and they look horribly surgical . . . I wish I could afford a gold tooth and a warm swimming pool.’ As he wrote the lengthy, detailed missive, he dined on low-fat fare, terrified of gaining weight, although each mouthful of Ryvita and soft brown egg and apple was washed down with alcohol. ‘Oh God!’ he wrote, ‘one egg gone, degeneration of handwriting apparent . . . the drunkenness is the same as when you were here and I’m not with another person. Not in love. No parties no cocaine no no no . . .’
Ian’s depression was accelerated by the failures of the Kilburns and what he saw as a deterioration in his professional relationship with Charlie Gillett and Gordon Nelki, who were now busy submitting the group’s tapes to various record companies. The first glimmer of hope came from Richard Branson’s Virgin Records, whose A&R man, Jumbo Vanrenen, was enthusiastic, but Ian told his managers he was not going with a ‘hippie company’. Charlie Gillett says, ‘It’s very difficult for the manager who is trying to weave his way through the thicket of the music industry if the artiste keeps changing the target. Ian was an absolute prototype of that destructive sort of person you find in groups.’
Gordon Nelki felt that managing Ian was like climbing a ladder, only to have Ian pull the ladder away and everyone would go back three spaces. ‘He didn’t like anybody else knowing the plot,’ says Gordon, ‘and retained his power by keeping everybody apart. If anybody thought they had a handle on where this thing was supposed to be going, Ian would throw a spanner in the works and disrupt it. He told me that one of his principles was to “make sure that you’re always in debt to the people around you, then you’ve got them”. He gave us all hell. You could put it down to the school he went to and the ego a front man needs in order to show off, but with his so-called disadvantages, for Ian to become a pop musician was an outrageous idea. He could hardly walk down the street, but the vision he put together was amazing, brilliant. It attracted spectacular attention from the start.’
Whatever Ian’s talents, Nelki and Gillett both feel that Russell Hardy’s musical contribution should not be over-looked. ‘They were equal in my mind,’ says Gordon. In ‘Crippled with Nerves’, a tender soul ballad enhanced by a sublime Davey Payne saxophone solo, one might imagine that Ian was making a play on his own disability, as he told us he couldn’t ‘give the girl the respect she deserves’ because he was ‘shaking with fright’, but he’d actually written the words with co-writer Russell in mind.
Russell had been shaking with fright ever since he met Ian in 1965. He was still lacking in confidence nine years later, but confesses to developing ‘a slight swagger’ as the songs they had written together looked like they might see the light of vinyl. But Russell too was tiring of the Kilburns’ desperate situation and having to play the same arrangements every night just because Ian depended on it. When he received a call from Charlie Hart, inviting him to join a new band, he was tempted by the opportunity to stretch his musical skills.
Whispers of a possible betrayal reached Ian, who realized he was about to lose his songwriting partner and ad hoc chauffeur. An eruption was inevitable. It happened on 4 May, ten minutes before show time at Clarence’s in Halifax, when Ian casually commented to Russell: ‘I’ve heard you’re doing this thing with Charlie Hart, we need to talk about it.’ Russell told Ian he didn’t want to discuss it and walked away. ‘Ian started going mental, stamping his feet and yelling,’ recalls Russell. ‘He started shouting, “You fucking nobody! I don’t need you!” I walked out of the building and kept on walking. My girlfriend Angela got a phone call in the middle of the night from somewhere on the M1, and her dad had to come and get me.’
Guitarist Ed Speight covered for the departed Russell Hardy when the Kilburns played Biba’s Rainbow Room on 19 May, atop the old Derry and Toms department store in Kensington High Street. Pub rock veteran George Butler played drums. The venue was celebrating the opening of its roof garden restaurant, and complimentary drinks were served to the invitees. Denise and Betty attended separately, and Ian flitted between them, consuming twelve measures of crème de menthe, followed by several brandies at the Speakeasy later that evening and a sore head the following morning. During the weeks that followed, he grew more dissatisfied as gigs were cancelled at short notice and record company interest started to wane.
As the Kilburns tottered on the brink of disaster, Ian pestered Charlie Gillett for answers, but none were forthcoming. There was the prospect of a pay-off from Warners, not that this would necessarily improve Ian’s personal finances. He yearned to have a telephone installed at Oval Mansions but couldn’t afford the connection fee. He occupied his time by decorating the flat, with a red and brown colour scheme in the bedroom, and fixing the shower. ‘I’ve put plain grainy wooden shutters up for beauty and quiet, and it has a 6’6” mirror and a heated wall,’ he wrote Roberta Bayley, his pen in danger of catching fire as he let his imagination run riot, telling her of all the things they could get up to if only she would come to London.
Within days of his discussions with Ian, Charlie Gillett received a visit from a large, jovial man named Tommy Roberts, purporting to be ‘helping Ian’. It became obvious that Roberts was assuming the role of manager. This disappointed Gillett, who, with Gordon Nelki, had put in a lot of hours on the Kilburns, but acknowledges that Ian may have been restless and in need of a change. ‘We were very low key in terms of chutzpah,’ says Gillett, ‘and I think Ian wanted somebody who was more likely to scam.’
The group’s booking agent, Paul Conroy of Charisma Artists, had suggested to Ian he should think about Tommy Roberts. Ian said, ‘I knew Tommy vaguely. He was a mate of Peter Blake’s. He was more like Flash Harry, and he knew about clothes.’ Roberts, however, was not the only prospective manager in the frame. ‘By this time I suppose I had started getting more ambitious than formerly,’ Ian continued, possibly referring to his secret meetings with Justin de Villeneuve, then husband and manager of the model Twiggy. Discussions were going well until de Villeneuve confessed he could not promise to be at Ian’s beck and call twenty-four hours a day. ‘Ian wanted 100 per cent, he wanted your blood,’ says Keith Lucas. ‘You had to give your life to Ian, that’s the way it was. He blew Justin out.’
So it fell to Tommy Roberts to take over management of the Kilburns. Roberts had studied art and design at Goldsmiths College in the late 1950s. He had been the proprietor of Kleptomania, a boutique near
Carnaby Street that once supplied Jimi Hendrix with his crushed velvet hipsters. Later, Roberts became ‘Mr Freedom’, with a thriving clothes and furniture business in the Kings Road, with celebrity customers including the Rolling Stones and Pablo Picasso. He employed as assistants Malcolm McLaren and Bernie Rhodes, future managers of the Sex Pistols and the Clash respectively. McLaren remembers Roberts as ‘a character out of an Ealing comedy, a jovial, lovable creature, a really brilliant icon of London.’
Roberts also opened a basement restaurant called ‘Mr Feed’em’, which offered brightly coloured cuisine. Over the next thirty years, he could be found lurking behind the cash register in a succession of London stores selling everything from retro fashion to cutting-edge home-ware. In Ian’s eyes, he had other important credentials, such as a thorough appreciation of jazz and pop style, a terrific sense of humour and a genuine cockney accent. He also had a partner named Willie Daly, who was business cool personified. ‘Tommy had that kind of verbal,’ said Ian. ‘He had it down, he had the humour. “I got the instant hippie kit here . . . go to Pontins, get the Indian bedspread, cut it in half, get the bell, today’s the first day of the rest of your life . . . instant hippie kit! Forty-two bob!”’
‘He was a bit of a mouth,’ says Denise Roudette. ‘He was Mr Showbiz. I think Ian felt that this was the missing element – someone who could wave the flag for the band. Things started getting more energetic, the Kings Road, Vivienne Westwood’s shop, clothes for the boys. We had a bit of money in the bank and it had been very carefully handled up until that point. Within three days, Tommy had blown the lot.’