The Songaminute Man

by Simon McDermott

  The worse of this ‘Heath Robinson’ behaviour was reserved for the new family washing machine. When Hilda was finally able to throw out the tin bath and afford a proper washer (that didn’t involve wringing out wet sheets until her hands were shredded to ribbons), it was among was the happiest days of her life.

  Although the new machine revolutionised Hilda’s life, it kept breaking down – it was second-hand and had been bought through a friend of Maurice’s at The Cora. That meant there was no real way of getting it fixed in a proper shop, so Ted would often volunteer to see if he could sort it out. Hilda would try and hold her tongue as she watched him take the whole thing apart, screw by screw, parts scattered all over the kitchen, messing up the floor that she had just cleaned. It would take him hours to put everything back together again but, without fail, there would always be one piece left over. Danger and lack of expertise withstanding, it was Ted’s way of trying to be useful, and deep down Hilda loved the way he devoted himself to making life better.

  It was around this time, in 1964, that Ted started hanging around the Pebble Mill studios in Birmingham, where the BBC was based. He met a lot of great people, all music lovers like him, all trying to turn their passion into something more, but there were three guys in particular who Ted, aged 28, met at this time and who would go on to transform his life: Ben Beards, Geoff Thompson and Fred Timmins. They were in similar situations to Ted – particularly Ben, who had a day job as a machinist at Wilkins and Mitchell in Darlaston, near Wednesbury, to provide for his wife and three young children. Despite the pressure on him to bring home a decent wage, he also played the piano accordion and used his skill to earn extra cash and help pay his mortgage. Geoff, a 30-year-old drummer, joined him, and the two of them got a regular gig at a pub over in Bilston, where they were joined by Fred, a 22-year-old guitarist: they billed themselves as ‘The Starliners’. Ben cleverly fitted his accordion with a microphone, allowing him to play the bass line and giving them a unique sound. Now and again he would get Fred to do a bit of singing, alongside playing his guitar, and this eventually led to a regular Thursday-night gig at the Friar Park Labour Club. The performances went down well but they didn’t quite have the audience on their feet clamouring for more. Fred’s vocals were OK, but not standout, and they knew deep down that was holding them back – what they needed was a real star to belt out the lyrics. They were in luck when one night, as they took a break during their set, a handsome and well-dressed bloke with perfect hair walked up to the stage and asked: ‘Can I sing wi ya, mate?’

  It was Ted.

  The band often had people coming up and asking to sing, and it mostly didn’t work as it was impossible to get a stranger to hit the right notes with no rehearsal. But there was something about Ted they thought was worth a go as he seemed to know his stuff.

  ‘Do you know “Mack the Knife” in C?’ he asked.

  The band played the intro and Ted started the song flawlessly. The guys were stunned by the quality of his voice and his phrasing. By the time he had finished the whole audience was standing up and applauding – something that hadn’t ever happened to them before.

  Ben turned to Ted: ‘You wanna job, mate?’ ‘Ar, go on. I’ll ’av a go,’ Ted replied.

  ‘That was the night our lives changed for ever,’ says Ben.

  The following week or so, Ben booked a room in a pub to go through some songs with Ted, as well as buying a new portable organ to complete the band’s sound. ‘We only needed one crack at any song. He just got them – he always knew the words straight away, so things didn’t take much practising, it was unreal,’ says Ben.

  After a couple of weeks of polishing their act, the band applied for a spot at the local Entertainers Club. It went down a storm. But there was one drawback – Ben felt Geoff the drummer was letting the band down, so he rang up Ronnie Cox, another drummer he knew, and he joined the band right away. It turned out that Ted and Ronnie knew each other – they’d grown up living a few streets apart, were the same age and had spent some of their earlier years getting into various scrapes and scuffles – and they got on like a house on fire. Ron was a real comic and Ted was constantly in hysterics at some of his jokes. It was strangely freeing for Ted, having someone else take the lead when it came to cracking jokes and keeping the mood up: it meant he could sing some of his best notes and not have to put on such a front. The chemistry worked perfectly and no one doubted that Ted was having fun. Ronnie would just have to make a passing comment to Ted onstage and then the next thing he’d be falling about laughing hysterically.

  For the next few months, the band kept the regular gig at the Friar Park Labour Club to polish their performances and to try out new songs. But they wanted bigger crowds, a higher bar, to challenge themselves with an audience that wasn’t made up of locals who already knew and loved them. Finally, after perfecting their act, they were ready to up their game. Everything was now in sync for The Starliners to move on to bigger things. So they began to spread the net wider, and auditioned at different clubs in the area.

  In the mid-1960s all the other bands were trying to copy The Beatles or The Shadows and were made up of kids ten years younger than Ted and the rest of the guys, who were all in their late twenties or early thirties. Sometimes the crowd didn’t always appreciate the different style of music that The Starliners, with their broader musical influences, brought to the stage. But the rest of the time, their refusal to conform was their best asset, something that became gratifyingly obvious during one particular open audition night at Rugeley Miners Club. This audition night was the one time every month that the Midland’s Entertainment Association – a group of social secretaries who were responsible for booking acts to play the pubs and clubs in the various local areas – were all in the same room and, once business had been taken care of, the night became the perfect shop window for them to witness potential talent first-hand. Bands would be queuing up to perform in front of the decision-makers in the hope of leaving an impression.

  The guys were waiting by the side of the stage to go on. They were third in the line-up that night and the band on before them was a young group who had the audience on their feet. They also looked the part, with all the top gear – the best guitars, best drums, best speakers – and The Starliners stood watching them a bit lost for words as they belted out all The Beatles’ and Shadows’ numbers.

  Despite feeling knocked by the huge reaction the youngsters received, Ted and the guys were ready as ever for their slot and, as soon as the stage was free, they set about getting everything in place. The previous band decided to wait in the wings and return the favour of watching their show. The only difference was that, as soon as Fred struck a chord, the other band started laughing and tried their best to distract Ted and the boys by shouting: ‘What the hell is this, mate?’ as they played ‘Mack the Knife’. Ted kept time and they made it through to the end of the track without any slip-ups. However, despite the jeers from the other band, The Starliners had the last laugh.

  The audience were on their feet dancing and after they’d finished, the applause for their set was the loudest of the day. ‘We’ll get a few bookings off this,’ thought Ben. He was right. As the band walked offstage and made their way to the bar, they were stopped in their tracks by a host of agents, who surrounded them, desperate to book the boys for a whole number of gigs. Within an hour, they had taken sixty-four bookings, covering most of the clubs around Wednesbury and the Black Country. The other band left, expensive equipment in hand, without a single booking to their name.

  For Ted this felt like a big step in the right direction. There was a real possibility of making this work in a more permanent way. Every single club they played at, without exception, booked them again; they had 100 per cent success rate. The Starliners were a tight unit and had developed their look as well as their sound. The band would wear scarlet red jackets with black piping down the sleeves and collars, black trousers and a white shirt, apart from Ted who would go for a slightly
different twist and sport a black jacket, a white shirt and bow tie. They were determined not to be one of those bands that just plugged in their guitars and wandered onto the stage. They wanted to make a splash, knowing that if you could hook the audience within the first few seconds, you would have them for the rest of the night. If there was a curtain, it would be opened slowly and the band would strike up. Ted would then stride on to the stage, grab the mike and launch straight into the song. You could often hear the audience exclaim ‘wow’ as they got their first sighting of the slick outfits. The band could play everything for any generation: strict tempo, old-time dancing, Latin American, rock and roll – they covered it all.

  The very thing they had been mocked for became their calling card, also helped by the fact that the 1960s craze for ballroom dancing had hit fever pitch and there were very few bands who could cater to that as most were beginning a love affair with rock. The brilliance of the music favoured by Ted and the boys was that it lent itself beautifully to quicksteps, foxtrots or waltzes. The Starliners would simply adjust the tempo and it became great music for all occasions – the dance floor was full to capacity at every gig and the audience, whatever the age, couldn’t get enough. The band never had to audition again.

  The Starliners were ambitious and being creative was something Ted excelled at. He thought about every note, every movement, what they would all wear and even how they would stand on the stage in front of the audience – all for maximum impact and designed to put on the best show possible. Sometimes the band would tinker with a song so that they could put their own spin on a classic and really bring the house down. All of this came as second nature to Ted, but he had to admit he didn’t really have a head for business. That fell to Ben, who took over the day-to-day running of things and dealt with the bookings and the fair splitting of the profits. The booking requests started coming from further afield and they had clubs in Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool asking them to do gigs. They all agreed to put a limit on how far they were prepared to travel as they had day jobs, so they settled on a 40-mile radius as the maximum distance.

  By this time the band began to rehearse regularly in a room in St Giles Church Hall in Willenhall. A group called The Inbetweens used to rehearse in the room before them and as the two groups were swapping over they’d usually have a chat about which gigs they were doing and what was coming up. ‘In later years that band went massive,’ says Ben. ‘It was Noddy Holder and they became the 70s glam-rock superstars Slade.’

  Christmas was a bumper time for The Starliners – they were booked practically every night throughout December. ‘I don’t know how we did it,’ says Ben. ‘We used to do about twenty-six or twenty-seven nights that month. We’d get home around two o’clock in the morning, go to bed, and be up for work at seven, then get home around 5 p.m., have a quick nap for an hour, pack up and then be at another club for seven the next night. But the money we made was unbelievable. I reckon in today’s money we’d be getting around £1,500 for each of those nights.

  ‘We were beginning to get really well known by this time. Whenever we did a gig, we’d turn up and often find “House Full” notices on the outside of venues,’ he adds.

  The Starliners were beginning to acquire a huge following and Ted was always was very popular with the ladies. ‘We used to have to sneak him out by the back door to the car park sometimes because of all the women who were after him at the end of the night,’ says Ben. ‘You’d be onstage and you’d see all these women throwing their telephone numbers on the stage. But he hardly went with any of them. I think he was seeing someone at the time. But the groupies could be too much sometimes – they’d be literally throwing themselves at you. It wasn’t pretty.’

  As with everything to do with his romantic life, Ted kept his cards close to his chest. The band suspected he was seeing someone, but his friends and family had no idea that he was also still in touch with Iris.

  ‘Well, after we split up, we still kept in touch,’ she says. ‘It wasn’t an affair as such. We’d meet for a coffee and a cake up West Bromwich or wherever and he’d tell me what he was up to – where he was singing, what songs he was doing and all that, the band and everything. He wouldn’t stop talking. You know, after we split up he said to me, “If yow ever need to talk, I’ll meet you at one o’clock on Saturday by the clock in West Bromwich.” We could go twelve months without seeing each other and have no contact and then I’d pop up to West Brom on a Saturday and he’d be there waiting by the clock. We did that for years and years – that was before phones. I would just turn up at one o’clock to see if he was around and he’d usually be stood there waiting. At one o’clock. It went on for years.’

  Says Ben: ‘I remember another night at the Bloxwich Memorial club. This club was one of the biggest clubs in the area and all the top-name national acts used to play there. Mac [Ted] had them eating out of his hand. Not only was he a great singer, but by now he had become a brilliant frontman too, with a great line of patter with the audience. We’d overrun a bit that night and towards the end of the show the audience were getting up to catch their last buses home. That’s when Mac began to sing the classic “Look Down That Lonesome Road”. Everyone stopped dead in their tracks. There was thunderous applause. I’ll never forget that. One of the most memorable nights in the band I had.’

  He continues: ‘A few weeks after that we had a call from the owner of Walsall Football Club asking if we could do the opening of their new social club. We were well known with the football club and had already done gigs there. Ken Dodd [great music-hall entertainer and stand-up comic famous for his buck teeth and ‘tickling sticks’, i.e. feather dusters] was top of the bill and The Starliners were booked to support him.’ Ben remembers it as the greatest night of his musical career: ‘We went on first for an hour or so, and there were a couple of local acts after us. At around 10 p.m. Ken Dodd came on and did about two hours non-stop. He had the place in stitches and tore it apart. We backed him for his song “Happiness” and “Tears for Souvenirs”.’ All the money that was raised that night went to a local charity – even Ken Dodd waived his fee. ‘He was a lovely bloke, Doddy was,’ says Ben. ‘There’s some people that look down on the public, but everyone was the same to Ken – he was great.’ The following morning back at Kent Road, when all the kids woke up, they were excited to find the lounge full of tickling sticks that Ted had brought home from the show; proudly taking them to school to show their friends.

  After the Ken Dodd gig, The Starliners were inundated with bookings, there was a real momentum to the group and, for the first time since that very early outing onstage at the Friar Park Labour Club, it seemed that Ted’s lifelong dream of making it big was finally coming true. That’s when the band received a call from an agent saying he wanted them to do a tour of the US Army bases in Germany. It was a massive gig and they would be on tour for weeks. Ted couldn’t believe they would be going abroad – the furthest he’d travelled was to Blackpool. This was life-changing and he told the family as soon as he had the news. No one could believe that ‘our Ted’ was going so far away. For Hilda, who had been so delighted that all her children had chosen to stay near home, this was exciting and devastating in equal measure.

  But Ted’s hopes were dashed before they could even make plans. Ben called a meeting to discuss the opportunity and Ted could tell immediately there was something wrong by everyone’s long faces. They certainly weren’t the expressions of men who had just been told they were going to Germany to do the thing they loved most.

  It was Ben who was given the job of delivering the crushing blow – they couldn’t go. The rest of them had day jobs, mortgages to pay and families to look after – they weren’t footloose like Ted and their responsibilities kept them tied down at home. It was a crushing blow for Ted and a sobering moment for the band – they knew they were holding him back. The good times stopped rolling and it didn’t take long for the rot to set in, especially when the tight-knit group made the mistake of l
etting others in.

  By 1968, Ronnie’s dad, Jack, had begun to help out with setting up the occasional gig, as well as driving them to and from venues. It helped relieve some of the pressure on Ben, who had a wife and kids to get back for. The problem was that once Jack had a formal role with the band, the power slowly went to his head. He started acting as if he ran the show – and that included telling Ted what to do. It was clear that Ted wasn’t too happy with the new order but Ben didn’t want to rock the boat; after all, Jack was giving them a hand lugging all the equipment around and driving them about. ‘He was a great guy but he could sometimes be too outspoken,’ says Ben.

  It all came to a head one Wednesday night at Woods Social Club in Wednesbury. It had been a typical knockout gig for The Starliners and the crowd had gone wild. After a couple of drinks at the end of the night, they were all packing up the equipment. Ted was joking around with the rest of the lads when, by accident as he was unplugging the microphone from the stand, he dropped it. ‘That’s when it happened,’ says Ben. ‘Jack went ballistic at Ted. The microphone belonged to the band and Jack just laid into him – telling him he needed to be more careful. But he went completely over the top towards Ted.’ This pushed Ted over the edge. He wasn’t being spoken to like that, no matter who Jack was, and he told him in no uncertain terms where he could stick his mike.