Still Whispering After All These Years, page 8
Family life was about to be stretched even further by the arrival of a new group in my life. I first saw Wally at a Melody Maker band competition final at the Roundhouse, in June 1973. They were from Harrogate in Yorkshire, and had an unusual sound for a British band, comprising drums, bass, guitar, keyboards, violin, pedal steel and vocals, melded together in swirling, extended jams. They didn’t win the competition but I thought they were fantastic, and immediately got them in to do a session on The Monday Programme and recommended them to Phil Carson at Atlantic Records. Unbeknown to me, Rick Wakeman had seen them too, at their London ‘warm-up’ gig a few days earlier, at the Greyhound in Fulham, and had also given Atlantic a glowing report. Along with Led Zeppelin, Rick’s group Yes was the label’s biggest seller and Phil signed them straight away, asking Yes’s manager Brian Laine to look after them and commissioning Rick and me to co-produce their first LP, starting immediately. The band couldn’t believe it and neither could I. Everything was happening so fast for all of us.
Atlantic brought the band down to London to begin rehearsing for the sessions. I spent a lot of time with them in pre-production mode, familiarizing myself with their songs and going through the arrangements. Vocalist Roy Webber was the main inspiration, with influences similar to mine – David Crosby, Neil Young, Jackson Browne, West Coast and country rock. We immediately forged a friendship that thrives to this day. He is a wonderful person – bright, creative, charismatic, generous, humorous and kind. And he’s a red, my contact for tickets to Old Trafford. Red Webber.
The band began to hang out at our flat, often sleeping over. Roy, guitarist Pete Cosker and steel player Paul Middleton were the most frequent visitors, and their runner, Dennis. Occasionally, all seven of them would be crashed out in sleeping bags on the floor in my music room, or on the front room sofa. Miri thought the chaos was fantastic, particularly all the instruments everywhere and the jam sessions.
I’d never done any production work in my life, so I was relying heavily on Rick to give me a beginner’s guide, but it didn’t happen. I arrived at Morgan studios to discover that he was in America with Yes. I’d had no idea he was going to be away and stood staring blankly at the state-of-the-art, 72-channel mixing desk that shimmered in the middle of the control room in front of me, wondering what the hell I was going to do. It looked like the control panel of a Star Trek space ship. Rick’s engineer, Paul Tregurtha, waited for me to give him some instructions. ‘Where do we start?’ was about as much as I could manage.
‘Sorry, mate, can’t hear a thing,’ he said and laughed. My heart sank. ‘No, seriously. The first thing we do is get a drum sound.’
We began work on a song called ‘Your Own Way’, and I immediately enjoyed the process – creating the right sound for each of the instruments and placing them into the overall sound picture, of balancing each instrument with the others and the decision-making involved. What to put in and what to leave out. I’ve always thought of production as creating the right setting to highlight the songs, as opposed to being a featured device in its own right. It’s all too easy to use all the available technology and ‘swamp’ the recording.
I really liked the idea of what I call ‘corner chords’ – putting in a rich guitar chord every four or eight bars to bind everything together and create dramatic impact. (The Bee Gees have often used corner chords on their productions, to great effect. Think of ‘Heartbreaker’ by Dionne Warwick, for example.) It’s a kind of ‘signature’ that crops up on most of the things I’ve recorded. Roy called it the ‘Harris Strum’, from which came my nickname with the group – Harry Strum.
Apart from a string section on the fade that Rick arranged for us later (I hummed a riff to him, which he notated), we’d all but finished ‘Your Own Way’ by the end of that first day. It was a wonderful and emotional experience – hearing our work take shape in those huge speakers.
The album had an open-ended production budget, and Atlantic additionally set up a tab for us on the bar with unlimited access to free food and alcohol. The temptation was just too much. Within hours of the band’s violinist, Pete Sage, making a couple of phone calls, friends began to arrive from Harrogate. It seemed like coach loads turned up, putting stuff on the tab, shrouding the place in a cloud of dope smoke. By the start of our fourth session they’d been joined by the guys from Black Sabbath, who were recording across the road, and the bar-bill record that had stood since that crazy night with Marc Bolan and Ringo Starr was consigned to history. Pete told me he’d taken a few Polaroids of the ensuing madness and sent them to Phil Carson, so he could see how the work was coming along. The following day Brian Laine arrived at the studio to impose some discipline and, within minutes, everybody but the band and Dennis were heading back up to Yorkshire.
Brian was getting the band a lot of work. They would frequently break off from the sessions to go out on the road, first with Leo Sayer, then with Lindisfarne. They supported Yes at Alexandra Palace and turned up at festival gigs throughout the summer. The album was released to a four-star ‘spotlight’ review in Billboard. They came into Whistle Test and then embarked with me on a college-tour ‘Whistle Stop Roadshow’, taking us all over the country in a three-and-a-half-hour package that also featured an acoustic performer, an audience question-and-answer session and a selection of films from the programme. I took Marc Bolan’s top road manager, Pete Walmsley, out with me to help with the organization.
The support act was singer/songwriter John Golding, who’d sent me a copy of a most beautiful LP called Discarded Verse, which he’d recorded in a little studio in Daventry, in my home county of Northamptonshire. I was so impressed by what I heard that I immediately called up the number on the letter he’d stapled to the album sleeve. It rang for ages. I was just about to put the phone down when a voice grudgingly responded.
‘Do you know what time it is?’ he said. I must admit I didn’t. I’d been listening to music for hours, picking tracks for my radio programmes. ‘It’s 2 o’clock in the bloody morning!’ he told me. I apologized and explained that this was Bob Harris from Radio 1 and that I’d like him to come into The Monday Programme to do a session – news that did nothing to lighten his mood. ‘Whoever you are, will you please stop phoning and leave me alone!’ With that, he hung up.
I didn’t know that he’d also sent the album to John Peel. John’s reaction had been exactly the same as mine, and he too had called to talk about an appearance on his show. Having already taken some persuading that this really was John Peel, my call an hour later convinced John Golding that someone was playing a practical joke. All became clear when we spoke again the following day.
I passed Discarded Verse across to Atlantic Records and they signed him on the spot. When we finished the first Wally album I went back into Morgan studios to make a record with John called Photographs, using the same production team as before – Paul Tregurtha, tape engineer George Nicholson and Rick Wakeman. Unfortunately, Rick was in poor health at the time and suffered a mild heart attack soon after we started. But he was brilliant, composing the arrangements from tapes I sent him in hospital and in the middle of it all discharging himself for a day, to come into the studio to supervise the 57-piece orchestra he’d booked to play on ‘All My Words Were Taken Away’, which closed the first side of the LP. It was a spectacular moment but the title of the song somehow summed up John’s attitude to it all. He resented the production process, sitting around while all this stuff was being added to his songs. He felt that they were being ‘stolen’ from him, which I can understand. Nevertheless, there are some wonderful tracks on that album. ‘Loner’ on side two is my favourite, with Wally featured as backing musicians.
The band was really great to be around; funny, gentle, creative people I really cared for a lot. They were also totally chaotic, seemingly unaware of the concept of taking responsibility. Important meetings to shape their future came and went without them, publicists would set up top-line magazine and newspaper interviews they couldn’t see the value of turning up to. Trying to keep them organized on tour was exhausting. I’d introduce them onstage to discover that half of them were still in the bar. Even when I did a head count before going on, they’d still somehow manage to disappear between then and the end of my introduction, off somewhere, maybe in the dressing room area, in a haze, blissfully ignoring the concern around them that they were beginning to blow it.
Atlantic continued to pump in money. Wally briefly visited America’s West Coast and toured Japan with Yes. Roy was increasingly, if reluctantly, taking on the role of spokesman, particularly during the Japanese trip. ‘Who does your lighting?’ asked a local journalist at the gig in Tokyo.
‘We don’t have our own lights,’ replied Roy. ‘We use the Yes rig.’
‘No, you don’t understand. Your lighting. Who does your lighting?’
‘Well, as I say, Yes let us use theirs.’
The journalist was getting frustrated. ‘I’m not asking you about that. I want to know about the songs!’
Roy laughed as the penny dropped. ‘Oh ... our writing. It’s me. I do our writing!’
There was something different about them when they got back, somehow. Some of the spirit seemed to have gone out of them, replaced by an unsettling world-weariness. Pete Cosker was becoming particularly affected by the tantalizing possibility of graduating to the successful rock star lifestyle he was already attempting to live, and was finding normal routines more and more difficult to adjust to. At the same time, Atlantic were doing some totting up, to discover that they’d so far underwritten the band to the tune of £87,000. The guys were told this was make-or-break time and that the pressure was now on. Having started the second album at Morgan, we were relocated to Chris Squire’s home studio in Virginia Waters, where it seemed to do nothing but rain. We recorded the sound of a particularly heavy downpour, which we used as a backing track for a song called ‘The Mood I’m In’, during which Pete wound out a guitar solo that literally cried with pain. He was standing under a spotlight, his skin a kind of porcelain-yellow colour, bathed in the unhealthy sweat of the alcohol and amphetamines that had kept him awake for the previous three days.
The album got great and much appreciated support from Johnnie Walker, who made the single ‘Nez Percé’ his record of the week on Radio 1. I’m still really proud of that track, recorded during our last weekend at Morgan. Roy had arrived at the studio with the song as a work in progress, having been inspired by a book he’d been reading about Elizabeth Wilson, wife of the chief of the Nez Percé Native American tribe. For the next two days we worked on the arrangement, beginning with a lone piano introduction up to Roy’s vocals, adding more voices on the first chorus. As other instruments come in one by one, the track gradually builds through Pete Sage’s beautiful violin section to a glorious, swirling steel guitar solo by Paul Middleton, arriving at the final chorus before the instruments pull back Phil Spector-style, re-building again on the fade. By the end of the second afternoon the track was mixed and finished. I thought it sounded absolutely wonderful, but Roy had reservations.
‘It needs something on the fade,’ he ruminated as we walked across to the bar. ‘You know the vocal on ‘Dark Side of the Moon’? We need something like that.’ We walked into the bar and couldn’t believe our luck when we found Madeline Bell, taking a break from her session, relaxing with a cup of coffee and a newspaper. As well as having been a big hit maker with Blue Mink, she was among the most sought-after session singers in London. ‘Perfect!’ said Roy. ‘Go and ask her if she’ll do it.’ She said she only had a few minutes but agreed to come and listen to the track.
‘I’ll only do it if I like it,’ she announced. We waited apprehensively as she put on the headphones and stood under the light facing the microphone, waiting for the music. ‘Just play the bit you want me to sing,’ she instructed. We played her the tape and took a quick voice level while she was humming along for pitch. After a few seconds she stopped and told us to do a take. George put the machine in record, and for the next 30 seconds we sat spellbound as she instinctively melded with the music, her voice soaring effortlessly around the top notes, mixing perfectly with the texture of the track. Roy was right, it was the consummate finishing touch. ‘Was that all right?’ she asked us, looking at her watch. ‘I’ve got to get to my session.’ She didn’t even have time to hear a playback, but it was wonderful, Madeline. You made the track.
Despite our best efforts, Atlantic declined to give the Valley Gardens album much support. They were reluctant to add much to their already heavy investment and soon pulled the plug altogether. Roy started getting calls from Dave Dee, the new Atlantic label boss, demanding the return of all their equipment. Simultaneously, Brian Laine told them he was no longer representing them. No record company, no gigs, no gear. After struggling on for a while with some equipment they’d borrowed from Manfred Mann’s Earthband, the guys were faced with the reality that the band was finished. It’s a tough business.
For Pete Cosker, the loss of the band was catastrophic. Saddled with a chronic drug problem and with no money, he returned to Yorkshire, drifting through a few gigs, a few jobs, then gradually into homelessness. The other guys tried to help, but Pete became increasingly resentful, occasionally threatening and abusive. Over the next few years his life collapsed completely and he eventually died a truly horrible death in a Harrogate squat. Following a massive overdose, he was found slumped on top of the faulty electric fire that provided his only heating, the front of his body so badly charred that he was hardly recognizable. It nearly breaks my heart, just thinking about it. It’s so tragic that the life of the sensitive, smiling, baby-faced lad who spent so many happy hours with us in those long-ago days in West Hampstead, mesmerizing us all with his beautiful guitar playing, should have changed so much as to end like that.
I was getting increasingly desperate to talk to someone about everything, to get advice on how to handle what was happening in my life. Pete Walmsley said I needed proper management and introduced me to Philip Roberge, a New Yorker working in London, looking after the UK affairs of Dee Anthony, who managed Peter Frampton and Gary Wright. Rod Stewart’s ex-girlfriend Dee Harrington was his secretary, Judy Garland his idol. Philip also represented jazz–rock group Back Door, British blues maestro Duster Bennett and the incomparable Alexis Korner.
I’d met Alexis through Jeff Griffin a few years earlier and, as our friendship grew, I increasingly turned to him for advice. He’d done it all, having first worked for the BBC soon after the Second World War, before founding the Blues and Barrelhouse Club with Cyril Davies in the early 50s, a venue that soon became a famous stopping-off place for visiting American blues exponents. When Chris Barber began to include blues into his otherwise traditional jazz set, he called in Cyril on harmonica and Alexis on guitar, to augment his live band and accompany singer Ottilie Patterson. It was a learning curve for both of them, and they soon broke away to form Blues Incorporated in 1961 and set up the Ealing Rhythm and Blues Club in a basement underneath the local ABC bakery.
Blues Incorporated variously included musicians drawn to the Ealing Club from all over Britain. Young hopefuls such as Long John Baldry, Jack Bruce, Ginger Baker, Eric Burdon, Graham Bond, Charlie Watts, Brian Jones and, briefly, Mick Jagger were part of the ever-changing line-up of the group. The encouragement and on-going support and enthusiasm Alexis so willingly offered were proving crucial to the development of a whole new generation of young British talent, his protégés going on to find later success with bands such as Cream, The Animals and The Rolling Stones. Later, he was the guiding influence in the formation of Free and in the early career of Robert Plant, as well as having hit singles of his own as a part of the band CCS, whose version of ‘Whole Lotta Love’ opened Top Of The Pops for many years.
After hosting programmes with Jeff for BBC World Service, he took his unique musical approach to Radio 1, where his idiosyncratic mix of ‘any music with soul’, effortless knowledge and rich, chocolate voice proved an irresistible magnet to this young broadcaster.
I loved hanging out with Alexis, particularly going to gigs. I learned so much. He took Sue and me to see Bob Marley, at the famous ‘Live At The Lyceum’ concert, in the summer of 1975. The music was fantastic but it turned out to be a nightmare experience. Midway through the evening I began to feel really weird. I couldn’t understand what on earth was happening, everything seemed to be turning to liquid in front of my eyes. I felt an uncontrollable urge to dive into the pool of people around me. I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t find Sue, who reappeared to tell me she’d been sick and urgently suggested that we leave. Someone offered to run us home, and we piled into a Mini, the sunroof open on that hot June night. As we drove through the West End of London, the buildings seemed to be bending over and coming in through the gap in the roof, ejecting a thick liquid into the car that I really thought was going to drown us. Sue tried to restrain me as, consumed by terror, I desperately tried to haul us out of the car.
Somehow we made it home, but the problem of getting me up the 67 stairs of our mansion block was immense. I was violently sick as I fell in through our front door, feeling gruesomely unwell. Sue dialled 999.
It was LSD. Someone must have spiked our drinks. We’d put our glasses down onto the floor for a few moments to light a cigarette. It must have happened then. It was the only explanation we could come up with. What I knew for sure was that I didn’t want to experience anything like it again and that Sue’s resilience was getting stretched to the absolute limit. Rock’n’roll was completely taking over my life and, on top of everything else, I’d begun to see another woman.
