Home Random Page


CATEGORIES:

BiologyChemistryConstructionCultureEcologyEconomyElectronicsFinanceGeographyHistoryInformaticsLawMathematicsMechanicsMedicineOtherPedagogyPhilosophyPhysicsPolicyPsychologySociologySportTourism






Comic Cuts

 

WHEN Oscar retired, they did manage to bring them­selves to give him a farewell dinner as well as his encyclopaedia. It was still not clear who was to succeed him. I think the general feeling about me was: This young upstart is not experienced enough yet. They’ll have to move in an experienced man to take over Parlophone. Besides, I had been something of a maverick during those first five years—an attitude which Oscar himself had encouraged, since he was quite a rebel himself in spite of his age.

 

So it was more than a pleasant surprise when C. H. Thomas approached me at the dinner and told me that I would continue in Oscar’s job - as I had, in effect, been doing for some time without official recognition. Later, Sir Joseph Lockwood gave me the job officially, and told me that I was the youngest person to be put in charge of a label.

 

It was a challenge, and I wanted to do something with the label; but the nature of the first problem was quite unexpected. One day Judy came to me and offered her resignation. ‘Now that you’re setting up your own organ­isation and your own department,’ she said, ‘you’ll want to make a clean sweep of it.’

 

She told me much later that she had felt sorry for me being lumbered with her without any choice in the matter. As far as I was concerned, it would have been disastrous to get rid of the one person who knew more about Parlophone’s business than I did, and I said so. I asked her to think about it, and she decided to stay, which was an enormous relief. Apart from Judy and myself, the staff consisted of Shirley Spence, who had joined three years earlier as Judy’s assistant, and Oscar’s son-in-law Alan Tulloch, who acted as plugger, promotion man, and general run-around. Later, when Judy and I married and she retired to raise human beings, Shirley became my secre­tary, and has been ever since.

 

I was still married to Sheena then, and had two children. The first was Bundy, who is now an expert linguist and works as a court stenographer at the Old Bailey. Then there was Gregory, known as Poggy, who is an actor, God help him! It was their arrival, as much as anything else, which made us leave Acton and move to Hatfield, the only place where I could afford a house. It cost £2400, and having managed to get a 90’Y mortgage I was just able to scrape together the remaining £250 to attain the exalted rank of householder.

 

I wasn’t the only one to move. The office space at Abbey Road was needed for other things, and we all moved to Great Castle Street, in the middle of the rag-trade district. Ironically, the AIR studios now look down on those offices, of which Parlophone were given half the top floor. But the fact that all the labels made the physical move together didn’t prevent the continuing rivalry between them, a rivalry in which Parlophone suffered great disadvantages.

 

Wally Ridley on HMV and Norman Newell on Columbia both had tie-ups with American labels. Norman was a lyric writer as well as a record man. He always wanted to be a Stephen Sondheim. He wrote good enough lyrics, certainly, but his main strength came from his ability to handle big showbiz entertainers. He specialised in making original-cast recordings, especially of English shows, for Columbia. Columbia was an English company, but was tied up with the American Columbia Records and exchanged catalogues with them, so that they were able to put out over here such huge names as Mitch Miller, Guy Mitchell, Frankie Laine, Doris Day and Johnny Ray. Then, around 1952, the axe fell. American Columbia broke off the contract with EMI, cutting off the supply of these great artists. The contract was given to Phillips of Holland, who at that time didn’t have a label in England. But they knew what they wanted, and so did American Columbia, who had wooed the services of Norman and his colleague Leonard Smith; it was they who left to set up the new label. It was a stunning blow. EMI were not happy.



 

In an attempt to answer the challenge, EMI engaged Norrie Paramor, the bandleader, and Ray Martin to be joint heads of production for Columbia England. Ray was an English artist whom Norman Newell had brought to the fore, and who had had a big hit with ‘Blue Tango’. Unfortunately neither he nor Norrie had any previous direct experience of record production.

 

Soon after this, matters were made worse when HMV similarly lost their contract with the RCA-Victor label; that meant that, apart from a lot of other fine talent, they lost the King - Elvis. At least none of EMI’s key people left this time, but the revenue loss was tremendous. When you buy a recording label, you are buying people. You are buying the contracts of artists, and the talent to handle them, and you just hope that they will all stay with you. But of course you can never be sure they will.

 

So it was with considerable courage that Sir Joseph Lockwood decided on his response. He went looking for an American label to buy. And buy he did. For nine million dollars he acquired a brash young label named Capitol Records, of Los Angeles, founded by Glen Wallichs and the lyric writer Johnny Mercer. Johnny Mercer had a number of friends who recorded for him - some quite well-known names, you might say: Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Peggy Lee, Stan Kenton. At the time we thought nine million dollars was a high price. In retrospect, it was dirt cheap.

 

Watching from the sidelines at Parlophone, I must admit that I derived a certain amusement, tempered with sympathy, from this confusion among my rivals. But mean­while I had to do something with my own label. Exactly what that would be, I wasn’t sure, except that I was obviously going to try to improve it. For a start I had to maintain allegiance to the artists we already had - Jimmy Shand, who was our biggest seller, Eve Boswell, Ron Goodwin, Jack Parnell, Johnny Dankworth, Humphrey Lyttelton. At the same time, I had already started trying to get ‘between the cracks’ of the other labels, by doing

things that nobody else had tried, or dared to try, like the original Peter Ustinov record.

 

My chance came when I went to a little theatre in Notting Hill Gate, where there was a new two-man show called At the Drop of a Hat, with Michael Flanders and Donald Swann. I loved the show, and managed to persuade them to let me have the rights to record it. In those days, the way to do an original-cast album was to get the cast on a day off, usually Sunday, bring them to Abbey Road studios and record them properly. But with Flanders and Swann I decided that would be silly, because one would lose all the audience atmosphere. So in early 1956, when they had moved to the Fortune Theatre, just behind Drury Lane, I recorded them there on five consecutive nights, using our mobile location unit. Then I was able to edit the best of the performances to make them flow as if they were one complete show. That record is still sold today, and was the start of a very long friendship with the pair of them. I was to make all their subsequent records, including At the Drop of Another Hat, The Bestiary of Flanders and Swann, and More oat of a Hat.

 

After Flanders and Swann, my next excursion into recording theatrical humour came when some friends in the business told me there was a show up at the Edinburgh Festival which was being put on by university undergrad­uates but which was very funny. So I took myself up to see it. It was called Beyond the Fringe. I immediately decided to record it, and took the mobile van up to meet the group when they came back to Cambridge.

 

The record was a huge success, and we got to know its perpetrators very well. Jonathan Miller, for instance, often came into the office to talk about ideas, and I remember him telling me the silliest story there.

It seemed that, having been brought up in a very ‘U’ kind of family, his father didn’t approve of his slopping around in jeans, or whatever the equivalent was in those days. He insisted that the youthful Jonathan should be clad in the hairiest and itchiest tweeds ever created in the Isle of Harris. So Jonathan was escorted to father’s tailor in Savile Row.

 

This worthy measured him up, and then enquired, ‘Which side do you dress, sir?’

 

Jonathan, perplexed, considered this apparently absurd question, and then replied, ‘Well, I generally get out of bed on the left-hand side in the morning, if I start thinking about it.’

 

Eventually the tailor managed to convey the delicate nature of his enquiry, and Jonathan suffered an immediate and terrible sense of inadequacy, realising with horror not only that he had never given the matter a moment’s thought, but also that it simply made no difference.

 

Dudley Moore, on the other hand, was the lady-killer of the group, sweetly attractive, the image of Tyrone Power - Cuddly Dudley. He did have an advantage, it’s true, in that he played the piano, and he was the ultimate proof of the adage that ‘If you can play the piano, you get the birds’.

 

While they were at the Fortune Theatre there was always a gaggle of really lovely girls waiting to see him. In fact, one evening, after chatting to Jonathan, Alan Bennett and Peter Cook, I went in to see Dudley and he was in the process of saying goodbye to the most gorgeous blonde. When this lady had said her farewells we sat down, and had hardly been chatting for three minutes when there was a knock at the door and the commissionaire ushered in another female. In an aside to Dudley he murmured, ‘That was just in time, wasn’t it?’ And that was before the show! Jonathan always said that the girls walked past his dressing-room to get to Dudley, and that this heightened his sense of inferiority.

 

It was a bit like that in the early days with Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan, too. In spite of Peter’s glamour, it was always Spike who got the birds, for which talent Peter used to call him ‘Goldenballs’. I guess Peter made up for it later!

I had made my first record with Peter back at the end of 1953. It was called Makka’, and was probably the worst-selling record Parlophone had ever made. It was a musical space fantasy, dreamed up by Ron Goodwin and his lyric-writer, Ken Hare, and needed a lot of different voices, for which Peter was ideal - a sort of successor to Peter ‘The Voice of Them All’ Kavanagh. In retrospect, it seems a ridiculously primitive little piece. Jakka was a space-boy, whatever that might be, and he wandered around the sky on a space-scooter, accompanied by his five-legged dog. From time to time some god-like creature addressed him from the firmament, for which Peter opted to use a Chur-chillian voice. The whole thing was frightful, and in spite of sending copies to every contact I had, I might just as well have tried selling it on Mars. It didn’t do a thing.

 

Now, three years later, I suggested to Peter that we start making singles, and we started off with ‘Any Old Iron?’ an old Harry Champion song. Peter loved it. His father had been in music hall, and he was steeped in that tradition. The record didn’t do badly. Having seen what he could do, I decided that Peter was really an artist for a long-player.

 

As head of Parlophone I had a certain degree of auton­omy, but for a big decision of that sort I had to go and persuade the monthly supplement meeting that it was a good idea, and get approval from the managing director of the EMI record division. They wouldn’t let me do a full album, but after a lot of argy-bargy it was agreed that I could do a ten-inch album, which only cost about 25s as opposed to about 32s for a full twelve-inch. I thought it was a crazy decision, but they were adamant, so I went ahead. The record was called The Best of Sellers, and that’s exactly what it turned out to be. Then, of course, they realised their mistake, and we reissued it as a twelve-inch record.

 

Working with Peter was terrific fun. He would ‘corpse’, because there was no audience: we frequently dissolved into giggles, which was fine, because we recorded them too. The only danger about it was that we enjoyed ourselves so much making these records that we sometimes thought we were much funnier than we actually were; it was easy to forget that we had to amuse people who were listening on record and didn’t have the benefit of the atmosphere in the studio.

 

This, at times, was total uproar. For example, there’s the track called ‘A Drop of the Hard Stuff’, in which a Ludwig Koch type of character goes out to make a field recording with an Irish band. ‘Ah, watch this fellow, he’ll look after us,’ whispers a member of the band, before chaos breaks out. One player accuses another of playing ‘a bum note’, and a fight begins. Now in those days we didn’t have the sound-effects tapes you can buy today. The BBC had a certain amount in their library, but we couldn’t get at it. So we had to invent our own effects. For the fight we piled a heap of chairs and tables and music-stands in the middle of the studio and put mikes round them. Then, as Peter was doing his Irish bit, a chair was kicked away, and a music-stand was sent hurtling across the floor. Bedlam ensued.

 

Since there weren’t enough people around to make a real madness of it, I joined them in the studio. At this point Peter shouted, ‘Ah, mind me harp,’ and gave a chair a tremendous kick, sending it flying across the room and into my unsuspecting shins, extracting from me a shriek of genuine pain. That’s on the record. So my bruises did achieve something, because I don’t think even Olivier could have acted that shriek!

 

A lot of the material was concocted in this ad-lib sort of way. Another track on that record was called ‘Shadows in the Grass’. The idea was that a silly old lady in the park is picked up by a Frenchman. The old girl was played by Irene Hand!, whose idea it was, and we just sat her and Peter down in the studio in front of a couple of mikes and let them go. Go they did, for about eleven and a half minutes. I guess it took about 150 editing cuts by Stuart Eltham, my engineer, to get out all the coughs and bumps and prune it down to five minutes. But it was worth it, especially as Irene was such a lovely lady. On the second day, by which time she had met all the studio engineers, she came in with an enormous and delicious cake which she had specially baked for the staff, and went round handing out slices of it.

 

Some of the tracks had proper scripts, of course, many of them culled from the current radio talent. Bob Monkhouse and Denis Goodwin did one. Frank Muir and Denis Norden wrote ‘Balham, Gateway to the South’. Putting it all together involved writing special music, and the addi­tion of sound-effects. This was something that no one else in the country was doing. After The Best of Sellers had proved such a success - to the private chagrin of the EMI people who had said it would be a waste of time - those same people now asked me to do another record. It was a kind of accolade, which recognised Parlophone as the label for humorous people.

 

But it was only as a result of personal friendship that it had happened at all. Soon after I had made the first singles with Peter, he and Spike Milligan came into the studios to make a Goon record. Harry Secombe couldn’t be on it since he was already signed to Phillips as a singer. One of the tracks was the Sellers-Milligan version of ‘Unchained Melody’, a hilarious send-up which ended with Peter singing, ‘I played my ukulele as the ship went down’, accompanying himself on the said instrument as he did so. At the next monthly supplement meeting I played the track to the assembled EMIcrats, one of whom said: ‘Well, of course, if we’re going to put out that particular version of “Unchained Melody”, we’ll have to get permission from the copyright owners, because you are distorting the song a bit.’

 

That was an understatement, but I couldn’t see the problem. ‘We’re playing the song,’ I said, ‘and we’re paying them copyright, so what are they going to be worried about?’

 

‘Oh, no, it’s not that simple,1 he said, ‘because you’re making it sound worse than the original.’

 

My view was ‘Issue first, and ask questions afterwards’, but the stuffy fellow insisted that we send it to Chappells and get their permission. Chappells in turn sent it to its American writer, Frank Loesser, the man whose wife was once introduced at a cocktail party as ‘the evil of two Loessers’. He listened to it and promptly threw something akin to a fit. ‘No way is this record of my gorgeous opus going to be issued,’ he declared, or words to that effect. He relayed this decision to Teddy Holmes of Chappells, and then, like the king telling the queen and the queen telling the parlourmaid, Teddy told me and I had to tell Peter and Spike.

 

Understandably, they were very bitter. So was I. We all thought the record was a knock-out. But I think in a way they blamed me at the time, and the next thing I heard was that they were recording for Decca, for whom Spike made his hugely successful ‘I’m Walking Backwards for Christmas1. The ill-fated ‘Unchained Melody’ was never issued, and to this day remains somewhere in the archives of EMI.

 

Happily we all soon got together again, and I made my first record with Spike, a work of minor importance called ‘You’ve Gotta Go Ow’. It was a resounding failure. It has always been a standing joke between us that we’ve never actually made anything together that has had the slightest success. Everything we ever turned our hands to seemed to end in disaster. Perhaps that’s why we became such good friends - so much so, that when he got married for the second time, which was during this period, he asked me to be his best man.

 

Since he was a Roman Catholic, and his first wife wasn’t, they had married in a registry office, so with typically crazy Goon logic he had decided that, since his new bride was a Catholic, they would have a full nuptial mass. His children would be the bridesmaids. Paddy, the lady in question, was a nun in the stage version of The Sound of Music. She came from a very strait-laced Yorkshire family, and Spike, being Spike, was terrified at the thought of meeting the family, especially as he hadn’t even met her father: an event which, coupled with the wedding, was to take place in Yorkshire.

 

He fretted greatly at the prospect. ‘I’ve got to get up there in good time’ was a fairly repetitious element in his conversation. ‘Don’t worry, Spike, I’ll get you there’ was my standard, and equally repetitious, response.

 

I had everything organised. We got our morning dress from Moss Bros, and set off for King’s Cross station in the little Mini of which I was now the proud possessor. I knew exactly what time the Pullman train was due to leave, and we arrived well in time. I parked the car and left Spike to get out the luggage while I went to see about the tickets. With these safely in my pocket I walked to the barrier to check how full the train was. Horror upon horror! There was to be no getting on that train. I had forgotten to reserve the special Pullman seats. And there was no other train that would get us to Leeds by 9.30 that night, the time arranged for Spike to meet his future father-in-law.

 

Spike’s jaunty prospective-son-in-law smile soon dis­appeared when I returned. ‘Get back into the car,’ I said.

 

‘What’s happening?’ he demanded, not unreasonably.

 

‘Well . . - I’ve changed our plans.’

 

‘What on earth are you on about?’ he enquired.

 

‘We’re going to drive there.’

 

‘What in?’

 

‘This.’

 

‘This?!! We’re driving all the way to Yorkshire in this!!! We’ll never do it. We’ve got to be there by half past nine.’

 

‘Don’t worry,’ I said, trying to convey a confidence I certainly didn’t feel.

 

It was just an ordinary Mini, with no specially tuned engine or any other refinement, but we piled into it and set off, with me doing my Stirling Moss bit and trying to beat the train. Poor Spike sat in the front passenger seat, gripping the fascia like grim death while I threw the machine round corners and hairpin bends. During the whole trip he didn’t utter a word. He couldn’t. He was paralysed with fear.

 

The nightmare lasted three hours, but we just made it in time. I switched off the justifiably protesting engine, got out, and walked around the car to open Spike’s door for him. At last he spoke: ‘Don’t ever, ever ask me to drive with you again.’

 

The following day, after some tricky moments spent in trying to assess how morning dress worked and which stud went where, we made our way to the church, which was in the country outside Leeds. As we walked down the aisle, the left-hand side was absolutely packed with Paddy’s friends and relations. On the right-hand side - not a soul. We were completely alone, just the two of us, with this vast crowd of Yorkshire folk staring at the strange idiot from London. Neither of us had ever felt so isolated.

 

Suddenly, there came the sound of heavy footsteps entering the church door. They came towards us down the aisle, clip-clop, clip-clop, accompanied by some light whis­tling. I looked round, and there was Harry Secombe strid­ing along with a big, silly grin on his face.

 

We heard later that he’d had to make a great effort to get there, because he was in summer season somewhere like Llandudno, and had had to get a helicopter to take him to the nearest airport and then fly to Leeds. But then, Harry’s that kind of person. He wouldn’t have missed Spike’s wedding for the world.

 

He knelt down in the pew behind us to say his prayers. Before getting up, he whispered: ‘I’ve just recorded a new number.’

 

‘What’s this?’ said Spike.

 

‘It’s called “Leather Thong”.’

 

‘What do you mean, “Leather Thong”?’

 

Behind us, Harry started to sing softly, ‘Leather thong in my heart.’ Suddenly, we didn’t feel quite so alone.

 

Like many comedians, Spike is a sad person, enormously funny when he’s on stage, but very serious in repose. He gets very worried about the state of the world. One week it will be whales, the next week baby food, or jazz or whatever. He gets very upset about things, and this tends to put a strain on his personal life.

 

On one occasion, when he was having a row with his first wife, he locked himself in the bedroom and got on to the telephone. Soon afterwards, his wife opened the door to find a messenger with a telegram from Spike. It read:

I’D LIKE BACON AND EGGS AND TWO ROUNDS OF TOAST FOR BREAKFAST PLEASE.

 

The mad Goon humour could erupt anywhere, whether there was an audience or not. One day, Harry and Spike had lunch down at Shepherd’s Bush Green, where Spike had his first office. It was a good lunch, heavily reinforced with quantities of wine. As they staggered out, Spike noticed the establishment next door: William Nodes, Funeral Directors. He whispered something to Harry, and the pair of them dived through the door and into the front parlour, which was empty. Grabbing a purple sheet, Spike lay flat on the floor and covered himself with it.

 

Harry put on an air of great seriousness and shouted, ‘Shop!’ Sadly, nobody came.

 

My history of failure with Spike was continued when we made an album which was a send-up of Bridge on the River Kwai. It was typical Spike humour, managing to make something very funny out of Japanese atrocities against British prisoners of war. To do this, we had to convey the impression of a jungle camp, with the noises of crickets and other beasts. Among the more terrible things we had to get over was the sound of a man’s head being chopped off. ‘How on earth are we going to do that?’ asked Spike.

 

I pondered the problem for a bit, realising that whatever else we had, we certainly didn’t have a recording of decap­itation. Then I hit on it. I told Stuart Eltham, our recording engineer: ‘Go round to that greengrocer’s in Alma Square, and buy half a dozen of the largest cabbages you can find.’ Stuart came back laden with the said vegetables, and putting them in front of the mike we chopped through them with a really sharp chopper. The result was totally blood-curdling - a most effective sound, helped of course by the imagination.

 

All in all I thought we had made a brilliant album. I finished editing it and was all ready to issue it. It was only then that I was told that if we did issue it under the title Bridge on the River Kwai, EMI would be sued for thou­sands of pounds, even though it was a typical Goon script and nothing to do with the film.

 

Somehow I had to salvage all our work, not least the cabbage trick. Then one night it came to me. We should simply call it something different. I got on the phone to Spike straight away. ‘I’ve got the answer,’ I” said. ‘We’re going to call it Bridge on the River Wye.’

 

‘But it’s Bridge on the River Kwai,’ said Spike. ‘We’ve said “Kwai” everywhere on the record.’

 

‘O.K.,’ I said. ‘So we cut off Trfee K on every bit of the record.’

 

That’s just what we did. We got out the scissors and went through all the tapes, cutting out the K whenever the word ‘Kwai’ appeared. It took ages to do, but at least we were then able to issue the record, and no one could sue us. Unfortunately, not many people bought it either.

 

Sound-effects were always a key ingredient in these humorous records, and we were forever having to impro­vise. For instance, there was a record I made with Michael Bentine, the former Goon, on one track of which he did a send-up of a horse show, a skit on the jingoism of English commentators. Obviously we needed horse noises, and we had a couple of horse whinnies on tape which we put in from time to time. But most of the sound-effects consisted of me patting my hand on a piano stool. In fact, you generally never use the real thing for a sound-effect, unless it’s a frightfully good recording - and in any case, people have their own ideas of what things should sound like.

 

At that time I had no sound-effects library, and when­ever I wanted a special effect I would ring up the chief effects man at the BBC, who liked to do a bit of moon­lighting. He was a real craftsman, and after I had told him what I needed he would turn up with an extraordinary variety of impedimenta - roller-skates, maracas, bits of tin, pieces of metal to simulate breaking glass, and good­ness knows what else. If there wasn’t a stock answer to a problem, he would soon work one out. For a burning house, for example, he would crumple up tissue-paper in front of a mike. It certainly sounds as a burning house would -though, to be fair, I’ve never burned one down to make the comparison. Besides, tissue-paper is cheaper. For the sounds of sea and wind we had a pail of water in the studio, accompanied by someone blowing through the mike - though if a real thunderstorm broke we would always rush out and grab it on tape while it was there. For the sound of marching soldiers we had a large cardboard box with a few lumps of fine-grade coke in it. If you shook the box from side to side you had an instant regiment. The snag was that after a while the box got a bit worn and began to leak, and the operator would be covered in coke dust and emerge black at the end of the session. With somewhat obvious cunning I always got my assistant Ron Richards to do that effect.

 

It wasn’t until ten years later, in the late sixties, that sound-effect tapes started becoming usable. Today, you can get a tape of literally anything, from Evel Knievel jumping into a river, to the birth of a baby. So life for the producer has become easier: but even now, one who wants effects will still try to gather his own. When I was in Hawaii I put up a stereo microphone by the seashore, simply because the sound of the waves and the surf there was so good. I’ve used that tape on a couple of records. Because recording now is so faithful, a tape like that would be better than anything you could manufacture, provided you took care not to get wind noise on the mike.

 

There were special musical effects to be found as well. On one occasion I decided that I needed four bugle players. I wanted the authentic sound of bugles, and didn’t want to use trumpets, so I rang up the Guards.

 

I got hold of one of their band sergeants and told him: ‘I need four buglers for this recording. Can you provide me with four buglers who can read?’ The point was that they had to be able to play the exact notes I needed. A bugle is like a trumpet without valves, so it can’t play every note, only its own basic harmonics: it’s essential, therefore, to write the proper music for it.

 

‘No problem, sir, we’ll get them along to you, said the sergeant. On the appointed day, along came four buglers from the Irish Guards, together with their sergeant, who didn’t play but who was in charge of them. I ushered them into the studio, fetched music-stands, put the music in front of them, and said: ‘O.K., that’s what we’re going to do. Just have a few goes at it by yourselves, then I’ll play you the track that we’re going to fit you on to.’

 

The sergeant looked distinctly uncomfortable, and started to wriggle in a quite unmilitary way. Finally he stepped over to me and cleared his throat. ‘Excuse me, sir. I’m afraid my buglers cannot read your music.’

 

‘But I specifically asked for four men who could read,’ I said testily.

 

‘Oh, sure they can read, sir,’ declared the sergeant proudly. ‘They can read all right, but they can’t read music.’

 

In the end, I had to teach them the part by singing it to them.

 

I needed a different kind of effect for the second album I did with Peter Sellers - the human voice. At that time, Frank Sinatra’s Songs for Swinging Lovers was the big hit, and we decided to do Songs for Swinging Sellers. For the opening track, a song I had written, I thought that Peter should sing with a voice as near as possible to Sinatra’s. Now Peter can sing, though not terribly well, and I thought he could use his great powers of mimicry so that it would actually sound like someone doing an impres­sion of Sinatra, which was the whole point of the record. I played him a tape of Matt Monro singing the song, and said, ‘All you’ve got to do is sing like this.1

 

‘I can’t do that,’ said Peter. ‘It’s great as it is. Let’s use that.’

 

‘We can’t. That’s another person,’ I said.

 

‘O.K., then let’s call him Fred Flange,1 said Peter, using a Goonish name always readily available.

 

So I approached Matt, who had just lost his contract with his recording company and was at a pretty low ebb, and asked: ‘Is it all right if we don’t use your name?’ I think he was a bit disappointed, and maybe was hoping for stardom to come from the song, but I paid him £25, and the record was issued with a credit to Fred Flange as having sung that track.

 

It did very well. Peter sang all the other tracks, and the difference between his voice and Matt’s is quite apparent. They include the classic called ‘Peter Sellers Sings George Gershwin’, which is precisely what he did. He sang ‘George ... Gershwin.’ Another of my favourites among his tracks was his rendering of ‘Wouldn’t It Be Lovely’ in an Indian voice, so that it emerged as ‘Wouldn’t It Be Lubberly’, with sitars and other weird instruments in the background.

 

That was typical of the attitude I had to humorous records. The technique with Peter, and other artists I worked with, was to make amusing records which the public would like to listen to time and time again. I tried very hard not to make the side-splitting kind of funny record including a lot of heavy jokes, because they tend not to last for more than a couple of hearings. Once you know the joke, you know what’s coming. But you can go on enjoying the way Irene Hand! says *a bottle of Borjolais’ instead of ‘Beaujolais’, and you can always find something new to chuckle about in the little noises and gurgles she makes while being goosed by Peter. The humour would bear repetition simply because there were combinations of words that stuck in the mind. This was especially true of Beyond the Fringe. If I’m a bit disappointed about something, I still say, quoting from them: ‘Well, it wasn’t quite the conflagration I was banking on.’ And when we leave the house there is a family recitation of: ‘Have you got the key? Got the tinned food? Got the tin-opener?’

 

In this world of catch-phrases, I suppose nothing became more universal than ‘Goodness Gracious Me’. We made the record while Peter was working with Sophia Loren on The Millionairess; Herbie Kretzmer and Dave Lee had written it specifically with Peter in mind, and for the character he was playing. We recorded it in the Number One studio at Abbey Road, and since I had just been recording Rolf Harris, I got Ron Richards (he of the coke box) to play the wobble-board on the record.

 

It had ‘Bangers and Mash’ on the reverse side; we reckoned it was a knock-out and naturally wanted to tie it up with the film. So I took it along to the producer, Dimitri de Grunwald, and played it to him. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘the film’s still in the shooting stage. But I think this will be helpful to the film, and the film will be helpful to the record, so for both reasons I’ll try and get it into the film.’

 

However, the director, Anthony Asquith, wouldn’t have it. He took the view: ‘No, this is a serious film. This is George Bernard Shaw. Your record is very amusing, but it’s not in the same kind of class as our film.’

 

I couldn’t wait, because I wanted to catch the Christmas season, and I went ahead and issued the record, which was a huge success. Some months later the film came out, and of course everyone went to it expecting to hear the record­ing. They didn’t, and they felt cheated. De Grunwald told me later what a big mistake they had made, and of the tremendous number of complaints they had had. Exactly the same thing was to happen later with the film Alfie and Cilla Black’s recording of the song ‘Alfie’.

 

Following the success of ‘Goodness Gracious Me’, I thought it would be a good idea to make an album with Peter and Sophia - though by now it had become rather more difficult, with Peter a rising international film star: hard to get hold of, more choosy about the material he used, and more reluctant to commit himself to records. But we finally got the project on the road. Peter would do a few solos, Sophia a few, and they would do a few songs together. However, by the time Peter had done his parts Sophia was back in Home, and obviously wasn’t going to come to England just to record a couple of songs. So I said that I would prepare backing tracks for her numbers, guessing the keys that she would sing in so that I could write the accompaniment, and that we would go to Rome with the tracks and dub her voice on there. Then I could come back and mix the whole thing. Peter wasn’t at all averse to coming out with me, since he and Sophia were, as they say, extremely good friends.

 

We were due to fly in one of the early Comets, and took our seats in the first-class compartment at the front of the plane. Unfortunately, as we taxied before take-off the nose-wheel broke; the front of the aircraft dropped about fifteen feet with a bump, and slewed along the runway. It was a nasty moment, and Peter was petrified and went green to prove it.

Luckily no one was hurt, and we were taken back to the airport buildings where, of course, newspaper reporters had gathered at the news that Peter Sellers was involved in a near-disaster. Poor Peter didn’t want to talk about it at all, and just wanted to be left alone to recover from the shock, so they asked me if 1 had any comments. I said, ‘Spike Milligan must have sawn it half-through before we took off.’ The papers promptly reported ‘Peter Sellers jokes . .. ‘, ascribing the quote to him when he hadn’t said a word.

 

Eventually we got to Rome. There was Sophia to meet us with her Rolls-Royce Phantom limousine, in which she took us to the villa she was having built on the Appian Way. She sat between us in the back, and I could hardly believe that I was actually there. Belief deserted me totally the following day, when we went to her flat in Rome to talk about the project. It was a marvelous place, entered through a courtyard where fountains were playing sur­rounded by sixteenth-century masonry. We must have been a little early, because when we got up to her flat we were invited to see her in her bedroom, where she was still in her negligee. This rather threw me, unaccustomed as I was to seeing film stars in their bedrooms at all, let alone in negligees. Peter, however, was clearly much more at home with the situation, and did his best to put me at my ease.

 

Sophia was incredibly charming, fun to be with and easy to work with. In no way did she play the big star in her private life. After we had finished the album I never met her again. However, years later she won an Oscar for her part in the film Two Women. I thought she was extremely good in it, and sent her a note of congratulation. In return I received a handwritten postcard saying: ‘Dear George, It was too sweet of you to send me the note of congratulation. Thank you very much.’ In itself that isn’t very important, but the fact is that few people take the trouble or, if they do, they dictate a note to their secretary. I was even surprised that she’d remembered me, but it’s always good to be reassured that there are still some superstars who don’t forget, and who don’t become inflated by their own ego, as so often happens.

 

If Sellers and Milligan were eccentric, they were nothing compared to the Alberts, who were quite mad. They used to deliver newspapers - perhaps they still do - and con­sisted of two brothers and Bruce Lacey. We were to make an LP called An Evening of British Rubbish, but we couldn’t know how apt a title that was. I was very keen on audience reaction at that time, and we recorded them in front of an invited audience of five hundred people in Number Two studio, where they were ready to enjoy such delicacies as one of Bruce’s robots complete with bubble-blowing machine. But before they came in, we had a test to do. The Alberts intended to fire a gun right in the middle of the performance, and we had to make sure that the loudness of the sound didn’t ruin the recording.

 

There we were in the studio, with the five hundred chairs all laid out in neat rows, and everything spick and span. Just before the audience came in we did our test. The gun went off like the proverbial crack of thunder and brought down about a quarter of a ton of soot from the ceiling. It was a fairly dramatic sight to see all this stuff floating down, but it put the recording back by the time it took to clear the mess up.

 

On other occasions the audience themselves could be a problem. We did a live recording with Rolf Harris of ‘Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport’ and ‘Sun Arise’, and to make him feel at home I got a load of Australians along for the audience. To make them feel at home I had cases of Swan lager specially brought in. That did it. We couldn’t get them out of the canteen, and those who did make their way to the studio were trying to put cans of the liquid in the echo-chamber or anywhere else they could find. In the end I appealed: ‘Come on, chaps, we’ve got to get on with the recording.’

 

To this I received the typically Antipodean reply: ‘Oh, stuff yer bloody recording. Is there any more of that Swan?’

 

Most musicians enjoy a drink or two, and one band that was no exception was called, with due logic, The Temper­ance Seven (there were nine of them). They played in a very authentic style of the 1920s, and their musical main­stay was Alan Cooper, known affectionately as ‘Hooter’. He was a genuine eccentric, who played various kinds of woodwind and was a master of the idiom. The vocalist was Paul McDowell, who sang through a megaphone, and in order to help the realistic feel of the recording I grouped them all round one mike and recorded in mono, even though stereo was with us by then.

 

The record was greeted with a great deal of scepticism at EMI, and they obviously thought I was becoming infected by its title - ‘You’re Driving Me Crazy’. But it wasn’t so crazy; it was on the night I was recording Beyond the Fringe up in Cambridge that I received a phone call to say the record had reached number one in the hit parade. It was my first number one, and Judy, Shirley, Ron Richards and I promptly took ourselves out to a celebratory dinner.

 

Up till then, the highest I had made was number two with ‘Be My Girl’. It was sung by Jim Dale - now a tremendously successful actor, but in those days my answer to Tommy Steele. Unfortunately, the association didn’t last too long. His manager, Stanley Dale (no rela­tion), exerted a Svengali-Iike influence over him. He had him tied up in more knots than I could count, and poor Jim never had the vaguest idea what his financial state was. After we had made a few records, including ‘Be My Girl’, it looked as though he had a big career in the making. But one day he came to me and said: ‘I’m sorry, but we’re not going to make any more records.’

 

‘Why on earth not?’ I asked.

 

‘Stanley and I have talked about it, and I’m going to become a comedian,’ he announced.

 

‘You’re crazy. You’ve got a good career going for you.’

 

But he wouldn’t be shaken, and that was the end of our contract. After all, you can’t force someone to make rec­ords, even if you do have a contract. He wouldn’t have been allowed to record for anyone else for a period, but then he didn’t want to. He wanted to be a comedian, for which he had always had a natural bent, and at least we parted good friends.

 

If he had been my answer to Tommy Steele, at least I kept my answer to the skiffle of Lonnie Donegan, which was the Vipers. They had a guy who played a bass made out of a tea-chest, and another who worked on a newspaper and played the washboard. They were amateurs, but they used to jangle away on the acoustic guitars and make the most enormous sound. The style was really the forerunner of the electric guitars which came later - in a way the precursor of the Beatles. They used to sing songs like ‘John B Sails1, ‘Cumberland Gap’ and ‘Rock Island Line’.

 

One of the group was called Johnny Booker, a little guy with a limp, who was mad about animals. He had a flat in the basement of a very expensive block in Eaton Square, where he kept a pet marmoset monkey which he would often bring to the studios. It was quite a sweet little thing, but not exactly what you would call house-trained. One day he went out, leaving the monkey in the flat, but forgetting to close the window. While he was gone, it accepted this open invitation and shinned up the drainpipe to the top floor, where Lady Something-or-Other had a luxury fiat. She too had gone out, locking her bedroom door and leaving its window open. That invitation, too, the monkey accepted. It then proceeded to do a tour of the bedroom, unearthing such delightful treats as face creams and hand lotions, which it ate. What it couldn’t eat it plastered all over itself. It then decided the time had come to jump about, spreading the said lotions all over her silk cushions and bedspread - during the course of which frivolity it was, not unforeseeably, violently sick and seized with diarrhoea.

 

Tiring of this rampage, it then made its way home down the drainpipe. The wretched lady returned home, unlocked the flat door, unlocked the bedroom door and practically fainted at the scene of devastation. To this day, she has had no idea how the vandalism was achieved. She will have now.

 

But of all the mad incidents, the one I have most cause to remember is that which nearly cost me my job; because, if the demon drink seems to have played an overly import­ant part in my early recording experiences, the exception was the case of Mr McRoberts. James McRoberts ran an outfit called The Scottish Festival of Male Voice Praise, a Bible-thumping hallelujah-chanting assembly which we used to record. McRoberts, not averse to the occasional joys of Mammon, used to do his own arrangements of things like ‘Eternal Father, Strong to Save’ and make sure he got the copyright on them.

 

I had been invited to appear on Scottish television with an interviewer named Larry Marshall, and hearing that I was going up there, the moguls at EMI’s head office at Hayes asked to see me. ‘We’ve made rather an unfortunate slip-up with Mr McRoberts,’ they said. ‘We’ve overpaid him on his royalties. In fact we’ve paid him much more than we should have done. Now, we don’t expect you to get the money back, though it would be rather nice if you could. But at least you must make him aware of the fact that we’ve been making erroneous royalty statements, otherwise there’ll be an awful lot of trouble.’ The buck had been passed firmly to me.

 

The first obstacle to be negotiated was the television interview, which was for a chit-chat magazine sort of show. Being hospitable, the television people plied me with several drams before I went on. I have no doubt they also considered that moistening the tongue would loosen it a bit as well. I got on extremely well with Larry Marshall, and thus came to be plied with several more drams afterwards. Luckily the Festival of Male Voice Praise was at the tabernacle just up the street. I say ‘luckily’ because, by the time I stepped out of the television studios and felt the cold wind biting into my lungs, it dawned on me that I had done severe damage to a bottle of best malt. Never mind, I thought, it would help me in what I had to tell poor Mr McRoberts.

 

1 entered the tabernacle, its austere hall painted green and brown, redolent of Dettol(Lysol and piety, and hearing singing in the background went in to find the choir in rehearsal. Mr McRoberts, with his protruding teeth, bald head, and spectacles a-dangle on the end of his nose, was conducting the orchestra. Seeing me, he stopped the rehearsal, and came over and greeted me quite affably. I in turn greeted him quite affably, since I was in a highly affable mood.

 

‘Hallo, Mishter McRobertsh. It’sh lovely to shee you again,’ I declared. An extremely temperate man, to whom alcohol was the nectar of Satan, never to be tolerated in the tabernacle, he reeled back from the fumes. Not to be put off, and still flushed with the success (and the scotch) of the TV programme, I didn’t hesitate but went straight for the poor man’s financial jugular. ‘We^e got shome unfortunate newsh for you, Misther McRobertsh.’

 

‘Oh, tsch, tsch, what’s that?’ he asked irritably.

 

‘I’m afraid that EMI have overpaid you to the tune of shornething like four hundred poundsh. And ash you only get about twenny quid a quarter in royaltiesh, I’m afraid you’re not going to get any more royaltiesh for about the necsht five yearsh.’

 

At that, I was seized of the most profound and uncon­trollable fit of the giggles. Mr McRoberts was mortally offended. The sad tidings could hardly have been delivered with less tact. Fortunately his choir were not the most important of our artists. Had they been, I think it doubtful that I would have remained long with EMI.

 

And I might never have signed up the Beatles.

 

 


Date: 2015-02-28; view: 822


<== previous page | next page ==>
All You Need Is Ears | Two Heads Are Better Than One
doclecture.net - lectures - 2014-2024 year. Copyright infringement or personal data (0.037 sec.)