Early Wiggle

Just before Christmas I visited a friend in Scotland who is also a doo wop and rock'n'roll fan. I brought a magazine with me which had an article about some new Carl Perkins finds - four roughly recorded sides predating his time on Sun - so was delighted to learn he already had the 10 inch Bear Family album (above) which contained these, along with some Sun alternate takes already issued on CD.

The magazine had described one of the newly unearthed sides, a version of Good Rockin' Tonight, as a "country blues boogie" or something of that sort. I'm not quite sure to what extent such a categorisation differs from plain ol' "rockabilly", but listening to the performances the question becomes academic: even if he hadn't quite arrived at the full-blown assurance of his later recordings with Sam Phillips, he was already well on the way by the early fifties.

For those who love Carl Perkins the three previously unheard sides on which he is leader, including a cover of Drinking Wine Spo-Dee O-Dee, are fascinating: you get a strong sense of how he must have played for audiences in the honky-tonks, as his intonation and pacing, especially on the Eddy Arnold song There's Been a Change in Me (written by Cy Coben), suggests he is imagining a crowd in his head.

A fourth tune on which he is a sideman, a traditional number called Devil's Dream, is also included on the album: pleasing enough of its kind though unremarkable, I suspect, unless you know of the association. But I'm very glad I had the chance to hear all these sides, and having loved Perkins from an early age it was especially pleasurable to be listening with someone who also understood his importance. Short samples of all four sides can be found on the Juno Records website here.

The release has also had the effect of correcting an error which may have been peculiar to my mind. It's some time since I read Perkins' autobiography Go Cat Go, which I remember as being pretty good, putting Carl's thoughts into self-contained sections so that author David McGee was freer to write about him in the third person. But what I thought I'd retained from the book, or possibly from some reference in another book or magazine, was that when Perkins first heard Elvis he thought: "I could do that!" and boldly made his way to Sun Records instanter.

Which is, I suppose, more or less what happened ... except that my fuzzy recollection was that Perkins hadn't put himself to the test already, just had some kind of mystical certainty, uncorroborated by experience, that his talents and inclinations must  perforce lie in the same direction. What these newly unearthed recordings make clear - or perhaps just confirm for more careful or retentive readers - is that Perkins was already doing that: he just needed someone like Sam Phillips to encourage and draw out his talent more fully.

Actually, maybe I'm not alone in that supposition. A press release on the Bear Family website  declares:

Those records make it clear that he was far from the clueless hillbilly who had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the rockabilly revolution. In fact, one of the four songs he recorded was Good Rocking Tonight, perhaps two years earlier than Elvis Presley cut it at Sun!

By sheer coincidence, a couple of days ago I happened upon Andrew Hickey's podcast A History of Rock in 500 Songs for the first time, and one of the episodes is dedicated to Blue Suede Shoes. I will probably write about this series when I've investigated it further, but it's worth noting here his comparison of Elvis's cover with the original. (The transcript is not mine but is taken directly from his website, here, where you can read it in full or listen to the podcast.)

Perkins' version of "Blue Suede Shoes" and Elvis' had a few crucial differences other than just their performer. Perkins' version is more interesting rhythmically at the start -- it has a stop-time introduction which essentially puts it into six-four time before settling into four-four. Elvis, on the other hand, stayed with a four-four beat all the way through. Elvis' performance is all about keeping up a sense of urgency, while Perkins is about building up tension and release. [...] It seems to stall after every line, as if it's hesitant, as if he doesn't really want to get started. But at the same time that gives it a rhythmic interest that isn't there in Presley's version. Perkins' original is the more sophisticated, musicianly, record.

Mr Hickey, who studied the history of popular music at university, recently guested on an Elvis-related podcast and told its hosts that a lecturer once apologised to students before playing a Carl Perkins track, assuring them that they were only being subjected to this for educational purposes and that no one was expecting them to enjoy it for its own sake. If that isn't a cue for setting up your own podcast to ensure such a situation never happens again in our lifetime I don't know what is.

Which seems a fitting moment to resurrect a post from my dialogue with Clarke Davis on the Doo Wop Shop board. At the time this was written I only had a web TV and the tiniest of keyboards - a strong disincentive to embellishing one's thoughts. Yet I don't think there's anything I would add today.

I go way back with Carl Perkins, loving those economic guitar solos (possibly because I could hear George Harrison in them - Beatles were of course Numero Uno in my early years, listening to the records my elder brothers bought, our father's disapproval bonding us further). Can anything be simpler, neater than the solo in Movie Magg? And maybe - unlike doo wop - there is a sense of writing more directly from experience. There's a very strange Perkins track, Her Love Rubbed off on Me, done when he was drunk (according to Go Cat Go) that is confusing but conveys the sense of real, unedited experience - and a lot of his songs were originally improvised in the tonks, the book says. I think it was Ringo who said that when Carl sings you believe him.

With Carl Perkins I feel, as I also feel about Louis Armstrong, that it's a voice that's known to me: like Ringo, I trust it. Like a friend or family member. And Blue Suede Shoes is still infectious when other records have become dulled by overfamiliarity. There is a kind of purity of heart about some of Carl's stuff, as well as the raunchier, hellraising Dixie Fried. 

14 Karat Soul one more time

Does anyone else actually know or remember this group? Sometimes it seems they were only a thing in my dream: an unattainable vision (and sound) of doo wop perfection, never seen by waking eyes or heard with unclogged ears (I'll explain later).

And yet there they are on youtube; CDs can be bought; they're mentioned in Jay Warner's Billboard book of vocal groups and there's still an official website online - even though to all intents and purposes they called it a day in 2003.

14 Karat Soul were undoubtedly an accomplished act, slaying live audiences time after time, as I can testify, yet they never made it big in America or the UK, only attaining the scale of recognition they deserved in Japan. And that's why I want to do my bit to commemorate a group who deserve to be revered all round the world.

I first came across them in 1981 at the Edinburgh Festival, an annual celebration of the arts in Scotland's capital. Anyone can perform at the so-called Festival Fringe, which over time has become much bigger than the festival itself.

Studying Greek tragedy at university in nearby Glasgow at the time, I was intrigued by the notion of a production of Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus with Gospel music. I can't remember if the word "doo wop" was mentioned in the Fringe brochure (each act is given two or three lines to sell itself to potential audiences) but what I got for my gamble in the staid setting of the Assembly Rooms that evening in Edinburgh was what seemed to me doo wop heaven.

As well as The Gospel at Colonus, as the Sophocles adaptation was called, the group performed a piece called Sister Suzie Cinema which was all about atmosphere rather than plot (five young men enter a cinema, are beguiled by visions of fifties starlets, then leave). The university student in me ought to have dismissed this as the slighter piece; the burgeoning doo wop fan was only aware of the most gorgeous, soaring harmonies, unimpeded by any instrumentation, and a growing sense of entering a kind of trancelike state. Doubtless this was partly the production's intended effect - the characters were in a place which peddled dreams - but the feeling was enhanced in my case because although I had been collecting doo wop albums for the last ten years I had never imagined that the essence of those fifties recordings which I listened to in my bedroom could be brought so vividly to life. And although I had been going to concerts for around the same length of time there weren't many doo wop groups, vintage or revivalist, who stopped off in Glasgow. (Please don't bring Showaddywaddy into it.)

Through a cruel twist of fate, at the precise moment of this wonderful discovery I was having ear trouble which meant that I had to pull down sharply on one lobe in order to hear anything which didn't sound as though multiple layers of cotton wool had been interposed between me and the sound source. So there I was, doing my best to soar high in doo wop heaven and drink in all this acapella perfection, taken to heights of aural ecstacy such as I had never known before ... all the while with a constant reminder of the baseness and imperfection of my human form, my head to one side, forever tugging on that lobe.

I'll spare you the details of the subsequent treatment, except to add that as wonderful bright, clear three-dimensional sounds finally rushed into my head once again, I could only mutter to the nurse: "Too late."

Living in the UK with no internet in those days, I had no easy means of finding out afterwards about the group's career in America, though I do remember thinking: "Hey, don't they realise they could use that singing ability to perform actual doo wop oldies? Now that I would pay to go and see." It never occured to me that Lee Breuer, creator of the two pieces, had chosen 14 Karat Soul precisely because, young as they were, they already had a reputation as ace doo wop revivalists, championed by the late Stan Krause and others. (Krause was a New Jersey record shop owner who founded Catamount Records.)



My chronology is now a little vague, but around a year later I was delighted to find that the group, who had toured The Gospel at Colonus and Sister Suzie Cinema around Europe, were having a week long residency in the unlikely location of the Mitchell Theatre in Glasgow.

I say unlikely because although Glasgow audiences are known for their warmth - Green's Playhouse, later the Apollo, was a renowned UK venue for rock acts - the more modestly proportioned Mitchell Theatre was part of a recent extension to Glasgow's main reference library, so it had no history or particular atmosphere to speak of. Possibly it had been cheap to hire and/or seemed was a handy place to try things out away from the glare of too much publicity. Maybe it had state of the art sound, as that was certainly very good. Or it could be that the decision was the a result of their earlier appearance at Mayfest, Glasgow's modest attempt to start a festival of its own to rival Edinburgh's.


Anyway, I booked to go to the Mitchell Theatre, normally home to local amateur theatre groups, just about every night of their stay. I saw them quite a few times afterwards but that week at the Mitchell Theatre is how I remember them. Aspects of the act changed from night to night, suggesting that it may have been a tryout base, although these were fairly minor. Essentially, they were good to go from the first night - and the first number - onwards.

Quite a few of the songs they sang that week are available on CD, although those antiseptic studio recordings are a long from hearing (and seeing) five figures with nowhere to hide blasting out at you.

I think this is what draws me to acapella doo wop, and acapella in general: the knowledge that you're watching a balancing act, and if there is one weak link in the troupe they will all topple. You're seeing something vulnerable and human.

At around the same time, a lecturer at Glasgow University was trying to explain the twentieth century to us - a good trick in precisely fifty five minutes. His main point was that in previous centuries people were in touch with the objects which surrounded them - eg a door handle would have been carved out of wood, and you could visualise how it was made: by a man, as you were a man. You could have made it. (Unless you were a woman, of course, but that was a whole 'nother lecture.)

Come the twentieth century, however, the advent of mass production and the development of new, artificial materials meant people were surrounded by objects which they didn't really understand and so they lost a secure sense of their place in the world which led to social alienation and lots of depressing - I mean, challenging - literature.

The tutor probably put it better (it was over twenty five years ago) but when I see an acapella group onstage, vulnerable in way that no rock band can be, I feel in touch with something fundamental. There's the sense of intimacy involved: the directness of the human voice, as opposed to an instrument, to provide the music; the self-exposure and risk in the sharing of that voice, in offering it to others for judgement. Then the magical-seeming way in which a group of individual personalities subdue their egos to create a single entity. To go back to the image of the balancing act, when nobody falls - when, in fact, they all seem to soar - then that is a joyous moment which affirms your faith in humanity. And as the listener, you feel like an intimate part of that group. During a discussion of In the Still of the Night on a long-vanished doo wop forum someone pointed out that there were actually only four members of the group, but it seemed to me that those who listened to and cherished that record - were the fifth Satin.




As part of my job I've had to do some research into folk music in Britain. I'd always known about the fifties folk revival in America and Britain but didn't realise that all through the twentieth century and earlier collectors had been trying to preserve what they could of ballads handed down through the generations. I don't know enough to discuss it in detail, though I believe part of the impulse in Britain would have been as a response to the growing dominance of imported American culture. Interestingly, however, on a visit to Cecil Sharp House (the UK's Folk Music Central), when I mentioned my interest in doo wop to the assistant librarian Peta Webb, she likened it to folk music. Which I suppose all comes back to a phrase which struck me all many years ago in the entry about doo wop in the Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock'n'Roll: "music you or your lover could have made."

The group kicked off their Mitchell Theatre set every night with Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy, and both ears now fully operational and tuned in. The bass singer, Reginald "Briz" Brisbon, had been a drummer, and was miming a double bass; but the moment I really knew this was something special was at a particular blending of voices around about the line "And now the company jumps when he plays reveille ..."

I can't describe precisely what was being done; I can only say it sounded grainy but right, rough but undoubtedly polished, not accidental. And a million miles away from the smooth stylings of  barbershop. Or, come to that, any white doo wop group I'd heard. The nearest match I've heard on record is towards the end of the Spaniels' Get Away Child (You Don't Move Me). Below is the group's Catamount recording of Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy. The sound is more basic, less processed, than their later studio albums but it still doesn't convey what I heard on those successive nights at the Mitchell Theatre. The sheer attack of that opening number (cannily chosen from outside the genre), and the promise of an evening of like joys to come, is something I'll never forget.




But one of the highlights for me was Farewell, My Love, which I'd never heard before. I subsequently found out it's an old Temptations number which was as much doo wop as soul; on the original recording the bass voice echoes (or is echoed by) an actual bass all the way through, so really one or the other is redundant, and the song was eminently suited to an acapella rendering. I'm presuming it was a favourite of Stan Krause's, as the Royal Counts also recorded it.

There was also a number called, I think, Take Me Back Baby which included the line "Try me one more time".

But the biggest thrill, perhaps, was seeing Gloria acted out rather than merely sung. Rather than repeat myself, I'll quote the relevant part of a Doo Wop Shop discussion:

The full meaning ... came to me: the bass, Briz, loomed as the lead sang, one last time, of his yearnings, intoning over him those doomy notes that spelled out just one thing: You're alone, Bub; get used to it. The bass was reality, just as he often takes over on "baser" group sides (Pookie for the dreams; Gerald for the down'n'dirty), and his notes here were a death knell for the lead's tattered vision of togetherness ("Maybe she'll want me... "), a bell to toll him back to his sole self, alone in the less than tender night. Briz was singing right into his face, with a sort of evil glee: maybe this message from the Reality Zone had to be given, but he was certainly enjoying the task, and the "teenage" lead was not much liking it, protesting his love and need to the end.

You can read the above in its original context here.

Whether it was before or after that residency, I was with some friends at the Mayfest festival and 14 Karat Soul were queueing in the communal cafe (no Edinburgh elitism in good old leftwing Glasgow). I wanted to go over and say It's great what you're doing - I love the Dells, etc - but I didn't. I dearly wish I had.

Fast forward a few years and I'm living in London, going to see 14 Karat Soul at the Fridge in Brixton. I'm near the front of the stage, immersed in the performance, when I find I'm one of the people called up to add a few extra dum dums to Come Go With Me.

This is a task into which I throw myself with relish - only at some point one of the singers, grinning, makes a gesture. He slashes his throat with his index finger, which I know now almost certainly means "Shut the *&%! up as you cannot carry a tune in a bucket," but I thought then, and even now would like to present it as a remote possibility, that it meant he envied my vocal command, joshingly indicating that he wished my prowess could be curtailed so as not to expose his own limitations quite so cruelly when he next stepped up to the mike. But I admit it's a bit of a long shot.


I'm still haunted by that singer's gesture. But maybe it's best - in order to pull some tattered shreds of self esteem around me - to look up from the gesture and fix instead on his grin, which seemed conspiratorial. So it could have meant - oh, I don't know what it could have meant, but whatever was going on, I was part of it, I loved what was going on, and the odds are I didn't actively ruin it.
Someone even complimented me at the bus stop afterwards: "That was great, man. Do it again!" But maybe he was tone deaf too.


This is a revised version of a piece originally posted ten years ago today. Other posts about 14 Karat Soul: 

14 Karat Soul in 1980 here.
14 Karat Soul live on Channel 4 in 1983 here.
As They Should Be Heard here. (From a 1983 BBC Radio 1 session.)

Try Them One More Time here. (The one-off reunion gig in 2011)

John Shuttleworth podcast and tour

This is to draw the reader's attention to Richard Herring's recent podcast featuring Graham Fellows, otherwise hapless middle-aged musician and songwriter John Shuttleworth (above). It can be downloaded here.

The interview is leisurely, and fairly frank as well as funny, perhaps helped by the fact that Herring once gave Fellows a fiver in the nineties when the latter was having no joy at a cash machine. (Herring framed the cheque he received in return, making his act of kindness doubly kind.) But it's clear, as the conversation progresses, that they do have a certain amount in common, that act of charity aside: both have forged unusual paths in the business of comedy after an initial bout of fame.

I don't recall reading or hearing too many other interviews with Mr Fellows since his long-ago days as spurned teenager Jilted John (he had a hit single of the same name in the seventies before he developed the older character), although one detail which sticks in my mind from, I think, an NME interview is of his associating with elderly men who bred fancy mice; the Shuttleworth character derives in part from afternoons spent with such people in drafty church halls.

Fellows announced during the podcast that he will be reviving John Shuttleworth next year after having given him a bit of a layoff - and it's scary to reflect that he is now older than his creation, who is forever hovering somewhere in his late fifties. I will certainly try to catch his new live show, to be entitled John Shuttleworth's Back, although I have to admit I'm less keen on the character live, as John's command of the crowd seems at odds with his "loser" persona: the intimacy of radio seems a better fit.

There have been several series of The Shuttleworths on BBC Radio 4, in which John talks directly to the listeners and tries, with varying degrees of success, to involve his circle (his wife Mary, his "sole agent" and neighbour Ken Worthington, and others) in the programme.

And there was a bit of a revelation about the radio show - for me, anyway - on the Herring podcast. I knew, or assumed, that there must be a bit of speeding up of the tape for voices such as Mary (Fellows, a trained actor, plays all the roles) but I didn't realise that The Shuttleworths is not actually scripted: he told Herring that although he had some idea of where he was going he disliked the sense of lines being obviously read in radio drama. Given that voices are recorded one at a time I reckon that makes The Shuttleworths an especially notable achievement.

If you haven't yet discovered or been beguiled by his radio show you are urged to do so. Perhaps the supreme example of his art in this medium is the episode from the first or second series entitled Pillock of the Community. This consists largely of John's wait outside a mysteriously closed hospice where he is due to play a gig - and it's left to the listener's imagination whether the inhabitants are simply ignoring him, perhaps having been entertained enough in the past.

John is confused but notices a Curly Wurly wrapper in the hedge and ... well, it's better to listen to this non-tale unfold at its own pace than to have it described. When one of John's songs swells up at the end, it's similarly nondescript yet loaded with significance:

And pubs and clubs
The bus to Crookes
And scouts and cubs
And doberman pups
And woodland paths
And parks and caffs
A Shandy Bass
In a lady's glass

It's a litany of small pleasures in a small life, but their importance to the character who has hymned them is beyond doubt, and for as long as the song lasts we feel something of it too.






Graham Fellows himself said (in William Cook's highly recommended book Ha Bloody Ha) that that episode was the best writing he'd ever done, even though nothing happened. (Presumably that means certain sections of The Shuttleworths were indeed written, or perhaps because this episode was essentially a monologue it required a different approach.)

One of the reasons it works so well, I think, is the way that pathos is held at bay. Even if John is a loser (especially if an audience of OAPs are desperate to avoid his act) he is a kind of poet too, not only via the details noted in the song but in his ability to seize on whatever he sees around him as he thinks aloud. Just as the aggressive optimism of Tony Hancock's character offsets his failures so John's ability to find meaning and interest in things means we needn't worry too much about him: he is well-insulated, even if a song in another episode speaks of John's feeling "alone with the day", which implies that loneliness, or boredom, is an everpresent threat. And Fellows tells Herring that Shuttleworth is "foolish" but also "sweet".

Occasionally the radio programmes have branched out to include celebrity guests and prankish phone calls. These are also enjoyable but do not work quite so well for me. The calls betray some signs of the performer's enjoyment and lessen the illusion. And why should biggish names condescend to give this man any of their time? This is why I'm also less keen on seeing John live - what does he think he's doing in a crammed theatre when his normal gigs are in hospices etc (or not, as the case may be)?

No, his true métier seems to be the radio, where you can believe he's wandering round with a tape recorder trying desperately to collect enough things of interest to fill a programme, even if you still have to suspend your disbelief about the BBC allowing him airtime. The domestic Shuttleworth, irritated by trivial things, with the merest suggestion of what the other members of his family think of him (not much), with the subtext always the need (in his life as in the programme) to fill up the time is the most deeply satisfying.

 Perhaps those live gigs and variations of the radio format are best appreciated as a kind of dream sequence, a chance to enjoy how John might behave in the unlikely event of success coming his way. And to invoke Hancock again, Galton and Simpson were never that consistent about how much fame had been enjoyed by the character they created. So maybe I should stop going down this route.

Far more interesting, in any case, to ponder over an episode of The Shuttleworths when Ken makes a reference to John's first wife only for John to shush him, fearful Mary will overhear. What's going on there? And to consider more deeply whether, in the Pillock of the Community episode, everyone in the hospice really was furtively watching behind lace curtains, praying he would go away and entertain somewhere else.

But that "Pillock" episode is a kind of victory (as well as a humiliation) for John, given the amount of interest and pleasure he can derive from a discarded sweet wrapper ... In fact, now I think of it, on an unconscious level my reservations about the Radio Shuttleworth series with celebs may have been not so much aesthetic as concern for his welfare: this is a man, after all, whose hobbies include measuring reservoir levels; surely exposure to C-list celebrities on a semi-regular basis might well result in some kind of sensory overload?

I've seen Fellows perform as Shuttleworth at least three times, and I must admit I did have to laugh when I saw him at Edinburgh a few years ago with a show around 5.15 - this was for our safety, John explained during the performance, as any later there could be "youths congregating outside."

It's just that for me the illusion is lost a bit when he's facing these large crowds who are laughing a lot at what he says and yet he carries on, by and large, as if they're not. I prefer the added melancholic dimension of listening on your own in the dark to John doing pointless things to fill in the day (and try to find enough material to constitute a show). In the same way that it can be a more melancholy experience to watch Laurel and Hardy by yourself rather than in a packed cinema (when you're more likely to register the pain and resignation in Hardy's expression in a closeup which, with the original audience present, would merely have been intended to mark time until the laughter died down) so for me the essential Shuttleworth is a solitary experience.

Of course an alternative explanation is it may be about my wanting to feel that only I get it - I don't want to see other people sharing my "secret" so maybe it's cultural snobbishness too.

Anyway, the details of the John Shuttleworth's Back tour can be found on his website here.

Teardrops of Burnished Gold

By way of commemorating ten (count 'em!) years of this blog I've uploaded the rare 1961 Vee-Jay release of the Flamingos' Golden Teardrops to youtube, as it doesn't seem to be available there or on spotify or anywhere else. You can find any number of transfers of the original 1953 Chance recording in variable sound quality - as well as a spurious "echo version" which would have turned Bill Putnam's stomach - but not the Vee-Jay pressing, which features an overdubbed guitar. Readers who have explored the earliest posts here will know how significant that recording was to me.

I had no idea that I'd still be finding new thoughts to add to this blog a few weeks after I'd set it up in December 2009, let alone in a decade's time. My modest intention had been to provide a permanent online archive for posts I'd exchanged with the American DJ Clarke Davis on a music forum, Steve's Kewl Doo Wop Shop, which had closed for business not long after our dialogue - or dialog, if you're American.

Over a few frenzied weeks in the autumn of 2000 Clarke and I had compared notes on how, despite coming from very different backgrounds, we had both managed to arrive at a love for this wonderful and ridiculous genre, and Golden Teardrops played a major role in the discussion, along with In the Still of the Night and Gloria.

The Doo Wop Shop vanished without warning but luckily I'd saved a few printouts - though I did manage, over the years, to lose an especially precious sheet of one particularly precious post: Clarke's description of the Cadillacs' recording of Gloria. At some point the page disengaged itself from my pile, and unless someone else has kept a copy you will have to fill in the blanks for yourself.

As a prompt for those inclined, here is the record:





The exchanges between myself and Clarke seemed to be enjoyed by a lot of readers on the original forum. Tokens of appreciation, in the form of videos, CDs and cassettes, were sent my way by especially generous individuals, to whom I send my heartfelt thanks once again. Some, like the late Bruce Woolf, were even kind enough to say that our dialogue might be of interest to doo wop fans in general, and those seeking to learn about the form, which is why I decided, with Clarke's approval, to make the posts available online again in December 2009.

But as I began transcribing the pieces for a new readership one thing led to another. It seemed only natural to add a commentary to the posts, filling out what I'd said or adding new thoughts, and to add the occasionally new piece about some treasured record I hadn't got round to mentioning in 2000.

And then, having got the taste for this sort of writing again - the pleasure of searching for words to convey to others how this music had given me so much pleasure - there didn't really seem any reason to stop. Those old messages were an incomplete picture of my early musical enthusiasms, so why not discuss the other genres which had also inspired me? And occasionally I'd add other, non-musical, elements to the mix: whatever else of the past had retained its importance for me, such as the comedians revered in childhood. (One of them even asked me to help write his autobiography after he had read my encomium, which can be found here.)

At some point the phrase "rummaging in the record shop of memory" advanced itself as a subheading for the blog; it seemed apposite, and it stuck. The image at the top of this blog is of another vanished Doo Wop (and other genres) Shop: the late lamented Cheapo Cheapo Records in Rupert Street, London. (I have written about that too, here.)

But whatever matters have crept in, doo wop remains the foundation of this blog - how could it not, with a title like "Pismotality"? That had been my username on the vanished forum, a nod towards one of the greatest (and possibly stupidest) doo wops of all, the Medallions' The Letter, so it seemed only natural to resurrect it for a blog which revived my contributions under that name. And what word better sums up that mixture of idealised romance and plain idiocy which characterises the best of this genre? (More about The Letter here.)

As I write this I am still eagerly awaiting the arrival of Todd Baptista's new book on the Flamingos, the first full-length study of perhaps the greatest of all the doo wop groups; they certainly recorded the supreme doo wop song, and I still thrill to hear it.

I first heard it - in that overdubbed form - just over forty years ago. Presumably the 1961 sweetening was an attempt to cash in on the group's recent crossover success with End Records: the hitmaking arrangement of I Only Have Eyes For You is ushered in with a guitar.

Not that I was aware that I was listening to a reworked recording when I first heard it. I only registered that this seemed a more challenging listen than some of the other tracks on the compilation album I had picked up cheaply in the basement of Glasgow's Listen Records in Renfield Street. It took me a while to adjust to the Flamingos' sound, as I told Clarke on that Doo Wop Shop forum. I reproduce the post below with a ghost of an apology for its slightly overheated style, reflecting the elation I was then experiencing at finding other doo wop enthusiasts, like Clarke and Bruce, via the new magic of the internet:

Odd as it may seem, it wasn't that accessible to me when I first heard it around 1978, on a poor quality oldies compilation with muddy sound and a dubbed-on guitar. Adjoining tracks, like Sonny Knight's Confidential or the Spaniels' Baby It's You, seemed far better: I got the point. But this - this was Ink Spots territory, wasn't it? That guitar. The Harptones' I Almost lost my mind, also on the LP, that was emotion; the Flamingos seemed out of reach, unfocused, somehow; I couldn't take the whole thing in in one listen.

I don't particularly recall a moment of piercing clarity. But at some point the elements made sense - tremulous falsetto, out-of-tune-sounding yet absolutely right lead, odd lyrics (why "a cottage by the sea"?) and above all that sense at the beginning that we're being ushered into a holy place, cavernous and echoing as a great cathedral, and then drawn together in a moment of collective stillness, as though calmly taking stock of the sadness in things (lacrimae rerum, appropriately enough: "the tears in things") before there's a collective sigh - at what life is?- and Sollie McElroy comes up to testify or confess: "Swear to God I'll stray no more ..."

But it's too late: although at one point he addresses the lost love directly - "Darling, put away your tears," – the burden (and howl) of the song is about regret: all he can do is try to take in fully the time he hurt her enough to make her cry: the time, now gone, when he mattered to someone, and the knowledge bearing down upon him that he's going to be carrying that memory to the grave and beyond: "Until the end of time, And throughout eternity - " Golden Teardrops. Cried, by her, for him.

And the rest of the group, or congregation, seem to grab him there - we're almost at the end of the song now - try to hold him in that moment when he feels the enormity of what he's done. Maybe the wisdom will last; who knows? But the sad, sweet pain - the knowledge that he was once loved - undoubtedly will, if the falsetto weaving in and out of the reiteration of that painful vision of her tears at the end is anything to go by.

Doo wop lyrics don't matter that much: a peg for emotions. They'd be trite enough here if read on their own. But on this occasion they seem to give the group a clarity of focus which inspires them to a height they never quite attained on any other song: Golden Teardrops is, quite simply, the loveliest and the saddest of all doo wop records. In his autobiography Chaplin talks of the day music entered his soul. Golden Teardrops seeped into me on some unknown date. But I never tire of it and always hear it afresh; for me it holds the whole mystery of doo wop: it's religious, it's secular, it's ... beyond words, actually.

At the time I knew the Flamingos' classic only through the Vee-Jay version until Clarke kindly sent a CD of one of his shows featuring the song "sans guitar" and I gradually learnt to wean myself off the doctored reissue. Now when I listen to it I can hear that the guitar is essentially an unnecessary underlining of what is already present in the restrained musical backing by Red Holloway and the other session musicians in 1953. (You can read more about Golden Teardrops in my song-by-song account of the Flamingos' early recordings here.)


That said, it does seem odd that the doctored side is so difficult to find in the digital era. Charly's ten disc box set of Vee-Jay recordings features the Chance original. So here, in order to commemorate the past Ten Glorious Years (other adjectives are available), is the overdubbed version of Golden Teardrops. Please note that sound quality is not optimal - this is taken from an old cassette I recently found, not directly from the original vinyl album depicted in the video, and the audio seems to have taken on a slightly corrugated effect over the years. But it's still worth hearing, if only to cement your opinion of the original.






A complete guide to posts about the Flamingos' Chance and Parrot sides, described by Marv Goldberg as "a wonderful analysis", can be found here. 

Or go straight to the piece on Golden Teardrops here.

A review of Todd Baptista's book about the Flamingos will follow in the New Year.

New biography of Ken Dodd by Louis Barfe

A new biography of Ken Dodd, the first to be published since his death, has just come out, and it's a good 'un: streets, if not whole counties, ahead of the book by Steven Griffin published in Dodd's lifetime, cheekily entitled Ken Dodd: the Biography.

That suggests a definitive study but Dodd offered no cooperation and in an edition of BBC's Arena programme he spoke darkly of "pirates" who'd written about him against his will; Michael Billington's monograph How Tickled I Am, now almost fifty old, was the only publication he mentioned with approval on the programme, and it's still a great read today if you want an insight into his craft. (Interestingly, although he doesn't use that particular term, Billington doesn't seem to see Dodd as a "funny bones" comedian, despite the obvious advantage of his physical attributes, but someone who has had to develop his skills.)

Griffin's book passes the time agreeably enough but the author doesn't have a compelling enough individual style to compensate for the lack of direct access to his subject. There isn't the sparkle of a John  Fisher (Funny Way to Be a Hero, which includes a portrait of Dodd) or the meticulous research of a Graham McCann (especially in his book on Frankie Howerd).  There are some insights from sympathetic interviewees like Roy Hudd but also pointless soundbites from celebrities (Anne Widdecombe?!) which didn't offer much or were quoted too briefly to be of use; Bob Monkhouse - not, in my view, a natural comic but one who undoubtedly understood and appreciated those who were - is the notable exception.

Griffin does offer chapter and verse on the tax trial, which earlier books obviously couldn't do, but overall there is little sense of, or even speculation about, the comedian's inner life; in his introduction to the book, as though in acknowledgement of its limitations, he regrets the fact that Dodd hasn't shared his own insights and can only hope he may do so one day.

Happiness and Tears, the new book by Louis Barfe, was commissioned after Ken Dodd's death so he has no additional advantages over the earlier biographer, no personal interviews with the great man to draw on, but he does a far better job than Griffin for several reasons. One is in the choice of interviewees: Anne Widdecombe doesn't get a look in but "Diddy" David Hamilton does, as do several others who worked closely with the comic. Barfe recognises that Dodd had a stock series of responses employed in interviews, but he talks to the people behind the Arena programme, whose constant presence around the comic during filming led to some less guarded moments.

Another key reason the book works so well is the sense of balance: in a nutshell, Dodd comes over as a man prone to meanness in professional matters but enormously generous with his time, and more than willing to pass on all he has learnt, provided the aspirant comedian appreciates what he is being given. We are given the testimony of a drummer who rejects the offer of a job with a show because he learns Ken will be offering him thirty pounds less than the Musicians' Union rate, but that comes only after his fulsome praise for Dodd has been noted. Similarly, it's common knowledge that Eddie Braben split with Dodd over a disagreement about money but more details are provided here (Dodd was given a substantial increase for a show which he chose not to pass on to his writer) and Barfe makes the point that the two understood each other so well that this was a real error of judgement on the comedian's part. It's tempting to wonder whether his TV career might have fared a little better with Braben still in tow.

Additionally, the research on display here is painstaking. Dodd often referred in interviews to seeing an advert for a ventriloquial device in a comic - but who else would have bothered to find what may have been the very issue which steered him towards a life in showbiz?

Most of all, however, you simply feel that Louis Barfe gets it: understands this world and why, despite his personal failings, Ken Dodd is and will remain such an important figure - and that his death is, in a sense, the final death knell of variety.

The book isn't that long, and a fair proportion of it is devoted to a "Doddology": a listing of live shows up until 1960, and TV and radio shows until the end of his life. But that is understandable: the occasions when Dodd diversified into acting or other activities were rare, and the bulk of his stage act remained substantially the same over the years, so in a sense there isn't that much to report. When I worked with Freddie Davies on Funny Bones (to which Ken Dodd generously contributed an introduction) there were three or four careers (at least) to draw on, not to mention a potted biography of his comedian grandfather as a final flourish. But in Happiness and Tears the interest never flags, and Barfe is to be congratulated on writing as good a biography as one might reasonably expect of a subject who shied away from revealing his private self in public. It's written with warmth and understanding, and unless some gamechanging cache of confessional recordings or journals comes to light I suspect it may be prove to be the final word.

I did have my own personal post-show audience with Ken Dodd once, during which he said that he didn't want anything written about him "which might harm comedy". I don't know how he'd feel about Louis Barfe's book - especially as a recurrent theme is that he always liked to be in control - but for the rest of us I reckon it will do admirably. I referred earlier to a comment of Bob Monkhouse's in Steven Griffin's book. It is also reproduced towards the end of Barfe's volume - unsurprisingly, because it could stand as a justification for any biographer's approach to this particular subject. Monkhouse declared that for Dodd "everything offstage is an interval", and that Dodd the person is of less interest than the "clever, spinning Dervish of a madman that he has invested with life" when performing.


Find out more about Funny Bones, the book what I wrote with Freddie Davies, in a dedicated website here.  

Not mentioned above, Eric Midwinter's 1979 book Make 'Em Laugh includes a substantial original interview with Dodd. Like the lately retired Michael Billington's How Tickled I Am it's out of print but fairly easy to obtain.

New book about the Flamingos! (No, really this time ...)

I am delighted to share the news that there is finally to be a book-length study of that enduring doo wop group the Flamingos - and for sceptical readers calling to mind a similarly-titled post from a few months ago I swear that the above image is the real thing this time.

Written by doo wop authority Todd Baptista, who contributed to the excellent BBC Radio 2 documentary series Street Corner Soul, this is due to be published in December by McFarland, whose website can be found here; the book can be preordered.

It's encouraging to see that both the Chance and End lineups are depicted on the front cover, which suggests that this new book will give appropriate emphasis to the group's early Chicago days - though as no member survives from that time it will be interesting to see whether any testimony not already familiar has been discovered.

As I have made clear in my song-by-song analysis of the group's Chance and Parrot sides, findable here, my personal preference is for the era of "deep R&B doo wop", as Robert Pruter, author of Doo Wop: The Chicago Scene has termed it: a time in the early fifties when session musicians for vocal groups such as the Flamingos were looser and jazzier before the notion of what constituted rock'n'roll backing became more firmly fixed.

You can hear the transition by comparing the Chess remakes of Dream of a Lifetime and If I Can't Have You (aka Nobody's Love) with their originals on Parrot and Chance respectively - see my posts here and here.

Oh, and the post about another Flamingos book, published in an alternative universe, can be found here.

Born Again Cockney: an interview with Pete West

A while ago I was contacted by Pete West, who played lead guitar in Alan Klein's group the Al Kline Five. Pete was in the lineup which auditioned for Butlins Skegness in 1960 although in the end he and another group member decided not to go. I recently spent the day with Pete and his wife Dierdre on the Isle of Wight to find out more: not just about his time with Alan but the larger story of how he got involved with music - and how, after a gap of many years, he eventually returned to it.

Like Alan, Pete was born in 1940 and grew up in Islington, North London. Their birthdays are only a few days apart, he says, although they didn't know each other before Alan joined Pete's group the Art Daniels Five. Pete attended Barnsbury Central in Eden Grove, which "wasn't much of a school - it hadn't had a permanent headmaster for several years." He thinks that Alan may have gone to Hugh Myddelton Secondary but says it's just a guess; the late Ken Pitt referred to Alan attending "grammar school" in a press release. Pete left at fifteen and took the first in a succession of jobs, as a plumber's mate; he later followed in his father's footsteps by working at Covent Garden Market.

Pete and his friends' first exposure to rock'n'roll was through Radio Luxembourg: "That's where I first heard it and liked it. And we liked it so much that Mickey Pease got his mother, who had a Singer sewing machine, to alter our trousers - snip snip snip - and we had drainpipe trousers."

Bill Haley was Pete's idol. He had "every Bill Haley record ever made" and recalls seeing him live, probably at the Dominion in Tottenham Court Road: "It was fabulous - the whole balcony was bouncing." At one point the lights went out and Bill and the Comets were transformed into fluorescent skeletons, sending the crowd wild. As for other stars, Elvis was "alright" but Buddy Holly was "brilliant", and Pete also loved the deep voice of Jim Reeves. In a 2008 interview Alan Klein reacted delightedly when Spencer Leigh quoted the "Drunk man, streetcar" line in Holly's Looking for Someone to Love, so that was evidently a shared enthusiasm.

Like many youngsters of the time, however, it was a British-born performer who prompted Pete to try for himself: "If Lonnie Donegan's doing that we'll have a go." He remembers the details of his first purchase: "I had a bug; I'd been listening to guitars and I thought I'd get one. On the bus to Fenchurch Street Station there was this shop that had an acoustic guitar in the window I liked the look of. It was a Framus, not a Famos – Framus was a well-known make and Famos was just a copy – and I thought: 'I'm gonna have that', and one day I did: saved me pocket money, went down there and bought it. And that lasted three years."

Famos was a brand name of the Dutch company Venlonia, presumably coined to lure potential customers away from its better-known German rival. According to a contributor to the mudcat forum:

The very best Famos was an OK (not brilliant) guitar. Most were not so hot.

Pete's Framus, by contrast, "was good enough, had steel strings on it, so it wasn't no Spanish-style cheap guitar," and he would play it for the next three years.

As the plumber's yard where he worked was conveniently two minutes' walk away "I used to come home and out would come the guitar and I'd sit there with chords written on a bit of paper in front of me, and eventually I got Bert Weedon's Play in a Day, like everyone did." He claims to have been puzzled when the letters "KBW" started appearing on walls everywhere: "Why 'Kill Bert Weedon'? He's great!"

Pete's friend Hank Hancock borrowed an aunt's or uncle's banjo "and we'd go down to Mickey Pease's house in Richmond Crescent and play skiffle. Mickey had a washboard, so that was three of us, then we met Charlie Swan in a cafe - he turned up with a tea chest bass. There wasn't much traffic about and we used to sit under the railings in Mick's eyrie, as we called it. I couldn't sing - never can sing, never do sing - but Hank used to join in and we'd play Lonnie Donegan ... I was fifteen, getting on for sixteen then."

Pete's late brother John found two guitar-playing friends, Johnny Walsh and Arthur Daniels, who joined forces with them and the Deputies Rhythm Group was born, featuring Arthur Daniels on banjo and vocals, Johnny Walsh and Hank Hancock on guitar and vocals, Mickey Pease on washboard, Charlie Swan on tea chest bass and Pete on his steel string Framus.  "We played in Johnny's father's local, the Comus, on Sunday lunchtimes," he remembers, "round the back of Caledonian Road, where all the coalyards were, for the railways. Somebody'd go round with the hat, get us a few bob, and we thoroughly enjoyed that." A local paper reports that they also stole the show at the Gifford Mission Hall where "A large audience ... were particularly interested in the innovation of Skiffle at a Mission Concert!"  (L-R: Pete, Hank, Arthur and Johnny at a later gig). 

Books such as Pete Frame's The Restless Generation suggest this was a phenomenon happening all over the country but there weren't many other groups Pete knew about at the time. The Deputies even attracted a bit of attention: "Someone did a recording of us which was played on some obscure BBC channel that probably doesn't exist anymore, but I never got to hear it."

In 1957 washboard player Mickey Pease left, to be replaced by Waldi Schubert on drums (above, with Hank and Pete), “and Charlie Swan was out, he was in the army, and Hank bought himself a nice bass guitar”, signalling a shift from skiffle to pop and rock'n'roll. Waldi, who was Polish, played piano but that wasn't a skill needed by the group, who bought him a snare drum and a kick drum: "Good enough for skiffle but he wasn't a brilliant drummer. Then we came across George Rodda, another learner, but he was good - he had learnt how to do paradiddles and he had a full kit." 

By this time the group had been renamed the Art Daniels Five, after their lead singer, and they would practise in Arthur's father's rag and bone shop among other places. They continued to play the Comus and also the Belinda Castle in Canonbury Road. 
 

"My brother John, sometimes with Hank, would go out looking for bookings, hence a lot of pub gigs; John also used his car to carry people and equipment about. Hank had a part time job with a local butcher and borrowed his van, a forerunner of the Ford Transit, to carry us and the gear to the further afield venues - we had to scrub it out cause it stunk of meat! My chauffeur was Ken Aslet and his Wolsey Hornet."

At some point in 1958, Pete isn't sure when, Johnny Walsh left and was replaced by Alan Klein. As Pete remembers it there was no warning about his departure: "He disappeared off the scene, didn't turn up." Johnny may have become caught up in the kind of serious relationship which the others had been avoiding and ended up marrying his girlfriend, "so he was gone. Arthur was still with us, so we had the Art Daniels Five for a while but then we got rid of Arthur for whatever reason."

Pete can't remember how Alan joined. Ken Pitt's press release refers to Alan's early days "playing in pubs, clubs and anywhere they would let him", so Pete's brother could have come across him during his sorties to find gigs for the group, though it's possible Alan might have seen the group locally and offered his services.

There seems to have been a period of overlap, as there are several photos in which Alan and Arthur can be seen together, as above, but with the departure of Arthur Daniels the group were renamed once again, becoming the “Al Kline Five” after their new lead singer (spelling as in that press release and elsewhere). "Yes, Alan was the man in charge,” Pete says. “It usually finished up like that: the man that sings, he's The Man."

It wasn't only his singing which brought a change to the group. Alan gave Pete and his friends a greater sense of motivation than they'd had before. They all had jobs, and playing a couple of nights a week was fun, something to look forward to after the grind of a working day. But when Alan joined things started to come together and they “began to sound like a group worth going to see, to dance to” - a group who might be going places. Looking back, Pete can't remember if Alan had a job, like the others, as they didn't socialise outside of the music: "It would be a case of 'See you down there next Saturday.' "

Pete recently chatted to fellow band member Hank and their friend Ken Aslet, who took almost all of the photographs of the group in its various permuations, but none of them can remember precisely when Alan joined, though all are agreed "he was a likeable fellow and full of enthusiasm to make us famous." Towards the end of Pete's time with the band they started wearing a uniform, an idea which may have come from Alan or Pete's brother John, who was also keen on image. "They were like a houndstooth red and black, long-sleeved polo neck - it looked great, even though we probably had our jeans and various trousers on underneath."

It was definitely Alan rather than John, however, who recruited George Bellamy as a second lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist, late in 1958. Alan told me: "I saw George singing at the Mildmay Tavern, Mildmay Park and felt he would be a good contrast to myself and was pleased when he agreed to join the group." The presence of another lead singer to share the strain also gave the group more stamina and would prove exceptionally useful when they came to played that season at Butlins.

Pete's brother (above right, with Alan and Hank) kept notebooks with details of venues played and earnings, which Pete guesses may have been a requirement of the Musicians' Union: “Some professional musicians got the hump with us newbies, said we should join.” I tell him the older musicians' snobbishness about the skiffle crowd puts me in mind of the jazzmen backing doo wop groups in America.

John's records are invaluable for piecing together the events of over sixty years ago but at the time they seemed like a sledgehammer to crack a nut: “I remember us all laughing at a notebook because it had details of money coming in and money going out, and the money coming in was by way of a pound in the hat or on the door – you know, half a crown to get in.”

Two of John's books from those days have been located but a third, which included the words of some songs and possibly even a setlist, can't be found. Pete can't remember many of the songs they played although he does recall that lyrics would either be copied down from Radio Luxembourg or taken from sheet music bought in Denmark Street, and new songs were regularly introduced into the set. They played a few Duane Eddy instrumentals including Shazam! as well as some Chuck Berry numbers, although he laughs that "You never got the Chuck Berry solo out of me - something similar but it was all guesswork."

I wonder whether Alan was writing any original material at this time. Pete doesn't have a clear memory of anything being presented to the group "but towards the end, when we were going to Skegness, I remember doing a number and Alan saying, 'I've written a solo - do you mind if I play it?' I said, 'No, not at all, Alan,' cause I was a bit hit and miss, a bum note or two - nobody bothered much. And sure enough, when it came to the break he played it - I don't think it was anything heavy. He'd either written it or worked it out; I don't think any of us were into reading music much - you'd read a songsheet for the words and adapt the chords. We'd often simplify things. I can't remember what the bloody tune was ... it might have been something he wrote, mightn't it?”

Now firmly rock'n'roll and pop rather than skiffle, the Al Kline Five played upstairs in a large function room at the Red Lion in St John's Street on Fridays for a year or more. By this time Pete had bought an electric guitar: a German-made Hofner Committee, so named because three musicians - "one being Bert Weedon, of all people" - had been involved in its design. "It cost me one hundred guineas but it was a great guitar; a lot of thought had gone into it."  

You can see Pete's new guitar particularly clearly in the photograph above, from a one-off gig as a backing band (the singer is Dave Brannon). Pete had first become aware of this model's potential when watching Dave Duggan's group, who had the Red Lion residency before them. Occasional reference can be found online to “the Dave Duggan Skiffle Group” but it seems they too had made a musical shift by then: "They were good, they played rock'n'roll, loud stuff - both the singer and the lead guitarist had the blonde version of what I later bought in brunette. They looked so good, and I used to stand next to them, see how they was playing it: those two fingers on the bottom, on the E string, and it was almost distortion, it was so loud. And I thought, 'I like this', and that's what made me go for a Hofner Committee." 

Gigs at the Red Lion were not without incident. Several years later, when he saw Alan's musical What a Crazy World at Stratford East, Pete recognised some aspects of Alan's life. The digs at Alf's sister in the show were, he thinks, "Alan knocking on his real-life sister." Pete also remembers a terrible fight one night at the Red Lion, which makes me wonder whether it might have been the inspiration for Alan's Wasn't It A Handsome Punchup:

"While we were playing at The Red Lion somebody came over and said there were four or five lads collecting glasses and bottles on a table. We could see there was going to be trouble, so I slid my guitar behind the piano. Just in time. They came and lined up in front of us and one of them threw a punch and knocked me to the floor. I stood up and aimed a kick at his whatsits; he leaned back and my kick caught him under his nose - what a mess that made. Then it all kicked off. Ken was sitting on a bloke, knocking him about, when he was hit on the head by a bottle - three stitches required there, then. Another one of our friends was hit with a bottle and required more stitches. There were bottles and glasses going in all directions - they had blocked the staircase off so no one could get up or down. I saw Alan in the thick of it, swinging his guitar round his head until it came apart. It was a horrible end to an enjoyable evening."

Another memory from that time also has a link to Alan's work, though it's more of a stretch:

“After a late gig at Weybridge Alan and I had a walk along by the River Wey. We came across a small rowing boat tethered to the bank and decided to have a little ride in it. We hadn’t gone very far when someone started shouting at us; we quickly crossed the river, only a matter of yards, and pulled the boat up the bank. We walked along the footpath and came to a small footbridge, so we crossed over - and walked straight into the arms of two policemen. They wanted to know why we were in Diana Dors' back garden.”

After What a Crazy World Alan worked for some time on a film adaptation of the musical Grab Me A Gondola, inspired by the real-life story of Dors "floating down the Grand Canal in a gondola wearing a mink bikini" as a publicity stunt at the Venice Film Festival in 1955 … Which admittedly isn't all that much of a spooky foreshadowing but it's a curious coincidence all the same.

More importantly as a pointer to the future, Pete also remembers what may have been Alan's first meeting with Joe Brown. It took place, he says, at the Strava Ballroom in Canonbury Lane. "I'm not sure how we got to be there but we went along - we were being nosey, to see what happened in there, and we realised they were making a programme - it might have been Oh Boy!" He recalls seeing Nancy Whiskey and "an old crab of a woman, thought she was the bees' knees, older than us lads, done up like a teenager."

This would actually have been a rehearsal for Oh Boy! rather than the show itself, which was recorded at the Hackney Empire. Geoff Leonard's website devoted to Oh Boy! states that the dance hall at this address began to be used for rehearsals by Jack Good and his team in September 1958, although it was the Four Provinces Club then, and did not become the Strava until later. If Pete's recollection about the name is correct Mr Leonard thinks that the meeting with Joe Brown would have taken place during the last month of the show's run, in May 1959, although at this distance he says it's hard to be certain precisely when the building changed name.

It seems odd that Pete and his friends would have taken so many months to investigate something on their doorstep, especially as the presence of producer Jack Good and his team was an open secret within days of their arrival, with “schoolboys run[ning] the perimeter of the building frantically clutching autograph books.” Mr Leonard also tells me there is no evidence Joe Brown took part in Oh Boy! but adds: “I've always believed Good discovered him when Oh Boy! was finishing its run. Perhaps, like Pete, he turned up at rehearsals?”

Such quibbles do not, however, detract from the historical significance of the meeting itself:

"Joe Brown was there, Alan had a chat with him. He borrowed Alan's ukelele, or whatever it was [possibly a banjolele], and it took Alan ages to get it back - he thought he'd lost it."

Could this have been the moment which ultimately led to Joe Brown's recording What a Crazy World, kickstarting Alan's career?

The Al Kline Five were playing a fairly wide range of gigs around this time. John's notebooks record that they played during film interludes at Odeon cinemas at Woolwich, Thornton Heath and Walton. One memory of Pete's appears to date from the days of the Art Daniels Five, however, as he recalls their starting up and nothing coming out of the amp; afterwards Pete discovered it had been tampered with and confronted Arthur, who didn't own up: "I think he was trying to cause a sensation to get in the papers - two guys turn blue overnight ..."

In addition to their Fridays at the Red Lion the group played at the Athenaeum in Muswell Hill on Saturday nights. "The resident band was Jeff Taylor and His All-Stars. Emile Forde and the Checkmates were on, but then they stopped playing up there and we filled their boots." They also played at the lately rechristened Strava as well as pubs such as the Winchester, the Duke of Edinburgh, the Belinda Castle, the Hemingford Arms, the Swan, and the Crown and Woolpack. Pete recalls their swapping with the Dave Clark Five on one occasion and playing in Tottenham (although for some reason Clark didn't reciprocate at the Red Lion).

The group even had a one-off gig at the famous 2 i's coffee bar where Pete remembers their having a laugh about the tiny stage with its goldplated double bass permanently screwed in: “The spike was in the floor and the head was in the ceiling so you could spin it round.” There was a further surprise when they went outside for a cigarette: “There's this group of people come along, somebody in the middle of them, with staff ruffling and patting his hair … It was Cliff Richard and they were touring him round, showing him off.”

Venturing further afield, they also performed in a couple of village halls, in Weybridge and Walton. Pete particularly remembers the atmosphere of the former: "The village hall was the only thing going for the kids there. And generally, I think, looking round, we were probably a little bit older than our audience. Their mums and dads weren't there, and prior to having a live group it was all records. In amongst Ken's photos there's one of somebody sat behind a desk - a compere, really."

There may have been an additional element of glamour in their coming from London, even though Weybridge isn't all that far away, which gives an idea of how starved of entertainment youngsters outside the capital must have been in those days. Here's a shot of Hank, George Rodda and Alan from what appears to be the same gig, judging from the record sleeves - which, if you look closely, include the Oh Boy! LP:
 

With momentum for the group building, did Pete ever think that what had started as a hobby might really change his life, perhaps even make him famous? He brushes this aside: "I never thought I was brilliant at playing the guitar; I was still learning. Maybe if I'd stayed there, practising ..."

Crunch time came for Pete and Hank when the group passed an audition for Butlins Skegness, possibly at the Aeolian Hall. The season was a lengthy one, from May until late September. Pete was working at the time for the central heating company Maplex. 

"I thought: four months - what do you do when you come back from that? Hank had a good job working for Gestetner's, and I had been offered a large pay rise providing I went to Manchester and set up a new distribution depot. Once we heard that they'd got the gig at Skegness then it was time to say okay, we won't be coming - but that did give Alan and whoever was carrying on time to do something: we didn't drop them in the proverbial the day before."

There were no hard feelings, then? "Not that I'm aware of." 

He did lose touch with his old bandmate for a while, although Alan contacted him around the time of What a Crazy World, which Pete and Dierdre, whom he'd met by then, saw at Stratford East. Pete recalls their visiting Alan's house and seeing him "mucking about with a tape recorder and a bowl of water, making 'boing' sounds for Art" - a possible dry run, so to speak, for Three Coins in the Sewer? 

Incidentally, Pete wasn't present but the actual recording session for that song was the occasion of another reunion. George Bellamy, then in Joe Meek's house band the Tornados, hadn't been told who they were backing that day: "We all had a good laugh when Alan turned up out of the blue."

Pete thinks the replacement bass player for Skegness was called Bill and that Alan "found a guitarist from somewhere, I really don't know." I am later informed by George Bellamy that Pete's replacement on lead was Johnny Patto and that the new bassist's surname was Quinsy, making the Butlins lineup: Alan Klein and George Bellamy, lead vocals and rhythm guitar; Johnny Patto, lead guitar; Bill Quinsy, bass; and George Rodda, drums. 

And so the Al Kline Five made the journey to Skegness without Hank or Pete: "All good things come to an end as they say; being in the group was my good thing."

Not long after that an incident occured which it's tempting to see as underlining the finality of Pete's decision. He was sent to Manchester for a few weeks and found somewhere to stay, taking a few personal things with him including his guitar and a couple of fishing rods. "I got a call to return to London as soon as possible; the following weekend I went back to Manchester to collect my things and the landlady said, 'Oh, somebody's already done that!' I couldn't disbelieve her, even though she couldn't describe who had been up there to collect it." For a while he tried, without success, to track down a suspected culprit.

When Pete first outlined this incident in an email he concluded with the words: "END of STORY". And it seems that the theft of that prized Hofner Committee did have a considerable impact on him. He didn't renounce music overnight - he still had his Framus acoustic guitar, which he played for a while, although with no more thought of public performance: "I was out of it. Once I left the group that was it." Then in 1961 he met Dierdre, whom he courted for three and a half years before they married. Early on in their relationship he gave his guitar away to Dierdre's brother – and, simply put, Life intervened:

"I never had a guitar for years. There were so many other things going on - other jobs, buying houses, children ..."

Then one day his younger son Christopher came home from school with a guitar, a distortion pedal and a Gorilla amp borrowed from a schoolfriend.

"He made a fearful noise with it, so I said, 'Can I have a go?' and turned the amp to a clean channel and played a twelve bar boogie in E. He said, 'Dad, how do you do that?' I said, 'You put your second finger here, then your first finger here, then your third finger here and the - ' And he said, 'But Dad - you're playing the guitar!'

"It came to me that I hadn't told him anything about my younger days playing in a group."

Pete had converted a former bakehouse above the shop he owned into a "den" to keep his kids out of mischief. Over time it evolved into a party room for the adults and Pete thought it would also be a good place for a music room. When both sons had gone to university on the mainland Pete bought "a guitar, an amplifier, some speakers,a large Roland workstation, a PA system etc - Oh yes, and another guitar. We have had some wonderful times up there. I have had people come in the shop and ask if they could come to one our parties."

And his old Framus had inspired its new owner:

"My brother in law learned to play finger style and he a married a girl who could sing, really sing. It was a treat when they came over to see us, and we always finished up in the Den."

And then Steve came on the scene.

"Many years ago we were having a meal in our local watering hole. We were in the rear part of the pub where a very young group of lads, maybe in their early teens, were knocking out a bit of rock'n'roll. We went back to the front bar to get a drink and I heard a bit of real old rock guitar being played. I thought, 'That's not one of them young lads playing ...' I went out back and saw that it was one of the foursome from the table next to ours, playing a borrowed guitar.

"When we all sat down again I congratulated him; he said he had been playing since he was twelve and was down here with his wife and friends staying in his holiday cottage just around the corner. When the pub called time I asked him if he would like to pop over and see my Den - I didn’t have to ask him twice. He thought he was in heaven and we made arrangements that he would come round tomorrow.

"The acorn had been sown."

Steve Crane, who is eight years younger than Pete, was inspired by Hank Marvin rather than Lonnie Donegan. Hearing the Shadows' Apache while on holiday in June 1960 he was desperate to play it and got his first acoustic guitar that Christmas.

"He told me he played lead guitar in a group called Sounds Familiar who had been together for a number of years," says Pete, "mostly playing for friends at weddings etc. He said they had always wanted to play on the Isle of Wight so I got that sorted out; they came down to play at the local blacksmith's birthday bash. Afterwards Tim the smithy said 'That was f...... marvellous!'

"We made arrangements that the next time he came down we could have a go at recording some stuff. I have a Roland VS1880 Workstation, an 18 track digital recording machine with all the bells and whistles, a Boss DR5 drum machine with an assortment of musical effects, a Yamaha QY100 synthesizer - more bells and whistles - a Fender 65 watt Ultra chorus 2 x 12 Amp, a Marshall JMP 1 preamp/power amp, a Boss GT6 guitar effects pedal and some other effects pedals ... in other words, enough to get on with.

"On later visits I would set a click track on the VS1880 to a suitable tempo and maybe a bass guitar or some strings playing with suitable chord changes. Steve was really good at making up tunes, playing finger style or with a plectrum. Sometimes we could complete a song (instrumental) in one visit; sometimes it would take another. I would add or change the backing then burn a CD and post it to him; he said he never knew what he was going to get. And we progressed through four albums, twelve numbers on a CD, which was a fair bit."

As Pete has told me that he's taking medication for an undiagnosed stroke I ask whether he is still able to play.

"Me? Hardly. They don't work like they used to", he says of his fingers. "Steve's even worse. He could play the guitar briliantly but nine years ago he got a trapped nerve in his neck that caused a problem with his left hand, and surgery on his spine didn't do any good. My memory is fading fast; Dave Bold, the rhythm guitarist in Steve's group, has a serious form of Parkinson’s and Ken, who I have known since I was fifteen, also has Parkinson's."

It seems sadly appropriate that the ravages of time have also had their effect on Pete's equipment: "My VS1880 is playing up and I can’t use it to burn CDs anymore."

Several of the discs he plays me on a laptop shudder to a premature halt, as though also afflicted by age, but I hear enough to know that they are very pleasant, evocative of Dave Gilmour, much admired by Pete, and Chet Atkins. Most tracks are originals, though Pete's personal favourite is a recording of Orange Blossom Special which could be seen as a kind of two fingers up to age, courtesy of present day technology. Steve recorded the guitar in one take and later Pete got Dave Bold to play various chords on the harmonica. Dave's condition is now so advanced that "most of the time he's out of it. But I got him to play - 'Just give me thirty seconds' worth of something!' - and I chopped it all up and made it fit ... it's amazing what you can do, just with someone blasting away on the harmonica."

Every aspect of making these albums has clearly been a labour of love. He shows me the cover artwork with carefully assembled images to reflect song titles, and a pile of letters sent to Steve along with the CDs, packed with jokey comments and cartoons. It feels like a substantial achievement, even as the disc I'm hearing is faltering and stuttering.

When I ask whether returning to playing music after a gap of so many years was like riding a bike Pete laughs quite a bit. It was hard work, then? "Well, yeah. We didn't play anything really fast."

Steve would come to see him perhaps three or four times a year: "After he left it was like giving someone a box of nuts and bolts: 'Put that together.' It's 'easy to listen to' music."

It is, I agree, but undoubtedly several notches above muzak. On one track Pete improvises a cod country-type recitation though the voice is too far down in the mix, at least from where I'm sitting, to make out the words. He confirms the intention is humorous, though as he is a self-confessed Jim Reeves fan who has freely admitted the song Nobody's Child brings a tear to his eye you never know.

There seems a sense of things coming full circle with these recordings. "We were doing it all for fun," he says of his collaborations with Steve; "weren't trying to get a record deal or whatever." It occurs to me that having started off playing for fun in the back rooms of pubs you could say he and Steve had just been making music in another back room.

"Exactly. We have played to live audiences if we've had a party in the Den. People would say to us, 'Can we get an invite to your party?' But anyone who ever asked never got one. We selected who we wanted in."

Sounds like the perfect audience, I say. I wonder whether he has been able to pass on anything of this to his son Christopher. "Not really, because he came in with this new kind of music I wasn't into - loud, thumping, droning sounds which I can do without."

Christopher and Andy live on the mainland now, and the Den was demolished after Pete sold the shop; four small houses now stand where it was. The upstairs bedroom where we are chatting in Pete's new home is full of the Marshall sound equipment listed above, including speakers which can never be switched on because even at their quietest setting Dierdre can hear them from the room below: "They've been used onstage and they make a lotta noise. That's a bass speaker over there but that bass goes right throught the bloody building. Most of the work done up here is through is headphones."

The room is too hot in summer to do much, though he comes up here in winter. "Trouble is," he says, "I've got nothing of Steve's to work on cause he can't play guitar anymore. Which is sickening. I coud go on doing things because I've got some good equipment which still works."

Which is undeniably a sad thought, although "There's always something to do wwhen you've got a garden", and Pete seems happy with his lot: "I've had an interesting, eventful life ... All the different jobs, all the different people you meet - it's all enjoyable." Pete married Dierdre in 1965 - "and it worked out alright." He regards himself as "A Born Again Cockney", as the Isle of Wight has been a popular destination for Londoners – another example of things coming full circle. One of the tracks made with Steve is called "Cockney Rockney" and starts with the sound of Bow Bells.

It's odd to reflect that Alan Klein was bringing his active involvement in music to a close in the early nineties just as Pete was about to rekindle his own interest, finally buying an instrument (or two) to replace that long-gone 1958 Hofner Committee. He opens one of two guitar cases lying on a bed and brings out "Spacey", a 1993 gold-plated Fender Stratocaster bought from a music shop in Ryde, telling me "they make them out of a decent bit of wood". He strums it briefly, demonstrating the whammy bar, then hands it to me; I only hold it a moment as it weighs a ton. I'm not a musician but I suddenly get why objects like these become fetishised by musos: they are holy relics of a sort, with mysterious powers locked up in them - not just the ability to blast people's ears off but those things Peter Pan declares he is made of: Youth and Joy.

If this were a TV documentary rather than a humble blog post it would be easy to up the poignancy stakes here: let the camera linger a little longer, as I have seen on occasion when former Beatle Pete Best is placed under interrogation. But this is not a story of opportunities unexpectedly or unfairly snatched away. This Pete chose to leave his group, after all, and remains justly proud of the results of that prolonged Indian summer of collaboration with Steve, who has told him: "When you add up what you and I have done over the years I'm satisfied."

Steve, for his part, doesn't seem to harbour any bitterness about the condition which has put an end to his playing days, telling me in an email: "What I am grateful for is being able to play for as long as I did, and for meeting my great mate Pete who spent many hours on my behalf recording and adding his own touch to our music."

As my time on the Isle of Wight nears its end Pete has answered everything he reasonably can, but my fixation on Alan Klein means I can't resist coming back one more time to the question of Skegness and what might have been. He replies:

"It's just so many years ago. This September I shall be seventy nine."

At one point earlier in our conversation he had wondered aloud: "Who knows what would have happened if I hadn't had that bloody guitar stolen?" But perhaps it's best to end with our documentary camera zooming out – one of those trick shots where we magically see a house, a town then the whole of the British Isles – because another of his remarks that day is a reminder of the wonder of that impulse which swept a generation:

"If you put Bert Weedon and Lonnie Donegan together they changed so many lives."




The photographs of the group were taken by Ken Aslet; my thanks for permission to use them. 

Thanks also to Geoff Leonard for information about Oh Boy!; his website about the show can be found here. 

This piece was revised on 5/9/19; thanks to George Bellamy for taking the time to provide corrections and additional information.