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.
