Magical Mystery Tours

by Tony Bramwell

  I continued to keep in touch with Paul, promoting Wings. On January 16, 1980 when they arrived for a tour of Japan, Paul was arrested at Tokyo International Airport after narcotics agents found two plastic bags in his suitcases containing almost eight ounces of marijuana. Japan was famous for its hard stand on drugs and Paul knew that. I suppose he thought the agents would never think he’d try getting pot past them. But they did. They searched his suitcases and Paul was soon handcuffed. To his shock, a rope was tied around him and he was carted off to jail where he spent nine days.

  On the face of it, it looked his fault. But I wasn’t the only one who believed that Paul was set up by Yoko Ono. Not only was Yoko Japanese, she was from an influential and very wealthy banking family. Paul and Linda and everyone in the inner circle believed that Yoko had informed the Japanese police that Paul was more than likely to have marijuana in his luggage. Even though Paul had been quite outspoken about his use of cannabis, and even though he may have been naive about getting caught, I think there had to be some “Japanese politics” involved. For one thing, Yoko was jealous that Paul was doing a concert in Japan before her own Plastic Ono Band had the opportunity. Japan was her territory, and for a long time she’d had every intention of flying there in a blaze of glory, the conquering heroine returns, only she hadn’t gotten around to it—and now here was Wings, with Linda, intruding on her turf.

  To make matters worse, Linda was also performing with Paul. A great deal was said when Paul was let out of jail and he, Linda and the band eventually returned home. None of it was pleasant. It was believed that Linda had been the one to pack the pot in their cases, and Paul graciously took the blame because of their children, who were young. “I was fully convinced that I would be imprisoned for nine or ten years,” he said when he was released. “I was scared out of my wits.”

  I was at MIDEM shortly afterward, when Denny Laine, who was in Wings, and his wife Jo Jo, disgraced themselves. At least Jo Jo did. She had a bit too much Pol Roger and started slagging everybody off, left, right and center, and calling Paul and Linda all sorts of names over the pot fiasco. Jo Jo complained that the whole tour had been cancelled and no one made any money. Not only did Wings lose the money they would have made from the concerts, but they had to pay back all the Japanese promoters what they would have made too. Denny depended on work coming in and he said he ended up so broke he had to sell all his copyrights. As for Jo Jo, she went off to be one of Lord Weymouth’s numerous wifelets at Longleat, his vast stately pile in Wiltshire. I think Denny—who started out with the Moody Blues and sang lead on their first big hit, “Go Now”—and Jo Jo got back together again after she tired of being part of a harem. He was an original with a great voice and had studied Spanish guitar, especially Flamenco. He had a string section with his band, long before ELO thought of it. I often mused on the fact that ELO also came from Birmingham, and wondered if there had been any synergy. The public dusting of Denny’s feelings spelled out the end of his relationship with Paul and Linda and was the reason why he left Wings. Later, Denny organized a band, a sort of tribute band, to do “Denny Laine sings the songs of Wings.” Very kindly, Paul gave his blessing, but according to the band, Denny failed to show up for rehearsals and it fizzled out.

  In February 1982 I started doing some freelance work for Virgin, promoting Mike Oldfield’s Five Miles Out and an album named Rhythm of Youth for a Canadian band with the ridiculous name of “Men Without Hats.” It seemed strange that Richard Branson—the odd little student pest who’d haunted us at Apple all those years ago—was now an enormously successful businessman. He’d grown into his clothes and full potential and gained a great deal of influence along the way, with a £2.6 billion fortune that encompassed a record label, publishing, wine, holidays, airlines, banks, railways and islands. Despite his lifelong passion for the music industry, I’m not sure that Richard ever really understood the record business, but he had some good people working for him, like Simon Draper. Virgin Records’ attitude wasn’t industry standard. It seemed to be more like “throw a lot of shit against a wall and see if any stays up there.” The amount of records they put out and acts they signed was phenomenal. Unfortunately, there were too many one-off single deals that went nowhere and died. It baffled me how they survived. Shrewder men like Mickie Most would put out only a few records and promote them intensely. Magnet were the same. The word to describe Virgin’s modus operandi was serendipity: see what comes along, sign it, tell them they’re wonderful, do a record and then like George III with America in 1776, say, “America? I don’t recall. Who are they?” Despite Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, Virgin Records struggled until Culture Club and Human League came along.

  At Virgin, Lesley’s first job was promoting Culture Club with Boy George. They had made two records for Virgin when she arrived and the label was about to drop them, so their third record was the make it or break it one. It was a matter of “you’d better sell some records, boys and girls, or you get dumped.” Virgin put out their single, “Love Is Cold,” and booked them on the BBC’s Pebble Mill lunchtime show, which had a big audience for daytime telly. Lesley went to Birmingham to look after them. They sang the song which was the A-side and then later in the show they sang the B-side which was, “Do You Really Wanna Hurt Me?” Lesley fell in love with it, as did the audience. She went back to Virgin and told them about the audience reaction. Bravely, she said, “Flip the record. The hit is on the B-side.” Naturally they begged to differ. They didn’t really want to know, but she was so sure, so adamant, she believed in it so much that she battered them until they said, “All right, all right! Go for it—but on your head be it.”

  It was a massive hit, as she knew it would be. Lesley gained a great deal of respect and was taken seriously after that. Their next single was “Karma Chameleon” which put them firmly on the map. In fact, blowing my own trumpet, there’s a family history of “flipping” records. When I was still at Polydor, Gloria Gaynor was signed to us and had a couple of hits, including “Never Can Say Goodbye.” Then she had a minor hit in the U.S. with “Substitute,” a song that was also covered by a South African girl group called Clout, who made it to number two in the U.K. I decided that there was little point in trying to compete against that, and almost idly, I listened to the B-side and was electrified. It was “I Will Survive.” We put that out as the A-side and it shot straight to the top of the charts. All these years later, it is still a world-class sing-along anthem.

  So Lesley was at Virgin, doing well when we met again. I asked her out. This time round, we fell in love. Of course there was Bernadette, my long-term girlfriend, in the background. She came from a very strong Catholic family, who lived out at Epsom, near the racecourse where the Derby was run. Her dad was a builder and when he met me he’d asked me what I did in the war, and I thought, war? What fucking war? Immediately I went and looked in the mirror to see if I looked old, or if I looked like I was suffering from battle fatigue.

  Then it was, “What religion are you, then?” I blurted out, “I’m Church of England,” which was stretching things a bit, but that’s what you wrote on any official forms in those days. He looked at me and it was like, “You’ve got no chance here, mate!”

  When I told Bernadette about Lesley, she lived up to being Irish and fiery. In fast order, she met and married Peter Reichert, the head of EMI Music Publishing in London. Peter was Jewish. Not only that, but he was a serial divorcer at that time so quite what Bernie’s old man made of all that I don’t know, but I can hazard a wild guess. However, Bernadette and Peter are still together, still happy.

  Lesley and I rented a wonderful old Jacobean house on Barnes High Street, with a garden that went down to the Thames, virtually at the end of the Boat Race course. It was next door to the White Hart pub, opposite a little village-type green. It was perfect.

  One of the most interesting double acts signed to Polydor when I was there were Demis Roussos and Vangelis Papathanassiou, known simply as “Vangelis.” But
I didn’t sign them as a duo by any means. They were very individualistic as musicians; the duet really came to life in the kitchen. At the time I met him, Demis was enjoying massive middle-of-the-road musical success but real fame still eluded Vangelis. This was mostly because Vangelis insisted on just doing his own thing. He was extraordinarily talented but very difficult to deal with. I became very fond of him. Notwithstanding the fact that he was a lavish host, sometimes he was quite perverse, a real character in many ways. He made a beautiful album called China. It was stunning, very Left Wing and esoteric, based on Mao’s famous long march and the Chinese Revolution. I thought it would be very hard to market, but quality always shines through. It did well and everybody copied it.

  Lesley and I used to go and visit him frequently at his luxurious flat near the Albert Hall, and we all became great friends. Demis was often around, too, and if he was, we were always in for a treat. They were great together, a double act, with Demis cooking away. They had been in the Greek band, Aphrodite’s Child, a very successful band in Europe, one filled with large men with big appetites for food and life. Sometimes, in idle moments, I imagined having to supply the buffet for that band.

  Sometime later, when David Puttnam wanted something different for a little film that he was putting together, called Chariots of Fire, I immediately thought of Vangelis because of the magical way he used electronic instruments. I talked him into it because I knew nobody else could do it. It had to be him. Even before we started, I had a sense of how it should sound, but first, we had to do a lot of talking, and cooking and eating and uncorking of wine.

  The film was a very slow burn, one of those things that live in your memory, something you can watch again and again. The music had to match that and be spacey and ethereal and haunting, yet triumphal. We used to go to Nemo, Vangelis’s studio in Edgware Road, where each day the rushes would be delivered so he could put sound to picture. It took ages and he got very frustrated because they kept changing stuff and there was no dialogue on the rushes. We used to spend days and evenings at Nemo with him.

  At the first preview, the producers showed the film without music and it was embarrassing beyond belief. People just didn’t know what to say, or which way to look. They didn’t think it worked, and didn’t think it could even be rescued. I heard someone say quite loudly into the silence, “Well, it’s a turkey in the oven.” It was a quirky little Hugh Hudson-period British film and they can be buggers to sell. Then later they showed it again, with the music added and those famous six notes just fitted it so well. It was instantly so uplifting that people were standing up and cheering the runner on. I knew as soon as I heard the finished soundtrack that it had lifted the film into Oscar territory. Of course it did—and it coined the Colin Welland premature soundbite: “The British are coming” at the awards ceremony.

  I didn’t supervise Vangelis as such for Polydor. In fact, he was probably unsupervisable. When China had come out, Polydor International was so keen they wanted to launch Vangelis as a major new star. We put him on at the Royal Festival Hall. Poly people came from all over the world; journalists and broadcasting people as well were all flown in at great expense and put up in expensive London hotels. But instead of playing what everybody came to hear, those wonderful, trademark soaring compositions that could make you weep, Vangelis played some avant-garde, straight-off-the-wall, electronic noodling with a percussionist. My heart sank. I couldn’t escape but many people walked out, saying it was a load of rubbish.

  At the after-gig party it was quite embarrassing because nobody knew what to say. No one went up to Vangelis to congratulate him, so he stood there looking quite glum. But not as glum as we all were. A generous point of view would be to say that he was not at all commercially minded. He really didn’t see why he should play what people came to hear. Personally, I could have throttled him. It was a good thing he wasn’t on CBS or Jet. He could have ended up at the bottom of the Aegean.

  As an indication of how good Vangelis was, Hans Zimmer was his assistant. Zimmer is now the wunderkind, a leading composer of movie music and much more commercially viable on a film-to-film basis than his former mentor. I have no doubt that he probably watched what happened when he was working for Vangelis and listened to the critics more, knew all the pitfalls and learned how to do it right. After Chariots, I asked Vangelis to do Blade Runner, which started life as another quirky little film. As usual, the production was blighted by many financial problems, with different backers coming and going, and kept changing shape. The executives changed. It was all change, all the time except for the director, Ridley Scott.

  Ridley was another genius, one who kept his head. Vangelis was doing this storming music but the film wasn’t shot in sequence and came in to him in obscure chunks. He was going up the wall, unable to see it clearly as a whole, and felt that he would never be able to complete a comprehensive soundtrack. In the end, the soundtrack album wasn’t released for about fifteen years, and the rights to the music had changed hands several times by then. Eventually, Warner put it out on the off-chance, on one of their el cheapo labels. It’s stunning music, and although it has made a great deal of money, it’s not anywhere near the kind of money it should have earned had it been released with the film. The funny thing is that Vangelis will go on stage and perform unstructured stuff when he feels he’s being constrained, but when he works to film he wants it absolutely structured.

  Vincenzo La Bella also came into my life during this period. He was head of the Vatican Film and TV Service, which, yes, dear reader, does exist—and so too does the Office of the Inquisition. He had a very bizarre job of running a huge budget, which was invested in films around the world on behalf of the Vatican. They also produced TV programs and records. It was an incredibly well-paid job, as were many Vatican gigs. Vincenzo toured the world, staying in the very best hotels and eating in the best restaurants. Dining with him was an experience on its own. I saw the lavishness of how the really rich live.

  The Beatles, for all their wealth, actually lived very modestly, even if an awful lot of vintage wine and caviar flowed into the Apple kitchens and dining rooms for the hangers-on. With Vincenzo, we often met and discussed film investment, though nothing much came of it. To me, it was a way of life not enjoyed since Nero fiddled in Rome. I think I preferred being with Vangelis and Demis, watching them cooking up a storm, laughing and eating and drinking. It all seemed far more real.

  43

  For a long time, the only Beatle I saw with any frequency was Paul, but I kept up with the news via conversations with Paul and mutual friends. John went to America on October 16, 1971, and would remain there for the rest of his life, for a long time under a deportation order, embroiled with visa and residency problems and unable to leave. But for eighteen months, during 1974 and 1975, he split with Yoko and had an affair with their assistant, May Pang. Initially—and somewhat contrarily, given his ambivalent feelings for Yoko—Paul played a part in helping to bring them back together. I heard that Yoko had telephoned Paul and asked his help. Paul said, “She sounded so sad that I found myself agreeing to act as negotiator by telling John that she wanted him back. And Linda said that we were so happy, I should bury my differences.” Paul was going to Nashville to record, and he made a detour to Los Angeles, where John was leading a highly publicized life of debauchery. Ultimately, John did return to Yoko, but reluctantly. She was supposed to have invited him to the Dakota for a mysterious “smoke cure.” May Pang is convinced that once again, Yoko had bewitched John because he called May sobbing to say he wanted to return to her, but was a virtual prisoner. From all accounts, for years he continued to write in his diaries how much he missed and wanted to be with May.

  I was sad when Ringo and Maureen—my old teenage buddy, Mitch—were divorced in 1975. Six years later Ringo married the American film star, Barbara Bach, while Maureen would marry Isaac Tigret, a founder of the Hard Rock Cafes, in 1989. Poignantly when Maureen died of leukemia five years later, her four children
, her husband, and Ringo were by her side. George and Pattie, who had also been apart for some time, were divorced in 1977. Pattie married her longtime love, Eric Clapton, and the following year, George married Olivia Arias, a secretary at his record label’s L.A. headquarters. A big shock within our once close-knit ranks was hearing about the death of Mal Evans under very strange circumstances in an L.A. motel. He was in the middle of a drug psychosis when his girlfriend called the police. They burst in and shot Mal dead. Such a violent end for a man who always enjoyed life upset everyone who knew him, and reinforced my own aversion to drugs.

  Happier times were ahead for me. Lesley and I were married on August 6, 1982, which was a Friday. It was also the day that Roxy Music started rehearsing for a new tour—which I happened to be promoting. They were rehearsing in Cork in Ireland, so Lesley and I joined them for our honeymoon. It was an unusual one, to say the least, shared with Brian Ferry and the road crew. After a few days in Cork we went to Limerick to a little theater to tighten up the show, then did a week in Dublin before hitting the U.K. We’ve always had fun saying that they came on our honeymoon with us, though strictly speaking it was the other way around!

  When Lesley got pregnant the first time, she gave up working and the world of record promotion lost a rising star. She convinced me that it was time we had some bricks and mortar of our own, so we bought a house in Mortlake where we lived until we had the two boys, and we decided to move down to Devon.

  I had been going to Devon quite frequently over the years, right back from when I stayed with Brian Epstein when he was working on his memoirs. When Simon was about two months old, Lesley and I went down to a little village we’d discovered near Exeter for some fly-fishing. We stayed for three weeks in a fishing lodge, a lovely place with fresh air and clean water burbling away to the sea, which was close. We bought a place to use for weekends, then the weekend turned into four days, then entire weeks until we just weren’t going back to London anymore. When the boys started school, we had to make some decisions about where we wanted to be permanently. Devon won, hands down. To some extent, economy was important because shortly after I married Lesley, I lost all my money again.