by Greg Tesser
Frankly, I found the Rick Gunnell/Bob Hind axis bad for my nerves, and with former associate Bob Baker decamping to East Anglia to develop his fantasy of some kind of youth-themed nightclub, I found that more and more I was living in the pocket of the unpredictable and unreliable, yet more humane frame of Giorgio Gomelsky. The gangsters and the geezers were not for me, so I moved out, leaving Hind and Libby and the blonde gofer to their own devices as I moved into an office with Giorgio in the National Jazz Federation premises overlooking Soho Square.
It was a tight-knit unit in Soho Square, with Bob Hind and his crew being replaced by Gomelsky’s number two Hamish Grimes and The Yardbirds’ beautiful fan club secretary Julie Driscoll, who reminded me at first glance of a younger version of Julie Christie. There was a touch of irony attached to this, as the woman-obsessed Hamish had cut his photographic teeth on Hampstead Heath by taking some striking snaps of Ms Christie herself.
I remember having an argument with Hamish. I was extremely touchy in those days. Julie was in the office at the time, and she took my side. Later, Hamish, who was a real character, but could also be extremely crude and irritating, said to me: ‘Would you like to poke Julie?’
Taken aback, I replied rather sheepishly and stupidly, ‘Yes, of course.’
Never in a million years did I imagine that this same Julie Driscoll, sitting at a desk in a rather ramshackle office would morph into the Julie Driscoll – ‘This Wheel’s On Fire’ with Brian Auger and all that.
Her first foray into the ‘Beat Scene’, as it was christened by the tabloids, was in 1965 when she became a founding member of the original supergroup, The Steampacket, formed by Long John Baldry. Its other members included Rod Stewart and Brian Auger.
‘This Wheel’s On Fire’ made it to number five in the charts in 1968, and some twenty-odd years later Julie’s rendition (with Adrian Edmondson) reached an even wider audience as the theme music to the hit TV comedy show Absolutely Fabulous, starring Jennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley (yet another showbiz Chelsea fan by the way).
Hamish was a real jack-of-all-trades in Giorgio’s organisation. He was an accomplished photographer and a talented artist – he designed all the adverts and posters and record covers – as well on occasions acting as a more than adequate master of ceremonies.
Mind you, as I have already said, he could easily get under your skin, and it certainly wasn’t difficult to lose your rag when talking to him. I remember one particular occasion – it was all so petty – when we started chatting about the whole concept of publicity when he said something, probably tongue-in-cheek, that upset me. I went on a bit of a rant, but Julie – who was a really nice quiet girl – stuck up for me, and this was enough to shut Hamish up!
****
The autumn of ’64 saw the precocious Chelsea outfit play a brand of football that had the finicky fans at the Bridge smiling broadly and rubbing their hands as the puppet master Venables and the elegant Scotsman George Graham (it was said he used Vaseline on his eyebrows) and the rest collected victory after victory as they surged to the top of the First Division table.
Several games stand out; most notably the 3–1 away success at Arsenal on 26 September and the 5–1 home drubbing of Everton on 14 November, with Graham grabbing a couple of goals. Seven days later he did one better, netting a hat-trick as the Chelsea plundered Birmingham City 6–1.
However, there is one game – played nineteen days before Christmas in front of a paltry attendance of just under 8,000 – that will remain forever in the scrapbook of my brain. It was the debut of a seventeen-year-old from Windsor, who a mere four years or so later, would turn my life on its head. His name was Peter Leslie Osgood. It was a League Cup quarter-final replay against lowly Workington of the Third Division.
In the first encounter at their place, Docherty’s championship aspirants had somehow managed to struggle to a 2–2 draw. The replay was a pretty tame affair, but the contest was lit up on a dank, dismal December evening by the young Osgood’s poaching prowess, as he put away both his side’s goals in their somewhat laborious advance to the semi-finals.
Being Chelsea, of course, it all imploded in the spring as internal division and ongoing schisms and fall-outs with manager Docherty saw their dream of an unprecedented treble crumble.
Four games remained and a first title since 1955 was very much on the cards as Docherty’s Diamonds remained top of the tree. But having drawn 2–2 with West Bromwich Albion at the Bridge on Good Friday, and then gone down 2–0 to Liverpool at Anfield two days later, it was imperative that they accrued points from the next two away games, at Burnley and Blackpool respectively.
Docherty’s plan was to spend a relaxing few days in that very English seaside enclave of Blackpool. But eight of the manager’s blue-eyed boys had other ideas, breaking the imposed curfew by going out on the town. The manager was not at all happy; in fact he was livid. So he sent home the Naughty Eight: Terry Venables, George Graham, Barry Bridges, John Hollins, Eddie McCreadie, Bert Murray, Marvin Hinton and Joe Fascione – and filled his side with untried reserves for the Burnley battle on 24 April 1965. Needless to say, it resulted in a 6–2 humbling; just two of Docherty’s ‘innocents’, Ron Harris and the late Peter Houseman, were on target.
Their final game two days later at Blackpool saw them go down 3–2, so any thoughts of the title had evaporated. However, the season itself had already plummeted to its lowest ebb on 27 March when, despite being hot favourites, Chelsea had flopped 2–0 to Liverpool in the FA Cup semi-final at Villa Park. There was one crumb of comfort in the shape of a 3–2 aggregate win over Leicester City in the League Cup Final, Chelsea’s first major trophy for ten years. But in truth, April was all about anti-climax!
Now more than ever, Chelsea Football Club was in my veins. Still making the daily tube trip to Soho and the madcap world of blues and rock, the glamour of it all was beginning to slowly but surely pall. Football was taking over, so I said to myself, ‘how about launching a one-off magazine?’
I had somehow managed to store away a bit of dosh, despite the slothful nature of both Gunnell and Gomelsky in paying their monthly bills, and in late March I ‘created’ Penalty magazine.
It cost 1/6d (under 8p), and to say it was Chelsea-centric would be an understatement. Apart from a full-page team photo, and a ‘low-down’, complete with potted biographies of the whole squad, my ‘Match of the Month’ was their 2–1 home victory over Arsenal played at Stamford Bridge on 6 February.
The sub-heading to this report was ‘GRAHAM OUTSHINES THEM ALL’, and the first paragraph read: ‘George Graham, Chelsea’s bargain buy from Aston Villa, again proved what a deadly scorer he can be. His two goals were impeccable in their execution, and his whole performance was almost a soccer education in itself.’
Later, I went on to write under the nom de plume of ‘Ronald Hall’, ‘this, of course, meant Chelsea were top of the league. “We are top of the League,” chanted the Chelsea throng. The crowd cheered almost continuously from that moment on to the final whistle, happy in the knowledge that Chelsea were indeed top of the League.’
Not yet nineteen, I was now doing my utmost to balance rock PR with football. I remember one occasion at the HMV shop in Oxford Street. I had arranged for The Yardbirds to make a personal appearance, meet a few fans (mainly girls), sign a few autographs and generally to show themselves to be nice friendly approachable chaps.
During this (in my view) pretty boring experience, I got chatting to Eric Clapton. He was a bit clam-like, but I did manage to ask about his music preferences. I threw a few blues names at him coupled with the odd rocker or two – Jerry Lee Lewis was one – and he dismissed all these revered names with just two words: ‘Bob Dylan’.
Having endured Chelsea’s fall of grace that spring, and spent a whole load of lolly on the launch of Penalty, I found myself at a crossroads. Did I continue to flog my guts out trying to plug The Yardbirds et al in the press, or should I diversify full time into football?
Born in the East End to Jewish/Polish parents, he left school at fifteen years old. Jazz was his first love, and by 1947 his group the Tito Burns Septet was performing the new-fangled bebop on BBC radio. Burns himself was a more than proficient accordionist, and two years later his outfit was touring the country and recording numerous records with the likes of Johnny Dankworth.
A seminal year, 1955, that saw the birth of million-selling rock records, and Burns, who was always a realist, saw the light and disbanded his group. He knew his brand of music was well and truly passé; from now on, the money would be where the rock ’n’ roll music blared.
In 1959 he replaced Franklyn Boyd as Cliff Richard’s manager. A little later he discovered and signed up Dusty Springfield, who had broken free from The Springfields; he was fast building up an array of outstanding talent.
Then, completely out of the blue, one afternoon in 1965 he gave me a ring. ‘I want to see you,’ he said. ‘This is important, so how about tomorrow afternoon.’
I asked him what it was about, but he was adamant that we needed to chat about it in person, so I agreed to be at his office in Vere Street off Oxford Street at 3 p.m. next day.
Arriving at his office in my best bib and tucker, I was confronted by this larger-than-life individual who oozed suavity from every pore.
‘I would very much like you to join us,’ he announced.
I was about to ask him something when one of his many phones rang.
‘Put her through,’ he said.
There followed a very detailed and personal chat with Dusty Springfield during which it became evident that she was a lesbian. Tito said the right things to her, which seemed to placate the singer, and the conversation ended on the usual pleasantries.
Looking very serious, Tito spoke to me in hushed tones. ‘Please forget everything you have just heard,’ he said, the permanent smile still lighting up his large face. ‘Please don’t repeat any of it to anyone,’ he emphasised. ‘Dusty needed to speak to me urgently from America.’ He remained overtly matey, but I got the picture.
Placing the receiver back on to its cradle, his smile became even more animated.
‘Yes, I’d like you to work for us,’ he reiterated. ‘When would you be able to start?’
I thanked him profusely for the offer, said I would think about it, and took my leave with a handshake and a wave.
Needless to say, I declined. A mistake? Maybe. But if I had said yes, I would not have had the pleasure of being a small part of that great Chelsea side of the late 1960s and early ’70s that swaggered to two major trophies in as many years.
By now, my PR work for Giorgio Gomelsky was beginning to take a back seat, and having failed to reach a wide audience with Penalty, I decided to launch a completely different type of football magazine – one catering for the still buoyant world of the amateur game. So, in December 1965, The Amateur Footballer was born.
My idea was to sell the copies en masse through the clubs. Our old family friend Clem Mitford (Lord Redesdale) wrote an effusive intro for the first issue, and in a short space of time my world was no longer dominated by pretentious aesthetes and doubtful dealers, but by amateur football club committee types and secretaries and enthusiastic programme editors – from the sublime to the ridiculous you could say!
SIX
CHELSEA ‘ALONE IN EUROPE’ AND
‘THEY THINK IT’S ALL OVER’
AND ALL THAT
I was nineteen in 1965, and nothing appealed to me more than a Friday night at the Marquee, pilled up on purple hearts, dressed to kill in my finest, followed by marvelling at the new Stamford Bridge wunderkind Peter Osgood on Saturday.
Having made his mark the previous campaign with two goals on his debut, he returned to first-team competitive action on 22 September 1965 for the first leg of Chelsea’s home Inter-Cities Fairs Cup first round tie with Roma; what a fraught and tempestuous affair that turned out to be.
Known as ‘The Battle of The Bridge’, the contest was notable for Terry Venables’ hat-trick; one of his goals was a cheeky free-kick that bamboozled the Italian defenders as he and Eddie McCreadie pretended to argue about who should take it.
One of the highlights for me was sitting next to a young man who was an Aryan clone of Jesus Christ; the look on his sensitive face when someone – I don’t know who – put a match to blue touch paper of some kind of rocket that almost singed his silky-looking though straggly beard, was one of sheer fear.
The match itself had a surreal quality about it. It was bad-tempered, with the players all seemingly adopting a ratty persona. Chelsea won 4–1, McCreadie was sent off, and between the posts for Roma that night was the father of future Chelsea goalkeeper Carlo Cudicini.
Following the Roma clash, Ossie really hit the headlines with seven goals, including one at Burnley that saw him gracefully slalom some sixty yards past bemused defender after bemused defender before slotting the ball home. Burnley goalkeeper, Scottish international Adam Blacklaw, proclaimed the youngster’s effort ‘the best goal I have ever seen’.
Come April and the nineteen-year-old was selected in Alf Ramsey’s provisional World Cup squad of 40, and even though he failed to make the final 22, everyone, whether pundit or supporter, was convinced that he was destined to mature into one of the game’s authentic all-time greats.
T.S. Eliot wrote in his magnum opus The Waste Land: ‘April is the cruellest month.’ Certainly as far as the players and fans of Chelsea were concerned, 23 April was a real downer.
Sheffield Wednesday were the opponents in their FA Cup semi-final at the mud heap that was Villa Park, and if the press favoured Chelsea twelve months earlier against Liverpool, then they were the proverbial banker against what was on paper a moderate Sheffield Wednesday outfit.
But once more they failed to reach their first-ever Wembley final, putting on a performance that was mediocre in the extreme, made even worse by the fact that one of Wednesday’s goals was put away by former Blue, Jim McCalliog, who signed for the Yorkshire club in October 1965 for £37,500 – a record fee for a teenager at the time.
Their advance to the semi-final stage was a saga in itself. Having struggled to deal with Third Division Shewsbury (3–2) in round four, they were drawn at home to Third Division table-toppers Hull City in the quarter-finals.
The game was notable for several reasons, one of which was that Chelsea became the first club to produce a programme with colour photographs. As for the game itself, the Blues cruised into pipe and slippers time by taking a 2–0 advantage, but home complacency brought the Yorkshire visitors back into the affair, and they purloined two goals to take the tie to a replay.
Fixture chaos ensued; on Monday Docherty’s charges had a Fairs Cup second leg match up with TSV 1860 München, with their Hull replay scheduled for Thursday, and Leeds United away the following Monday! Modern managers and pros would be moaning and groaning about such a fixture congestion.
A 2–2 draw in Munich on 15 March meant Chelsea needed a victory to progress to the semi-finals (away goals counting double was not an issue in those days). With so much on their plate, it was understandable that the Chelsea boys were more than just a wee bit edgy. In a game in which the result was all that mattered, Ossie was on target to poach the only goal, yet again displaying coolness and expertise well beyond his years. The Shed chants of ‘Osgood Is Good’ were at full blast that dramatic night.
Thursday 31 March was General Election Day. Two years of Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s government had seen the atmosphere in the country grow from depression and doubt to one of optimism. Labour were odds-on to retain power, but by how many seats?
BBC TV’s Election Night extravaganza was hosted by the peerless professional Cliff Michelmore, whos
e first job that momentous night for the Labour Party was to announce: ‘I have my first result for you: Hull City 1–3 Chelsea in the FA Cup quarter-final replay.’
Over 45,000 packed Boothferry Park to see two goals from Bobby Tambling and one from George Graham ease Chelsea into their second successive FA Cup semi-final.
The 2–0 Sheffield Wednesday defeat was a major dent, and Barcelona, their opponents for the Fairs Cup semi, were not the force they are today. Docherty knew that if his team played to their potential, a first European final was more than just a remote possibility.
A 2–0 defeat at the Camp Nou on 27 April in front of 70,000 screaming Catalans was indeed a struggle, but confidence remained high for the second leg.
11 May 1966, my twentieth birthday, was a wet old day. It rained and it rained with all the intensity of an angry autumn day. I was perched in Chelsea’s new stand, sitting next to a sartorially elegant Barcelona fan on one side and England cricket legend Jim Laker, the man who took 19 wickets with his lethal off-spin in the Fourth Test against Australia at Old Trafford in 1956 on the other. The encounter aped the Roma game in so many ways. To say it was a stormy affair would be an understatement.
However, the early portents were for a boring 0–0 draw, without incident and lacking in the finer arts. Then, late in the first period, Barca’s Eladio Silvestre decided to take a wild swing at the home side’s bundle of energy John Hollins, and he was not unsurprisingly given his marching orders. This moment of madness swung the match in Chelsea’s favour, and despite the obdurate Uruguayan Julio Cesar Benitez, the Catalan club’s defence eventually cracked in the 71st minute, when Gallego somehow managed to deflect Bobby Tambling’s header into his own net.
The equaliser was even more of a mess; with goalkeeper Manuel Reina, the father of Liverpool’s Pepe, parrying Peter Houseman’s speculative effort into his own goal. In the dying minutes, a Ron Harris effort found the net, but much to the chagrin of the home fans, the goal was ruled out for offside.
