by Elton John
And, in my heart, I knew Bluesology weren’t going to make it. We weren’t good enough. It was obvious. We’d gone from playing obscure blues to playing the same soul songs that virtually every British r’n’b band played in the mid-sixties – ‘In The Midnight Hour’, ‘Hold On I’m Coming’. You could hear The Alan Bown Set or The Mike Cotton Sound playing them better than us. There were superior vocalists to Stuart out there, and there were certainly far superior organ players to me. I was a pianist, I wanted to hammer the keys like Little Richard, and if you try and do that on an organ, the sound it makes can ruin your whole day. I didn’t have any of the technical knowledge you need to play an organ properly. The worst instrument was the Hammond B-12 that was permanently installed on the stage of the Flamingo club in Wardour Street. It was an enormous wooden thing, like playing a chest of drawers. It was covered in switches and levers, draw bars and pedals. Stevie Winwood or Manfred Mann would deploy all of them to make the Hammond scream and sing and soar. I, on the other hand, didn’t dare touch them because I had literally no idea what any of them did. Even the little Vox Continental I usually played was a technical minefield. One key had a habit of sticking down. It happened midway through a set at The Scotch of St James. One minute I was playing ‘Land Of A Thousand Dances’, the next my organ was making a noise that sounded like the Luftwaffe had turned up over London to give the Blitz another go. The rest of the band gamely continued dancing in the alley with Long Tall Sally and twisting with Lucy doing the Watusi while I attempted to fix the situation by panicking wildly. I was contemplating calling 999 when Eric Burdon, the lead singer of The Animals, got onstage. A man clearly blessed with the complex technical expertise I lacked – The Animals’ keyboard player Alan Price was a genius on the Vox Continental – he thumped the organ with his fist and the key was released.
‘That happens to Alan all the time,’ he nodded, and walked off.
So we weren’t as good as the bands who were doing the same thing as us, and the bands who were doing the same thing as us weren’t as good as the bands who wrote their own material. When Bluesology were booked to play at the Cedar Club in Birmingham, we arrived early and found a rehearsal in progress. It was The Move, a local quintet who were obviously on the verge of big things. They had a wild stage act, a manager with the gift of the gab and a guitarist called Roy Wood who could write songs. We snuck in and watched them. Not only did they sound amazing, Roy Wood’s songs sounded better than the cover versions they played. Only someone who was clinically insane would have said that about the handful of tracks I’d written for Bluesology. To be honest, I’d only written them because I absolutely had to, because we had one of our very infrequent recording sessions coming up and needed at least some material of our own. I wasn’t exactly pouring my heart and soul into them, and you could tell. But I can remember watching The Move and having a kind of revelation. This is it, isn’t it? This is the way forward. This is what I should be doing.
In fact, I might have left Bluesology sooner had Long John Baldry not come into the picture. We got the job with him because we were in the right place at the right time. Bluesology just happened to be performing in the south of France when Long John Baldry found himself without a backing band to play the Papagayo club in St-Tropez. His original idea was to form another band like Steampacket with himself, Stuart Brown, a boy called Alan Walker – who I think got the job because Baldry fancied him – singing, and a girl who had just arrived in London from the US, Marsha Hunt, taking the female vocalist’s role. Bluesology were to be his backing band, at least after he’d revamped the line-up slightly: a couple of musicians he didn’t like got the push and were replaced with ones he thought were better suited. It wasn’t really what I wanted to do. I thought that line-up was a real step down for John. I knew how good Julie Driscoll and Rod were. I’d seen Rod playing with John at the Kenton Conservative Club when the band were still called The Hoochie Coochie Men and I was still at school, and he’d blown me away. And Brian Auger was a real musician’s musician: he didn’t seem like the kind of organist who’d ever require the lead singer of The Animals to climb onstage and offer a helpful thump in the middle of a show.
So I had my reservations. The line-up with Alan Walker and Marsha Hunt didn’t last long anyway: Marsha looked incredible, this gorgeous, tall black girl, but she wasn’t a great singer. Even so, I had to admit that, with Long John Baldry around, things suddenly got a lot more interesting. Indeed, if you ever feel your life is getting a little routine, a bit humdrum, I can wholeheartedly recommend going on tour in the company of a hugely eccentric six-foot-seven gay blues singer with a drink problem. You’ll find things liven up quite considerably.
I just loved John’s company. He’d pick me up outside Frome Court in his van, which came complete with its own record player, alerting me to his arrival by leaning out of the window and screaming ‘REGGIE!’ at the top of his voice. His life seemed packed with incident, often linked to his boozing, which I quickly worked out was self-destructive: the big clue came when we played the Links Pavilion in Cromer and he got so pissed after the show that he fell down a nearby cliff in his white suit. But I didn’t realize that he was gay. I know it seems incredible in retrospect. This was a man who called himself Ada, referred to other men as ‘she’ or ‘her’ and continually gave you in-depth reports on the state of his sex life: ‘I’ve got this new boyfriend called Ozzie – darling, he spins around on my dick.’ But again, I was so naive, I honestly had no real understanding of what being gay meant, and I certainly didn’t know that the term might have applied to me. I’d just sit there thinking, ‘What? He spins around on your dick? How? Why? What on earth are you talking about?’
It was hugely entertaining, but none of it changed the fact that I didn’t want to be an organist, I didn’t want to be a backing musician and I didn’t want to be in Bluesology. Which is why I ended up at Liberty Records’ new offices, just off Piccadilly, prefacing my audition for the label by pouring out my woes: the stasis of Bluesology’s career, the horror of the cabaret circuit, the tape machine and its role in our legendary non-performance of ‘Let The Heartaches Begin’.
On the other side of the desk, Ray Williams nodded sympathetically. He was very blond, very handsome, very well dressed and very young. As it turned out, he was so young that he didn’t have the power to give anyone a contract. The decision lay with his bosses. They might have signed me had I not chosen Jim Reeves’s ‘He’ll Have To Go’ as my audition piece. My logic was that everybody else would sing something like ‘My Girl’ or a Motown track, so I’d do something different and stand out. And I really love ‘He’ll Have To Go’. I felt confident singing it: it used to knock them dead in the Northwood Hills public bar. Had I thought twice, I might have realized that it wasn’t going to muster much enthusiasm among people who were trying to start a progressive rock label. Liberty signed The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, The Groundhogs and The Idle Race, a psychedelic band fronted by Jeff Lynne, who went on to form the Electric Light Orchestra. The last thing they wanted was Pinner’s answer to Jim Reeves.
Then again, maybe singing ‘He’ll Have To Go’ was exactly the right thing to do. If I’d passed the audition, Ray might not have handed me the envelope containing Bernie’s lyrics. And if he hadn’t handed me Bernie’s lyrics, I don’t really know what would have happened, although I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it, because it seems like such an incredible twist of fate. I should point out that Ray’s office was chaos. There were piles of reel-to-reel tapes and hundreds of envelopes everywhere: he hadn’t just been contacted by every aspiring musician and writer in Britain, but by every nutcase who’d seen Liberty’s ‘talent wanted’ advert too. He seemed to pull the envelope out at random, just to give me something to take away, so the meeting didn’t feel like a dead loss – I can’t remember if he’d even opened it or not before he gave it to me. And yet that envelope had my future in it: everything that’s happened to me since happened because of what it con
tained. You try and figure that out without giving yourself a headache.
Who knows? Maybe I would have found another writing partner, or joined another band, or made my way as a musician without it. But I do know my life and my career would have been very different, most likely substantially worse – it’s hard to see how it could have turned out any better – and I suspect you wouldn’t be reading this now.
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Liberty Records weren’t interested in the first songs that Bernie and I wrote together, so Ray offered to sign us to a publishing company he had set up. There was no money in it unless we actually sold some songs, but for the moment that didn’t seem to matter: Ray really believed in me. He even tried to set me up with a couple of other lyricists, but it didn’t work out with them the way it did with Bernie. The others wanted us to work together, writing the music and the lyrics at the same time, and I couldn’t do that. I had to have the words written down in front of me before I could write a song. I needed that kick-start, that inspiration. And there was just a magic that happened when I saw Bernie’s lyrics, which made me want to write music. It happened the moment I first opened the envelope, on the tube train home from Baker Street, and it’s been happening ever since.
The songs were really flowing out of us. They were better than anything I’d written before, which admittedly wasn’t saying much. Actually, only some of them were better than anything I’d written before. We wrote two kinds of songs. The first were things we thought we could sell, to Cilla Black, say, or Engelbert Humperdinck: big weepy ballads, jaunty bubblegum pop. They were awful – sometimes I shuddered at the thought that the weepies weren’t that different from the dreaded ‘Let The Heartaches Begin’ – but that was how you made your money as a songwriting team for hire. Those big middle-of-the-road stars were your target market. It was a target we missed every time. The biggest name we managed to sell a song to was the actor Edward Woodward, who occasionally moonlighted as an easy-listening crooner. His album was called This Man Alone, a title that eerily predicted its audience.
And then there were the songs we wanted to write, influenced by The Beatles, The Moody Blues, Cat Stevens, Leonard Cohen, the kind of stuff we were buying from Musicland, a record shop in Soho that Bernie and I haunted so frequently that the staff would ask me to help out behind the counter when one of them wanted to get some lunch. It was the tail end of the psychedelic era, so we wrote a lot of whimsical stuff with lyrics about dandelions and teddy bears. We were really just trying on other people’s styles and finding none of them quite fitted us, but that’s how the process of discovering your own voice works, and the process was fun. Everything was fun. Bernie had moved to London and our friendship had really bloomed. We got on so well, it felt like he was the brother I’d never had, a state of affairs magnified by the fact that we were, at least temporarily, sleeping in bunk beds in my bedroom at Frome Court. We would spend the days writing – Bernie tapping out lyrics on a typewriter in the bedroom, bringing them to me at the upright piano in the living room, then scurrying back to the bedroom again as I started to set them to music. We couldn’t be in the same room if we were writing, but if we weren’t writing, we spent all our time together, in record shops, at the cinema. At night, we would go to gigs or hang around the musicians’ clubs, watching Harry Heart drink his vase full of gin, chatting to other young hopefuls. There was a funny little guy we knew who – in keeping with the flower-power mood of the times – had changed his name to Hans Christian Anderson. The aura of fairy tale otherworldliness conjured by this pseudonym was slightly punctured when he opened his mouth and a thick Lancashire accent came out. Eventually he changed his first name back to Jon and became the lead singer of Yes.
We recorded both our types of song in a tiny four-track studio in the New Oxford Street offices of Dick James Music, which administrated Ray’s own publishing company: it later became famous because it was where The Troggs were covertly recorded shouting and swearing at each other for eleven minutes while trying to write a song – ‘you’re talking out the back of your fuckin’ arses!’ ‘Fuckin’ drummer – I shit him!’ – a recording that later got released as the notorious Troggs Tape. Caleb Quaye was the in-house engineer, a multi-instrumentalist with a joint permanently smouldering between his fingers. Caleb was very hip and he didn’t let you forget it. He spent half his life guffawing at things Bernie or I had said or done or worn that indicated our desperate lack of cool. But, like Ray, he seemed to believe in what we were doing. When he wasn’t rolling on the floor in hysterics or wiping tears of helpless mirth from his eyes, he was lavishing more time and attention on our songs than he needed to. Strictly against the company rules, we worked on them late into the night, calling in favours from session musicians Caleb knew, trying out arrangements and production ideas in secret, after everyone else from DJM had gone home.
It was thrilling, until we got caught by the company’s office manager. I can’t remember how he found out we were there – I think someone might have driven past and seen a light on and thought the place was being burgled. Caleb thought he was going to lose his job and, possibly out of desperation, played Dick James himself what we’d been doing. Instead of firing Caleb and throwing us out, Dick James offered to publish our songs. He was going to give us a retainer of £25 a week: a tenner for Bernie and fifteen quid for me – I got an extra fiver because I had to play piano and sing on the demos. It meant I could quit Bluesology and concentrate on songwriting, which was exactly what I wanted to do. We walked out of his office in a daze, too dumbfounded to be excited.
The only downside of this new arrangement was that Dick thought our future lay with the ballads and bubblegum pop. He worked with The Beatles, administering their publishing company Northern Songs, but at heart he was an old-fashioned Tin Pan Alley publisher. DJM was a strange set-up. Half the company was like Dick himself: middle-aged, more from that old Jewish showbiz world than rock and roll. The other half was younger and more fashionable, like Caleb, and Dick’s son Stephen, or Tony King.
Tony King worked for a new company called AIR from a desk he rented on the second floor. AIR was an association of independent record producers that George Martin had started after he realized how badly EMI paid him for working on The Beatles’ records, and Tony dealt with their publishing and promotion. To say Tony stood out in the DJM offices was an understatement. Tony would have attracted attention in the middle of a Martian invasion. He wore suits from the hippest tailors in London: orange velvet trousers, things made out of satin. He had strings of love beads around his neck and one or more of his collection of antique silk scarves fluttered behind him. His hair was dyed with blond highlights. He was an obsessive music fan, who’d worked for The Rolling Stones and Roy Orbison. He was friends with The Beatles. Like Long John Baldry, he was openly gay and he couldn’t care less who knew it. He didn’t walk so much as waft through the office: ‘Sorry I’m late, dear, the telephone got tangled up in my necklaces.’ He was hilarious. I was completely fascinated by him. More than that: I wanted to be like him. I wanted to be that stylish and outrageous and exotic.
His dress sense started to influence my own, with some eyebrow-raising results. I grew a moustache. I bought an Afghan coat, but opted for the cheaper kind. The sheepskin wasn’t cured properly and the ensuing stench was so bad my mother wouldn’t let me in the flat if I was wearing it. Unable to stretch to the kind of boutiques Tony shopped at, I bought a length of curtain fabric with drawings of Noddy on it and got a seamstress friend of my mum’s to make me a shirt out of it. For the adverts for my first single, ‘I’ve Been Loving You’, I wore a fake fur coat and a mock-leopardskin trilby hat.
For some reason, the sight of me clad in this striking ensemble failed to galvanize record buyers into the shops when the single was released in March 1968. It was a total flop. I wasn’t surprised. I wasn’t even disappointed. I didn’t particularly want to be a solo artist – I just wanted to write songs – and my record deal had come about more or less b
y accident. Dick’s son Stephen had been shopping demos of our songs around various labels in the hope that one of their artists would record them, someone at Philips had said they liked my voice and the next thing I knew, I had a deal to put out a few singles. I wasn’t sure at all, but I went along with it because I thought it might be one way of getting some exposure for the songs Bernie and I were writing. We were really improving as songwriters. We had been inspired by The Band’s rootsy Americana, and by a new wave of US singer-songwriters like Leonard Cohen, who we’d discovered in the imports section of Musicland. Something about their influence clicked with our writing. We’d started coming up with stuff that didn’t feel like pastiches of other people’s work. I’d listened to a song we’d written called ‘Skyline Pigeon’ over and over again and, thrillingly, I still couldn’t think of anyone else it sounded like – we’d finally made something that was our own.
But Dick James had picked out ‘I’ve Been Loving You’ as my debut single, apparently after a long but ultimately fruitful search to find the most boring song in my catalogue. He managed to unearth something completely nondescript that Bernie hadn’t even written the lyrics for, one that we’d earmarked for sale to a middle-of-the-road crooner. I suppose it was Dick’s old-fashioned Tin Pan Alley roots showing. I knew it was the wrong choice, but I didn’t feel like arguing. He was the Denmark Street legend who worked with The Beatles, and he’d given us a contract and got me a record deal when he should have thrown Bernie and me out on the street. The adverts claimed it was ‘the greatest performance on a “first” disc’, that I was ‘1968’s great new talent’ and concluded, ‘YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED’. The British public reacted as if they’d been warned every copy was contaminated with raw sewage; 1968’s great new talent went back to the drawing board.
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