by Chris Welch
Richard was a tough character from a tough district in north London. He had fought as a boxer and certainly knew how to ‘handle his dukes’. His work as a scaffolder on construction sites ensured he had a vice-like grip of steel. “When I was a kid I did boxing so I picked stuff up from an early age,” he says. “Also scaffolding is not an easy business. You develop very strong forearms and fingers to get a grip. It’s very easy to shake people’s hands and almost break their bones. Those scaffolding tubes weigh 90 pounds and you really have to hold them tight or you’d never lift them. You develop muscles that other people don’t have. I could grab people by the throat and they couldn’t move!”
Like Peter Grant, Cole wanted more out of life than labouring or fighting. He loved music and bands and, like most sharp young men of the Sixties, he was well into clothes. He even had plans to be a fashion designer and claims to have designed the shirts worn by John Lennon and Ringo Starr on the Revolver album cover. In the event, he found himself being drawn into the band business and eventually became one of rock’s most respected tour managers.
His introduction to ‘humping gear’ for a living came when he was drinking in The Ship, a music biz pub in Soho’s Wardour Street, just a few yards away from the Marquee Club. He bumped into Richard Green, a journalist from Record Mirror, fondly known as ‘The Beast’.* Cole recalls the outcome of their meeting. “I was drinking with The Beast and I said, ‘Do you know any bands who’ve got a record in the charts that might need a road manager?’ He said, ‘Why don’t you try Unit 4 Plus 2?’ He gave me a number and I went to see their manager John L. Barker and got the job. I was only with them for a couple of months. They were nice guys but they weren’t really my type of people. They were such a straight bunch and I didn’t get on with their personal manager, so I left.”
Soon Richard had a reputation for being a tough ‘road wrangler’. He worked with many London groups including Herbie Goins & The Night Timers, but deep inside he was looking for a job with a really successful hit band. One night he went to a party at The Moody Blues’ house in Roehampton. The Who were there and one of their staff men, Mike Shaw, asked Richard if he wanted to ‘roadie’ for The Merseybeats who’d lately become managed by Kit Lambert, The Who’s co-manager. Instead of taking up the offer, Richard went looning off on holiday in Spain where he enjoyed the sunshine, drank a lot and sat in on drums with a band he heard in a club. “After one number they threw me off. But there was a guitarist called Mick Wilshire. When I came back to London I called Mike Shaw and asked him if the job with The Merseys was still going. He said, ‘No’ but they had just fired The Who’s road manager Cy Langston. Their van had got stolen outside Battersea Dogs Home and he got the bullet. So I joined The Who and was with them for about a year.”
Caught up in the chaotic lifestyle of the Sixties, Richard lost his driving licence and fled again to the continent, this time to St Tropez in the South of France. He hung out with visiting musicians Long John Baldry and Elton John before returning to London where he found work with Freddie Mack & The Mac Sound. “He had so many musicians in the band he never even knew their names,” says Cole. “He only knew them by the song they sang!” In the band was drummer B.J. Wilson, later with Procol Harum and at one time a contender to join Led Zeppelin. Richard went on to work with yet more bands, including The Young Rascals, over from America to tour the UK, and The Searchers. “They wanted to keep me, but I was coming out of The Ship again one night and bumped into Mick Wilshire, who was back from Spain and now in the New Vaudeville Band. ‘We need somebody like you,’ he said. ‘The roadie we’ve got is no good at all! Why don’t you come with us? We’re going to America.’ I was just 20 years old. Mick gave me Peter Grant’s number. So I called Peter up and went to his office. He said to me: ‘How much do you want?’ So I said, ‘I want £30 a week. Take it or leave it.’ He kinda looked at me. Years later he told me that he thought: ‘This is the guy for me. He isn’t going to fuck around when he’s getting the money off the promoters!’”
Richard remembers Peter’s lair at RAK Management office at 155 Oxford Street. Grant sat at a large desk on one side of the room and Mickie Most sat at his desk on the other side. “I remember Peter wagging his finger at me and saying, ‘If you ever fucking repeat anything you hear in this office, I’ll cut your fucking ears off.’ I said, ‘If you are going to point your fucking finger at me much longer I’m going to fucking bite it off!’ So, that’s how I met Peter Grant.”
The office that Mickie and Peter shared became legendary. The whole building was full of music business companies and became known as the British version of The Brill Building, the Manhattan office block, where writers churned out streams of hit songs for music publishers and record companies.
Of course being London, the RAK HQ wasn’t quite as glamorous as its New York counterpart. Recalls Mickie Most: “We used to be on the sixth floor of the building in Oxford Street and sometimes the elevator wasn’t working because someone had left the bloody gate open. Peter would just go all the way home again. He wouldn’t walk up six flights of stairs. The landlords were Millets, the camping gear store on the ground floor. They were responsible for the heating of the building and sometimes they forgot to put it on in the winter. I remember Peter going in there and grabbing hold of the manager of Millets and saying, ‘If you don’t put that fucking heating on I’ll put you in the fucking boiler!’ From then on we used to have heat any time we wanted, even in the middle of the summer.”
Another occupant of the building, who subsequently worked for Peter Grant, was publicist and journalist Bill Harry. He handled the press for the New Vaudeville Band and later became the first of Led Zeppelin’s long suffering PRs. Liverpool born, Bill Harry was an expert on The Beatles and the entire Mersey scene. He had gone to school with, and befriended, John Lennon and in July 1961 founded the magazine Merseybeat, one of Britain’s first ever fanzines and also one of the best. He moved to London to work as a pop journalist and later became an independent PR with clients that included The Hollies, The Kinks, Pink Floyd and Suzy Quatro.
Bill had known Peter Grant when he was still a road manager for Gene Vincent and working for Don Arden. “We met in Liverpool and had a few drinks and got on quite well,” he says. “He was a big man even then.” When Harry moved to London he began working for the Ellis Wright Agency, run by two former university students, Terry Ellis and Chris Wright. Before long these two budding entrepreneurs would merge their names – Chris and Ellis – into Chrysalis.
“They had a small office in Regent Street and asked me to do publicity for their acts like Ten Years After and Jethro Tull,” says Bill Harry. “Then they moved office into 155 Oxford Street. Every floor had a showbiz company, which was quite unique. When Ellis-Wright decided to call themselves Chrysalis and move into Oxford Street, they asked me to rent an office there too. There were shops on the ground floor. Terry, Chris and me had a small office on the first floor. Island Music and Mike Berry, the publisher, occupied the next floor. On the top floor Peter Grant and Mickie Most shared their office. We were always going up there and chatting, so there was a lot of communication between the companies.”
Bill Harry did PR for Chrysalis acts and the latest crop of blues bands, Chicken Shack, Savoy Brown and Free. When Peter spotted him bustling about the building he asked him to do PR for his acts as well. “Mickie and Peter had an open-plan office. It wasn’t big by modern standards, but they seemed to get on really well, even though they were as different as chalk and cheese. They had their own separate businesses and Peter didn’t even have his groups recorded by Mickie. Really, they were just sharing an office.”
It was the era of pirate radio and Grant wasn’t slow to pick up on the promotional potential of the offshore stations. On at least one occasion, Grant and Most’s efforts to reach the pirates ended up in farce. Mickie: “I had a yacht and we used to sail out to Radio Caroline in the North Sea. We used to go out there to try and plug our records. There was him and I dr
iving this bloody boat and what we knew about yachting was dangerous! We lost the anchor at Clacton. We dropped it overboard and it wasn’t tied to the boat. The chain was going out and all of a sudden the whole lot went over the side. We didn’t realise it was tidal and we tied up at the end of the pier and halfway through the night, we were hanging from the moorings because the water had disappeared!
“We were trying to get to Radio London and Radio Caroline I think, because they were stuck out there on some bloody sandbank off Clacton, or wherever. We eventually got out there on the boat and it was blowing a gale. I was trying to throw these records on board and they kept falling into the sea. We never got one of them onto the fucking boat! We had so much fun. I can’t remember the artist we were promoting but whoever it was, his records are still at the bottom of the North Sea. If you wanna dive you’ll find them because the old shellac never rots. They’re still down there.
“I had just got the yacht and knew nothing about boats really, so how we got there and back beats me. Me and Peter just turned left when we got out of the Thames Estuary. It was highly dangerous. I didn’t think about the sand banks and restricted areas. I just headed where I thought the pirate ships might be. They certainly weren’t expecting us because there were no mobile phones in those days or telecommunications. The ships were illegal and you weren’t supposed to communicate with them. Another thing was there was no alcohol allowed on board the pirate radio ships. We had all this booze on the yacht, but we thought we couldn’t get them pissed. We’d get into trouble. One of the DJs was a guy called Tony Winsor. He was an Australian guy who had been around a long time and he was more interested in the Scotch we had on board, not the records. ‘Throw the Scotch!’ he’d shout. It was so funny. We had a big yacht with lots of cabins, but I told Peter to stay amidships because I didn’t want him to tip us up! He’d be sitting there grumbling. ‘What is there to eat? I’m fucking starving.’ He was always hungry was Peter. I said, ‘Don’t worry, when we get to Southend, we’ll have fish and chips.’”
Peter and Mickie never dared risk repeating their expedition to the pirate ships at sea but they did try boating up the Thames, with equally hilarious results. They were due to have lunch with a top producer at the BBC studios at Teddington Loch. “I said to Peter, let’s go on the boat. So we had lunch with this guy and we said goodbye and the BBC guys were all waving at us out of the window, as we cast off. But we couldn’t leave. The Thames had risen and we were locked in! I couldn’t get under the bridge and so we had to go round and round in circles going ‘Goodbye, goodbye!’ We couldn’t get under Hammersmith Bridge either and had to wait an hour for the tide to drop. We used to get into all sorts of trouble.”
Peter once described his partnership with Most: “RAK Music Management was the name of the company, but names are not important in this business. People don’t say, ‘Let’s get in touch with RAK,’ they say, ‘Let’s go see Peter Grant.’ It’s the personal bit that matters. At one point just Mickie Most, myself and three girls worked in those offices and yet we had four LPs in the Top Twenty.”
During his Oxford Street years, Peter also managed guitarist Jeff Beck and singer Terry Reid, and had a ‘business interest’ in Donovan. The working day could be hectic on the top floor with phones ringing constantly and a steady stream of visitors, some welcome, others not quite so welcome. Peter’s explosive temper sometimes got the better of him. Usually calm, smiling and benign, he would suddenly become enraged at the incompetence – or worse – the discourtesy of others.
Mickie Most: “Peter on the phone was amazing. I remember he once had an offer for Led Zeppelin for a million dollars and he told them to ‘fuck off’. He said, ‘Listen, when you get some serious money together then we’ll do it.’ I said to him, ‘What was all that about?’ and he said, ‘They’re giving us a million dollars for that gig. Nah, it’s not enough.’ When he used to get really annoyed he’d kick the front of desk out. So if I came into the office in the morning and found the desk lying in pieces, I knew Peter had had a particularly good evening! The desk had this front panel and he would swear and kick the panel out.”
Such antics undoubtedly amused and intrigued the parade of artists ascending the erratic lift to their office in search of work. One such visitor was the multi-talented John Baldwin of Sidcup. Better known as John Paul Jones, he was a classically trained musician, adept on the keyboards and bass, who could turn his hand to writing and arranging music. He was much in demand for sessions and did a lot of work for Mickie Most. Another visitor was a frail, curly haired young guitarist called Jimmy Page. Says Mickie: “Jimmy used to play on all the records I was making as a session musician and John Paul Jones used to be an arranger, bass player and keyboard player. They were both very talented musicians. John Paul Jones is a genius. I’m sure he’s not as well appreciated as he should be, but he’s a brilliant guy and he did some great stuff for me. He once told me that he took the name ‘John Paul Jones’ because it would look good on a cinema screen. His ambition then was to write music for the movies.”
John Baldwin was born on January 3, 1946 in Sidcup, Kent. His father was a pianist and arranger for big bands and John was destined for a musical career from an early age. “I was a choirmaster at our local church at the age of 14. That’s how I paid for my first bass guitar! I was at boarding school at Blackheath from the age of five because my parents were in a variety act, touring round the world. I spent three years at Eltham Green comprehensive school. But I didn’t do very well with my exams, mainly because I was out playing in bands on American bases.”
John’s first band was called The Deltas with guitarist Pete Gage, who was later with Elkie Brooks in Vinegar Joe. “We played gigs all through our GCEs. I was asleep most of the time! That was my first serious band when I was 15. So I had a lot of experience. I used to play with my dad in a trio, playing weddings. We did waltzes and quicksteps and nobody knew what we were playing after a few drinks, so we’d play a bit of jazz. It was all useful stuff, which got used all through my session career and ever since. Keyboards were my first instrument, but my father was a really good pianist and I never felt I’d ever be anywhere near as good as him. So I took up the organ because it was different. I liked the way the notes sustained.”
John had thought of going to the Royal College of Music but had to wait until he was 17. At the age of 16 higher education wasn’t his main priority. He wanted to play pop music and earn some money. “So I stood on the corner of Archer Street in Soho every Monday for three months hoping for a gig. That was the place all musicians went looking for work. Eventually I met Jet Harris and asked him if he wanted a bass player. He said, ‘Well I don’t but see those people over there.’ He was just forming a band as Jet & Tony, which I’d read about in the Melody Maker. That’s why I was looking for him. But he’d got a bass player from the Jett Blacks, so I rehearsed with the Jett Blacks a couple of times.”
John finally got called back to play with Jet & Tony when the group was number one with a number called ‘Diamonds’. He toured with them for 18 months until they broke up. Recalls John: “The first time I met Peter Grant was in 1963 when I was still with Jet Harris and Tony Meehan. I went out on tour with their backing band, which included a tenor sax, baritone and another guitar. Jet played tuned down guitar and I played the bass. I was 17 years old and earning thirty pounds a week! I think we carried our own gear until we all chipped in a few quid to get a roadie. I ran into Peter when he was driving the van for Gene Vincent and we saw him in Wardour Street, outside The Flamingo Club. He was a big bloke but he seemed very friendly and a nice chap. I think you had to be – driving for Gene Vincent.”
After the Jet & Tony experience, John began doing sessions for Decca records at the behest of Tony Meehan. He was earning good money in the studios, and between 1964 and 1968 recorded with a huge range of artists including Lulu, The Rolling Stones and Donovan. In April 1964 he released his own instrumental single ‘A Foggy Day In Vietnam’ without much
success. However he began to make the switch from playing bass guitar on sessions to arranging the music. He did both jobs on Donovan’s ‘Sunshine Superman’ and as a result came to the attention of the producer, Mickie Most.
Says John: “The next time I saw Peter Grant was when I was working for Mickie Most as his musical director. They had that huge forty-foot office at 155 Oxford Street. Mickie had a desk down one end and Peter had a desk at the other end. They used to face each other across this long room. So if you saw Mickie, you saw Peter. It was just a small bunch of people working there. They had an accountant and Irene the receptionist, who was wonderful. She more or less ran both of them! Peter was managing the New Vaudeville Band at the time and later The Yardbirds.”
During 1967 the New Vaudeville Band took up much of Peter’s time but he knew they were, at best, a novelty act, so he was anxious to expand his interests and look out for new projects. He was perhaps fortunate that The Yardbirds virtually fell into his lap while Mickie Most was producing their 1967 album Mind Games. John Paul Jones worked on several of the songs on the album at Mickie’s behest. During these sessions John renewed his acquaintance with Jimmy Page, now a member of The Yardbirds, and a mutual admiration society was established between the two. Nothing came of it for now, though.
By 1967, the music business had changed drastically since Peter Grant cut his teeth as a tour manager with visiting American rock’n’roll stars. Most importantly, the emphasis had switched to promoting home-grown talent in the wake of the global success of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.
