I Read the News Today, Oh Boy

by Paul Howard

  Tara spent most evenings at the Scotch or London’s newest, most exclusive member’s club, Sybilla’s. Occasionally, he sought the consolation of a warm body. He had a one-night stand with Marianne Faithfull at some point between her split with John Dunbar and the start of her relationship with Mick Jagger.

  ‘We had a little scene together,’ she remembered. ‘It was just one night in a hotel in London. Like Tara, I married too young. I had just broken up with John and I didn’t know what I wanted to do next. So I was just checking things out, just as Tara was coming out of his marriage and also checking things out.

  ‘What more can I say? It was a wonderful little fling. We liked each other very much, even though we didn’t want to get involved in something so serious again. But I do think sometimes how my life might have been different had something developed between us. I think I could have loved him.’

  Tara tried to stay busy. The opening of Dandie Fashions was scheduled for Christmas week. John Crittle had managed to secure the lease on the ground floor, as well as the basement below the Methodist chapel on the King’s Road.

  In November, Tara asked Dudley, Douglas and Dave to paint the exterior and interior of the shop to match his car. They set to work immediately, working mostly through the night, as they did with the Cobra. The final coat was barely dry when they suffered a near-disaster.

  ‘With Dave,’ Dudley remembered, ‘it was like living with a time bomb. You never knew when it was going to go off. Doug and I had been working away till two, three, four in the morning, painting away. Dave would often be, like, stood around twiddling his thumbs. And that was when he was at his most dangerous. But what you didn’t want him to say was, “I’ll pick up a paintbrush and help you, lads,” because he’d make a complete arse of it. We’d have to go over it, you know, without trying to offend him.

  ‘On this particular night, he was hanging around. He said, “Shall I go and get some teas from the pie and tea stall down at Sloane Square?” We said, “Great idea, Dave.” Anything to keep him occupied. So he shot off in the Buick. Doug and I are quietly working away, thinking, “Thank Christ for that – he’s off out of the way.”

  ‘Anyway, it must have been about an hour later, or whatever, the Buick comes screeching to a halt outside. He comes racing through the door, going, “Douse the lights! Grab an ’ammer! Douse the lights! Grab an ’ammer!”

  ‘And what had happened, it transpired, was that he’d gone to the pie stall, and, as was his wont, he got into a row with the next guy in the queue. Dave, when he got served, must have got hold of his pie and shoved it in this bloke’s face.

  ‘Then he noticed the guy run back to his car, which was full of about three or four other guys. They’d got the boot up and they were grabbing hold of jemmies and whatever. So Dave jumps in the Buick and shoots off. But instead of, like, trying to lose them, down side streets, he drives back to Tara’s shop – driving the most conspicuous car in London, by the way.

  ‘He shoots in through this narrow doorway, shouting this thing: “Douse the lights! Grab an ’ammer!” And the next thing we hear this other car screech up and all these big blokes come racing towards this entrance. As it happened, they couldn’t get through more than one person at a time. I noticed the first bloke who got through had got bits of food all over his face. But Dave was stood waiting for him. And he threw the scalding hot teas in his face. So we heard this scream. The bloke shot back to the car and the car shot off.

  ‘They must have only gone around the block, because the next thing they came back and they started throwing all these bricks at the shop front. Tara never knew anything about it. Just by a miracle, the stones hit all the bits on the corners and never broke any of the work we’d done.’

  While the shop was being painted and fitted out, Tara and the man he suspected of cuckolding him were busy building up stock. John took care of business in his office in the basement, while Tara popped in, usually around lunchtime, before he started work at the garage, to check on progress.

  ‘John would go and buy the fabric,’ Alan Holsten remembered, ‘then bring it up to Soho or to someone in the East End to get it turned into something. Before the shop opened and we had a cash flow, all the bills got sent to Tara, who wrote out cheques to settle everything, because he never carried cash.

  ‘Tara’s role was really as a backer, but they both knew the kind of clothes they wanted to sell – things like Regency jackets; red velvet jackets with stand-up collars, semi-bolero style. John ordered jackets in the same fabric as the trousers that the wine waiters in the Dorchester wore. We did jackets and suits in flannel cloth – all these different-coloured stripes. Jackets with ruffles and lace and all that kind of thing, which you could dress down by wearing a T-shirt underneath. And then we were going to do stuff to order. You could have a shirt with cuffs or a jacket with lapels that could be any colour you wanted.’

  If it all sounded familiar, then there was a good reason. Dandie Fashions would be a shop that followed more than it led, offering almost identical styles to those Michael Rainey was selling on nearby Cale Street, but for a lower price. ‘It did have its own aesthetic,’ according to Paul Gorman, author of The Look: Adventures in Rock and Pop Fashion. ‘But there’s no doubt that what they were doing was very similar to – and some would say a cheap imitation of – Hung On You.’

  Dandie’s, as it quickly became known, was a combination of Michael Rainey’s stolen vision, John Crittle’s cynical opportunism and front, and Tara’s access to enormous amounts of Guinness money. It broke Michael Rainey’s heart – and, eventually, his will. ‘They nicked my suppliers,’ he said, ‘my tailors, my manufacturers, everything. Foster’s was my jacket and trousers maker. Then I had a shirt-maker in Soho, very close to the French Club. I had worked with these people for six months. I taught them how to cut things just the way I liked them. So Tara and John were stepping into a ready-made scene. While he was working for me, John had been filtering a lot of clothes out of my shop and they copied all my designs.’

  Michael eventually took the disastrous decision to move from Cale Street to World’s End. Time magazine had named Hung On You as one of the must-see locations in Swinging London. Suddenly, no one knew where it had gone. ‘It was a mistake. I thought the King’s Road was where it was happening but I went down the wrong end. I wasn’t particularly ambitious – not like John Crittle was – but I was upset that I had this little shop that I loved and suddenly I felt like I’d been chased down the street by a pack of wolves.

  ‘We didn’t fall out, Tara and I. It wasn’t Tara who planned it. I fell out with John, though. The suppliers were assuring me, “Don’t worry, we’ll never let them copy your stuff,” and, “We’ll continue to make stuff for you.” But in the end, I gave it up. I said, “I don’t think there’s enough for two of us in this.” John had Guinness money behind him. I couldn’t compete with that. So I got out of the clothes business and went into carpets.’

  The arrival of Dandie Fashions would mark the moment when the King’s Road began to follow down the same commercial path as Carnaby Street. As Alan put it: ‘By the time we opened, everyone was just plagiarizing everyone else.’

  Dandie’s would lack the personality of Granny’s. Joss sticks would be the nearest things it had to a gimmick. ‘But it had everything going for it. It was in the right location. We were right smack bang in the middle of the King’s Road. The shop looked the business from the outside, with the mural and everything. Then when you went in, it actually felt like a shop. Those other places, they were doing their own thing, but they were a bit, I don’t know, not upper-class snooty, but you were either “in” or you weren’t. And they seemed to have very little to sell. Some of it was antique, some of it was new – it was whatever they got their hands on. Dandie Fashions would be more of a commercial environment. We were going to do it right.’

  •

  Tara wasn’t alone in feeling confused and a little lost that autumn. The Beatles were exhausted at
the end of what had been for them a turbulent summer.

  Revolver revealed a group of musicians who were thrilling to the technical possibilities of the studio, experimenting with tape loops, backward guitar parts and varispeeding to create sounds that had never been heard on a record before.

  Thematically, the album had broken all manner of taboos. ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ was the band’s most overtly drug-themed song yet, in which John Lennon attempted to render the experience of taking LSD in a three-minute song.

  Musically, the album had everything. George was allowed to indulge his growing obsession with Indian music in ‘Love You To’ and Paul his penchant for classical string arrangements in the strange and ethereal ‘Eleanor Rigby’. John managed to work Peter Fonda’s trippy assertion that he knew what it was like to be dead into ‘She Said She Said’, one of three tracks with a clear drug theme. Acid, politics, love, spiritualism – and even Ringo’s ‘Yellow Submarine’ thrown in for the kiddies. Yet it still sounded like a coherent body of work put together by four musicians who were all on the same page creatively.

  But their transition into grown-up, independent-minded Beatles and heralds of a new consciousness had not been without growing pains. In July, they’d been attacked in the Philippines – and kicked, quite literally, onto the plane home – after refusing an invitation to meet the country’s First Lady, Imelda Marcos. They were lucky to escape without serious injury.

  A month later, while touring America, there was trouble of a different colour when John Lennon’s philosophical musings on the popularity of The Beatles in comparison to Jesus Christ got him in trouble. When a five-month-old London Evening Standard interview was regurgitated in the American press, it triggered a fortnight of anti-Beatles hysteria. Radio stations banned their records. Religious fundamentalists burned them. Even the Ku Klux Klan managed to steal the moral high ground from the once ‘cute’ Beatles.

  At a press conference, convened to try to take the heat out of the story, John – against his better judgement – apologized for what he said. But the whole absurd charade confirmed in the minds of The Beatles what they’d been discussing amongst themselves for a year: the Fab Four thing was a beaten docket.

  On 29 August, after playing Candlestick Park in San Francisco, they announced that they were taking a break. When they returned to London, the four Beatles did their own thing for the first time since becoming famous. John went to Spain to play Musketeer Gripweed in Richard Lester’s black comedy, How I Won the War. George went to India with Patti, for sitar tuition from his musical guru, Ravi Shankar. Paul stuck around England, working with Beatles producer George Martin on the score for the British film The Family Way.

  The wholesome, fun-loving Beatles disappeared from public view, eventually to be replaced by four serious-minded cultural subversives; long-haired, drug-savvy avatars for the world’s ‘turned-on’ youth. Tara saw a bit of Paul in London that September. Paul was growing a Pancho Villa-type moustache to try to conceal his scarred lip from the moped accident. When he saw Tara’s painted Cobra, he was beside himself with excitement. ‘He said he wanted the same thing done to his piano,’ remembered Dudley Edwards. ‘So Tara took us around to his house and introduced us to him.’

  The following week, Dudley and Douglas Binder painted Paul’s upright piano with an almost identical colour scheme to Tara’s car. It was the piano on which he would write the song ‘Getting Better’, part of a new concept album, the idea for which was starting to percolate in his head that autumn. In November, he went on holiday to Kenya with Jane Asher, but he was straining to get back to the studio. Revolver had been a great effort. But Pet Sounds, in his view, had raised the bar. And now he had an idea for something that was even better.

  •

  Tara, normally so self-contained, so effortlessly cool, found himself, for the first time in his life, overwhelmed by a weight of worries as December approached. The divorce. The children. His broken love affair with Amanda. Long meetings with solicitors and trustees. And Oonagh in the background, dictating matters.

  His friends began to notice an unfamiliar sense of doom about him. ‘I remember one night I was having a trip with him in Theodora’s house,’ said Martin Wilkinson. ‘We were playing chess and the acid started working. And suddenly he looked at me and I was sure he was having some kind of premonition that something was going to happen.

  ‘I’d had a very serious accident about a year before in a Lotus Elan that belonged to him. I was in Cornwall and I hit a wall and I ended up upside-down in the thing. I was very lucky that I wasn’t killed. But I still had the scar and that’s what Tara was staring at and he obviously saw something or developed some sense and was really frightened. He said to me, “Don’t look at me like that,” and Tara wasn’t normally like that on acid.

  ‘It probably had something to do with his emotional state at the time. I know he used to tell people that he wasn’t going to live a long life. Then he had all these problems with Nicki and the children. I think he was disturbed at the time.’

  It probably didn’t help that he was spending a lot of time with Brian Jones, who was going through his own dark agonies. The Rolling Stones were adding the finishing touches to their new album, Between the Buttons, in London in November that December. For a whole variety of reasons, some of them chemical, Brian was playing far less of a role in the studio than he had in the recording of Aftermath. While his confidence reached a new low point, Mick had developed a clear sense of his own sexual potency. He was in the process of jettisoning Chrissie Shrimpton, his girlfriend from the days before he was famous, who now found herself, like the subject of ‘Out of Time’, old-fashioned, out of touch and obsolete, especially compared to the exotic and free-spirited Marianne, who was now sharing his bed.

  Brian still showed flashes of the old brilliance, colluding with Keith to write ‘Ruby Tuesday’, which Marianne regarded as his final, heroic effort to regain his place as the leader of the band he founded. But The Rolling Stones was now clearly Mick and Keith, which left Brian plenty of downtime to indulge his insecurity, jealousy and full gamut of dark thoughts. He became a difficult presence around the studio, petulant, uncommunicative, drunk, or drugged.

  ‘People always say that Mick and Keith took over the band because Brian couldn’t write,’ said Anita, ‘but it wasn’t true. Brian was very creative. He stayed up all night writing songs. But the following morning he would erase them all, because he was paranoid. He didn’t want anyone to know what he was doing. And at that time, it became much worse because of the political scenario with Mick and Keith and Andrew.

  ‘For Brian, I think his friendship with Tara was a safe haven with all that was going on in the studio, with all that antagonism. It was difficult because Brian was very sensitive and I think he recognized that Tara was sensitive, too. Brian didn’t have many friendships. It was unusual that he let someone so close. In the end, he didn’t have any friends at all, except people who worked for him or people who used him to procure drugs and girls. But at that time he was lucky enough to have Tara.’

  Martin Wilkinson remembered calling in to see them in Courtfield Road one night that November. ‘Brian answered the door,’ he said. ‘He invited me in. He said he was teaching Tara the chords on the guitar, or he was teaching him the blues, something like that. They were very, very close, Tara and Brian.

  ‘The flat had a very gloomy hotel sort of feel to it. The whole Tibetan Buddhist thing was still new at the time and Brian had done a Mandala on the wall. It was like a picture of his life with all the elements represented in it. It was supposed to represent what your life meant. I remember thinking it was incredibly sinister.

  ‘And Tara was beginning to do one as well – or he had done one. And because they were both so young, I remember thinking, how could you think your life is encapsulated in something like that? They might have seen it as an act of rebellion, writing on the walls of this ghastly flat, but I remember being worried about it. It just seemed terri
bly morbid.’

  In the middle of November, just days before the start of the divorce case, Tara returned to Luggala for Dorian’s third birthday. Brian made the trip with him. Oonagh took photographs of them in the drawing room, looking like two brothers in their matching black polo-neck jumpers and identical blond haircuts.

  After the stress of the last few weeks, Tara was relieved to be home, not least because he was still permitted to drive in Ireland. He took Brian around in a Lotus Elan that he kept at Luggala and showed him the sights of Wicklow, including the trees he loved to climb as a boy and the lake where he learned to swim. On the way back to the house one day, there was an incident involving a neighbour’s hens.

  ‘I heard what sounded like a racing car coming up the hill,’ remembered Thomas Webster, who sold free-range eggs from his home in Roundwood. ‘The noise of the thing was unbelievable. I heard a screech, then I looked out the window and all I could see was feathers everywhere. I’d no car at the time. I was getting up on the tractor to go after him, but my wife, Noeleen, told me to forget about it. It was only two or three hens, she said. He was very attractive to the girls, you see. So I hopped down off the tractor and I said, “That lad would want to slow down.” And then later, of course, I wished I had gone up after him, because maybe he would have listened to me.’

  •

  On Friday, 9 December, the Daily Express carried a short article about the forthcoming opening of Dandie Fashions. The newspaper had spoken to the Reverend Ron Hoar, the minister at the Chelsea Methodist Church, about his newest tenants. ‘I don’t think I shall be getting any clothes there,’ he told the newspaper. ‘But I will probably drop in some time to get acquainted. And my children aren’t quite kinky enough. The eldest is nine.’