The Moody Blues © raythomas.co.uk

Music at Waverley

Elsewhere in this scholarly tome, the more attentive readers will have spotted that Waverley Grammar School was very big on music. The school was extremely open-minded when it came to encouraging our interests in this area, so when we asked if we could bring a record player into the classroom to play records during lunchtime, they readily agreed. My mate Tony brought in a stereo(!) which was fairly rare in the late 60s (most record players were still mono) and we duly set about blasting out our sounds. There were several camps operational in the school at that time, so we had to accommodate the various tastes. One day, we may have Rock, another day, Pop, another day Soul and so on. This was a good thing as it kept the interest levels high. A wide variety of artistes would feature on the playlist, ranging from the likes of Family, The Nice, King Crimson and Deep Purple through to Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye, the Temptations, Four Tops and Supremes, via the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Beach Boys and Simon & Garfunkel. The school even let us pin album covers to the wall if they were deemed to be suitably artistic, for example Anyway by Family featured a drawing by Leonardo da Vinci:

Cover of ‘Anyway’ © dustygroove.com

The ‘Conservatoire’

After leaving school, some of my friends went to the Birmingham School of Music, nowadays rather pretentiously known as the Conservatoire. They always had a more than decent student orchestra, who with typical Brummie self-deprecation, would refer to themselves as Stan’s Band.

Stan’s Band, early 1970s

I used to hang around in their rehearsal rooms quite a lot, drinking coffee and chatting. Occasionally, I would tap out a tune by ear on one of the instruments, which Stan’s students always seemed to find quite surprising, they could read music really well, but would often struggle to improvise, whereas improvising was the only thing I knew how to do. Put a sheet of music in front of me and it would be back to the pedestrian one-note-at-a-time routine.

A great thing about being with these students was that they opened my eyes and ears to music that I would probably never have heard under other conditions. Shostakovich Symphony No.5 was one I remember vividly hearing for the first time at the Music School and it became a pet obsession of mine for quite a while afterwards.

Some local band.

Jumping back to Waverley for a moment – one time, when I was about 14, I got invited to a wedding reception in a basement in Moseley. The bride and groom were friends with a local band from Aston who played at the (now) legendary Crown pub at the back of New Street Station. I toddled along and was pleasantly surprised at how good (and bloody loud!) they were. My ears were ringing for about four days, having unwittingly encountered the as-then-unknown Black Sabbath in a small Moseley basement.

To be honest, I’ve never really like them much, I find a lot of their stuff quite cringeworthy, although there’s no disputing that Tony Iommi was instrumental in defining a whole new genre in Heavy Metal and has led the way for dozens of bands to find their niche. He doesn’t get the credit he deserves.

Then, it all got real…

When my brother moved to Brownfield Road, Shard End, we quickly made friends with his next-door neighbour, Jake Commander. Jake had been lead guitarist in a Shard End band called The ‘Andicaps. His predecessor in the band had been one of his mates, a chap called Jeff Lynne. When Jeff left the ‘Andicaps to join a band called The Chads, he recommended Jake as his replacement. Jeff went on to join The Nightriders and then the Idle Race. Jake eventually left the ‘Andicaps and moved more into the Production and Engineering side of the music business.

Jeff and Jake remained close friends, so, when Jeff and Roy Wood were looking to start up a new band called the Electric Light Orchestra, it was a logical decision to recruit Jake to help sort out the technicalities of working out how to ‘mike up’ classical instruments to be able to play through a highly-amplified PA system, which is where I came in…

This would have been 1971/72; something like that. I was a teenage boy, ever eager to please, and had been plaguing Jake (his patience with me was admirable, even though I must have been a bloody nuisance), so he enlisted me to help him and Jeff sort out what kind of microphones or pickups would work best through a PA. Jake had converted one of his bedrooms into a makeshift soundproof recording studio, so they locked me away in the bedroom with a variety of instruments - cellos, violas, violins, with devices such as contact microphones gaffer-taped to various positions on the instrument. We’d have a pre-amp in the bedroom and a cable running down the stairs to a Bang & Olufsen tape recorder and, possibly an oscilloscope, (although I may have imagined that after all these years!) I would scrape away gamely at the strings of the instruments, Jake would record the racket I was making, document the set-up and then him and Jeff would analyse the racket I’d made and decide with type of pickup may be best for each instrument.

Meanwhile, Jeff and Roy were advertising for proper musicians in Melody Maker:

The Change of Direction

Jeff and Roy disagreed on the direction that ELO should be going in. Roy envisaged a ‘wall of sound’ type of deal, similar to the type of thing that Phil Spector had done, but Jeff, a massive Beatles fan, wanted to go for a gentler, more orchestral type of vibe like the one the Beatles had explored in tracks like Eleanor Rigby. They agreed to disagree, remained friends, and Roy went off to form Wizzard.

Jake stayed close with Jeff/ELO and assumed the role of Sound Engineer. I went along to a few of their early gigs around Birmingham and, it has to be said, the sound was very muddy. Nobody had ever tried anything like this before and it’s a credit to Jake’s ingenuity that he gradually and systematically worked out a way to nail down the trademark ELO sound that later became world-famous.

An early publicity shot for the embryonic ELO. Jake is on the left, next to Jeff Lynne.

Top of the Pops

Very early on in the ELO story, they got invited to play on Top of the Pops, performing 10538 Overture. My memory of this is somewhat cloudy, but I seem to remember that Roy Wood chipped in to help out. They still hadn’t recruited all the musicians they needed, so Jake stood in, dressed in a gorilla suit and miming playing a cello. Ever the technical wizard, Jake had adapted a reel-to-reel tape recorder to be a video recorder, his wife had recorded the show at home on the Thursday evening and we all gathered around with a takeaway curry to watch the recording at the weekend. Rod Stewart and The Faces had been on the same show performing You Wear it Well (my favourite Rod Stewart song) and Jake regaled us with tales of the after-show party where Rod and his team systematically drank everyone under the table, despite strong competition from the Birmingham contingent!

The Grand Piano Incident

There was a classic ‘Pretty Woman’ occurrence in Oxford. It goes like this: Jeff has asked Jake to go and buy a grand piano, so Jake, looking like he does in the photo above, wearing a Mickey Mouse t-shirt and scruffy jeans, wanders into a posh music shop. The salesman doesn’t take Jake seriously when he says he wants to buy a Steinway and seems keen to evict Jake from his snooty establishment. Jake goes off to another shop, buys a Steinway, paying an eye-watering amount of money, then returns to the first shop, goes up to the salesman and says “I’ve just got the piano I was after. Would you possibly have a stool that fits it?”

The Moog

A man called Walter Carlos (now a woman called Wendy Carlos) had recorded a couple of fascinating albums using a revolutionary new instrument called a Moog Synthesizer, the first was called ‘Switched on Bach’, the second called ‘The Well-Tempered Synthesizer’. Both Jake and Jeff were captivated by this new musical experiment and Jeff was wondering whether a Moog would help fill out the sound of the ELO, so he bought one. It was a real struggle to get anything other than squeaks or farts out of the instrument, especially as it was an analogue device and went seriously out of tune under stage lighting, so…

…We toddled along to see Emerson, Lake and Palmer at the Birmingham Odeon. Keith Emerson played a hauntingly beautiful piece called Lucky Man on his Moog, which was masterful, yet utterly demoralising for Jeff. He decided to drop the Moog from the roster of ELO instruments although we later discovered that Emerson had Robert Moog himself on the tour crew, tasked with keeping the damned synthesizers in tune for the live performances. Later on, Richard Tandy worked out how to incorporate the Moog into ELO’s repertoire and they used it successfully.

Thanks, Jake

Looking back, I can only now appreciate how immeasurably patient and tolerant Jake Commander must have been with me. I was a gormless teenager, of actually no use whatsoever to him, but he indulged me and allowed me to hang around, not doing anything particularly useful, just getting under his feet. He was, and still is, a really lovely man. We lost touch for a decade or three, Jake went to live in America, where he worked with the likes of Elton John, Tom Petty and George Harrison, as well as providing backing vocals and guitar for the ELO in stadium gigs at venues such as Wembley. The last time I saw him would have been about 2005, when he invited me along to an open mike night at a golf club in Sutton Coldfield where he was gigging with some of his old mates from the ‘Andicaps. I forgot to mention, but he’s an absolutely blistering Blues guitarist and, on that evening, he stood out a mile from everyone else who took a turn. We hadn’t seen each other for years and he was disappointed that I’d cut my hair short. I reckon he thought I’d let the side down!

Jake Commander, ripping out a Blues solo at an open mic night in a golf club © Flickr/Sally Payne

It may be old age, but..

Looking back, when I was 16, 1971 seems to have been a sensational year for the release of albums that were to go on to be regarded as all-time classics, so a bad time for ELO to release their debut album: Led Zeppelin IV, Hunky Dory, Meddle, What’s Goin’ On, Blue, Sticky Fingers, Who’s Next, Fragile, LA Woman, Tapestry, Imagine, Songs of Love & Hate, Electric Warrior, There’s a Riot Goin’ On, Ram, Aqualung, Pearl, The Yes Album, Tarkus, Madman Across the Water, The Inner Mounting Flame, Nilsson Schmilsson, Muswell Hillbillies, Fireball, Every Picture Tells a Story, Killer, Roots (Curtis Mayfield), American Pie, ELO, Santana III, Teaser and the Firecat, A Nod’s as Good as a Wink, The Cry of Love, Echoes, Shaft, Mirror Man, In Search of Space, The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys, Songs for Beginners, Carpenters, The Point, ZZ Top, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour. I bought most of those, so it’s no wonder I was permanently broke!

Birmingham Venues

Birmingham was blessed, and still is, to some extent, with a wide variety of good venues where you could see live acts at a reasonable price. One such venue was called the Kinetic Circus. The Kinetic had been a sort of ballroom, I think it had been called the Mayfair Suite. There was no seating, just a hall with a wooden floor and a large bar with a sticky beer-soaked carpet. They used to hold all-nighters featuring two or three bands and you’d stagger out in the first light of morning, stoned, exhausted and drunk. I saw some legendary bands and artists at the Kinetic, including Jeff Beck, The Who, Family and Rory Gallagher. Other bands that played there without me in attendance included Led Zeppelin, The Doors, The Beach Boys and Hawkwind. You’d be standing just a few feet away from the bands and I vividly remember watching Jeff Beck playing his intricate finger-style guitar at very close quarters. It almost made me give up playing the guitar! What was the point?

Another venue I frequented was the Birmingham Arts Lab. They would have an interesting and varied set of acts there, apart from the bands, they’d have people like Victoria Wood and Julie Waters honing their comedy act. One night, they had an act called Grimms there – Grimms was a spin-off from the Scaffold and the Bonzo Dog Band, they were terrific, featuring the ‘Liverpool Poets’, Adrian Henri, Roger McGough and Brian Patten, alongside the likes of Mike McGear (aka McCartney), Viv Stanshall and Neil Innes. The Arts Lab was a very cosy, informal, venue and it was routine for the act to come and have a drink in the bar with the punters. Janice and I got immersed in a drinking session with the Grimms, the banter was incredible. At some point, Jan asked Adrian Henri to autograph her arm. He was forlorn, saying “Elvis gets offered tits to autograph – what do I get? A bloody arm, that’s what!”. Meanwhile, I was happily chatting with Roger McGough, who was good company

A few years later I was attending a short course at Loughborough University when, during a lunch break, I bumped into Mr McGough again in a pub. We had a pint together and got chatting. He pretended to remember me from the Arts Lab, but of course he didn’t, really, why would he?

The university circuit was always very lively in the 70s. I saw Arthur Brown at Birmingham University when his flaming headgear set off the fire sprinklers and caused the safety curtain to come crashing down, snapping the electric keyboard in half. Aston University was always good for a night out – the two most memorable acts I saw there were Stomu Yamash’ta, whose intricate jazzy percussion music was hypnotic and, for a short while, became another of my obsessions, even involving me going down to see him again at The Roundhouse in London.

Arthur Brown’s flaming headgear © purplepumpkinblog

Another gig at Aston featured a pub-rock band called Chilli Willi and the Red Hot Peppers. There were five of them on stage in the Great Hall and two of us in the audience – me and Janice. Occasionally, someone would pop their head around the door, listen for a few minutes, decide they were crap and wander off for something else to do. The band were great fun, gamely playing along to an effectively empty hall, pretending they were performing for 15,000 at Madison Square Gardens or something like that. We’d finished our first drinks, so I went up to the band and offered to get a round in. They accepted the offer, stopped playing and we all sat on the edge of the stage, having a pint together. Glasses emptied, they strapped their instruments back on and finished their act for the two of us. They broke up not long afterwards

The Rolling Stones

I was lucky enough to get to see the Stones during what many people regard as their peak – the Mick Taylor era. Janice and I queued for tickets all night outside the Birmingham Odeon in the pouring rain. There were a couple of thousand kids in line, all soaking wet and freezing cold. We were all taking it in turns to go down to the toilets underneath the ramp in Stephenson Place and warm our feet in the hand dryers. It’s amazing really, no matter how cold and wet you are, having warm feet makes everything else manageable.

Eventually, we got to buy tickets. We bought six, for my brother Ian and his wife Lynda, for Jake Commander and his wife Ann, and for ourselves. I eventually got home at about 11AM on the Monday and went to bed. Mom called into work for me and lied “He’s got hot dog poisoning from one of those street stalls”. On Tuesday I went into work, to find myself confronted by John Jackson, the Training Manager:

John: “Were you really ill, Colin?”

Me: “OK, John. I’ll be straight with you. I’d been up all night, queuing for Rolling Stones tickets”

“THE BLOODY ROLLING STONES??? What’s more important to you, your career or the Rolling Stones?”

“Hmm, that’s a tough one. Let me think about it”.

There was a long pause while I pretended to think. John’s secretary, Jane, with whom he shared an office, was a similar age to we apprentices, was struggling to hold her composure, trying not to laugh.

John: “Well?”

“OK. Listen. I’ve been honest with you because I respect you and think you deserve to be treated honestly. I could very easily have lied to you and you’d be none the wiser, but no, like a fool, I thought I’d speak with you adult-to-adult. Is this the thanks I get? I tell you what – from now on, you and me are finished. Whatever happens from now on, I can never treat you like an adult again. Never”

“No, No, Colin, don’t be like that. I appreciate your honesty and maybe I overreacted. Let’s just agree to put this down to experience, although I’ll have to dock you a day’s wages”.

By this point, Jane had cracked, lost her composure and scuttled out of the office.

“Erm, OK, John, but I’m not going to pretend I’m happy with any of this”

Eventually, the big day came and we sat if the front row of the balcony, watching The Stones and Billy Preston. They were absolutely fantastic and the memory will stay with me forever. The support act was Billy Preston and his band, with Keith Richards standing in on guitar, then Preston returned the favour by playing keyboards during the Stones’ set.

The big night came © Birmingham Mail

Birmingham Poly

I attended Birmingham Polytechnic for four years. We used to have fairly regular events, sometimes a band would play in the Main Hall and pretty much every week we’d have someone performing in the informal atmosphere of the students union bar. I was never formally part of the entertainments committee but used to chip in with input and ideas occasionally. One time, we were struggling to find someone for the union bar until a lad on our course suggested a local folk singer he knew called Jasper Carrott, who ran a club called The Boggery in Solihull. We contacted Jasper who was quite happy to perform for £25, so we booked him. Between our booking him and the actual gig, though, Jasper released a record called Funky Moped/Magic Roundabout and started appearing on national television. He’d suddenly become famous. We re-contacted him and said we’d understand if he wanted to cancel our gig, but Jasper was having none of it, he said “a deal’s a deal, I’ll come and perform”. We decided to move the gig from the bar to the Main Hall and charge for admission, so told Jasper we’d be able to pay him a lot more than the £25, but again he refused to accept any more money than we’d agreed.

Jasper played in the hall to an audience of around 1,000 people, went down an absolute storm and joined us all in the bar for a drink afterwards.

Recycling the profits made from the Jasper night, we booked Dr. Feelgood for the Main Hall. That turned out to be riotous gig that people still remember to this day, the hall was packed to the rafters, the sweat was dripping from the ceiling and the kids drank the place dry.

Now, we were on a roll. Loads of money in the bank and getting a reputation for holding barnstorming gigs, so what would be more natural than to expand our ambitions even further? Rod Stewart and the Faces were planning a tour, so we contacted his tour manager, Mel Bush, and offered to put on a big ‘do’ at Perry Barr Dog Track, which was across the road from the college. We reckoned we could get about 12,000 people in and it seemed like Birmingham Council was amenable to giving us a licence. Rod and the lads were very enthusiastic about playing at a dog track, it fitted nicely with their laddish image, so the whole thing was gaining some momentum. We’d need to set up a stage in the centre of the track, get a bank loan, sort out Security etc. but it was all do-able. Then, the college stepped in…

The college decided to put a stop to all this nonsense, rein us in and get us back into focusing on our studies rather than spend all day negotiating with security firms, stage crew companies, banks and publicists. They contacted the Council who blocked us from getting a license and everything died a death.

Minister of De Fence

In the 1990s, I used to do a lot of fell running and was member of a cross-country team. One of my friends was a woman called Carolyn Hunter-Rowe, who was a World and European 100km ultramarathon champion. She also represented Britain in the marathon at the World Athletics. At one time, Carolyn and I would train together, but as she rocketed up through the world rankings, she soon became too fast and too strong for a ageing 30+ club runner like me to be able to keep up with, so that soon died a death. Anyway, I digress…

There is an annual event called the Man vs. Horse Race, held in Llanrwrtyd Wells. At the time, the race was sponsored by the bookmaker William Hill and they would pay Carolyn an appearance fee to take part. A few of us would tag along and scrounge hospitality off the sponsors. The retired pop singer Screaming Lord Sutch used to be the starter for the race, I think he lived nearby. After the race, and after having availed ourselves of William Hill’s splendid buffet, we’d decamp to the local pub where Sutch and his musician friends would hold a jam session in the bar, playing old rock and roll numbers from the 1950s. I’m a reasonably good singer, so I’d sing along with them. It went on into the early hours.

On the morning after the night before, we would all reconvene for breakfast together – about fifteen of us around a large table. Sutch would be there with his entourage, several of whom were members of his Monster Raving Loony comedy political party. I have to say they were the most unhealthy-looking bunch of individuals I’ve ever met. Everyone of them had a grey, flaccid complexion and looked as if they’d just risen from the tomb. Every year, Sutch would solemnly introduce them all, with lines such as “This is Eric. He’s my Shadow Minister of Defence, in fact he’ll be painting de fence later today”

Finger Trouble

My wife’s family have a friend who used to visit from Russia. His name is Alexander Korbakov and he’s an accordionist. Not your run-of-the-mill accordionist, though, he plays Bach cantata and fugues, Beethoven sonatas and pieces by other composers such as Rossini. I’d never imagined that kind of music could be played on an accordion. My unconventional stepson, David, as a young teenager, felt inspired to learn the accordion so we bought him one from a fascinating little folk music ship called Hobgoblin in Digbeth. He started having lessons from a lady called Ingrid Gould in Kings Norton. Ingrid learned that I could play guitar a bit, so enrolled me to accompany her accordion band at charity concerts etc. Playing rhythm guitar for the band quickly developed into playing bass and mandolin as well, so I’d be lugging three instruments along, plus music, plus an amplifier for the bass, guitar stands, music stand, extension leads etc. I don’t know whether Ingrid did it on purpose, but she’d sometimes arrange the pieces so that I’d be playing bass on one tune, then mandolin on the next one, then guitar on the next one – different stringings, different tunings and very different fret spacings. One number finger-style, the next number with a plectrum, different plectrum techniques between the guitar and the mandolin. I’d be tying my fingers into knots! Add into the equation the fact that I can’t sight-read and I’d be having to rehearse my bits well ahead of the event and memorise them, using the sheet music purely to give me a very rough idea of approximately whereabouts we were in the piece. The rest of the band tolerated my ineptitude quite well, all things considered. I managed to muddle through, purely by using the innate musical ability I’d inherited from my dad.

Phew! That was a bit of an epic, wasn't it? I hope it wasn't TOO boring and you made it this far. As ever, if you enjoyed it, it would be really nice if you could treat me to a coffee, using the link...

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