HOW DOES IT FEEL? SLADE AND BEYOND by Jim Lea (with Daryl Easlea)

It’s no surprise that Jim Lea waited until after the other three members of Slade had written memoirs – not that he’ll have bothered to read them – before writing one of his own, but it did come as a surprise to me when, about a year ago, I learned he was writing a memoir in the first place. 

        Fiercely independent and warily protective of his privacy, Jim was the ‘quiet one’ in Slade, like George in The Beatles, John in The Who or JP in Led Zep, the member of the group who kept himself to himself, who wasn’t interviewed or photographed much, who thought being famous was a pain in the ass, who let his musical skills do the talking even if they weren’t necessarily appreciated by the world at large. He knew his value and that was all that mattered to him.

Slowly but surely, and perhaps inevitably, Jim has become exasperated by this situation. Meanwhile, Noddy Holder has been elevated to the status of national treasure, cropping up on TV chat and game shows played for laughs; Dave Hill is still out there, fronting an ersatz Slade group, promoting it for all he’s worth, unchanged from the sprightly little chap who was once trussed up like an oven-ready turkey; and Don Powell is celebrated as a heroic survivor, enduring all that a mean world can throw at him, always friendly, always with a grin on his craggy face. But Jim? Who knows? Whatever Happened To Slade?, the title of Daryl Easlea’s wonderful Slade biography, published in 2023, might just as well be applied to their reticent bass player.

How Does It Feel? goes some way to answering that question in respect of Slade’s most naturally talented yet most retiring member, their multi-instrumentalist, occasional singer, arranger and 50/50 (as credited) co-writer of all their hits bar the first, ‘Get Down And Get With It’. Here is whatever happened to Jim Lea, in bite-sized, easily digestible chunks, a strange, non-linear format for an autobiography devised by co-writer Easlea to which Jim consented, no doubt eagerly, because he invariably opts for the unorthodox. Thus, his book isn’t about Slade per se, it’s about Jim, his life and loves and music, how he felt about all that was going on around him and how he dealt with it, what he did before, during and after the group and, in spades, the immense value he places on his relationship with Louise Ganner, the pretty-as-a-picture childhood sweetheart he met aged 16 and married in 1973, the mother of his two children, still the love of his life after 53 years and to whom he wrote scores of affectionate letters while away from home, many of them reproduced in his book’s pages, kisses and all. 

Nevertheless, the book is sequenced chronologically. It is divided into five sections, beginning with Jim’s birth in 1949, and closing long after the group has ceased to function with Jim ruminating on Slade’s legacy, not least the enduring loyalty of their fans. In between are over 100 ‘chapters’, some no more than a few lines, all prefaced with the words How Does It Feel as in, to give three examples, How Does It Feel To Meet Chas Chandler or How Does It Feel To Go To America or How Does It Feel To Be Asked If Slade Will Ever Reunite. The answer to that last one, by the way, is, “Bored, and no.” 

        ‘How Does It Feel?’, of course, is the title of a song from the 1975 film noir Slade In Flame in which the group starred but which somehow fell between two stools, too dark for fans, too light for non-believers. As Easlea pointed out in his Slade biography, its lyrics “simultaneously induce pathos, despair, poignancy and hope”, adding that both Noddy and Jim (and Noel Gallagher) regard it as the best song they ever wrote and recorded, an opinion I share. As a single, it reached no higher than 15 in the UK charts, their worst showing in four years and, though its poor chart performance is unlikely to have troubled Jim, the song itself clearly still means a lot to him. 

By and large, the feelings that Jim expresses to Easlea for inclusion in his book are similar to feelings he has communicated to me over a 56-year friendship that began when I met the members of Slade for the first time in 1970, developed while I wrote about them for Melody Maker and, later, while researching my 1983 Slade book Feel The Noize!, and flourished after the group disbanded. The older and wiser Jim got, the more he told me about what really happened inside the band, sometimes with brutal honesty, unafraid to offend anyone, least of all the other three, with much of what he said diametrically opposed to the old showbiz tradition of constantly putting a positive spin on things. 

        These conversations about the inner workings of Slade began when he and I used to meet up in the 1990s, often for a pint or two in a pub near where he owns a flat close to London’s Marble Arch. I never took notes – these weren’t interviews, just informal, but not necessarily confidential, chats – but I felt he was conveying a sense of injustice and some of what he told me would subsequently inform Slade-related posts on this blog, which I launched in 2014, well after these discussions. I was somehow under the impression that this was what Jim wanted, that I was the conduit of his thoughts to the wider world, and what I wrote was occasionally confirmed by his younger brother Frank, to whom he remains close. Either way, it seemed to me that sharing some of the things he said strengthened our friendship. We even exchanged Christmas cards. 

Jim’s chief complaint was that he didn’t receive the credit he thought he deserved for his role in Slade, most especially as the group’s principal composer. Tellingly, he states in his book that he wrote “most” of ‘Coz I Luv You’, Slade’s first number one hit, but that… “Chas [Chandler] put names as Holder/Lea on the credits. I said, ‘Well hang on, I wrote most of that song’ but Chas… wanted it like that because he didn’t want me to be in front of the band… I was fuming.” Eighty pages later Jim is still fuming when he learns that Holder has told Cub Koda of the American band Brownsville Station that he wrote all the songs. “I told Nod that if he ever said that again, he’d be looking for a new bass player and a new songwriter. I was not happy.” Reading between the lines, and noting comments elsewhere in the book regarding the construction of songs, among them ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’, we are left to assume that the 50/50 writing partnership was actually weighted more in Jim’s favour. Louise Lea, we are told, even wrote the couplet that opens ‘Everyday’, the perennially popular Slade ballad.

Frustrated, too, that others in the group continued to attract more attention than him, Jim would shrug when I suggested it was his own fault, that it was his decision to maintain a low profile, to avoid the spotlight, so what did he expect? He knew it was probably true. Well, How Does It Feel? represents an about-face in this regard, not only insofar as Jim has finally taken it upon himself to speak his mind for the benefit of the public, not just those close to him, but that he draws back the veil on a pop star life quite unlike what that public might imagine it to be. Not only was Jim the odd man out in Slade, he was an odd man out in the music world in general, as reflected in awkward encounters with other musicians, among them David Bowie, Ray Davies and John Bonham, his curiously offhand attitude towards success and his decision to go into psychotherapy which, in turn led to him to study counselling and psychotherapy himself. 

In 2014, Lea was diagnosed with prostate cancer, from which he has thankfully recovered, and in 2018 Holder too was diagnosed, though this wasn’t made public until 2023 by which time he, too, had recovered, equally thankfully. However, this shared misfortune does not preclude Jim from suggesting a few pages later that during chat shows Holder is economical with the facts, albeit admitting ruefully that “a tale is always far more interesting than the truth”, and condemning his former song writing partner for blaming Slade’s split on “one of five reasons [all groups split]: egos, money, drink and drugs, women or musical differences… and with Slade it was all five.” 

        “With all due respect to my old bandmate, that’s bollocks,” writes Jim. “We split because Nod had simply had enough… he wanted to diversify into DJing and acting and I felt no one was appreciating the work I was putting into crafting our records… so let’s hear less of the five ‘reasons’.”

It would be wrong to assume from these gripes that Jim’s book is all about petty point scoring. He’s fulsome in his praise for Holder’s showmanship and magnificent singing voice and also Powell’s drumming – “When we locked in together we were sticking people against the wall” – though he hasn’t much to say about Hill beyond how embarrassed he was by some of the guitarist’s OTT outfits. There’s a good deal about the Lea family, all positive, and it is touching to read about how Jim cared for his elderly parents. 

        Nevertheless, parts of the book stirred up a degree of nostalgic melancholia for me, not totally unexpected. The Slade I knew and wrote about during the first half of the 1970s was a tight, friendly, fun-loving rock and roll showband of the highest rank, masters of their stages, led by a strong, savvy and hands-on manager. It’s therefore poignant, even disheartening, to read the chapter How Does It Feel To Finish The Band. “Nod, Don, H [Hill] and I have met in public* three times since we called it a day,” writes Jim. “Twice in 1996 – one sad, one happy – Chas Chandler’s funeral and Noddy’s This Is Your Life, and in 2002 when Wolverhampton University gave us honorary degrees,” adding later that after the degree ceremony, “I couldn’t wait to leave. Nod wouldn’t have an interview done with us… I buggered off. I don’t know what the others did.” That last sentence, I thought, spoke volumes. 

        Once upon a time I thought their bond was unbreakable, their camaraderie steadfast. Now I know how it feels to be to be wrong. I must therefore advise fans that though How Does It Feel? Slade And Beyond is an essential Slade book, the most truthful they’ll ever read and as important for fans as Easlea’s biography, they’ll need to brace themselves before opening its pages. Sometimes the truth hurts. 

        The book has 301 pages, a timeline, a comprehensive Lea and Slade discography (in that order!) and is packed with pictures, including two eight-page plate sections, mostly colour, and facsimiles of letters and postcards written by Jim to Louise from far, far away. There’s also forewords by Francis Rossi and Roy Wood, and an afterword by Paul Weller. It will be published by Omnibus Press in late October. 

*Jim once told me that at least one private meeting ended in a blazing row, with doors slamming and one member, who shall remain nameless, fleeing the room. 

BARROWLAND: THE INSIDE STORY OF GLASGOW’S BELOVED BALLROOM by Alison Irvine

Books about venues invariably dwell on the artists who have performed there, even though the reality is that they have spent a fraction of the time on the premises compared to the regular staff. The act arrives after their road crew, probably do a sound check, hang around in the dressing room and play the gig, spending at most four or five hours there, perhaps less if their overnight accommodation is close at hand and they can nip back to ‘rest’. The staff, however, are there night after night, arriving hours before the doors open and remaining on site to clear up the mess afterwards, so it stands to reason that their experiences are more profound than those who take the applause, no matter how famous they might be. 

        Alison Irvine understands this. Had her love letter to Barrowland, Glasgow’s much-loved palace of entertainment, been written by a specialist music writer then it would have been act-centred, like several other venue books on my shelves. Alison, however, is not a rock writer, though she could probably make a decent fist of becoming one if she tried; in fact, she’s a novelist whose forte is creating fiction from within the environments she knows and loves. Her book about Barrowland is certainly not fiction – but it is about an environment she came to know and love as she spent time there, with a far greater emphasis on the men and women who have worked there, many for years, and a host of regular patrons, than on the acts that have drawn the crowds. 

So, after a preliminary piece about how Simple Minds brought Barrowland back to life by filming their video for ‘Waterfront’ at the venue in 1983, we are introduced to Tam who runs the burger bar, and a couple of regulars, Sharon and Pammy, who love to dance, thus establishing the theme that runs throughout the book: that is it is the staff, the barmen and women, the crew, the security, the cloakroom attendants, the house photographer, the whole lot of them from general manager Tom Joyce, who contributes a foreword, to the cleaners, that have made Barrowland what it is to the people of Glasgow. 

As such, it’s a book about the Barrowland community as much as the building or the music. Famous now for its yellow neon sign, it was opened in 1934 for ballroom dancing, and an early photograph shows couples with men in uniform, their partners in below-the-knee skirts, the band in evening dress, a far cry from the hands-in-the air, crammed throng watching The Pogues at the book’s conclusion.  

        Adjacent to the Barras street market with its 120 stalls, the building was largely destroyed by fire in 1958, after which it was rebuilt, and from 1983 onwards it has operated as Glasgow’s premier concert venue, capacity 1,900, famed also for its sprung dance floor. Voted ‘best music venue in the UK’ by Time Out magazine, Alison Irving investigates just why so many staff and fans have taken the venue to their hearts, teasing out behind the scenes stories. Granted an Access All Areas pass, her mission was to discover how Barrowland ticks, and she has succeeded, interviewing everyone with a story to tell, staff and fans alike, occasionally offering fly-on-wall, sometimes heart-rending, accounts of situations and circumstances often overlooked by less skilled observers.

Originally published in 2019 as a limited edition under the title Barrowland Ballads, this 2025 edition has an additional seven chapters that bring the Barrowland story up to date, following its closure for Covid in March 2020 and reopening in May 2021. It has 328 pages and is illustrated with colour photographs throughout. 

PUB ROCK by Mark Wilkerson

Compact but packed with all you really need to know, Pub Rock by Pete Townshend and Thunderclap Newman biographer Mark Wilkerson is one of 18 similarly-sized titles in Bloomsbury’s Genre 33 1/3 series, all of them handy guides designed to educate the curious, probably those too young to have been around when the particular genre emerged, often briefly, into the mainstream.

Oddly for a trend that was unambiguously British, the first group to be identified in the music press as pub rockers came from San Francisco and were named after an American breakfast staple served in US diners: Eggs Over Easy. The British connection was enabled by their manager Peter Kauff who just happened to be the US partner of Chas Chander, the man who discovered Jimi Hendrix and who in 1971 was riding high on the success of his next clients Slade. Arriving in London in the spring of that year to record an album produced by Chandler, Eggs Over Easy took lodgings in Alma Street in Kentish Town, a short walk away from the Tally Ho, a pub that featured jazz most nights of the week. 

An element of subterfuge thus surrounded what Mark Wilkerson identifies as the first ever pub rock gig, Eggs Over Easy at the Tally Ho on Monday, May 3, 1971. They’d told the landlord they were a jazz band and the well-connected Chandler rounded up a decent crowd for what was traditionally the slowest night of the week. “Doubtless surprised by the distinct lack of even the slightest hint of jazz in the set but nonetheless pleased with the turnout and unmistakable quality of the Eggs’ performance, the Tally Ho’s owners gave the band a weekly residency,” writes Wilkerson. “The first domino had fallen. By October, Eggs Over Esy were performing four sets a week at the Tally Ho, with jazz relegated to just one night. By sheer accident, Eggs had tapped into a glaring need in the London music scene: accessible, direct roots rock – the anti-prog.”

The rest is history and Wilkerson’s book goes on to relate how other bands, initially Bees Make Honey, Brinsley Schwarz and Ducks DeLuxe, took up the baton, and how among the genre’s fans were Declan MacManus (17) and John “Woody” Mellor (19), soon to change their names as punk pushed pub rock aside. 

It helped that the music press was on the side of the pub rockers, and that before long a host of belting bands found themselves loosely connected to the genre, among them Dr Feelgood, Graham Parker & The Rumour and Kilburn & The High Roads who featured Ian Dury on vocals. Within a year the scene had shifted to the Hope & Anchor in Islington where promoter Dave Robinson, Brinsley’s manager, became the genre’s leading promoter. Soon he and Jake Riviera would launch Stiff Records, by which time pub rock was becoming a memory. 

Pub rock wasn’t really a style of music, just a scene, and it encompassed many actual genres, country, R&B, roots Americana, soul and even rock’n’roll fifties style, but it was the key bridge, both musically and chronologically, between before and after punk. Mark Wilkerson’s pocket book, 142 pages long, might not be the last word on the subject but it’s a more than useful guide, easy to digest and – like pub rock itself – utterly without airs and graces. 

MANCHESTER MUST DANCE by Mike Pickering

Mad about Manchester, Man City and dance music, not necessarily in that order, Mike Pickering carved a life for himself that wasn’t in line with what his dad expected from him. He hit the jackpot eventually with M People, having learned how the music business worked the hard way, moving on up through Factory Records and the Hacienda nightclub from gopher to DJ to golden boy. Along the way he got into a few scrapes, befriended just about everyone who mattered in Manchester music and observed it all from a position slightly left of centre, enabling him to offer a refreshingly honest appraisal of the scene that produced Joy Division, New Order and Happy Mondays and, hovering just outside of his orbit, The Smiths, Stone Roses and Oasis. 

Though uncredited on the front cover, the writer Paul Morley had a hand in fashioning Pickering’s story onto the page, presumably acting as a ghost-writer for the credited author who, as he readily admits, left school at the earliest opportunity with little in the way of academic credentials. Thankfully, Pickering’s down-to-earth temperament and highly-tuned bullshit antenna has reined in Morley’s tendency to bedazzle with words, and the result is a good-hearted book that rings true in every way. 

        Pickering was only nine when he saw The Beatles in Stockport on November 20, 1963, one month before I, aged 16, saw them, in Bradford but, like me, the sight and sound of the Fab Four at the height of Beatlemania, sound-tracked by screaming girls, seems to have done something to the wiring in his brain. Thereafter, conventional life wasn’t for him and, much to the regret of his conformist dad, he ingratiated himself amongst the Factory crowd, tagging along with his great pal Rob Gretton, who managed Joy Division and subsequently New Order, wryly observing the antics of visionary oddball Tony Wilson who introduced Manchester to the Sex Pistols. Punk liberated Pickering and, although he seems allergic to guitar groups, there was no turning back, nine-to-five jobs were off the agenda, travel – to Holland and Greece – beckoned and when he discovered dance music a new and better life was within his grasp.

        Much of his book focuses on the inner workings of Factory Records and the Hacienda, all fascinating stuff, especially the idiosyncratic way in which Wilson runs his shop and the ways in which those who work for him react to his oddball decisions. The rise and fall of the Hacienda is a story in itself and up in his DJ booth, hands aloft, Pickering plays ‘Ride On Time’ by Black Box and sees it all, the joy of dancing, the lure of ecstasy, the gangland violence that accompanies it and the ham-fisted approach of Manchester’s police. It all makes for grim, albeit riveting, reading, not least the consequences when his fame as a DJ leads to his name being used to promote “illegal” raves of which he is completely unaware.

        Woven throughout the book is Pickering’s long, close and occasionally combative relationship with fellow Man City fan Rob Gretton, which makes chapter 47 – A Rob By Any Other Name – a tribute to his great pal that tugs at the heart strings. The fortunes of Man City are similarly treated, their current standing as one of the world’s great football clubs treated with a measure of incredulity after the disappointments of earlier times. It ends, as you would expect, with the formation of M People and the discovery of Calvin Harris, by which time Pickering has become a roving A&R man for Sony, a role for which he is singularly well qualified, not that he’s really comfortable working for a major label. He’s left Manchester behind but his heart still belongs there. 

        Manchester Must Dance has 51 shortish chapters over 376 pages, and forewords from Martin Fry, Johnny Marr, Noel Gallagher and Calvin Harris, with additional chapters from Marr and Gallagher that extol Pickering’s integrity, 16  pages of colour photographs, playlists and a good index. It’s a must for anyone who was there and an illuminating read for those, like me, who weren’t. 

LONDON FALLING by Patrick Radden Keefe

Regular visitors to my Just Backdated blog will have noticed that these days many of my posts are reviews of music books, and as a result the impression is probably given that I read nothing else. Although two soon-to-be-read music books – one about Barrowlands, the Glasgow music venue, and another about pub rock – sit on the coffee table in our front room right now and I’ve just started another, Manchester Must Dance by Mike Pickering, which is well promising, I have read two non-music books in past month too. 

        The first was London Falling, an engrossing account of the death of 19-year-old Zac Brettler who either fell or was pushed from the balcony of Riverwalk House, a luxury apartment building that just happened to be opposite MI6’s HQ by the Thames in Central London whose cameras caught his fall. Zac led a double life and had somehow convinced various persons of doubtful morality that he was the immensely wealthy son of a Russian oligarch, and when his story began to unravel he found himself between a rock and a hard place. The book’s author, Patrick Radden Keefe, originally wrote the story for New Yorker magazine, and has turned it into a book with the help of Zak’s grieving mum and dad. 

        London Falling is a gripping tale of corruption, greed and criminality, that the Met seem curiously unwilling to investigate deeply. Keefe also wrote Empire Of Pain, an award winning investigation into the behaviour of the billionaire Sackler family whose Purdue Pharma company was largely responsible for America’s opioid epidemic. I read that three years ago and can recommend it as another fact-that-reads-like fiction tale that exposes immense greed and corruption. 

        The other non-music book I have just read – for the second time – is Memoirs Of An Invisible Man, by HF Saint, and second time around was equally as enjoyable as the first. That was almost 40 years ago now, picked up as a paperback at Gatwick airport when my plane to Spain was seriously delayed and read superfast over the next 12 hours. I think I gave that copy away. I had more time to savour the novel this time around and laughed just as hard at the droll humour, especially a sex scene, initially occurring in pitch darkness. When someone wanders in and switches on the light, however, the girl involved freaks out since the man to whom she has been making love appears not to be on top of her after all. Or anywhere else. Meanwhile, she lying there, legs apart. Think about it. 

        The hero of the story, name of Nick, is in the wrong place at the wrong time when a scientific experiment in a laboratory goes wrong and when the US forces of law and order realise what’s happened he becomes a fugitive. As before, I found myself willing Nick on against the nasties who are out to capture him and turn him into a government spy. It’s a terrific thriller, dripping with suspense, and at the same time a useful practical guide on how to survive in New York if by some stroke of ill-luck you are rendered invisible. Unlikely I know, but this time – just in case – I won’t give it away.

        Memoirs Of An Invisible Man was turned into a dodgy film starring Chevy Chase and Daryl Hannah, but the book is far better. Its author, HF Saint, earned plenty of money from it and became a recluse, writing no further books.        

        Now, back to Mike Pickering. 

THE ROLLING STONES – by Bob Spitz

Led by multimillionaires Sir Michael Philip Jagger and the now abstemious Keith Richards, The Rolling Stones are as solid a fixture in the British psyche as the Royal Family, the Houses of Parliament and 100-year-old naturalist Sir David Attenborough. This was not always the case, however. Indeed, for the first 15 or so years of a career that seems eternal, they were looked upon by the forces of law and order as desperadoes and misfits, a menace to society, a shocking manifestation of undisciplined adolescents whose long hair, scruffy clothes and jungle music was an affront to polite civilisation. “Lock ’em up,” they cried and, by golly, they almost succeeded.

This doorstopper of a biography by US writer Bob Spitz is therefore a timely reminder of those times, essential reading for anyone who became a Stones fan during the last 40 years or so, which I’ll wager is the vast majority of those who during that time have packed stadiums around the world and paid top dollar to watch Jagger and Co strut their stuff on stages large enough to accommodate the many offspring Jagger, Richards (and Brian Jones) have sired between them. For this generation of fans, that tongue and lips logo is as universal as the curvy contours of a Coca-Cola bottle, the cowbell intro to ‘Honky Tonk Women’ as recognisable as any national anthem and The Rolling Stones a byword for a dependable night out of rollicking rock and roll. 

Spitz has worked very hard to document the lives and times of the Stones and, like most biographers of rock performers who’ve stayed the course, his focus is almost exclusively on the early years. By the halfway point of this 690-page book we’re still in the 1960s, on the tour that led up to Altamont, not yet a quarter into the group’s lifespan; 150 pages later, in 1975, Jagger is vainly defending the cover of Black And Blue; 100 pages after that we’ve reached the acknowledgements followed by 90 pages of end matter. All of which demonstrates how Spitz has prudently concluded that once the Stones became rich, touring the world every three or four years – seven such tours are helpfully itemised in one paragraph on page 586 – to amass vast fortunes, their story becomes repetitive, even dull; far better to concentrate on the shenanigans that came before, the naughty years on which their legend was built.

        This, of course, is anything but dull and neither is the book. At its heart are the many chapters that cover the period between 1965 and 1975, which relate the extraordinary highs and lows of the Stones’ saga: fan mania that rivals The Beatles; pissing on garage forecourts; the Redlands and other drug busts; the court appearances; Jagger’s blustery relationship with Marianne Faithfull; the Brian/Anita/Keith love triangle; Jones’ downfall and death; the financial squeeze after falling out with US co-manager Allen Klein; Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers and Exile On Main Street – the great triumvirate of Stones’ masterworks; the nightmare of Altamont and its repercussions; Richards’ debilitating heroin addiction; tax exile in France; and, finally, back on the road as a stadium-filling juggernaut. 

        Quite how Jagger, firmly in charge after Klein and early manager Andrew Oldham are dismissed, found the reserves of mental stamina to deal with it all while writing songs and fronting the group on stage boggles the mind. Spitz covers all these high jinks in great and often illuminating detail, a roller-coaster ride through the Stones’ devil-may-care years that makes this central section of his book a page-turner of the highest order, most especially when recounting the mischief that occurred at Nellcôte, Richards’ hideaway on the French Riviera that became a flophouse for every ne’er do well for miles around.

        Before and after all this, the momentum isn’t quite as recklessly debauched. Assembling the group from the pool of London’s young blues devotees took time but, unlike The Beatles, there was no Hamburg or Liverpool to hone their chops on stage for three years before fame beckoned. Once the right five had found each other, it happened quite quickly, as did the notoriety stoked by Oldham who was brilliant at PR but out his depth controlling this bunch of strong-willed characters. Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts keep their noses clean for the most part, maintaining a low profile during the mayhem; Jones, acknowledged early on as the best musician in the group, is fragile, losing his way, an accident waiting to happen; and, once they started writing songs together, Jagger and Richards take control, each reliant on the other though no prizes for guessing who was the most unreliable, at least until he weaned himself off heroin following that 1977 Toronto bust. Mick Taylor, who never really fitted in, comes and goes. Ron Wood is a far better fit, musically and mentally. WAGS come and go. 

        An awful lot is crammed into the final two chapters. The penultimate finds Jagger and Richards at loggerheads, the bone of contention the former’s stab at a solo career, and for a while the group’s future is in serious doubt. Meanwhile, they lose Ian Stewart, the Rolling Stone who doesn’t get his photograph taken, Watts goes off the rails, and Wyman hits the headlines through his courtship of 13-year-old Mandy Smith whom he would marry when she turned 18. Exhausted, he leaves the band four years later.

        The final chapter concertinas the period from around 1993 to the present day, 30+years, and closes, rightly, with the death of Charlie Watts and a moving report of the tribute night at Ronnie Scott’s organised by his great friend and fellow jazz enthusiast Dave Green. A brief epilogue finds the author attending a 2024 Stones show in Los Angeles. “Mick and Keith were both eighty years old,” notes Spitz.

        The book’s only flaw is that it is written with an American accent, almost certainly a reflection of its intended market. While the size of America – where in some parts the weekly grocery shop involves a day-long round trip – can perhaps explain how Dartford is described as “around the corner” from Ealing (they’re 65 miles apart), and Cheltenham is “nearby” to Guilford (about 100 miles apart), the vast majority of reviews quoted are from US media, and the UK – the country of the Stones’ birth, after all – doesn’t get much of a look in after the group has decamped to France. As an example, their barnstorming 2013 Glastonbury appearance doesn't merit a mention. Still, this is a minor quibble in what is the most substantial Stones book I’ve read since Keith Richards’ Life in 2010. 

        As stated, the book has 690 pages, plus two 16-page picture sections, includes lengthy source notes and a decent index. The front cover features a magnificent portrait of Jagger and Richards by Norman Seeff, albeit from the era of Mick Taylor, who is on the reverse alongside Wyman and Watts. I think Woody or Jones belong there myself. 

BIGGER THAN THE BEATLES: SIXTY YEARS IN SHOWBUSINESS by Richard Ogden

In a month when Paul McCartney releases his first new album since 2021, I have it on good authority that it’s not much fun being his manager. He’s demanding, difficult to please and inclined towards throwing tantrums behind closed doors. He doesn’t like to lose money on tour or be told that, heaven forbid, a new song he’s just written isn’t quite as good as some he’s written in the past. He loves applause but doesn’t like the word no. When Richard Ogden, who managed Paul from 1987 to 1993, suggested he needed a yes-man as a manager, Paul responded by saying that a yes-man was better than a no-man. 

        When Ogden finally threw in the towel his relationship with McCartney had deteriorated to the extent that they were barely speaking. “Dealing with him had become even more difficult than it was when I first started,” he writes in his self-published memoir of a lifetime in the music industry, “and his dissatisfaction with me was affecting Linda who, as everybody who worked at MPL [McCartney Productions Ltd] knew, tended to ‘get it in the neck’ first when the boss was unhappy… it wasn’t unusual for my ‘McCartney hotline’ phone to ring first thing and for a tearful Linda to warn me that all was not well with His Nibs.”

        Richard Ogden began his long career in music as the Press Officer for United Artists Records at the start of the seventies and ended up promoting massive concerts in Brazil, a country where he lives for some of the year today and clearly loves. In the meantime, as head honcho at various record labels his paths crossed professionally with any number of A-list superstars, and his book is unusually honest, truth to power that spares no blushes when it comes to revealing precisely how everyone – including himself – behaves in the music industry, not just the stars but their entourages, their agents and promoters, record company minions and, sometimes, even their romantic partners. Also, and rarely for this kind of book, we get a taste of the money involved, not just what Richard earned but also pretty much everyone else. 

        The four chapters that deal with McCartney are at the heart of the book and, in light of McCartney’s enormous fame, the most interesting. Indeed, the book’s title is a quote from Paul himself, shouted to Ogden after a concert in Brazil that, at the time, attracted the biggest paying audience in the history of rock. The way Ogden tells it, the issues surrounding that concert alone would put anyone off managing a big rock star for life, even if he did meet his future wife from among the local promoter’s staff. 

        Elsewhere, you can read about Ogden’s encounters with The Rolling Stones, Black Oak Arkansas, Black Sabbath, The Motors, that troublesome Michael Jackson statue, Aerosmith, Ricky Martin, eternally unsociable Van Morrison and many more. He has a chatty, informal style of writing and is inclined to veer off at tangents, leaving his readers momentarily wondering quite where they are, but above all there’s an honesty – we learn about his mistakes as well as his achievements – to his writing that is too often lacking in books where the author in disinclined to offend anyone. Richard Ogden evidently doesn’t give a hoot whether or not he upsets people, famous or otherwise, which gives his book a refreshing dose of authenticity. These days, he’d have been asked to sign an NDA and, though most of what Ogden writes about occurred long before celebrities sought to rigorously enforce confidentiality among their employees, it’s perhaps convenient for him that there is no extradition treaty between the UK and Brazil. 

        Finally, I should mention that, like many self-published books, Bigger Than The Beatles suffers from sloppy production, poor photo reproduction and inadequate indexing. Nevertheless, it has 438 pages, making it good value for a tenner, and can be obtained at: https://www.thegreatbritishbookshop.co.uk/products/bigger-than-the-beatles-sixty-years-in-showbusiness?_pos=1&_sid=dbc6035c2&_ss=r

BOWIE ODYSSEY 76 by Simon Goddard

There was only ever one picture for the front cover of Bowie Odyssey 76, the coolest mug shot ever taken, this one on 21 March in Rochester, NY, after he and others were busted for drugs at the Americana hotel. As is the way with touring musicians, members of his entourage had invited a pair of likely looking girls back to the hotel, perhaps to enjoy a post-gig romp, only to discover they were plain clothes cops out to bust that notorious drug abuser David Bowie who was bound to have a sack of cocaine on his person.

In the event all they found was a bag of marijuana but it was still a pickle that David could do without and it wasn’t the only pickle that David found himself in during 1976. There was a cash-flow problem stemming from his fall out with ex-manager Tony Defries, an ongoing dispute with wife Angie, now largely absent from his life and soon to be shown the door, and an alarming pre-occupation with all things Nazi which, unhappily, coincided with the rise of the English National Front whose cause was championed by a bigoted bus driver called Robert Relf. 

All of this – not least the trials and tribulations of Mr Relf – are covered in forensic detail by Simon Goddard in this most recent episode of his fly-on-the-wall Bowie Odyssey series. As with the previous six books, it’s another eye-opening read, no quarter given as David’s topsy-turvy life is exposed as not quite as wonderful as it might seem to those outside the glass bubble in which he exists. Only two are permitted inside: Coco, his indispensable, devoted handmaiden who tends to his domestic requirements and diary, making sure he’s where and when he’s supposed to be and maybe warming his bed if no other candidates are available, and Jim, aka Iggy, brought on board as a playmate and musical foil, with whom Coco doesn’t necessarily see eye to eye. 

It’s the year of the Thin White Duke, the black and white tour that promoted Station To Station, which is a roaring success and fills empty coffers, and resettlement in Berlin where, having grown an unsightly moustache, David can mingle without being recognised, some of the time anyway. Romy Haag is lurking, England stinks of right wing dung, the punks are waiting in the wings and aside from a pre-occupation with that loathsome Relf fellow, Odyssey 76 is, like 70 to 75, riveting stuff.  

JOHN & PAUL: A Love Story In Songs by Ian Leslie

I can recall with unusual clarity the first time I ever heard The Beatles. It was the second Sunday in January, 1963, and I was 15 and already a committed pop fan. I was in the passenger seat of my father’s car, a white Triumph Vitesse, being driven from Skipton back to boarding school at York. On the car’s back seat was his red Roberts radio, tuned into the BBC Light Programme, its reception enabled by a cable that snaked its way to an aerial clamped outside the rear window. The programme was Pick Of The Pops, hosted by DJ Alan Freeman, freshly appointed to the role, and as we cruised through Harrogate, sometime between 1 and 2pm, he played ‘Please Please Me’, the group’s second single, just released.

Hello, I thought, that sounds different, funny, really good, terrific in fact. Who on earth is it? I strained my ears to listen but it was over too soon. I wanted to hear it again straight away but I couldn’t, of course, and I didn’t catch the name of the act. But the important thing is that I recognised something, the singing, the guitars, the harmonica, the oh yeas, in the two minutes of ‘Please Please Me’ that stood out from all the other records that Freeman played that day, stood out from pretty much anything I’d ever heard before in fact. I was an instant fan of whoever it was and I didn’t even know their name. 

Sixty-three years later, it is reassuring to be told yet again that my adolescent ears weren’t deceiving me. “‘Please Please Me’ is impatient, lusty, playful and reproachful,” writes Ian Leslie in this extraordinary book, and later: “[It] is a series of climaxes: the mouth organ’s clarion call; the opening harmony; the call and response; the sweet release of the chorus; the final oh yeahs. It combines Bing Crosby, the Everlys, Little Richard, girl groups and Motown, yet instead of sounding patched together it is utterly itself, unified by force of collective personality.” Quite. 

John & Paul: A Love Story In Songs was published late last year to universal acclaim. I was hoping that Santa might drop a copy down our chimney but that didn’t happen so I waited until it was available in paperback, as it was last week. This edition has three pages of laudatory reviews at the front, eight similar snippets on the cover and I’ve been utterly absorbed by it for the last five days. 

        The reason for all the fuss is that it’s a different sort of Beatles book, not a biography or chronicle or diary, not a memoir by someone who knew or worked for them, not an exposé of disreputable behaviour, not an arty picture book, not a critical study, not even a structural analysis of their music, not really. It’s simply a deep dive into the minds of John and Paul, focusing almost exclusively on their relationship – the Love Story of the subtitle; a beautifully written account of how the two principal Beatles worked together in the studio, where their songs came from and how they wrote and recorded them, how John and Paul in particular bounced ideas off each other and how the ying and yang of their contrasting personalities somehow fused together to create a body of work that to this day remains the shining exemplar of popular music. 

        “The twentieth century tilted on its axis,” writes Leslie of the day in July 1957 when Paul introduced himself to John, nailing his colours to the mast at the close of Chapter 1. It wasn’t long before they realised that, musically, they could read each other’s minds. To the astonishment of everyone around them, not least producer George Martin, their rivalry drove them to get better and better until it simply exploded into a situation where communication stopped, like the breakdown of a marriage, a tragedy that even now leaves everyone scratching their heads (and authors writing books like this). 

        Seeking comparisons, many reviewers have likened John & Paul to Revolution In The Head, Ian MacDonald’s 1994 book, widely acknowledged as the pinnacle of Beatles criticism, but there are important differences: MacDonald is comprehensive, covering every Beatles track, Leslie is selective, choosing songs – 43 in total, not all written by them, a handful written after the split – that support or amplify his themes; MacDonald is disparaging, sometimes brutally, of songs he considers under par, of which there are plenty, Leslie does nothing but shower praise; perhaps most importantly, Leslie’s emphasis on the group’s principal songwriters gives it an entirely different feel to previous books on the group. George and Ringo barely get a look in.

        At the heart of John & Paul is the author’s theory that many of their songs are, in fact, coded messages between the two. Building on his knowledge of human behaviour, about which he has written extensively, Leslie interprets songs in ways that no previous Beatles critic has done; they might be songs of encouragement, or convey feelings of jealousy or vulnerability, or love or hurt, or simply friendship. In short, their songs are about, or aimed at, themselves and because of this the Beatles’ music contains hidden emotions that reveal themselves only after time, and this is the reason why, after all these years, it is still universally loved. 

        This might sound contentious but in many instances Leslie’s interpretations hold water. Try it: do they believe they can work it out; was the relationship getting better during the Pepper sessions; is Paul urging John to go and get Yoko in ‘Hey Jude’: does Paul want John to get back to him; does John plead with Paul not to let me down; is Paul telling John he’ll never do him any harm and can’t make it alone in ‘Oh Darling’; and surely the memories referenced in ‘Two Of Us’ are their own. And when John sings ‘Nobody else can see, just you and me’ in ‘Look At Me’, written in 1968, was he addressing Paul? After the split, of course, these messages became far more transparent: ‘How Do You Sleep?’ from his LP Imagine is John’s scathing, unfounded attack on his former song-writing partner, while ‘Dear Friend’, the poignant closing track on Wildlife, is surely Paul’s conciliatory message to John.

        Interwoven between this hypothesising is a concise and accurate resume of the group’s career, drawn – as Leslie freely admits – from existing sources, all credited in his acknowledgments at the close. The roles played by Yoko and Linda are discussed, along with revealing conversations and meetings between the two couples that reinforce the love John and Paul still felt for each other after the group split up. Suggestions throughout that John needed Paul more than the other way around go some way to redressing the balance as regards which senior Beatle was more crucial to the construction of their catalogue of songs. Leslie quotes many instances where John would bring a song to the group and how Paul would transform it, but far fewer cases where the opposite was true. John often arrived at Abbey Road with fragments, Paul with completed songs. In this respect Leslie mistrusts the somewhat inevitable canonisation of John following his murder, attributing much of it to Philip Norman’s revelatory book, Shout! The True Story Of The Beatles, first published in 1981. 

        Each chapter in John & Paul is titled after a song, a handful of which towards the beginning of the book are covers. Chapter 4, Will You Love Me Tomorrow, intrigued me insofar as there is no recorded evidence of The Beatles performing this much-admired song, only narrative evidence in Mark Lewisohn’s Tune In. “If there’s one of these lost cover versions I would love to hear, it’s ‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow’, a Shirelles song Lennon liked to sing at the Cavern,” writes Leslie (and, by the way, so would I). “Lennon understood, in his bones, the emotion that animates ‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow’: wanting love and not trusting it to stay. What he learned from Smokey [Robinson] and from black teenage girls was how to communicate feeling rather than just feel it.”

        At the other end of the book, in a heart-rending closing chapter that considers ‘Here Today’, Paul’s hypothetical conversation with John from his 1982 Tug Of War album, Leslie bows out with the realisation that by sharing the love they had for one another with the world, the music it inspired has made this world “an immeasurably better place”. Who would argue with that? 

        John & Paul deserves to be read by every Beatle fan. My paperback edition has 433 pages including 24 pages of reference notes (including my own interview with Paul in 1971), a superb index and, as a sort of coda, a Q&A with the author conducted by Kate Mossman. Though well known, the eight pages of mostly b&w pictures are carefully selected to complement the text. 

RINGO – A Fab Life by Tom Doyle

Pity the poor drummers, left high and dry when the band no longer needs them, even one as famous as Ringo Starr. Singers and guitarists are shown the red carpet but drummers can’t figure out what to do with themselves. Charlie Watts sat in, but couldn’t drive, his high-priced cars while reading his ultra-rare first editions; Keith Moon drank himself to death; Ginger Baker squandered his riches on polo; Clem Burke played with a Blondie tribute band. Ringo tried pretty much anything and everything, and by 1979 was perpetually drunk. Diagnosed with a life-threatening intestinal blockage that year, a doctor told him that if he left the hospital without the recommended treatment he would die. To his great credit he sobered up, though it took a while, and is still with us, now Sir Ringo. In July he’ll be 86.

        There is no rational explanation why Ringo has, until now, been largely ignored by biographers but to the best of my knowledge A Fab Life – great title, by the way – is only the second [1] book to have been written on him while those about his band (and three bandmates) could fill a library. Perhaps the reason lies in this quote from Ringo’s close friend and fellow drummer Jim Keltner: “He seemed too overly humble… almost beyond humble… totally unaware that he’d done anything. That’s what it must have been like to be the drummer with The Beatles.”

Ringo’s diffidence is to blame, then, for the paucity of books about him but the truth of the matter is that his life is just as interesting, and indeed more comical, than John, Paul or George. Within a year of being drafted into The Beatles, just as they began their recording career, he found himself amongst the most famous men in the UK, and a year after that he was America’s favourite Beatle, and all the while he just kept grinning blithely and muttering plays on words, amusingly dry malapropisms that became known as Ringoisms, the best known of which was the title of The Beatles’ first film. 

This is a good-hearted book about a good-hearted man, and it covers all the important events in Ringo’s life, albeit not precisely in linear fashion. Wisely, Tom Doyle has opted to tell Ringo’s story through a series of snapshots, seventy in all, bite-sized chapters that are roughly chronological and in their often droll fashion somehow suit the character of the smallest, oldest and most lovable Beatle. There is a school of thought that Ringo, born Richard Starkey and known to his friends as Richy, is the luckiest man alive but he has lived up to his billing, even if his passage through life, as recorded here, occasionally reminded me of the character of Chance The Gardner from Being There, Peter Sellers’ last great movie role. 

If you’ve taken the trouble to keep tabs on Ringo’s extraordinary life during the past 50 years then you probably won’t find much that is new in this book. Nevertheless, Doyle has done his research admirably and listed among the many chapters every film in which Starr has appeared and every album that carried his name – and there’s lots of them, certainly more than I thought – and every one of them is critically analysed, their merits or otherwise noted in a detached manner.  One thing I didn’t know, and that Doyle makes clear, is that the well-known aphorism that Ringo wasn’t the best drummer in The Beatles, falsely attributed to John Lennon, was in reality a Jasper Carrott joke, uttered in 1987, that Carrott subsequently regretted. “I’ve never met Ringo,” says Carrott, “but if he was in the same room as me, I’d skirt around it very quickly.”

Of more import, perhaps, is the genuine love that Ringo inspires among his many friends. Aside from the period when he was so drunk that people avoided him, no one has a bad word to say about him, which reinforces the widespread view that he was the diplomat amongst the Beatles; bluff, warm and engaging, never one to raise his voice in anger or throw a tantrum, a born light entertainer who was probably more at home during The Beatles’ early years than those that followed. Indeed, Doyle’s portrait led me to feel a bit sorry for Ringo during those times in his life when he was drifting aimlessly, famous for having once been famous and, for a while in his middle age, little else. It comes as something of a relief when, sober, he rediscovers his love of drumming and goes back on the road with a series of bands under the Ringo’s All Starrs banner. 

Ringo: A Fab Life has 389 pages but, sadly, contains no photographs and isn’t indexed. This is poor, and can probably be blamed on excessive penny-pinching by Putnam, the publishers. What’s more, the Lennon quote on page 294 about the likelihood of The Beatles reforming isn’t credited to Melody Maker, let alone myself who conducted that particular interview in 1973. 

[1] The first was Ringo Starr: Straight Man Or Joker by Alan Clayson (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1991, subsequently republished by Sanctuary) which appears to be out of print though used copies can be found on the Internet. 

SURF’S UP: BRIAN WILSON & THE BEACH BOYS by Peter Doggett

Behind a cover that shamelessly mimics the typography and colour scheme of Pet Sounds lies the best book on The Beach Boys I have read since Timothy White’s The Nearest Faraway Place in 1994. This is not to disparage the work of David Leaf, whose closeness to the group, and Brian Wilson in particular, gives him an insider’s edge, or Steven Gaines, whose flair for drama made his 1986 biography Heroes & Villains a page-turner, just that Peter Doggett mixes precise literacy and in-depth research with an impartial critical assurance that previous books have lacked. Moreover, it’s my guess that he has spent much of his adult life considering what he wants to say about a group whose music he clearly adores, before finally settling down to write the book that might well be the last word on the subject.  

First, an acknowledgement. I have known Peter Doggett since the 1980s when, as editor at Omnibus Press, I commissioned him on a fairly regular basis to produce discographies for inclusion in the music books we published. At the time Peter was the editor of Record Collector magazine whose discographies, I had noted, were the most comprehensive and accurate to be found anywhere. I wanted the best and found it, and as we got to know one another I commissioned him to write several books for Omnibus, some of them published under the pseudonym John Robertson, taken from the Byrds song, because the powers-that-be at Record Collector took a dim view of their staff moonlighting elsewhere. 

But I digress. Although Surf’s Up begins more or less at the beginning (after Peter’s coverage of an astonishing, unexpected appearance by Brian Wilson at a London fan club event in 1988) and ends with Brian’s passing, this is not a linear biography that follows the career of The Beach Boys year by year, song by song or trauma by trauma. Instead it jumps around, artfully leaping from key issues into subsidiary areas, the sum of which leads to a greater understanding of the progressive forces and, perhaps more importantly, malign undercurrents that shaped the group’s career. Among them are razor-sharp profiles of the widely contrasting personalities involved, the power struggles between them, anecdotes galore, many of them unflattering, and, of course, plenty about the mental health of Brian Wilson, their in-house maestro who wrote and arranged all their best songs. 

To this end, Surf’s Up is a jigsaw with 59 pieces, each one a shortish, unnumbered chapter, or essay, on some aspect of The Beach Boys. In a book of 382 pages (discounting end matter), that works out at about six a half pages per bite-sized chapter, which makes it more of a compendium than a biography; an easy read then, and, for that matter, one you can dip into here and there without losing the plot, complex as it is. This structure might not suit newcomers to the saga of The Beach Boys’ but, by now, it’s unlikely that those interested in the group, this book’s core market, will be unfamiliar with the lurid details of what went on behind the scenes. Nevertheless, at the start Peter helpfully proffers potted biographies of the dramatis personae, all 41 of whom in some way or other play a role in the story, from Brian and his brothers right down to management, auxiliary musicians and even a few in-laws. 

Let’s pick a random essay. “Why do people hate Mike Love?” begins one. “Let me count the ways.” Plenty of them follow, though Peter does recognise that, obnoxious as he can be, without Love’s energy the group might never have got off the ground in the first place. The relatively long chapter on Pet Sounds emphasises how so many of its songs laid bare Brian’s insecurities yet doesn’t quite nail what everyone thought about the LP at the time, not Peter’s fault of course, just that mixed messaging over the years and, quite possibly, fake news reportage, has blurred reality. Keith Moon, however, hated it, probably for the same reasons that Mike Love may or may not have hated it too. Among the many others, therapist Dr Eugene Landy’s influence on Brian gets two chapters, and there’s plenty about deaths in the family, relatives galore, surfing as a sport, the joys of California, dietary and spiritual matters, Dennis’ indiscretions with Charles Manson (and 17 naked girls), Mike Love’s money-making schemes and whatever rivalry existed between The Beach Boys and The Beatles. 

What else have I learned? Dean Torrence of Jan & Dean sang uncredited lead on ‘Barbara Ann’; Al Jardine is a bit dull; ‘Good Vibrations’ lost out to ‘Winchester Cathedral’ by The New Vaudeville Band for Best Contemporary Song at the Grammys in 1966 (what were they thinking?); ‘Heroes And Villains’ was re-written after Brain’s Rolls Royce was nicked from a cinema car park; supplementary Beach Boy Bruce Johnson, born Benjamin Baldwin as the son of a single mother from Illinois, had the enormous good fortune to be adopted by an uber-wealthy LA family. No wonder he always looked so laid-back. 

There’s almost 30 pages of reference notes at the end, a reflection of the author’s dedicated research, a three-page bibliography but no index which would have appalled at least one mutual friend of ours. Neither are there any pictures, no doubt because no new ones could be found and, in any case, everyone knows what The Beach Boys look like. It’s what they sound like that really matters, and Peter Doggett’s deft musical analysis sent me back to the music, specifically my Good Vibrations box set and a CD of remasters called Summer Love Songs, time and again over the past week, the only trusted and true factor in judging the merits of a music book. 

        “The music survives best in the hearts and souls of everyone who has been touched by it, enriched by it, opened themselves to all its emotional ambiguities and riches,” writes Peter at the close of his book. “Nobody else made music like Brian Wilson; nobody ever could.” 

        I couldn’t agree more. 

YOU’VE GOT MICHAEL: Living Through HIStory – A Memoir By Dan Beck

Jackson, that is, and to have ‘got’ Michael was something of a poisoned chalice as Dan Beck, senior product manager at Epic Records in New York, would find out over the five years they worked together. What’s more, after reading his book, it somehow comes as no surprise that one of Jackson’s many managers played the role of gangster Tuddy Cicero in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas. 

This is not to say that Jackson’s entourage and wider circle of business associates were all gangsters, just that the ruthless methods they and Epic employ, as portrayed by Beck, somehow reminds me of organized crime – or how food chains and clothing manufacturers market their product. 

Take how Walter Yetnikoff, boss of Columbia, Epic’s parent company, reacts when MTV decline to show Jackson’s video for ‘Billie Jean’: “Yetnikoff, who was livid, called a senior executive at MTV,” writes Beck. “‘Listen,’ he said, ‘You know those Journey and Bruce Springsteen and REO Speedwagon videos of mine that you guys like to play so much? Pack them all up. Put all the masters in a box and send them back to me. Because we are no longer in business together… unless you play [‘Billie Jean’].” We were thrilled to have the moral high ground! It was a place of integrity a major label rarely, if ever, enjoyed.”

Although Dan Beck’s book focuses on his role as Jackson’s go-to man at Epic and, primarily, his part in the marketing of HIStory, Jackson’s 1995 compilation-plus album, it’s really a memoir of his 20 years working for the company that exposes – if that’s the right word – the way in which major labels operated during a period when cash flowed into the record business like the Mississippi in flood. Beck’s in-tray features other artists besides Jackson but the revenues generated by Michael, most especially Thriller and albums either side of it, make the Jackson 5 star his number one priority. 

As might be expected, dealing with those who surround Jackson means Beck must walk on tiptoes. “Most superstars had a manager, an agent, an independent PR person and perhaps an influential road manager,” he writes. “It generally didn’t take long to engage that artist’s team and learn how to work with them. As product managers, we had to understand their strengths (and often their dysfunctions) to help them succeed with the giant multinational corporation to which they were signed. When it worked, the results could be nearly unimaginably great. When it didn’t, it could be a disastrous nightmare. Michael Jackson’s world was entirely different. By 1991, still only three albums deep into his solo career, his organizational structure was a sprawling maze of powerful experts, creative collaborators, well-meaning friends and a few questionable hangers-on.” 

In many respects the book is the inside story about the issues surrounding Jackson during a period when his career soared before hitting choppy waters brought about by what Beck judges to be naïveté. Thriller became – and remains – the undisputed best-selling album of all time yet at the same time its success posed an insurmountable dilemma in how to better it. Subsequent releases that sold less could, of course, be considered failures even if their sales figures exceeded 20 million, a figure 99% of acts would kill for. 

Beck wrestles with this and other problems over the five-year period in which he was product manager for the self-styled King of Pop, by then the world’s most famous entertainer. His biggest problem seems to have been a reluctance on the part of those surrounding Michael to be decisive. Better make no decision at all than to make the wrong one. 

        “As his own CEO, he had a disregard for costs that was legendary,” Beck writes. “The immediate need, as I perceived it, was to find the decision-makers and the people who could answer questions so that we could move swiftly and decisively on Michael’s behalf… We often had critical deadlines that would require his personal attention. Since we had to be able to get approvals and quick action, I was concerned that the fiefdoms in Michael’s orbit would be inclined to hold up decisions in fear of making the wrong ones.” 

Beck quit Epic in 1996, and thereafter watched sadly from the sidelines as Jackson’s career and public image plummeted. “I still couldn’t fully fathom the idea that he could commit the despicable crimes for which he was charged. I knew a Michael Jackson who was stubborn. I knew a Michael Jackson who could tell a fib if he felt it was necessary. But I also knew a Michael Jackson who had a certain core of honor. I had challenged and tested it, and he had never betrayed it. Had his naïveté led to his legal woes? Had the side of him that was socially awkward compromised him with the wrong people? Then again, how well did I know him? The magnitude of that trial emphasized just how minor my role and relationship were in his huge life… I was just a cog in the wheel for a brief time.

        “I liked Michael,” Beck concludes. “He was always polite. Almost always smiling. He was so often excited and enthusiastic… And while he understood every nuance of a dance move, he did not always grasp the subtleties of public opinion. In fact, there were times when he had difficulty seeing the obvious, such as ignoring our strong advice to curtail photo ops with children. He even seemed puzzled by it.”

        You’ve Got Michael is published by Trouser Press Books, has 290 pages, and is fully indexed. It includes an eight-page photo section featuring several shots of the author with Jackson and one with the manager who played that role in Goodfellas. He certainly looks the part. 

NORTHUMBRIAN BLUES: The Lost World of Big Pete Deuchar by Colin Harper, Volume 1: 1933-60.

No, I’d not heard of Big Pete either, not until Colin Harper sent me a copy of his book which, as labours of love go, might rank alongside Mughal emperor Shan Jahan building the Taj Mahal as a mausoleum for his dead wife, albeit not quite so time consuming as Shan needed almost 20 years to finish the job.

Colin’s skills as a tenacious researcher into the nooks and crannies of modern music first came to my attention in 1998 when I read his Mojo feature on Anne Briggs, the high priestess of British folk music. To come up with 6,000 words on a singer whose determination to leave society behind and take up residence on a remote Scottish island demonstrated extraordinary resolve, and the same can be said for this strangely moreish book about a little-known banjo player with broad shoulders, a moustache and goatee beard who died in 1988.

Colin came across six foot four inches tall Big Pete while researching Bathed In Lightning, his biography of guitar maestro John McLaughlin who, aged  17, long before fame and Mahavishnu beckoned, played New Orleans jazz alongside Big Pete in The Professors Of Ragtime up in the north east of England. This is little more than a footnote in McLaughlin’s career, of course, but Colin delved deeper and discovered the extraordinary life that Big Pete led in and out of the jazz music he loved, so much so that he couldn’t fit it all into one book. He’s working on Volume 2 as I write. 

Quite who’ll be inspired to buy this book is anyone’s guess, but it’s an astonishing tale, partly hinted at in the subtitle ‘Lost World’. It’s not so much pre-Beatles – though the Fabs will make a cameo appearance in Vol 2 when Pete encounters them in Hamburg – as pre-rock and roll, an era when even jazz, its precursor, was looked upon with deep suspicion by the authorities. Those who preferred this kind of music over the ‘light entertainment’ offered by the BBC, let alone performed it in public, were heading for a life of criminality, at least as far as right-thinking people were concerned. “There was still, two years into the 60s, a lingering frisson of seediness, doubt and debauchery about jazz and those who peddled it,” writes Colin his introduction.

This didn’t faze Big Pete. He was born into money, a Scottish dynasty of brewers and pub owners, but it was a dysfunctional family with upstairs cavorting with downstairs and the posh boarding schools to which he was sent didn’t suit his temperament. Indeed, Pete’s childhood reads like a gothic horror story from which he escaped with little more than a banjo and a bicycle, both of which he put to good use as he set about promoting jazz evenings on Tyneside and, in the fullness of time, pedalling across whole continents. 

        The band with which he was most associated, the Vieux Carré Jazzmen, was formed in 1954, lasted until 1976, was revived in 1991 and is still going strong. The venues at which they played were seedy and the rewards meagre but Pete swam against the tide, a bit of a hero who was both loved and loathed by most of those he encountered. Through scouring the local press, Colin has researched scores of gigs that in some way wouldn’t have happened had it not been for Pete’s energy, flair and, it has to be said, cussedness. Pete also had a fondness for the product on which his family’s fortune was secured which, coupled with a rather wanton disregard for authority, led him into trouble with the law. Amusingly, Colin is equally assiduous in detailing Pete’s many appearances in the dock at the local courtroom. 

        An outsize personality, Big Pete made enemies too, including a few ex-girlfriends and, as Colin traces his life up to 1960, he paints of picture of a resolute nonconformist in an era when it was deemed right and proper to stand in cinemas while the national anthem was played after a film’s closing credits. In 1957 he visited New Orleans where he encountered his idol, the clarinettist George Lewis, with whom he performed, on banjo, in the UK in 1959, recordings of which have been made available on the Danish Rarities label and 504 Records.

        As a convert to pure New Orleans jazz from the early part of the 20th Century, as espoused by the more celebrated and equally uncompromising Ken Colyer, it will come as no surprise that Big Pete was no fan of British trad, a vanilla variant performed by men in funny hats with striped waistcoats who, briefly and inexplicably, found themselves popular in the doldrums years leading up to the arrival of The Beatles. Nevertheless, he embraced trad somewhat reluctantly before turning his attention to R&B with His Country Blues band, but there we must take a break until the arrival of Vol 2 in which we will learn of the fate of Sally Stevens, Pete’s younger half-sister, a session singer who emigrated to California. Sally, a charismatic familial link to Big Pete, owned a copy of his ultra-rare self-published, largely autobiographical, 1981 novel Half A Chance. Regrettably, however, less than a year after Colin interviewed her, she died from bronchial pneumonia. 

        Northumberland Blues, published as a limited edition by Jazz In Britain Books, contains 24 pages of photographs, among them one of Sally with Jackson Browne, scores of foot- and endnotes and an unreliable index. It’s a fascinating read, a valuable history of the evolution of jazz in Britain outside of London. I’m filing it alongside Pete Frame’s Restless Generation. 

CAT ON THE ROAD TO FINDOUT by Yusuf/Cat Stevens – Part 2

The life of Cat Stevens was forever changed in the autumn of 1975 when, by his reckoning, he was saved from drowning by the Almighty. Swimming in the Pacific off the coast of Malibu, a powerful undercurrent pulled him away from the shore, his heart froze and his limbs felt too weak to get him back to land. “In a split second of the rapidly dwindling moments that remained of my life, I looked and prayed, ‘Oh God if you’ll save me, I’ll work for You.’” 

He was as good as his word and, though it didn’t happen overnight, Cat Stevens soon became Yusuf Islam and thereafter followed the Muslim faith, devoting himself largely to good works prescribed by a religion that, in his opinion, doesn’t get a fair crack of the whip in the Western world. 

        “Never was there a troubadour more handsome than Cat Stevens, nor a career so coloured with romantic stories and downright peculiarity,” I wrote in 1983 as the introduction to my book about Cat Stevens, and 42 years later – after reading his autobiography – I have come some way to understanding why he did what he did and, perhaps more importantly, what this likeable man had to endure when he swapped pop stardom for life as a Muslim. 

        It is a book of two halves, the first devoted to his life as Cat Stevens, initially as a rather dandyish and, we are told, reluctant pop star, then as the sensitive singer/songwriter who sold millions of records and became rich. The second half, roughly from 1977 onwards, is devoted his life as a Muslim, with plenty of emphasis on the difficulties he faced, some brought about by his earlier vocation, others by what he perceives as an antipathy towards Islam by an unsympathetic media that concentrates only on negativity. To this end he deals with issues like Salmon Rushdie, the Iranian Revolution and 9/11, invariably pointing out that – as in all religions – there are the good, the bad and the ugly. 

        This sets the book well apart from just about every other music biography I’ve ever read, as does Yusuf’s focus on his family, be it the mum and dad who raised him and his elder brother and sister in the Moulin Rouge restaurant near Cambridge Circus, or the family of four daughters and one son he raised after marriage to fellow Muslim Fawziah Ali in 1979. Yusuf writes about them all with affection and the frequency that other musicians devote to bass players, drummers and record producers. The on-off relationship with his brother and sometimes manager David is an ongoing sub-plot to the book.

        The slightly precocious, independent-minded child christened Steven Demetri Georgiou was fascinated by religious belief from an early age and, though the earthly temptations that came his way through exposure to the pop world were hard to resist, his eventual conversation seems somehow inevitable. Still, he road-tested other religions, among them Christianity, Buddhism and the I Ching, before settling on Islam to which he was drawn after David gifted him a copy of the Koran. 

        The clues were there in many of the songs he wrote between 1970 and 1975; expressing the thoughts of a seeker (‘On The Road To Find Out’ and ‘Miles From Nowhere’), climate-conscious environmentalist (‘Where Do The Children Play?’), disquiet at materialism (‘Hard Headed Woman’) and hope for mankind (‘Peace Train’ and ‘Sitting’). ‘Morning Has Broken’, of course, is an arrangement of a Christian hymn from 1931 while ‘How Can I Tell You’, to my mind his greatest love song, scores through the writer’s inadequacy to express himself. More than once in the book Yusuf recounts his dislike of being interviewed, and frustration at how the media misrepresented whatever opinions he was trying to express. 

        Yusuf has a friendly, unpretentious writing style and though some may be deterred by the detours into religious reasoning that occupy large chunks of the book’s latter stages, I shared his exasperation at incidents where he was shoddily treated by immigration officials in the US and Israel. Much of this he attributes to his high profile as a one-time celebrity, the quid pro quo being his ability to fund charities and Islamic education from the fortune he amassed as a million-selling artist. His gradual re-emergence as a musician, somewhat unexpected after selling his guitars and giving the proceeds to charity, is a welcome relief towards the end of the book. 

        It’s a long read – 554 pages – and, unusually, the 24-page b&w photo section is at the back. Inexplicably for a lengthy autobiography, there is no index. Finally, I need to mention that he’s in no doubt that Carly Simon wrote ‘You’re So Vain’ about him. “I never understood the endless hide-and-seek of finding out who [it] was about bro!” he writes. “Naturally, I knew it was me.” His song ‘Sweet Scarlett’ from his 1972 LP Catch Bull At Four was his response.