DAVE MARSH (1950-2026)

Dave Marsh, who has died aged 76, was amongst the first music writers I befriended in New York where I was posted in 1973 and spent the better part of the next four years as Melody Maker’s man in the US. He and I bonded over our shared admiration for The Who, but I soon came to realise that he was no sycophant and that if he felt The Who were straying from the path of righteousness – as he saw it – then he’d be the first to take them to task. Indeed, any rock or soul act that he deemed had somehow betrayed whatever values and virtues rock music was duty bound to fulfil would feel the sharpness of his pen.

In this respect Dave held true to the old-fashioned values that I believe were shared by, amongst others, Dylan, Lennon, Townshend and Springsteen; that not only was there an intrinsic morality in rock music but that its best exponents were duty bound to uphold that morality. Like these stars, Dave believed that while rock music couldn’t save the planet it did have the power to improve our world. He was the enemy of overt commercialisation, of vanity, of greed, of tastelessness and of any act that disrespected or short-changed their fans. He made a few enemies along the way but he didn’t give a shit. 

Born in Michigan, Dave co-founded Creem magazine in Detroit where he worked alongside his close friend Lester Bangs. Between them they turned Creem into an opinionated ‘must-read’ for serious rock fans, covering metal, glam and punk, never afraid to write dismissive reviews of LPs they felt were under par, regardless of the act’s popularity or status. He went on to become an associate editor of Rolling Stone, the rock and pop columnist for Newsday and in the early 1980s launched Rock’n’Roll Confidential, a subscription-only fanzine-style pamphlet that exposed dubious practices in the music industry. I was an early subscriber and even contributed a few ideas.

Dave went on to write over 20 books. His first was Born To Run, the first substantial biography of Springsteen for which Omnibus Press acquired UK rights in 1981. He wrote a second book on Springsteen, entitled Glory Days, published in 1987, his connection to Springsteen enabled by his marriage to Barbara Carr, whom I first met as a publicist with Atlantic Records in New York and who went on to co-manage Springsteen with Jon Landau. 

Dave also wrote Before I Get Old, the second in a triumvirate of Who biographies that were published in the early eighties, alongside Richard Barnes’ Maximum R&B and my own Illustrated Biography. Many fans felt the book was too pro-Townshend, with scant attention paid to the other three members of the group, but Dave didn’t care; that was the way he saw it and the way he wanted to write it. When he came to the UK to research the book we visited a few old Who sites together, among them the Oldfield Hotel in Greenford where, in February of 1964 they billed themselves as The Who for the first time, and in May of that year were joined on stage by a drummer from the audience whose name was Keith Moon. Dave and I shared a couple of pints and, together, we closed our eyes and tried to imagine the scene that night. The Oldfield was demolished in 2001.

The Oldfield Hotel where Dave and I tried to imagine the night Keith played for The Who for the first time.

        In the 1990s, when I was involved in the reissue of upgraded CDs from The Who’s back catalogue, I commissioned Dave to write liner notes for The Who Sell Out. He delivered in spades, describing it as, “The Who’s consummate masterpiece, the one work that holds together as most tightly as concept and realisation. Sell Out is the most fun of any Who album, and the one whose spirit is most tightly linked to the glorious pop insanity that psychedelia and its aftermath destroyed forever.”

Among the many other books that Dave wrote were The Heart of Rock & Soul: The 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made, Louie Louie: The History and Mythology of the World’s Most Famous Rock’n’Roll Song, and biographies of Michael Jackson, Sam & Dave and George Clinton. His journalism was collected in Fortunate Son (1983) and his only book on the Beatles, The Beatles Second Album (2007), mercilessly skewered Dave Dexter, the clueless Capitol Records employee responsible for overseeing Beatles releases in America. Both Lennon and George Martin were also highly critical of Dexter, of whose work Dave described as “genuinely stupid”.

Many bands felt the sharp tip of Dave’s pen, among them Led Zeppelin – he was particularly critical of John Bonham’s drumming – Queen, Journey and, most notably, Kiss. Then again, he could be critical of his favourite band, The Who, writing of Meaty Beaty Big And Bouncy in 1972: “They really let us down this time. I don’t know if anyone else resents it, but I do. Why reissue things for the second (third) time on an album when you have such an incredible backlog of material? C'mon Peter: who won't get fooled again?” I disagreed with him on that one and can recall an evening spent arguing with him over its merits at JPs bar on New York's Upper East Side. On another night in that same bar my friend Glen Colson and I joined a heated discussion involving Dave, Barbara, Jon Landau and Bruce, the topic ‘the greatest British hit singles’. 

        Wrote Bruce on his website today: “[Dave] was a true Rock’n’Roll Lifer. He was soulful, intelligent, heartfelt, opinionated, bruising and often fantastically argumentative. Watching Jon Landau and Dave drive each other crazy over some arcane piece if music would make my day.”

Dave had been ill for some time and I was told recently by a mutual friend that he was losing his sight. I hope to hell he never lost his hearing and that during his final days Barbara cranked up the speakers in their Connecticut home and played Marvin Gaye’s ‘I Heard It Through The Grapevine’, Dave’s all-time favourite song, at top volume.

RIP old pal. 

VICKI WICKHAM (1939-2026)

Vicki Wickham, whose death aged 87 was announced at the weekend, was everywhere that mattered in music during the sixties and seventies, her finger always on the pulse, rushing around to meet someone, to be somewhere, to do something. Bursting with energy, she was the pioneering spirit behind Ready Steady Go!, where the weekend started, still the yardstick by which rock and pop on TV is measured. She more than anyone introduced the UK to the music of Tamla Motown, wrote for several music magazines, most notably Melody Maker, and managed successful acts. She was even the co-writer of the lyrics to a number one hit, her great pal Dusty Springfield’s ‘You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me’ in 1966. 

In 1971, on my first visit to New York, by then Vicki’s adopted home town, she steered me into a situation that enabled me to see The Who on US soil for the first time, and we remained good friends ever since, most especially after I moved to New York to become Melody Maker’s US editor in 1973 and remained in the city for three years. Partly this was because Vicki was an early supporter of The Who, occasionally part of their extended entourage and, for a period in the 1970s, headed Track Records New York office. She first encountered the group at the Marquee Club in 1965, and very quickly befriended their co-manager Kit Lambert. Shortly after its release in May 1965, The Who’s second single, ‘Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere’ became RSG!’s theme tune. 

        “Vicki, bounding from the control room [at RSG!] to the studio, beaming, laughing and enthusiastic, tall and beautiful, but a little scruffy with it, like a highland pony,” wrote Pete Townshend in Andy Neill’s definitive book on RSG! “She [and RSG! director Michael Lindsay-Hogg] both conveyed the sense that we were, all of us, breaking every rule of television. I felt they were breaking societal rules as well, and of course that is now a given.”

        “Of all the groups on Ready Steady Go!, The Who most typified what the show was all about,” Vicki told US writer Dave Marsh for his Who biography Before I Get Old. “RSG! was instant pop music. It was every trend before it happened, and things came and went super-fast. It was about youth and their dreams and aspirations and had nothing to do with thinking about tomorrow… The Who was all of that.”

        Vicki was born on 23 March 1939 in Newbury, Berkshire, and raised in the village of Inkpen, the only child of a farmer and nurse. At 18, she moved to London to attend Langham Secretarial College. Her first job was with publishing house Cassell & Co in the City. A succession of dead-end jobs followed before she found work as a production assistant on BBC Radio Light Entertainment. She worked on all types of programmes ranging from Roundabout, Easy Beat, Jazz Club and Saturday Club to semi-feature documentaries. Two years later she switched to ITV, to Associated-Rediffusion, becoming secretary to Elkan Allan who would become the producer of RSG! and it was while Allan was dictating a letter about what would become RSG! that Vicki piped up and demanded to become involved.

        Involved she most certainly became. Music mad, switched on and out at clubs all night, Vicki befriended all the groups that appeared on the show, The Beatles and Rolling Stones among them, and she was an early and uber-enthusiastic promoter of black music. In 1965, she was instrumental in putting together an RSG! offshoot special featuring several Tamla Motown acts, The Supremes, Martha & The Vandellas, The Temptations and The Miracles. “The wonderful Vicky Wickham had convinced her boss to do a one-hour TV special,” said Motown founder Berry Gordy. “The Sound Of Motown was a big moment for us because it brought our music and artists to the UK’s national TV audiences for the first time.”

        Vicki’s crusade to promote black acts continued until the show went off the air, with Wilson Pickett, Irma Thomas, the Exciters, Arthur Alexander and Don Covay also appearing. When Doris Troy arrived in London, not only was she immediately booked but Vicki threw a welcoming party for her at Blaise’s club in South Kensington where Vicki first caught sight of the all-female group that were to play an important role in her future. This was Patti LaBelle and The Bluebelles whom she would book for RSG! and go on to manage. Nona Hendryx from the group became Vicki’s lifelong partner. 

        In the meantime Vicki wrote for several music magazines, starting with Fabulous, then Disc & Music Echo and finally MM. Covering The Who’s prestigious performance of Tommy live at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House in 1969, she wrote in MM: “At the end of the first show, over the incessant clapping, cries for more, shouting and applause coming through the back-stage speakers, I heard Pete say to Kit Lambert as he went back out for an encore: ‘You really book us on some bum gigs, man!’

        “They then did another twenty minutes, climaxed by Pete banging his guitar down on stage. It broke and he hurled it into the audience. Later some very small girl was hugging it like a baby as she made for the subway homeward bound!

        “The Who's performance on both shows was superb. I haven't seen them perform for some time and although I hadn't forgotten how dynamic they were, they topped all memories. Roger, his bare chest glistening, has come through as having a great body, and taken over and surpassed where Jim Morrison left off image-wise. At times he's like an angel, the lights haloing his hair against the background: then like a devil, meanly throwing the mike towards the audience, up in the air, almost to Pete and then back to neatly catch it. And Pete, in his white boiler-suit, attacking his guitar. He leaps feet above the stage, lands and goes down on his knees, to emphasise a passage. But perhaps it's Keith who steals the stage. He's everywhere. He's all over his massive drum-kit, contorting, leaping, his sticks soaring, twirling high in the air and being caught to thunderous applause. He ‘mimes’ behind Pete, he pours with sweat, he enjoys himself, and his drumming is out of sight. And then there's John. At first hardly noticeable, dressed entirely in black merging with the shadows of the amps, but as you listen the bass comes pounding through. Four people — the most exciting group in the world.”

        I wish I’d been there. 

        Vicki went on to manage Dusty Springfield and she co-wrote a Dusty biography Dancing With Demons with Penny Valentine, published in 2012. At various times she also managed Holly Johnson, Marc Almond and, very briefly, Morrissey. In 2013, Vicki was awarded the OBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List for services to music. 

        RIP Vicki. 

(Some of the information in this post was gleaned from Ready Steady Go! – The Weekend Starts Here by Andy Neill, published by BMG in 2020. The photograph at the top of this post was scanned from Rock's Back Pages website, where many of her music press articles can be found.) 

KEITH ALTHAM - PR TO THE STARS

The music writer and PR Keith Altham, whose death aged 84 was announced yesterday, was a fixture in my life for over 50 years. He’d seen it all and done it all, and no one I know, probably no one in the world, had a richer fund of hilarious stories – many of them salty and unflattering – about the music business and those who toil within it. I never came away from spending time with Keith without a smile on my face.

        Keith was already a seasoned music business insider by the time I reached Melody Maker in 1970. He began his career writing for Fabulous in the early 1960s, then graduated to NME, and he interviewed and wrote about everyone, Beatles, Stones, Who, you name them. When he branched out into PR in 1971 his client roster read like a Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame. He was down to earth and practical, and didn’t stand for any prima donna behaviour from anyone, no matter how famous they were. His 1999 book No More Mister Nice Guy! is series of letters to those clients of his, 37 in total, and he doesn’t mince words. It’s one of the funniest music books you’ll find anywhere.

        At various times Keith represented the two groups, The Who and Slade, with whom I became the closest during my years on Melody Maker, and it’s perhaps no coincidence that the only two stars who come of out of No More Mister Nice Guy! smelling of roses are Pete Townshend and Noddy Holder. He and I tended to think alike. 

        His escapades with Keith Moon could fill a book, and I can still recall spending a hair-raising afternoon in 1971 with the two Keiths and ‘Legs’ Larry Smith at the Chertsey Agricultural Show. Quite why Moonie and Legs had decided to enter the ‘tossing the hay bale’ competition no one knew, or cared, but they did and, though alarmed at the prospect of Moon wielding a pitchfork, Keith Altham was on hand to ensure that the local papers got all the photos they needed. When his great pal John Entwistle died, Keith wrote, knowingly: “His dexterity and imagination on the bass guitar – often considered a basic and pedestrian instrument in other groups – was an integral part of the Who’s classic wall of sound, so much so that that the three instrumentalists and one vocalist on stage often sounded like a full orchestra on the charge. John’s complex rhythms always provided an explosive cannon at the rear.”

        As for Slade, it was Keith’s suggestion in 1969 to turn them into skinheads and their manager Chas Chandler, always keen to generate publicity, good or bad, leapt on the idea. Years later, when I was researching my Slade book Feel The Noize! Keith was enormously helpful, and we spent three days together in Walsall, spending time with Noddy, Jim Lea, Dave Hill and the group’s tour manager Graham ‘Swin’ Swinnerton. He was particularly close to Chas and in 1996 we took a train to Newcastle together to attend Chas’ funeral in Cullercoats on Tyneside where Keith gave a eulogy, mentioning – to everyone’s astonishment – that at one time Chas had plans to link Perth to Sydney by canal. 

        Keith was always happy to share his memories with anyone and everyone. In 2018, he and I were among guests who attended the premiere of a movie entitled Should Have Been There, a documentary about Melody Maker in the 1960s and 70s that focused on the work of our photographer Barrie Wentzell. I took along my son Sam, then aged 23 and a massive admirer of Jimi Hendrix. Aware that Keith had known Hendrix well (it was Keith who’d suggested Jimi set his guitar alight at the London Astoria back in 1967, and he was the last journalist to interview him in 1970), I steered them both to a pizza restaurant in Leicester Square when the film was over and for the next hour he delighted Sam, who was spellbound, with stories about the great guitarist. 

This photograph was taken following the movie premiere I refer to above. Keith is second from the left, in a hat, and I'm stood just behind him, alongside Chris Welch and his wife Marilyne. Barrie Wentzell is in the centre, and my son Sam is second from the right. 

        For the past 20 years or so Keith and I met twice a year at the Bull’s Head in Barnes where a group of music industry veterans gather together to reminisce about how things were before big business and computers ruined everything. It was always a pleasure to spend time with Keith, even though in recent years his health wasn’t what it was. Four years ago, Keith’s daughter Nancy asked me contribute to a book to be presented to Keith on his 80th birthday. Here’s what I wrote: 

Lines of the occasion of KA’s 80th

(With apologies to Pete Townshend)

People try to put him down

Just because he gets around

He’s a prince among his peers

Hope he lives for 100 years

This is Keith Altham

Keith Altham, baby

Why don't we all kneel and p-p-pray

To wish our Keith a happy birthday

I’m not tryin’ to cause a big s-s-sensation

Just tryin’ to give him v-v-veneration

This is Keith Altham

This is Keith Altham, baby

He ain’t gonna f-fade away

‘Cos we all like what he has to s-s-say

I love him ‘cos he loves The Who

An’ if you don’t dig that well screw you too

Talkin’ ‘about Keith Altham

Keith Altham, baby

RIP old pal. 

CHRIS REA (1951-1925)

It’s a bit of a cliché to call a rock star down to earth, implying that he or she is unchanged by fame but there is no more apt description of Chris Rea whose death, aged 74, was announced yesterday. With his creased, careworn face, stocky shoulders and tough, no-nonsense attitude, he looked like a builder’s labourer, seeming to me to have arrived at the restaurant straight from the stage set of Auf Wiedersehen Pet and, of course, he had the accent to match, gruff Geordie, just like Dennis, Neville and Oz. 

It was 2012. We had not met before and the lunch had been arranged by someone in his employ to talk about a book he might write, an autobiography possibly published by Omnibus Press, of which I was editor, responsible for acquiring books. I chose a nearby restaurant and it wasn’t expensive, of which I was glad because as soon as he began to talk I sensed a man unimpressed by wealth and fame, of which he had both, who would have been just as happy if I’d taken him to a greasy spoon, not that there are many of those in the West End of London.

I like to think we got on well. We were both from the north. I told him that I loved his song ‘Driving Home For Christmas’ because it resonated with me insofar as every Christmas Eve for years and years I used to drive up the M1 from London to Skipton to spend a few days with my dad when was alive. He was pleased but shrugged. It wasn’t his greatest moment, he said, and he talked about how the blues was his real love, and soul music too, and if all I had of his in my record collection was a greatest hits set – which was true – then he’d put me straight. A week after the lunch he sent me a copy of Chris Rea (Blue Guitars), an 11-CD (and 1 DVD) collection of his blues recordings, 127 songs in total. Beautifully packaged in a large format, the accompanying booklet was illustrated by his own paintings – he was a dab hand with a brush and palette – and photographs of the 25 instruments he played, and when I played the discs I realised there was so much more to Chris Rea than the handful of hits with which he is associated.

Over lunch he talked about his love of Little Feat, and when I told him I’d interviewed Lowell George a couple of times back in my days on Melody Maker, he was impressed and wanted to know everything, all I could remember, about the encounters. He also told me how much he loved Motown music but he wasn’t much impressed when I told him I’d met Michael Jackson. 

Chris had arrived for the lunch in a taxi which had brought him all the way from where he lived in Cookham, near Maidenhead, and he told the driver to wait, probably for two hours. He explained that he was unable to drive for some health reason, which must have galled him because we also talked about cars and his love of motor sport. It seemed slightly ironic to me that this pragmatic, humble rock star owned a Ferrari that he couldn’t drive. 

I think we parted as friends and I’d like to have met him again but it was not to be. For reasons unexplained, the book never happened. A shame. I’m playing Album Eight (Gospel Soul Blues & Motown) from his Blue Guitars collection as I write. Sounds great. RIP Chris.

OZZY OSBOURNE (1948-2025)

Like Alice Cooper and, to a lesser extent, Elton John, there was something slightly preposterous about the Ozzy Osbourne that I encountered as a staff writer for Melody Maker during the 1970s. Ozzy, who died yesterday aged 76, struck me as a good-natured showman in those days, his Prince Of Darkness moniker a tongue-in-cheek portrait for a singer who was happy to act out any role if it advanced his career, however outrageous that may be, even one that involved biting the heads off bats, doves or any other small species that came to hand.

        Ozzy spoke with the pronounced Birmingham accent that never left him, no matter where he laid his hat. Hard, thick ‘Brummie’ made his speech rise in tone at the end of every sentence, as if everything he said was a question, and when he and Black Sabbath’s then manager Pat Meehan met me for lunch at a Chinese restaurant in London’s Lyle Street in early 1971, he struck me as utterly hilarious, a prisoner of his own good fortune – he’d arrived for the lunch in Meehan’s pale blue Rolls Royce Corniche – and quite unsure how to respond to the group’s sudden success. “Prince of Darkness?” he might have said to me. “Bugger that for a goime of soildiurs.”

        This was quite early in Black Sabbath’s career and, as I relate in my Just Backdated memoir, arrangements were made at this luncheon for me to accompany the group for a handful of dates on a forthcoming UK tour, during which I would interview them and review the shows. As it happened I opted not to interview Ozzy but, instead, guitarist Tony Iommi who struck me as the most loquacious, earnest and, probably, intelligent member of the group. This may have had something to do with an incident I witnessed in Manchester where, at the hotel in which we stayed, Ozzy over-refreshed himself in the late-night residents’ bar. Someone in the party, noting Ozzy’s comatose state, stuck a bedroom-style ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign around his neck which remained in place until he was helped to bed. “Best interview that Tony on the tour bus tomorrow,” I thought as I observed Ozzy being led unsteadily away.

        Heavy metal was never really my bag, so I wasn’t much of a Black Sabbath fan but I respected their achievements and professionalism, looking on from a journalist’s perspective as their success expanded in America when I worked there as MM’s US editor. I saw them play arena concerts in St Louis, Chicago and New York and acknowledged that they were the foremost performers in the genre they had chosen, an inspiration to a host of others, as can be seen from the many tributes paid today by Ozzy’s peers. I watched Ozzy inspire audiences in their thousands to reciprocate his peace signs and afterwards encountered him backstage or at parties thrown to celebrate the group’s success. He hadn’t changed a bit. He still struck me as a rather guileless innocent, carried along on the crest of a wave without really knowing why or how or where it might lead or, indeed, to care or even think very much about it all either. 

        It might have led to penury – Sabbath were early victims of what I might term “managerial materialism” – and mid-life death from substance abuse, and we have his second wife Sharon to thank for Ozzy’s renaissance in the 1980s and beyond. By this time, I had lost touch with Ozzy but I revisited his story to a certain extent when I commissioned Joel McIver to write Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, an exhaustive biography of the group for Omnibus Press, described by the Sun newspaper as “a brilliant insight into one of the country’s most famous bands”. I was happy to offer Joel my own experiences of the group and its materialistic management during his research. 

Ozzy soilduired on, eventually becoming a solo star and the principal actor in the family reality TV show which, I noted, portrayed the master of the house, that Prince of Darkness I once knew, as the naïve, childlike ingénue I always assumed him to be. 

        But I was probably wrong in this judgement. I read in today’s paper that he and Sharon are jointly worth £145 million. RIP Ozzy. 

SLY STONE (1943-2025)

Oh Sly, you great big mixed up ball of confusion! I loved your records and only The Who could have followed your set at Woodstock, the defining moment of your chequered career. But what a mess you made of things along the way. 

        I have written about meeting Sly before but the death yesterday of this musical-genius-cum-provocateur-extraordinaire prompted me to re-read the three editions of Melody Maker in which I wrote about him and reproduce the second – an interview – pretty much verbatim for the first time. 

        The first time I saw Sly was in November 1973, a show at the Hollywood Palladium. “Will he? Won’t he?” I wrote in my review for MM’s Caught In The Act page. “Sly Stone’s reputation is too firmly etched for those questions not to be asked when he’s advertised to appear anywhere in the USA these days. His tantrums and failures to show for concerts are legendary to the extent that his contracts now contain a clause with a heavy penalty for non-appearance. Well, Sly did show at the Palladium but only just. The Palladium was sold out for the funky guy with the panama hat – but Sly made only a token appearance, leaving the stage after just over half an hour, apparently satisfied that the customers had had their seven dollars’ worth on entertainment. It was as big a rip off as I’ve witnessed since I started reporting on rock’n’roll three years ago.”

        I went on to report that while his band was stage for about an hour Sly was present for only half that time, offering his audience endless choruses of his two best-known songs, ’Dance To The Music’ and ‘I Want To Take You Higher’. “When the house lights went up everyone went home surprisingly peaceably. For what there as of it the music was tight and entertaining but other aspects of this show left me with a bitter taste in my mouth,” I concluded.

        Although I didn’t realise it at the time I caught Sly Stone on a relatively good day when I interviewed him in a basement apartment on New York’s West Side in June of 1974. It was his HQ in New York that week because, I was told by his publicist, he didn’t like hotels but after less than an hour in his company I figured it was more a case of hotels not liking him. Either way, bad days outnumbered good ones at this stage of his career, and would go on to do so for much of his troubled life.

As I recall in my Just Backdated memoir, Sly dressed for his Melody Maker interrogation as he would for the stage: a gleaming all-white leather outfit with tassels and rhinestones topped off with a huge afro, his eyes hidden behind outsized sunglasses. Sat next to him on a couch in this cramped, untidy apartment was his fiancée Kathy Silva whom he would soon marry on the stage at Madison Square Garden. She was decked out in a matching outfit save for the petite mini-skirt that exposed a generous amount of thigh, so much so that shortly after the interview began Sly enticed her into the adjoining bedroom for an intimate tête-à-tête, quite noisily too. In the meantime, the mortified publicist and I made small talk and twiddled our thumbs.

I’d been warned in advance that interviewing Sly Stone might be problematic but I’d come away unscathed from an awkward encounter with Lou Reed earlier that year and fancied my chances. Things got off to a bad start, however. It was scheduled for 3.30pm but when I arrived I was asked to return at 5pm because Sly was having a blood test, a legal requirement for his forthcoming marriage. I did as I was bid but there was no sign of him at 5pm, so I waited for a further hour during which his soon-to-be-released LP Small Talk was played for me. “It was only a rough mix but, again, it’s a departure from previous Sly material,” I reported. “All but the two opening songs on the first side feature a prominent violin and many of them are slow, almost waltz-time, pieces. Despite this, there’s still the pounding bass that has distinguished Sly’s recordings from the early days.” 

The new LP offered me a topic of conversation when Sly finally arrived but before we began I gave him a recent copy of MM that contained a feature on him in our Rock Giants series. This was a mistake as he promptly left the room to read it, evidently on the toilet as his return was accompanied by the sound of plumbing. I tried to sound friendly, smiling openly as I asked my first question, about the use of violins on his new album. 

        “It’s different. It’s unusual. That’s probably why I did it. The strings were around so I used them.”

Have you been wanting to do this for a long time?

“Probably. I don’t need to think about it at all to get it together.”

You seem to be forever changing.

“Time changes me, man.”

Will you be introducing strings on stage?

“I got a violin player in the group now. His name’s Sidney. He’s from Sausalito and I’ve known him just long enough for him to get into the group.”

Did you arrange the strings yourself?

“Part of them.”

There’s a lot of slower material on the album. Are you cutting down on the frantic Sly Stone material?

“There’s a lot of songs so I introduced slow songs also. There’s 11 songs. I don’t count which are slow.”

How big is your group at present?

“Nine people.”

It was at this point that Sly and Kathy retired to the bedroom. They were gone for about 15 minutes and returned together, Sly looking rather pleased with himself. I resumed my questioning as if nothing had happened. 

Tell me something about the bass player.

“That’s me. I play bass on all my records. I play most everything on all my records. I just overdub everything.”

[Later in the year I would interview Larry Graham, the bass player in the Family Stone, who refuted this.]

Wouldn’t the group like to be on the records with you?

“Sometimes they’re on the records also, but they feel good about it [not being on the records]. They like it this way and they’re pretty honest about what they like. I‘ve recorded like this ever since the Stand album, ever since ‘Dance To The Music’ I guess.”

Bass is such an important part of your sound. Have you ever felt like playing bass on stage yourself? 

“Sometimes I do.”

“It’s in his heart,” chipped in Kathy who by now had returned from the bedroom and re-joined Sly on the couch. He plays it so good that he’d like to play everything on stage if he could. He’s only one man but he has a million thoughts.” 

Do you get bored with always playing the very familiar material like ‘Dance’ and ‘Higher’?

“No, they like it and they keep on liking it and you gotta keep telling people you like it too. I love every period of my career.”

Where you do you write?

“My songs come from environments. I just go about my day an as things come to me, I write them down. I write on the toilet ‘cos no one bothers me there.”

Are you trying to change your image by getting married and releasing slower material? Is the image mellowing these days? 

“I’m not trying to. Vibes just leave me. I’m still as crazy as I always was, if crazy is the right word.”

Will you actually turn up for shows?

“I won’t ever be predictable.”

But there have been reports of you not turning up.

“It’s bad promoters, man.”

Your performance in the Woodstock movie helped you enormously in England.

“Sure. I enjoyed playing there. All my gigs are good.”

Are there other highlights of your career that you remember?

“Yeah, but you wouldn’t know about them.”

Because I was the wrong country?

“It’s not the country you’re, it’s the skin you’re in. And it’s not the colour at that. I enjoy myself best on the toilet and I wouldn’t invite you there.”

“This last remark brought the interview to an inevitable conclusion,” I wrote. “Sly’s PR showed me to the door while the man himself curled up on the soda with his fiancée. ‘You know something,’ said his PR girl. ‘He really opened up this afternoon. Usually he just grunts at writers. He’s done a few interviews this week and he’s said more this afternoon than he’s said all week’.”

A triumph, then.

A week later I reported on Sly’s nuptials at the Garden in my New York news column. “The ever-unpredictable Sly Stone married the mother of his nine-month-old son in front of 20,000 fans at Madison Square Garden on Wednesday evening,” I wrote. “Following a set by Eddie Kendricks, Sly’s mother came on to the stage to call for quiet. Then she introduced Sly’s 12-year-old niece who sang a gospel hymn like someone twice her age before the stage filled with friends and relations all dressed in gold costumes.

Sly & Kathy on the MSG stage as they were marred. 

        “A dozen girls holding palm leaves high in the air formed a backdrop as Sly himself loped out last, dressed all in gold with a gold cape. The preacher – brought in specially from San Francisco – called for hush and the service began. Appeals for the audience to keep silent because of the solemnity of the occasion were largely ignored, but the words of the marriage service were clearly audible through the PA system. When the words ‘Do you, Sly Sylvester Stewart, take this woman’ were uttered, a huge cheer went up. The service closed with the traditional ‘Let no man put asunder’ line which prompted the crowd to go crazy.

        “Then everyone trooped off. The whole affair was over in less than 15 minutes. There was another delay before the band came back on, followed by Sly who ripped into a long set, at least by his standards. 

        “The new Family Stone included a violinist and there were several new songs in his repertoire as well as old favourites,” I informed MM’s readers. “‘Dance To The Music’ opened and closed the set. Musically, Sly was as good as ever, alternating between organ, guitar and harp. He seemed to rise to the occasion and actually addressed the audience between numbers instead of merely jumping from one number to the next to hurry the proceedings over as quickly as possible.”

Two years later Sky and Kathy separated. “He beat me, held me captive and wanted me to be in ménages à trois,” Kathy later told People magazine. 

RICK DERRINGER (1947-2025)

Rick Derringer was everywhere in New York when I lived in the city in the 1970s, backstage at gigs, record launch parties thrown by labels, hanging out in the rock’n’roll clubs all over Manhattan. He and his first wife Liz were social animals and good hosts too, throwing parties at their downtown apartment where, one night, Rick showed me a guitar he’d had made that was constructed from granite. It was too heavy to wear on stage, he explained, but the tone was unique. 

        Rick was the main man in The McCoys who had a massive hit in 1965 with a song called ‘Hang On Sloopy’, also covered as ‘My Girl Sloopy’ by Jeff Beck’s Yardbirds, superior bubble-gum I guess you’d call it, but Rick went on to far greater things in the seventies and beyond, both as a session guitarist and record producer. His death last week saddened me, and prompted me to look up a very long interview I did with him for the March 16, 1975 issue of Melody Maker.  

        What follows is the first half of that interview, dealing with the rise and fall of The McCoys. 

The gold disc rests on the mantlepiece, taking pride of place as it justly deserves. There are two more on either side of it, but the gold record is the one that sticks out a mile, the one that’ll be remembered as the classic of its time and the one on which the laminated gold will never fade with age.

It bears the simple inscription: “Presented to Ricky Zehringer. The McCoys. Hang On Sloopy. Number 1 in the Nation.”

Oh, what a record that was! The ultimate pop commercial single out of America in the mid-sixties; the record that every discotheque danced to in 1965, the record that was played at every party and on every transistor radio.

It was so simple but so effective. Three chords repeated over and over again, same as ‘La Bamba’ and ‘Twist And Shout’ but slower and mellower, with vocal harmonies layered on top to produce that good-time feeling that pop was all about nine years ago today.

It’s changed now, of course, Ricky Zehringer is Rick Derringer. The McCoys are all involved with Warner Brothers. The music is hot, heavy, fast and complex. Derringer is now an ace record producer; lessons have been learned, experiences shared and good time spent. Everyone’s a little wiser and a lot richer, Derringer especially.

The first thing you notice about him is how small he is. Rick Derringer is tiny and this, coupled with what could be described as a baby face, gives him the air of a worldly teenager. Actually he’s 25, but he could pass off as 17 or 18 without difficulty. Only the rings below his eyes betray his real age. 

Rick began his musical life with The McCoys and they began as a high school band in Union City, Indiana. “The McCoys started when I was 14 or 15 years old, way before ‘Sloopy’,” he recalls, almost as if it was yesterday. “That was when I was in school. I’d just graduated when the record came out but we’d been together almost four years by then.

“We were playing all the top 40 songs. We just got together to make friends and play the local dances and have the kids come up to us and tell us we were cool. We’d be making a little money so I’d have something extra to spend on clothes but usually I’d save up for a better guitar. At the same time I never really went into it with the attitude that someday I would make records and be in the music business. We were just an ordinary little high school band.”

In 1965 The McCoys made THAT record – almost by accident. 

“One night we were playing with The Strangeloves in Dayton, Ohio. It turned out they were the act on a record called ‘I Want Candy’ and they’d told everyone they were from Australia and were sheep herders. In reality they were three record producers from Brooklyn, and they asked us whether we’d like to go to New York and make a record called ‘Hang On Sloopy’. We said ‘great’. We’d heard the record about a year before by The Vibrations when it was a number one R&B record in the States.”

The next day Rick’s parents packed the band into their car and drove to New York City. “We drove up on Sunday and went into the studio on Monday. We did the music part first and then the producers gave us a disc of the vocal and a portable record player and told us to go out and come back when we’d learned it. We practised it note for note and then went back and did it. The producers jumped up and down in the studio, saying ‘number one, number one’. A few weeks later we heard it on the radio. Two weeks after that it really was number one.”

The McCoys then began an endless series of tours in the United States. “The band hadn’t changed at all,” says Rick. “No one had ever explained anything to us so we just carried on doing exactly what we’d been doing before, which was top 40 material. And we’d throw in ‘Hang On Sloopy’ as the last song.

“In those days having a number one record meant you were like The Beatles, so all the kids would scream and flip out and try to pull our clothes off. It didn’t matter what kind of music you played because no one could hear it anyway.”

The McCoys had two other big singles after ‘Hang On Sloopy’. ‘Fever’ got to number three and ‘Come On Let’s Go’ reached the twenty. They made a total of nine singles but most of them never made the upper reaches of the charts.

“When that first one was number one, it made us think that everything was going to be easy because it was. We just did what we were told, they yelled ‘number one’ and it was number one. The second record was number three and the third was number 40 and that scared us so we made a better one and that reached the twenties. Then the fifth was in the fifties and the sixth was in the sixties and we got worried.”

The group also made two albums, the first of which had a classic introduction during which the band introduced themselves into the music. The second was very similar and the introduction was taken from their stage act when it was the done thing for the guys in the band to introduce themselves on stage. 

After a couple of years, The McCoys realised that their albums didn’t actually contain the music they were playing on stage. They switched to Mercury Records where they made two more albums, this time containing the wide variety of music that they used in their act. They didn’t sell well but Derringer says they are soon to be re-released as a double package. 

“When we went to Mercury we were in high spirits because we were being allowed to do the music we wanted to do, but because we didn’t have anyone to guide us we became entrenched in the whole psychedelic period in what we thought was supposed to be hip. The records weren’t selling and we were naïve enough to believe that if we made what we thought was good music, people would go for it.”

It was Steve Paul who came to the McCoys’ rescue. Paul was managing the Winter Brothers, Johnny and Edgar, and he offered his help to The McCoys. “We met him through playing at his club in New York and we told him that anything he could do would be appreciated. What he did was to give us the chance to stop working in these weird places and go and live in the country and straighten ourselves out. Then we met Johnny and started playing behind him and that’s when The McCoys ended.”

Later, of course, Derringer would join Edgar Winter’s band and go on to play on, or produce, records by countless other artists, among them Steely Dan, Todd Rundgren, Bonnie Tyler, Barbra Streisand and Cyndi Lauper. 

MICHAEL TRETOW

There are too many fifth Beatles to count – Brian Epstein, George Martin, Stuart Sutcliffe, Pete Best, Neil Aspinall, Derek Taylor and at least a couple of their wives – but there was only ever one fifth member of Abba, recording engineer Michael Tretow who death at the age of 80 was reported today.

        “You meant more to us four in ABBA than anyone else,” says Benny Andersson. “Our music lives on, it seems, and you are the one who made it timeless.”

        “His significance to Abba cannot be overstated,” added Björn Ulvaeus, and the two Abba singers, Anni-Frid Lyngstad and Agnetha Fältskog, are of the same mind.  

        So, too, is my friend Magnus Palm, the group’s premier archivist and historian and author of several Abba books, among them the definitive Abba biography Bright Lights Dark Shadows, commissioned by me in 2000 and still in print having been revised and updated many times. “Michael Tretow was an endless source of ideas on how to make their recordings more exciting,” Magnus tells me. “He was Benny and Björn’s unofficial co-producer. Just as importantly, he was an empathetic human being who knew how to lighten the mood when spirits sank during the group’s interminable backing track sessions, or when Agnetha and Frida got stuck during the recording of a vocal overdub.”

        It was Magnus’s epic biography that drew my attention to Michael’s contribution to Abba, specifically how keen he was to explore new studio techniques in an era when Sweden’s studios lacked the hi-tech capabilities of those in the UK and US. Like the group, he was ambitious, never one to stand still or abide by outdated procedures that had governed the way records were made for years. And like them, he wanted their records to appeal to an international audience.

        Ever on the hunt for anything that might help his endeavours, Michael found what he wanted in a bookshop. “He found the book he’d been dreaming about,” wrote Magnus in Bright Lights Dark Shadows. “Just published, Out Of His Head: The Sound Of Phil Spector was written by Richard Williams, the assistant editor of the British music paper Melody Maker who’d been present at the recording of John Lennon’s Spector-produced ‘Happy Xmas (War Is Over)’ and seen the legend at work. Michael headed straight for the cashier with this find, eager to secure his copy before anyone else snapped it up.

        “Björn, Benny and Michael were… big fans of the records made by Phil Spector in the early Sixties [but] what Michael wanted to know was how Spector achieved that enormous sound. Although he wasn’t entirely sure, he thought he had a hunch – and now Out Of His Head revealed all the secrets. ‘Then He Kissed Me’ by The Crystals had used ‘a whole gang of guitars’, the book established. On the following page, a section about The Ronettes’ classic ‘Be My Baby’ went into even greater detail. ‘The orchestra, outrageously gigantic, had pianos and basses arrayed in ranks in the studios,’ wrote Williams, ‘and everyone joining in to play the percussion which Spector had arranged with almost militaristic precision.

        “Michael nodded to himself. ‘That explained why it sounded like five guitars,’ he recalled, ‘it was because Spector really did use five guitars.’ But having several guitarists, pianists, bassists and so on in the studio at the same time would have been far too expensive for comparatively low-key Swedish productions. If a similar effect was to be achieved, they would have to do several overdubs of each of the instruments. Michael knew he simply had to try it sometime.

        “Similarly, Björn and Benny were thrilled to be working with an enthusiastic engineer. ‘Right from the first time I met Michael in the studio, I felt that here was a guy who thought this was just as exciting as we did,’ recalled Benny. It didn’t hurt that the engineer wasn’t just a technical boffin, but understood and shared their dream of achieving success outside Scandinavia.”

        The first Abba recording that Michael engineered was ‘People Need Love’, followed by ‘Ring Ring’, initially intended as the group’s entry for the 1973 Eurovision Song Contest but which failed to win sufficient votes. Nevertheless, by Swedish standards it was a breakthrough recording in terms of studio technique, the first song that Abba recorded that didn’t sound clumsy against UK and US recordings. A year later, of course, Abba won Eurovision with ‘Waterloo’, another Tretow engineering job and one clearly influenced by Spector. 

        In 2008 I was asked to write an introduction to a matching folio for Gold, Abba's multimillion-selling hits album. “It was Michael Tretow who discovered Abba’s ‘third’ voice,” I wrote. “This was the sound of Frida and Agnetha singing together, layer upon layer of overdubbed backing vocals creating the rich, all-enveloping choral landscape that became one of Abba’s most distinctive trademarks. Coupled with exemplary musicianship from Björn and Benny and the best Swedish session players available, the result was pop perfection.” 

        Michael worked closely with Abba throughout their entire career, eight studio albums, two live sets and the 4-CD retrospective Thank You For The Music, his final recording ‘The Day Before You Came’, the atmospheric track with a nod towards minimalism and electronica that became Abba’s glorious swan song in 1982. 

        As Magnus’ book makes clear, in the late 1970s, Björn and Benny rewarded Michael generously. From the Voulez-Vous album onwards Tretow received a 0.5 per cent royalty on all Abba recordings as a reward for his loyalty and contributions over the years. “It was kind of unprecedented,” says Michael with some understatement. “And it wasn’t because I asked for it, they were the ones who said, ‘You should have that’. I’ve never heard of anything like it.” This gesture meant that when the three per cent royalty rate allotted to the stars – the Abba members – was split four ways, it amounted to only 0.75 per cent, marginally more than the 0.5 per cent allotted to their recording engineer.

Michael suffered a stroke in 2001, and although he recovered well, he retired from the music business and as a result Abba’s 2021 album Voyage is the only one in their catalogue not to feature a Tretow credit. 

        The last word must go to Abba’s formidable vocal duo: 

        Anni-Frid: “You were the security in our little studio bubble with your never-ending creativity, warmth and joy and no one fit the bill as well as you! For us, you are forever part of the ABBA sound and you will never be forgotten!” 

        Agnetha: “So many memories are preserved, your encouraging words during the recordings meant so much. We are sad now, a talented and unique person has left us. Sleep well Micke, you are in our hearts forever.”

CLEM BURKE (1955– 2025)

Clem dressed to impress; Elvis Ramone backstage at the Apollo in Glasgow, Scotland, 

December 31, 1979. 

(Photo by Bob Gruen.)

A PhD is generally awarded to those who have attained the highest academic achievement in a given discipline, be it scholastic or physical. I long ago realised that Clem Burke, whose death from cancer at the age of 70 was announced today, merited one in both. He was Blondie’s powerhouse, a tireless, rock-solid drummer whose energy never flagged – just listen to ‘Dreaming’ – but he was also a friend to anyone and everyone, from the big stars to the up-and-coming hopefuls and all the fans too, a bit of an Anglophile ever eager to share his knowledge or learn from others. In this way he amassed an encyclopaedic wisdom about every record of merit ever released, and every decent rock and roll band too, US and UK and everywhere else, from the fifties right up into the new millennium. What’s more, he did it for the sheer love of it. 

He was also a friend of mine. We first met way back in the 1970s, in New York, when Blondie were learning their trade at CBGBs and I wrote about them for Melody Maker. We bumped into one another again and again over the years, most recently at Blondie shows in London during the 2010s. He always put me on the guest list. It would have been about 15 years ago when he approached me to help him write a book about his life and we went out to lunch at an Italian restaurant on Berners Street. I encouraged him all I could but it never happened, though he did send me some sample text which I edited for him and returned. He requested that I keep it confidential and I complied, and, unfortunately, no longer have any of his text on my computer. 

        The passage I remember most was about his wide-eyed wonder at finding himself in some backstage dressing room somewhere with most of the Travelling Wilburys, Bob Dylan and George Harrison amongst them. He recalled the dialogue which was as droll as Michael Palin’s sleeve notes on the first Wilbury album. Whenever I saw him after that I got on his back about his book, but it never happened and now it never will. 

        But what a book it would have been for aside from playing at every Blondie gig ever, Burke played his drums for, amongst many others, Pete Townshend, Bob Dylan, Eurythmics, Iggy, and once or twice for a sort of Ramones tribute band, calling himself Elvis Ramone. He was also a member of a group called The Empty Hearts that featured others from name bands, and he loved it so much he even played in a Blondie tribute band when the real thing was between tours. 

        Clem sent me a copy of the first Empty Hearts album that I reviewed here on Just Backdated. “The obvious influence is the tougher end of sixties power pop,” I wrote, “those wonderful mid-decade singles by the Stones, Who and Kinks, but I think the Hearts have dug a bit deeper into their record collections and listened again to Beck/Page era Yardbirds and Roy Wood’s Move, and they also tip their hat to Cheap Trick and the garage rock that Lenny Kaye unearthed in 1972 for the first Nuggets compilation. Either way, all four of these grade-A students of rock history must have had a whale of a time writing and playing songs that pay tribute to their formative Brit influences yet at the same bring them into the modern era with crisp production, faultless playing and a rippling feel for the music, passion really, that rocks hard from beginning to end.” 

The Empty Hearts CD, its design a pastiche of The Who's debut LP, with Clem in Op-Art top.

        And in 2017, reviewing a Blondie show at London’s Roundhouse, I wrote. “Burke is still the band’s engine room, unrelenting, staunch and sturdy. I probably wasn’t alone in noticing that Clem wore – no doubt deliberately – a New York City t-shirt in the design favoured by John Lennon that for the encore he had changed to one emblazoned with the logo of CBGBs. Always the Blondie man most respectful of rock’s past, he is a showman drummer in the tradition of Keith Moon, chucking his sticks into the air, tumbling around the kit and at one point adopting one of those Moon poses with one arm high in the air and the other at right angles. He is largely responsible for bringing many of Blondie’s songs to a thumping close, soloing briefly before the final crashing chord, and tireless throughout.”

        Clem looked like a rock star. He wore his hair in a style that recalled The Beatles in their Revolver period, and he always dressed to impress, often like a Mod. Also, finally, he idolised Keith Moon. Blondie were in the midst of a European tour on September 7, 1978, the day Keith died, and two days later, played at the Hammersmith Odeon. “I went downstairs in the hotel and all the British tabloids had the headline ‘Keith Moon Is Dead’, so that day became kind of a dream sequence for me,” he told Blondie biographer Kris Needs later. “We played the Hammersmith Odeon and I wanted to get some gasoline and an axe to use on the drums and no one would give them to me. So I threw my whole drum kit in the audience, not wanting them back, because I wanted to sacrifice them for Keith. And the roadies went and got them back, which I was upset about. It was a real emotional time for me because he had meant so much to me.”

        RIP Clem. 

DAVID JOHANSEN - The Last Doll To Fall Over

The New York Dolls in 1973, picture by Bob Gruen. David Jo is on the right.

The legend of The New York Dolls, erstwhile nominees for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame yet shamefully never inducted, reached its finale last week with the announcement that David Johansen, their singer, had died aged 75, so it’s a pound to a penny it’ll never happen now. Or maybe it will. A dead Doll can’t disrupt proceedings after all. 

        The Dolls were the trashiest of the trash and for a year or two in the 1970s I was on first-name terms with David Jo, the last Doll standing. They were a band that never fitted in but never wanted to either. The field they ploughed alongside very few others, Iggy perhaps, maybe Lou at times, was at the extreme end of decadence, which was where they believed rock should squat. With the possible exception of Keith Moon, I cannot think of anyone who revelled in licentiousness as much as the five Dolls, David, Johnny Thunders, Arthur Kane, Sylvain Sylvain and Jerry Nolan (who replaced original drummer Billy Murcia who died in London in 1972). They made the Pistols look like choirboys. It made them enemies as well as friends, and I liked to think I was their friend, well for some of the time. 

        For a couple of years in New York, from 1974-76, when I was Melody Maker’s man in America, I saw David and his band regularly but they presented me with a dilemma. My predecessor in that role, Roy Hollingworth, adored them, declaring them the future of rock’n’roll, writing, somewhat loquaciously, in MM: “Here on this stage battles a baggage of balls and trousers and high-heeled shoes; and drunkenness and unwashed hair; and untuned guitars and songs that musicians would call a mess but a rock and roll child would say ‘God Bless You – You are so necessary!’ Rock and roll is sex. And the Dolls played on. And they played sex. Non-stop.”

        Such was Roy’s enthusiasm for the Dolls that it seemed churlish for those MM writers that followed him not to share it, to some extent anyway. There was much to admire about them, not least their enthusiastic embrace of an “us against the world” attitude, a stance much respected by those music writers who harboured a militant streak, but at the same time, as Roy noted, they could be very loose on stage, almost to the point of incompetence. Some of their songs, though, were absolute killers, especially ‘Personality Crisis’ and ‘Looking For A Kiss’, both of which were played endlessly on the juke box in Max’s Kansas City and, later, at Ashley’s Bar. 

        The first time I saw them, at the Whiskey in Los Angeles in 1973, I thought they were a hoot, and the second time, at the Academy of Music in New York a year later, I wrote about how much they’d improved but how they seemed intent on imitating the Stones. I would see them perhaps half a dozen more times over the next couple of years, a period that saw their fortunes slipping and sliding alas. At the Academy, however, they were still on a pedestal, their set preceded by a short film that had been made by their biggest fan, Bob Gruen, New York’s hippest rock photographer, then and now a good friend.

The Dolls were social animals, hanging out in New York bars like Max’s and Ashley’s where musicians gathered late into the night, and I got to know singer David Jo well, along with his girlfriend Cyrinda Foxe, a beautiful blonde who left him for Steve Tyler, the singer with Aerosmith. We also bumped into one another at parties and yesterday the US writer Jon Tiven posted this picture of me at the same table as David on my FB page. I think – but I’m not 100% sure – that the girl I’m with at the back is the model Lisa Stolley. 

        Later that same year I saw the Dolls at Club 82, the joint where I first encountered Debbie Harry with The Stilettos. “For the past two Mondays, the Dolls have appeared at the Club 82 in New York, an ideal place for premiering new ‘glittery’ talent in New York, but hardly the kind of venue for a band with two British tours and two albums under their belt,” I wrote in MM. “An obvious step down, in fact, and a sure pointer that all is not well in the Dolls’ camp. Some observers are going as far as saying the Dolls’ demise is a carbon copy of the Velvet Underground’s story in New York. Perhaps in five years’ time, their albums will be hailed as works of art and David Johansen, Johnny Thunders and Co will be resurrected in much the same way as Lou Reed has made his recent comeback.”

It wasn’t to be though Malcolm McLaren, a Dolls groupie, tried his best to resurrect their career by dressing them up in red uniforms and declaring them communists. “The Dolls had only just survived being labelled gay transvestites and had the bruises to prove it. If they were going to pursue the Communist trip under Malcolm's regime, Vivienne [Westwood] was going to have to run up matching bullet proof vests,” wrote Nina Antonia in Too Much Too Soon, her biography of the band, published by Omnibus in 1997 and eagerly commissioned by me. 

Nina's book - highly recommended. 

         When I left New York I thought I’d never see the Dolls again but I was wrong. On the evening of March 10, 1996, I watched what remained of the group – just David and Syl – at Selfridges on Oxford Street where they played in the basement, the Ultra Lounge as it was called in those days, and it was very dark and noisy and smoky, and throughout the evening beautiful models in off-the-shoulder short black dresses with long legs and six-inch heels plied me with champagne. Decadence still followed the Dolls everywhere, it seemed. The event was to mark the opening of a punk fashion week, though quite why the Dolls had been flown over at huge expense from New York for one free gig escaped me completely. For starters they weren’t really punks, more 60% glam, 35% Rolling Stones clones with the remaining 5% punk – but only in attitude, not musically.

         It would have been around midnight when the Dolls finally tottered on to the small stage in their high heels and finery but they played so excruciatingly loud that I was hard pressed to identify anything other than the opening number, ‘Personality Crisis’. Thereafter the Dolls turned up and up and, in a room with a relatively low ceiling that was never intended for live music anyway, the sound degenerated into a great wash of noise. I don’t think my ears have been assaulted in such a way since I stood on John’s side of the stage for Who shows back in the Seventies. As ever, David Jo pranced around like Mick Jagger, colliding into Syl and sharing his mike. Still, despite the volume the Dolls didn’t disappoint.

         My final Dolls show was on June 18, 2004, when the two Dolls who were at Selfridges, David and Syl, appeared with their original bassist Arthur Kane at the Royal Festival Hall as part of that year’s Meltdown Festival, curated by Morrissey, one of their biggest fans who once published a Dolls fanzine. At one point in the show, between numbers, David approached the microphone and thanked their English fans for their support. “And we got a lot of support from a writer on Melody Maker,” he said. “I can’t remember his name.” 

“It was Roy Hollingworth,” I yelled at the top of my voice from where I was sat, in a box at the side. 

David glanced up at the box but I doubt he recognised me from those days back in New York. “That’s right, Roy Hollingworth,” he mumbled into the mike. 

RIP David.