MAGICAL HIGHS: ALVIN LEE & ME by Loraine Burgon

Around the middle of last year, through a friend of a friend, I was introduced by email to Loraine Burgon who asked me to help her with a book she had written about the decade she spent as the partner of Alvin Lee, guitar hero leader of Ten Years After. 

Loraine and Alvin met as teenagers in Nottingham, where they were both raised, and stayed together as TYA found fame and fortune, moving first to London and then to a country mansion near Henley. When it all became too much, the relationship fell apart. 

I edited Loraine’s book for her, reducing its length by about 30%, and helped her find a publisher. It is a very frank account of her time as the girlfriend of a guitar hero, 

        As it says on the cover, “MAGICAL HIGHS is a love story of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll… If you’ve ever wondered what it’s really like to be the partner of a rock superstar, MAGICAL HIGHS is the book for you.”

It was published last week and this extract details the night Loraine first met Graham Barnes, aka Alvin Lee.

On November 5, 1962, my friend Johnnie Clifton introduced me to a slightly drunk young man on the steps outside of the Rainbow Rooms in Nottingham, our midweek rock’n’roll jiving venue. He asked me for a kiss, which I gave him with a smile. I already knew who he was. I had glimpsed him briefly in The American Bar at the Black Boy hotel. He was a local musician with a mysterious, slightly dangerous reputation. Later he offered me a lift home and that evening my future was sealed with more kisses. I had no idea where my heart was leading me. 

His name was Graham Barnes but the world would come to know him as Alvin Lee.  

“It definitely wasn’t love at first sight, nor even lust,” I wrote in the late seventies. “Not that he wasn’t a handsome young man, he most certainly was. Six-foot tall, lean, blond hair cut short and swept back from a clear, wide forehead. His eyes were green-grey, misty with a positive twinkle, though on this occasion pinkish around the edges due to alcohol, which was also causing him to grin somewhat foolishly and sway unnervingly, like a snake attempting to hyponotize its prey. The nose was perfect. I believe the word is Greek, straight and finely chiseled, the nostrils slightly flared. Set between two fine high cheekbones and above a beautifully shaped mouth, the lips not too full but certainly not thin, the teeth, which flashed at me through a constant grin, white and straight. The jaw was square and strong, not overly so but in exact balance with the rest of his face. The total image was classic Greek.”

I daresay I was grinning back at him, disarmed and taken by surprise by his direct request. It was a short and tender kiss, a real connection, a brief meeting of lips despite or perhaps because of him being a little drunk. We grinned at each other, something was said, and I left those two on the wide steps of the Rainbow Rooms to continue up the remaining steps into the music and the dancing. 

A DJ was playing rock’n’roll records in a modern hall on the front of the stage, long curtains closing off the stage behind. Low lighting lit a polished wooden dance floor, with a carpeted standing area by a bar to one side. I joined my friends and in the twinkling lights from the glitter ball, we jived and smiled and laughed. From the corner of my eye I saw Johnnie and Alvin arrive. I was being watched. Alvin was not a dancer but later in the evening, he came over. “Do you have a lift home?” he whispered in my ear. Smiling, I accepted his offer and he left me to dance until I was ready to leave. I was excited, nervous. I saw him smiling at me again from the sidelines. My heart was beating faster, and not just from the dancing.  

I had heard rumours about Alvin, that “maybe he took drugs” because a friend had seen him “collapse in his dressing room after a show” and that he “had lived with a girlfriend”. This was pretty outrageous in 1963 in Nottingham, where most teenagers, including me, drank alcohol and smoked cigarettes, but were pretty moderate in our habits except at weekend parties. So, I was a little nervous but already drawn to his disarming directness and exotic look. He stood out among the Italian pin-striped suits. His casual, suede-fronted, knitted jacket, blue jeans and black Cuban heeled boots gave him an air of confidence and intrigue. 

I wish I could remember us leaving the dance hall, walking together, talking, not talking, finding The Jaybirds’ Commer van, painted cream and decorated with red birds and “The Jaybirds” painted in large red letters. I do remember him struggling to engage the gears, which caused me to wonder if that was because of his drinking. He assured me it was only a mechanical fault. By this time, I didn’t care. I was both confused and entranced.

We parked in the side street outside The Newcastle [the pub where Loraine lived with her family] and kissed and kissed. Our feelings were overwhelming, our connection obvious and complete. “It’s in his kiss,” sang Betty Everett in ‘The Shoop Shoop Song’, a huge hit in March 1964. 

When I met him, Alvin Lee was only his stage name. He was Graham Anthony Barnes, 18 years old, and living at home with his parents, Sam and Doris, a few miles from my own home. His friends and family all called him Graham, not Gray or any nickname. For me he only became Alvin when we started living together in London in September 1966. So, he was Graham off-stage and Alvin on stage with The Jaybirds. Although I’d heard of them I had never seen them play. 

It’s many decades ago now but I’m surprised I don’t recall the first time I saw The Jaybirds and saw Alvin play. It was definitely in the first week we met, as we were immediately inseparable. We just wanted to be together whenever possible. We just couldn’t stop kissing. I have a treasured black and white photo of us, standing, locked together kissing, taken by the official Locarno photographer, the second evening we were together. People are sitting watching us but we are lost to the world, lost in each other and never noticed the picture being taken.