Being interviewed about my Just Backdated memoir by Simon Morrison at Louder Than Words in Manchester over the weekend brought back an odd memory of my early days on Melody Maker, one that I didn’t mention in the book but probably ought to have done.
When I attended a training course for journalists at Bradford Technical College in the mid-sixties I was taught that at the end of an interview a good reporter would ask for the phone number of the interviewee, be it a local councillor, a high ranking police officer or anyone else who’d come to the attention of the paper for which you worked. This was so you’d be able to call them if a follow-up question was necessary or if you needed clarification on some issue or even if you were unable to read back your shorthand notes properly – yes, I wrote shorthand in those days. This procedure became automatic for me when I worked on regular newspapers.
So it was that when I joined MM I did the same thing, at first anyway. The first interview I did for MM during the first week of my employment there in mid-June 1970 was with Paul Rodgers, the singer with Free, as I recall in the Just Backdated book. I went to his tiny flat in a redbrick building in Clerkenwell and we talked in a nearby greasy spoon café. As was my regular custom, at the end of the interview I asked Paul for his phone number and he gave it to me without thinking twice about it, though in hindsight he might have felt it was an odd request. That same week I also interviewed Don Everly of the Everly Brothers but that took place in the Inn On The Park hotel where he was staying and I figured that if I needed to ask a follow-up question I could always call the hotel and ask to be put through to his room, at least for the week when he was in London. I also interviewed Cliff Richard on the phone and made a note of where he was speaking from, his manager’s office as it turned out.
I continued with this practice for about a month, finally realising that it was probably inappropriate to ask the musicians I interviewed for their phone numbers. Then, six weeks into my job on MM, I was appointed the paper’s News Editor, unexpectedly fast promotion, and because Free was the band of the moment, with ‘All Right Now’ topping the charts, over the next few weeks I called Paul Rodgers on a fairly regular basis to ask how the band was getting on and if there was any Free news worthy of inclusion in MM. He always seemed a bit surprised to hear from me and didn’t have much to say, and before long he moved from Clerkenwell and changed his phone number anyway.
The only rock star of note to give me his phone number from that point onwards was Keith Moon whom I got to know fairly well as I went to lots of Who shows and wrote extensively about the group. I suspect he gave out his number to all and sundry in those days, discretion being foreign his make-up. It was a Chertsey number and I called him a few times to ask about Who news and if he was up for a drink locally. In those days I had friends in nearby Englefield Green where I once lived, so if I was in the neighbourhood I’d call him and, being Keith, he was invariably up for a brandy or three. In April, 1972, I called him to arrange an interview at his Chertsey home there, one of the longest interviews he ever did, as detailed in the Just Backdated memoir. There was something strangely fulfilling about arranging interviews in this way, sidestepping the protocol of the music industry.
Finally, I should add that it was probably more out of hope than expectation that in New York I asked John Lennon for his phone number, my boldest ever inquiry along these lines. He didn’t know it, of course. “Yoko’s always changing it,” he told me. As I’ve written in Just Backdated and elsewhere, John nevertheless offered to call me if I sent him a telegram with an interview request and included my own phone number. He was as good as his word too. “Hello Chris, it’s Johnny Beatle,” he would say when he rang back.
The editor of Melody Maker, Ray Coleman, was a newspaper man at heart and I think he’d have approved of this way of doing our business. I guess it was simply a case of nothing ventured nothing gained.
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