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 ‘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 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 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. 

ALBERT LEE, Borough Hall, Godalming, July 13, 2025

I have Ritchie Blackmore to thank for turning me into a fan of Albert Lee. Immodest, prickly and mischievous, Ritchie told me in 1971 that the only two guitarists who could play better than him were Jimi Hendrix and Albert. I wasn’t sure whether or not to believe him but I’d seen Ritchie practising scales and arpeggios, with and without a plectrum, backstage at a Deep Purple gig and deduced he was professionally trained and knew what he was talking about, so I made a point of checking out Head Hands & Feet, the band for whom Albert played in those days, for myself. 

        Suitably impressed – an understatement really – I interviewed Albert twice for MM later that year, once for one of those guitar supplements when he talked about his technique and the guitars he preferred, and again in 1975 when he was a member of Emmylou Harris’ Hot Band, having taken over the role occupied by James Burton who’d gone off to back Elvis in Vegas. By now I’d realised that what Burton was to the US, Albert was to the UK, the foremost player in the country rock and rockabilly idiom.

Albert went on to play in one of Eric Clapton’s stage groups and put the band together that backed The Everly Brothers when they reformed in 1983. He also showed up for the recording I attended of a live LP by Chas & Dave (Chas Hodges was a member of HH&F) at Abbey Road’s Studio 2 which had been turned into a pub for the occasion and, if I remember rightly, Eric showed up to jam along too. Since then Albert has made many distinguished guest appearances, notably at the Concert For George (Harrison) at the Royal Albert Hall in 2002, and led his own bands, one of which was called Hogan’s Heroes and recorded a gig at the New Morning club in Paris that was released in 2007 as a 2-CD package I nowadays play a lot.

A few years ago, Albert gave a master class in nearby Guildford, sponsored by Andertons Music, the city’s guitar shop, at which he demonstrated his skills on the signature red Ernie Ball Music Man guitar that he uses these days, having long ago abandoned the 1950s Telecaster that he played for years. 

        Which brings me to last night at the Borough Hall in Godalming where Albert performed as the leader of a quartet alongside brothers Ali (keyboards) and Iain Petrie (bass) and Tim Hilsden (drums). Well, he’s still an absolute wizard on guitar but there’s something strangely disturbing about seeing him play in a hall that held around 300 people – there’s wasn’t an empty seat in the house but that’s not the point – for which tickets cost just £30 a pop. It may be that Godalming was amongst the smallest venues on his current UK tour but that doesn’t alter my view that a musician of Albert’s stature and pedigree ought to be on a much bigger stage with tickets a good deal pricier.

        Much of the show featured tracks from Albert’s 2024 album Lay It Down, with which I am unfamiliar, and elsewhere, as expected, he demonstrated excellent taste, drawing from a well of songwriters like Gram Parsons, Carl Perkins, John Stewart, Jimmy Webb and Richard Thompson. His playing remains extraordinary, all those runs and licks that defy analysis as he zips up and down his fretboard, pulling off and hammering on, often playing what I might call mini-chords, a combination of strings, usually the top two or three, picked simultaneously. He conjures up a gorgeously full tone, especially on the lower strings, fresh and, at times, very sharp, very crisp, very deep. What’s more he makes it look effortless and, as ever, comes across as the humblest of men, giving keyboard player Ali plenty of opportunity to shine and even sounding a bit sheepish when he name-drops. 

        “I was at this party at David Geffen’s house,” he began before performing ‘Highwayman’, a long-time feature of Albert’s repertoire. “I was to talking to Jackson Browne, whose girlfriend at the time was Joni, and Jimmy Webb. We decided the party was dull and headed off to Jimmy’s house in the hills where had two grand pianos, nine-foot long, in his living room. Jimmy played a song, then Jackson, then Joni and then they tuned to me. Crikey! I honestly didn’t know what to play.” It was at moments like this that made me think Albert, and not some parvenu playing a stadium tonight, was our real rock royalty. 

        Albert played piano on this lovely, slightly otherworldly, Jimmy Webb song about reincarnation, but was soon back on guitar for a furious ‘Tear Stained Letter’ that preceded the final song in the set, ‘Country Boy’, the signature song he wrote with Tony Colton and Ray Smith of HH&F that in 1983 was a hit for Ricky Skaggs. It featured the hottest licks of the night and brought the house down, in fact, but Albert returned for a couple of encores: a moving rendition of Glen Campbell’s ‘A Better Place’ and, to send us on our way, an all-out rave up on Jimmy Burnett’s ‘Tear It Up’. 

        The only flaw in an otherwise impeccable show was the sound balance. The drums were on the loud side and at times threatened to drown out Albert’s guitar which, after all, was what we had come to hear. Perhaps in a larger venue there would have been on-stage monitors and a mixing desk out front. 

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The photo above was taken by my friend Jeremy Hamerton whose mobile phone is superior to my own (and who owns 27 guitars). 

JUST BACKDATED HITS THE 2,000,000 MARK

Sometime in the last 24 hours my Just Backdated music blog notched up its two millionth hit. It reached one million in October, 2020, taking seven years to do so, as I launched Just Backdated at the end of 2013. That it’s taken under five years to clock up the second million indicates growth, the be-all-and-end-all of our capitalist society, though I’ve never been convinced that more and more and bigger and bigger is the best way for humanity to survive. 

But I digress. At this rate it’ll hit the three millionth mark towards the end of 2027, assuming I’m still around to keep it going, but lately I’ve been toying with the idea of somehow monetising it. In 12 years of posting on Just Backdated, I’ve given away 1,069 articles on music, the vast majority newly written by me simply because I enjoy writing. A few, probably less than 5%, are extracts from books or reproductions of pieces I wrote previously, mostly for Melody Maker. A tiny handful feature the work of others. I don’t adhere to a fixed quota; sometimes a week or two might go by without a post from me, other weeks I might write two or three. It all depends on what I’ve read, or what I’ve heard, or what I’ve seen, or if there’s something in the air that I feel like writing about. (The next post will probably be about the guitarist Albert Lee, whose concert in Godalming I’m attending this coming Saturday.) Increasingly, I find myself writing about musicians that have passed on whom I knew or whose music I admire. 

I long ago realised that becoming a writer, be it about music or anything else, is a lifetime’s work. Just because writers pass retirement age doesn’t mean they automatically stop writing for a living and take up gardening or bowls. Writers simply carry on because it’s what they do, and, as the years roll by, I for one have come to realise that continuing to write is the best way to keep the brain in decent shape. Freelance editing assignments, however, are becoming thin on the ground these days, an inevitable consequence of advancing years. 

Quite how I might monetise Just Backdated I haven’t a clue and it might well be beyond my technical ability. I’m making inquiries about how it could be done – I’m fortunate to have a computer-savvy daughter whose mind I’ll tap – but in the end I might still abandon the idea if it proves unworkable. Either way, it’ll be cheap. That said, I’ve realised that if each time anyone ever read something on Just Backdated, all two million of them, I was paid just one penny, I’d be £20,000 in credit now. 

But back to the posts on JB and, as before when a landmark has been reached, I’ll list those that are the most popular and comment on any changes amongst them. Firstly, there’s a new number one: my treatment for a proposed book by Mandy Moon, daughter of Keith, which I would ghost-write (but which never happened), takes over at the top (with 52.5k hits) from my review of The Who’s CD of their show at the Fillmore East in 1968 (49.7k). I thought the Fillmore piece would never be surpassed but I was wrong; however, these two posts are streets ahead of anything else. 

        Jimmy Page (17.6k) is at numbers three and seven but, as ever, The Who still dominate the list. Interestingly, posts about John and, especially, Keith, outperform posts about Pete and Roger. Nice to see Marianne Faithfull creeping in at number 20, the first female ever to make the Top 20, no doubt a result of her leaving us, and also my story about the 1968 North Of England Beer Drinking Championships, a rare non-music post, holding its own at number 16. 

MOON GIRL: My Life in the Shadow of Rock’s Wildest Star 52.5k

THE WHO Live At Fillmore East, 1968         49.7k

JIMMY PAGE: Boleskine House, Tower House & More 17.6k

JOHN, PAUL & KEITH, Santa Monica, 1974         14k

JIMI HENDRIX AT THE ISLE OF WIGHT, 1970 8.3k

DEEP PURPLE: Trouble in Jakarta         7.5k

JIMMY PAGE: The Day Jimmy Met Robert 6.71k

KEITH MOON’S LIVING ARRAGEMENTS 5.61k

PALAZZO DARIO” The Palace That Tommy Bought         5.58k

WHO UK TOUR 2014         5.16k

THE WHO: My Hidden Gems Album 4.53k

KEITH MOON & THE PYTHONS         4.29k

LAUNCHING DEAR BOY 4.15k

THE WHO: Hyde Park London, June 16, 2015 3.59k

JOHN ENTWISTLE Obituary (1944-2002) 3.44k

THE NORTH OF ENGLAND BEER DRINKING CHAMPIONSHIPS         3.08k

THE OX: The Last of The Great Rock Stars (Book Review) 2.97k

UNDERTURE: Keith’s Great Triumph         2.85k

PRETEND YOU’RE IN A WAR: Who Book Review 2.84k

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: Saturday Night Live, 1980 2.8k 

BLACK SABBATH DIDN’T INVENT HEAVY METAL

Emotionally charged reviews of Black Sabbath’s Farewell Concert – their third ‘final’ show, following those in 1999 and 2017 – at Birmingham’s Villa Park on Saturday bestow upon them the accolade that they invented heavy metal music. This was further emphasised by members of the distinguished supporting groups, most of whom are headliners in their own right, claiming they owed their careers to the Sabs. 

Bollocks, I say. If heavy metal is characterised by a repetitive, relatively simple guitar riff, often distorted and accentuated on the on beat by bass and drums, then we have The Kinks to thank for its origination. In my biography of Deep Purple, first published in 1983, I attempted to define the genre and explain its origins, writing as follows: “The roots of hard rock, which would come to known as heavy metal, lie in the harsh, riff-based songs recorded by various British bands that emerged in the mid-sixties, groups like The Kinks (‘You Really Got Me’ and ‘All Day And All Of The Night’), The Who (‘I Can’t Explain’ and ‘My Generation’) and, to a lesser degree, The Rolling Stones (‘Satisfaction’) and The Yardbirds (‘Shapes Of Things’ and ‘Evil Hearted You’). Even The Beatles were not immune to the trend, with both ‘Helter Skelter’ and ‘Birthday’ – both Paul McCartney compositions – on their ‘White’ album betraying distinct HM leanings. 

        “It was the sound of a strained electric guitar riff played at great volume through a fuzz-box, a machine that distorted the notes into a blur of sustain that was repeated ad infinitum until sheer repetition dulled the senses into eventual submission. At least that’s what had happened by the time it came to be known as heavy metal. 

        “The riffy groundwork by The Who and Kinks was taken a stage further by Cream and The Jeff Beck Group and further still by Jimmy Page and Led Zeppelin, the group he formed in 1968 after the dissolution of The Yardbirds. Page added the vocal wail of Robert Plant to his own distorted guitar and toughened up the rhythm section so that drums would explode at appropriate breaks. Though Led Zeppelin would vary their stylistic output considerably, ‘Whole Lotta Love’, the song that kicks off their second album, is the perfect example of heavy metal music at its most cohesive and ingenious, the blue print for a type of music that countless groups would follow in the seventies.” 

        Unless I’m mistaken the first use of the phrase “heavy metal” famously occurred in Steppenwolf’s ‘Born To Be Wild’, the lyric of which mentions “heavy metal thunder” in reference to sound of a motor cycle. This was released in 1968, about eight months before Led Zeppelin’s first LP which contained the riff-laden ‘Communication Breakdown’ and a year and bit before Led Zeppelin II which opens, as I wrote above, with ‘Whole Lotta Love’.

The release of Black Sabbath’s first LP in early 1970 occurred after the Steppenwolf and two Led Zeppelin LPs, and although Sabbath became standard bearers for heavy metal by continuing to mine its motherlode throughout their career – unlike Zeppelin who prodigiously developed and varied their output – it is for this reason that is it inaccurate to suggest they invented the HM genre. Indeed, one review of the Villa Park show I read mentioned that an all-star band, including Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler and Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood, actually performed ‘Whole Lotta Love’, thus slyly suggesting Zep were to be commended – or to blame, depending on your point of view – for creating HM. 

None of which is to take away from the Black Sabbath’s achievements or the pleasure they have given their fans over the years. Ozzie can’t really sing any longer and was obliged for health reasons to remain seated during Sabbath’s performance on Saturday but he is to be commended for giving it his all on a day that was packed with emotion. The other three Sabs seem to have lost nothing of their skills, however, but at this stage in the game it would be sacrilege for them to continue with another singer. 

But they didn’t invent heavy metal. 

GLASTONBURY 2025

For a contrast in styles look no further than the oldies on the Pyramid stage at Glastonbury this past weekend. Rod, who turned 80 in January, was as cheesy as it gets but his cheese wheel has been maturing for more than half a century now and while it isn’t as pungent as it once was, it’s certainly as entertaining. Neil, however, though a sprightly 79, never looked likely to arrive at the cheese course, and instead delivered a dour, rather ponderous set, the kind of thing that only diehards could appreciate, even if his closer, ‘Rockin’ In The Free World’ finally lit the kind of fire we expect from Glastonbury headliners. Perhaps Emily Eavis should have switched them around – Rod on Saturday night and Neil on Sunday afternoon might have worked better – but either way, I preferred Pulp, billed as Patchwork, and, most especially, the gorgeous Olivia Rodrigo who wiped the floor with just about everyone I watched from the comfort of our sofa. 

Rod was always a showman, unreconstructed, confident and a bit cocky, and these traits have amplified of late. Accompanied on stage by a bevy of beautiful ladies in short red dresses, all of them singers and/or instrumentalists, most of them his preferred blonde, he worked the crowd well and wisely offered up a greatest hits set lapped up by his fans, especially a group of elderly ladies with a sign that read ‘Nans For Rod’. Clearly affected by the heat, his raspy voice has lost some of the sharpness of tone that I remember from his Faces days, and he wasn’t quite as nimble on stage as he used to be. Still, he’s trooper in the old showbiz style and he didn’t disappoint. 

        After a couple of breaks to change outfits, first a pink suit followed by a green one, he seemed happier as his set drew on. He brought on Michael Eavis, delivered by Emily in his wheel chair, a gesture much appreciated by everyone, then Mick Hucknall for ‘If You Don’t Know Me By Now’ and Ronnie Wood for ‘Stay With Me’. Next to arrive was a sprightly Lulu with tassels on her white pants who joined Rod for ‘Hot Legs’. I’d have preferred it if, instead of the sillier stuff, Rod and Ronnie had sat side by side on stools with acoustic guitars and given us a couple of more introspective songs like ‘Mandolin Wind’ and ‘Reason To Believe’ and I don’t think his fans would have minded too, even if this would have slowed things down. 

        After kicking a few footballs into the crowd, he closed his set with ‘Sailing’, as kitsch as it gets, a mighty arm-waving singalong with Rod centre stage surrounded by his girls who’d changed into Celtic tops with sailor’s caps. Same as it ever was. Now there’s a thought. Perhaps Talking Heads should take the Sunday tea-time spot at the next festival. 

        Neil Young, always untroubled by sartorial concerns, dressed for his set like an armed backwoodsman on the lookout for bears, old jeans, a rumpled check shirt and a peaked cap pulled forward to obscure his face. His band did likewise and the stage lighting was dim. ‘Harvest Moon’ was lovely, and ‘Like A Hurricane’ was fine too, but too many songs plodded along, especially ‘Sun Green’, an endless dirge that I thought might never end. He soloed long and well, occasionally catching fire, but his determination to play down any semblance of razzle-dazzle wasn’t really in the Glastonbury spirit. I went to bed before his set ended and caught up with the climax on Sunday morning. 

        Pulp, however, imbued the spirit of Glastonbury in spades, judiciously opening up with ‘Sorted For Es And Wizz’, mixing new songs with old favourites and closing with a lengthy, crowd-pleasing ‘Common People’. As ever Jarvis, dressed in the kind of stuff you can pick up for a tenner in a charity shop, was all angles and quirks, having the time of his life with his reinvigorated band. Switching Pulp with Neil wouldn’t have been a bad idea either. 

        Finally, Olivia Rodrigo took the festival by storm. Hitherto completely unfamiliar with her songs – aside from when she brought on Robert Smith for ‘Friday I’m In Love’ and ‘Just Like Heaven’ (and a hint of Beauty And The Beast) – I watched in awe as this slip of a girl, just 22, commanded the stage like a veteran, dancing here and here, pirouetting and singing as if her life depended on it, a natural performer, confident, relaxed and somehow bridging the gap between the old and the new. Her band, mostly women, was spot on while clearly rehearsed changes were delivered with panache time and time again.

        Welcome, too, was her spontaneous, unforced chat between songs. That she loved the UK was palpable – she was spotted in the crowd on her boyfriend's shoulders while Pulp were playing – as she delivered song after song, her amplified soprano voice, often double tracked for extra bounce, ringing out across the arena far more clearly than anyone else I watched. Her joy at headlining Glastonbury, her smile, came over as truly genuine, and her fans – thousands of young women – truly appreciated her obvious sincerity. It’s unlikely I’ll rush out to buy her records – her songs are a mix of teen pop with a leaning towards power ballads, the lighter end of indie and the odd dollop of crunchy rock – but it was refreshing to note the lack of those on-stage dancers deemed necessary by artists of her ilk. She does it on her own with the help of a well-drilled rock band, the kind of thing Rod used to do with The Faces. 

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. 

THE WHO ALBUM BY ALBUM by Dante DiCarlo

In the manner of Revolution In The Head, Ian McDonald’s acclaimed book analysing the music of The Beatles, Dante DiCarlo attempts something along similar lines for The Who, and while his writing style falls somewhat short of McDonald, this is a workmanlike effort at evaluating The Who’s 14 studio albums, track by track, 168 songs in all. It helps that DiCarlo is a guitarist himself, thus enabling him to analyse the songs from a musician’s standpoint, recording which keys Pete Townshend plays in, D being his preference as anyone who’s ever essayed ‘Substitute’ surely knows, and chord progressions. 

To a certain extent this book renders my own Complete Guide To The Music Of The Who (1994 & 2004, the update written with Ed Hanel) redundant, though DiCarlo omits live albums and compilations, thus disregarding those singles (like ‘I Can’t Explain’, ‘Anyway Anyhow Anywhere’, ‘Substitute’ and a handful of others) that appear only on collections of hits, tracks on the Ready Steady Who EP and ‘bonus’ tracks that have appeared on certain compilations and reissues. Most, however, get a mention in the text that prefaces each LP, especially those that somehow align with Townshend’s various musical concepts. My Who music guide was one in a series of 46 books designed in the shape of CD cases and, through necessity, was considerably more concise than Album By Album, even it did include live LPs and compilations, of which there are now too many to count. Album By Album contains far more detail, not just in the scrutiny of the actual songs but in the background essays that introduce each LP. 

So, beginning with ‘Out In The Street’ from My Generation (1965) and ending about 200 pages later with ‘She Rocked My World’ from WHO (2019) we get the low down on The Who’s recorded oeuvre, most of it positive though DiCarlo doesn’t shy away from critical assessments, mostly, as might be expected, on tracks from the post-Moon LPs. Those songs that might be regarded as landmarks in the group’s career – ‘My Generation’, ‘Pinball Wizard’ and ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’, for example – get the five-star treatment, with up to three pages of worthwhile analysis.  

        DiCarlo was born in 1983 and thus missed out on The Who’s classic period and with this in mind he’s written a book aimed at newer fans of The Who, by which I mean those who’ve picked up on the group after Keith left us in 1978 and possibly also John Entwistle in 2002. For such Who fans this is a valuable guide to their legacy and to the way their long career has panned out. Older fans won’t find much here that they don’t already know if they’ve paid attention along the way and read all the books but DiCarlo has done his research well and produced an accurate, interesting summary of the group’s output. 

Of course, 168 songs (plus maybe a dozen or so that don’t make the book) in what is now a 60-year career is by no means prolific. The Beatles recorded 213 songs, 188 of which they wrote themselves, in eight years, a work-rate that exposes The Who as shiftless slackers. But that doesn’t consider The Who’s brilliance as a live act, which is what really attracted me to them towards the end of the 1960s, turned me into a rabid fan during the 1970s and has kept me banging on about them for years. This, for me, is where their true greatness lies. Perhaps, therefore, a follow-up book might consider their live legacy, contrasting and comparing all their many concert releases, even though the songs they perform haven’t changed that much over the last 40 years. 

Album By Album contains 16 pages of colour photos, many taken by the author, the vast majority from the new millennium. It’s 220 pages long with a useful index and costs £25 (£19.85 on Amazon). 

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. 

MEN OF A CERTAIN AGE: My Encounters with Rock Royalty by Kate Mossman

Kate Mossman specialises in profile journalism of the highest order, her preferred subject rock stars well past their prime, two or even three decades older than herself. Carefully observing their tics and gestures, and if possible their environment, she brings them to life on the page, making them interesting even if they are not. What makes her work even more impressive, not to mention unusual, is that most of the musicians she writes about in this compendium are far from fashionable or cool in the accepted sense; indeed, some were positively vilified by the music press during the period of their peak popularity and they still bear the scars. 

Men Of A Certain Age contains 20 profiles that have previously appeared in either The Word or The New Statesmen. They are an eclectic bunch, ranging from country icon Glen Campbell, whom Kate idolises, to her childhood crush, Roger Taylor of Queen, passé rockers like Kiss and former Journey singer Steve Perry, punks like Shaun Ryder and Johnny Rotten and oddballs like psychedelic recluse Kevin Ayers, whom she skewers, albeit not in an unkind way, even though he proposed they sleep together. For whatever reason, often musical, she has some spiritual connection with the men – they are all men – in her book and in an era when fake news is everywhere, Mossman is its antithesis. She delves into the truth, crafting beautiful descriptive sentences about what she sees and what her subjects tell her, often in off-the-cuff remarks that reveal far more about them than they realise.

My attention was drawn to this book by The Blue Moment, my former Melody Maker colleague Richard Williams’ music blog. However, in this instance Richard had prudently invited his friend Caroline Boucher, a former writer on Disc & Music Echo, to review it simply because she was a female journalist who could contrast and compare her experiences with those of Mossman, which she did admirably. More specifically, Caroline pointed out that Mossman described Gene Simmons’ hair as resembling ’loft insulation’ which made me laugh out loud and – having encountered Simmons myself – was very true. This sharp-edged observation prompted me to buy the book. 

Caroline also made the point that when she was a music writer, a period that coincided roughly with the years I spent writing for MM, we tended to give whomsoever we were interviewing the benefit of the doubt. We were generally kind to them. Also, we didn’t tend to dwell too much on extraneous matters like how an interview was set up, how we travelled to where it took place or the furnishings in the room where it occurred. We rarely even mentioned what, if anything, the interviewee ate, drank or smoked during our allotted time with them. Mossman, however, excels in this aspect of her character sketches, drawing the reader into the experience of the interview as much as the dialogue between them which, in her case, often veers off into territories where a watchful PR might feel the need to steer it back towards whatever the interviewee was supposed to be promoting, like a new record or forthcoming tour. This, of course, makes Mossman’s work that much more readable or interesting. “There is no more boring question than, ‘Tell us about your latest album’,” she writes in one of her profiles. 

In new text that top and tail her interviews, Mossman writes about herself and occasionally lets us in on her technique. “The older man and younger woman dynamic is particularly fruitful,” she writes in a foreword to her interview with Tom Jones. “The older man often ends up being vulnerable because he feels he is safe: It’s just a pretty lady!... I have felt – and seen – the palpable relief on the face of a rocker when I show up, rather than a male writer their age: a brightening of the eyes, and a fractional loosening of the shoulders.”

The Tom Jones interview was done via Zoom which Mossman dislikes because, “you cannot ‘feel’ the body, so to speak, the tics and the tensions. It is harder to detect shame and embarrassment, awkwardness and irritation… the invisible force field between two people, containing all your unconscious projections onto one another.”

As a result of her penetrating gaze, I learned a great deal more about the characters of the subjects than I knew before, which is not always the case with interviews that appear in today’s mainstream music magazines. Who knew that Bruce Hornsby owns paintings by Edward Hopper, of whom he is a huge fan, as am I? Or that a group with a seemingly unlimited complement of musicians called Trans-Siberian Orchestra, founded by the now deceased Paul O’Neill, make millions performing prog-rock style Christmas music? Or that Neal Schon’s philosophy for Journey is that it doesn’t matter who’s in the group so long as the musicians on stage can reproduce their music competently and entertain their fans. Or that it took Ray Davies five attempts to pass his driving text? Or that Tom Jones lives alone in a flat near the Houses of Parliament. Or that Shaun Ryder and Bez, both broke, used reality TV to pay their tax bills. I did, however, know that Jeff Beck was the world’s greatest guitarist, an opinion to which Mossman concurs.

The book’s final interview is with Cary Raditz, the ‘Carey’* whom Joni Mitchell sang about on Blue, that mean old daddy who romanced her in the Cretan fishing village of Matala where they lived together in a cave, albeit fairly briefly. After reading it I learned more about Joni than anything I gleaned from the two biographies of her on my shelves. 

Men Of A Certain Age has 340 pages, b&w illustrations throughout and costs £16.74 on Amazon. 

_____

* Joni misspelt his name in the song's title. 

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.”

BOWIE ODYSSEY 75 by Simon Goddard

It is January 1975, cold outside, and 61-year-old Mrs Margaret Jones, Peggy to her friends, is shopping in Sainsburys in Beckenham, not displeased to be recognised by fans of her son David but still wishing he’d get in touch more often. The £3,000 mink coat he bought her for Christmas hangs unworn in her wardrobe, and stays that way, even when Angie, her daughter-in-law, accompanies her to the Ideal Home Exhibition at Olympia. She cries when she plays his records. 

        David, meanwhile, is in New York, recording at Electric Ladyland studios with no lesser accompanist than Dr Winston O’Boogie, who having lately duelled with Allen Klein is offering advice on two issues: how David can disentangle himself from manager Tony Defries and how to inject the correct thump into ‘Fame’, the single that will place him at the top of the US Billboard charts later in the year. 

Thus begins Bowie Odyssey ’75, the sixth instalment in Simon Goddard’s series of 10 fly-on-the-wall books, each one dedicated to a single year in the decade that announced Bowie to the world. It’s all here: Young Americans, playing Thomas Newton in The Man Who Fell To Earth, the fall out with Deep Freeze (as we used to call him), the toxic, narcotic-fuelled stay in Los Angeles, Iggy in and out of his life, the Bay City Rollers, Patti Smith and nascent Sex Pistols, and hints of the recording of Station To Station, his masterpiece; all played out against a backdrop that sees the emergence of Thatcher, the Cambridge Rapist and serial killer Patrick Mackay, a trio of villains, the first of whom bears an uncanny similarity to the Thin White Duke, as demonstrated in photos of both, cunningly printed opposite one another on pages 4 and 5 of the photo section. I found that slightly disturbing, which I guess is how Simon Goddard intended me to find it 

As I pointed out in a review of Bowie Odyssey ’73 elsewhere on this blog, Goddard’s books in this unique series are not biographies in the accepted sense but attempts to get inside Bowie’s head while at the same time place him squarely amidst all that was going on at the same time elsewhere, much of it unpleasant. The language is sharp, forthright, uncontaminated by anything that might ease a troubled mind, so much so that at the start of each book there is a warning that its contents might offend those of tender sensibilities, noting that they depict “prevailing attitudes of the time” and are included “for reasons of historical context in order to accurately describe the period concerned”. 

Well, they ain’t kidding. Like the others in the series I’ve read so far – all of them actually, Odysseys 70, 71, 72, 73 and 74 – Bowie Odyssey ’75 spares no blushes, whether it be Bowie’s bonkers behaviour, not least his fixation with Nazi Germany, obscure religious texts and keeping bottles of his wee in the fridge, his nomadic lifestyle and fury at Defries (the legal battle is wonderfully depicted as a boxing commentary), all you know about and quite a lot you probably didn’t, right down to the modus operandi of Peter Samuel Cook, aka the Cambridge Rapist. 

After a terrorising ride through the canyons of Los Angeles, skidding through mountains of cocaine, the book closes with a furious row between Angie, queen no more, and Corinne, aka ‘Coco’, David’s trusty girl Friday, who – as Goddard so decorously puts it, does everything but ascend to the top job, “the warmer his bedsheets”. 

        It doesn’t take long to read these books but that’s not the point. They simply home in on their targets with uncanny accuracy even if you do come away thinking it really wasn’t much fun being David Bowie during the 1970s. Recommended. 

LOVE AND FURY: THE EXTRAORDINARY LIFE, DEATH AND LEGACY OF JOE MEEK by Darryl W Bullock

Among the more oddball singles I played endlessly on that juke box in the coffee bar in Skipton when I was 12 was ‘What Do Want To Make Those Eyes At Me For?’ by Emile Ford & The Checkmates. At the time I didn’t know that it was an old song, originally recorded in 1917, only that it caught my ear because of the way it sounded. A number one UK hit in October 1959, it was a perfect little doo-wop pop song with a hint of Caribbean happiness about it, a record that simply sounded great, two minutes of what the best pop should sound like. The singer was from St Lucia and his voice, drenched in echo, rang out ever so clearly, enhanced by a single sharp drum crack that launched a chorus by a choir of backing vocalists doo-wopping away. There was even an upward key change after the first verse to add to its charms.

I long ago lost that 45rpm disc on the Pye Nixa label and had completely forgotten about it until I read Love and Fury: The Extraordinary Life, Death and Legacy of Joe Meek. Well, I should have guessed. Emile Ford’s chart topper was co-produced by Joe Meek, and that’s why it sounded so good on the juke in the coffee car on Mill Bridge. In the UK in 1959 only Joe Meek made records like this. 

        Long referred to as the UK’s Phil Spector, after reading this book I’m more inclined to consider Spector as America’s Joe Meek. Both were innovators and there’s a macabre coincidence in that both fatally shot women who’d evidently displeased them, Meek shooting himself immediately afterwards and Spector spending the rest of his life in jail. 

        Spector’s first hit, ‘To Know Him Is To Love Him’, by his group The Teddy Bears, was in 1958, but to all intents and purposes he and Meek were contemporaries treading the same path. The big difference was in the studio equipment they utilised. In America Spector had the benefit of everything modern technology made available; Meek, on the hand, was a DIY man, cobbling together bits and pieces of equipment he begged, borrowed or stole and wiring them all together in his home, three floors above a leather goods shop at 304 Holloway Road in North London that served as his studio, his control room and bolt-hole. These days there’s a plaque above the door, dedicated to ‘The Telstar Man’, and another one at his birthplace at Newent in Gloucestershire. 

        ‘Telstar’ was Meek’s biggest hit, a UK number one in 1962 and, perhaps more importantly, a US number one as well, only the second UK record to reach top the charts in America after Acker Bilk’s ‘Stranger On The Shore’ earlier the same year. It’s a futuristic instrumental credited to The Tornados, which featured on bass Heinz Burt, the apple of Meek’s eye, on guitar George Bellamy (whose son Matt is the leader of Muse), on drums the venerable Clem Cattini and on keyboards, deputising for Roger Lavern, Meek’s writing partner Geoff Goddard who plays ‘Telstar’’s uplifting, anthemic melody on a clavioline. It opens with a rumble intended to sound like a spaceship taking off that simply explodes out of your speakers, especially on the 7” vinyl single, a remarkable bit of noise previously unheard on phonographic apparatus in the UK up to that time, but this was nothing compared to the sheer exhilaration of the upward key change and a guitar solo that sounds for all the world as if it was recorded on the bottom of a fish tank. 

        Joe Meek led a complicated life that Darryl Bullock carefully outlines in his richly detailed book. He was gay in an era when homosexuality was a crime, eagerly prosecuted by police with nothing better to do, and suffered as a result. He had a short temper and was constantly worried about money, and he almost certainly suffered from mental illness exacerbated by drugs. He believed in the afterlife and through seances tried to contact the dead. He may or may not have displeased the Kray Twins, who fancied muscling in on the record business, and through his erratic behaviour made enemies of powerful people in the record industry, among them Sir Joseph Lockwood, the head of EMI, and Robert Stigwood, then a struggling impresario, both of whom were also gay. 

        Meek was also a workaholic, recording countless singers and groups, many of them no hopers really, in his makeshift studio at all hours of the day and night. Many names soon to be famous, among them Tom Jones, Ritchie Blackmore and Jimmy Page, climbed the stairs at 304 Holloway Road, though the rumour that David Bowie recorded there with The Konrads is probably a myth.  

        Alongside ‘Telstar’ were other hits Meek either produced or engineered, the most notable ‘Johnny Remember Me’ by John Leyton, an eerie masterpiece, and the Honeycombs ‘Have I The Right’ which reached number one in 1964. But this was the tip of the iceberg. “During his career as an independent producer, Meek placed 40 singles in the UK Top 50 charts,” notes Bullock. After his death 1,856 reels of tape from Meek’s studio would eventually find a home at Cherry Red Records.

        Meek was the UK’s first independent record producer at a time when most, like George Martin, were salaried staffmen at record labels, and this alone makes him important, so much so that in 1989 I assisted John Repsch in writing and producing The Legendary Joe Meek: The Telstar Man, the first ever biography of Meek. Oddly, Darryl Bullock fails to mention this in the extensive bibliography which, at the back of his 382-page book, is followed by copious research notes and a good index. There are also two 8-page photo sections in what must now be regarded as the definitive work on this most fascinating music man.