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 resulted in my seeing 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 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. 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, on which many of her music press articles can be found.)
