JUST BACKDATED REACHES 750,000

In the last 24 hours Just Backdated had its 750,000^th hit since I launched this blog of mine at the end of 2013. That works out at just over 400 hits a day but that statistic is deeply flawed as posts about The Who, especially those linked on their own site or FB page, usually outnumber almost everything else by a tenfold margin.

         The last time I conducted one of these surveys was in May 2017 when the number of hits reached 500,000. At that time there were 638 posts. Now there are 710, which indicates I’m slowing down and quite dramatically too. In the first year of its existence I managed 374 posts, in 2018 a mere 29. This is because at the beginning I had a lot of catching up to do, ie a lot of archive stuff on my computer that I wanted to upload. That process continued for the next year or so, gradually slowing down as the well emptied. It’s not quite empty yet and other old writings of mine will almost certainly come to light as I plod onwards.

         Old material of mine regularly turns up on Rock’s Back Pages where, to date, there are 293 articles of mine, almost all of them from Melody Maker between 1970 and 1977. This was the case last week when, to my surprise, there was a review I wrote for MM of Liza Minelli, of all people, at the New York Winter Gardens in January 1974. Now I cannot for the life of me remember seeing her show, nor writing about it. I seem to have enjoyed it but felt it was bad value for money, concluding my review: “The show commenced shortly after eight and finished before ten. With almost half an hour's interval, that made it rather short by my standards. My seats cost 12.50 dollars and whether it was value for money is certainly debatable. But it was short, sweet and simple nevertheless, and what there was I enjoyed.”

         But I digress. The biggest ‘event’ in Just Backdated’s 2018 was a dramatic change in the leadership, by which I mean the most visited post. For years it was the post about the photograph of Keith Moon with John and Paul Beatle, taken by my friend Peter ‘Dougal’ Butler in Santa Monica in April 1974 which I contend was the last ever photo to have been taken of the two senior Beatles together. This had what I considered an unassailable 4,000+ lead over whatever post was at number two. Well, to my surprise that lead was smashed big time by my review of The Who’s Live At Fillmore East album in May of last year which has clocked up an astonishing 49,699 hits to date, so far ahead of the field as to have lapped everything else three or four times.

         The post about John, Paul & Keith (13,904 hits) is now at number two, followed by two about Jimmy Page, one on his houses (8,432) and another on hosting Robert Plant at his Thames-side place in Pangbourne (6,597) in 1968 when he was drawing up the blueprint for Led Zeppelin. In the past Who posts have occupied all ten top places but Zep seem to be encroaching a bit. However, they’ve a long way to go to topple The Who, who occupy five of the next six places, with the one about Kit Lambert’s palace in Venice at number five. The non-Who post amongst them is the extract from my Deep Purple book that tells the tale of their horrific experience on Jakarta in 1975 which, surprisingly, has had 4,286 hits.

         I say surprisingly because as far as I am aware this hasn’t been shared on any Deep Purple fan sites, while the reason The Who and Led Zep have so many hits is because they are shared, most especially with Zep on Dave Lewis’ Tight But Loose site which has become an extension of his long-running TBL running fanzine. Conversely, my posts about The Beatles, either collectively or individually, and also David Bowie, get a relatively small number of hits, doubtless because they haven’t been shared on fan sites. This explains why posts on Abba, shared by Swedish Abba expert Carl Magnus Palm and on their FB fan sites, outdo them, with a surprisingly high 2,998 hits for my review of their Live At Wembley album back in 2014.

As for geographical data, the US still tops the league with 305,882 followed by the UK (66,969), Russia (54,166), Canada (23,933) and Germany (18,172). Weirdly, I have had 14 hits from an ‘unknown region’, so someone is reading Just Backdated from somewhere that hasn’t been discovered yet, hopefully a space station circling the globe.

KEITH MOON & THE PYTHONS

Who fans will be fascinated to learn that, according to Eric Idle, Keith Moon would have had a speaking part in Monty Python’s The Life Of Brian had he not inconveniently left our planet a few days before filming was due to begin. In his memoir, his Sortabiography, which I have just finished reading, Idle states that he and Keith spoke to one another at the party Paul McCartney threw on the eve of Keith’s death.

         “He came racing across and spouting his lines from Brian as a mad prophet: ‘And there shall at that time be monstrous things…’,” writes Idle. “He was terrific in his Robert Newton voice and I said, ‘Yes, yes, Keith, that’s great, save it for next week.’ Sadly, after that night… that was that.”

         A few days later the Pythons left for Tunisia to start filming and, had things turned out differently, Keith would have been with them.

         If nothing else, this story puts to the sword any lingering speculation that Keith may have overdosed deliberately. As plenty of people know from personal experience, Keith was a huge fan of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, and there is no way in a million years that he would have missed out on an opportunity to feature in one of their films, nor of the opportunity to travel with them abroad, or anywhere else for that matter. 

         Two pages earlier in Idle’s book, the nudge-nudge-wink-winker relates that in January of 1978 Keith “followed” the Pythons to Barbados where he joined in games of Scrabble with John Cleese and Graham Chapman, “adding the word CAT to their very long words. Mick Jagger also came to dinner with Jerry, and we played charades, at which he [Keith] was terrific.”

         Oddly, there is no mention of Keith’s visit to Barbados with the Pythons in any of the many books about him or The Who, so this nugget of information is revealed for the first time in Idle’s book. All six Pythons – Idle, Cleese, Chapman, Terry Jones, Michael Palin and Terry Gilliam – were there to work on the script for The Life Of Brian, so it seems likely that Keith was offered the mad prophet part during this stay.

         Keith was living in London at the time having just moved to the UK from California, and The Who were recording Who Are You, mostly at their own Ramport Studios in London’s Battersea. I am reliably informed that Keith flew out to Barbados on January 16 during a break in recording and stayed at the Colony Club.  

         The Sortabiography, subtitled Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life, also contains lots of stories about George Harrison and sundry other rock stars with whom Idle, the most musical of the core Pythons, became friendly. Not to mention celebrities from just about every other walk of life, thus turning the book into the biggest name-drop I’ve ever read, for which Idle, amusingly, makes no apology whatsoever.

THE SEARCHERS & THE CROWN CASINO

I was an early fan of The Searchers. I bought their chart-topper ‘Sweet For My Sweet’, on the pink Pye label, which with only three chords was simple to play and was therefore amongst the repertoire of my first band, The Rockin’ Pandas. The bass player in our group owned their first album, Meet The Searchers, and from it we learned to play ‘Love Potion Number 9’ and ‘Farmer John’, about a girl with ‘champagne eyes’, a lyric I found captivating. The Searchers tore into it at a terrific pace, a very tight, very exciting version of a song covered by many others, among them much later Neil Young, who played it slower and heavier, and contemporaneously by The Hep Stars, the Swedish group whose keyboard player was Benny Andersson, later of Abba, whose translation – their English is slightly wonky – mimicked The Searchers.

         In 1964 came ‘Needles And Pins’, another chart-topper, which I also bought and learned to play. As our group’s lead guitarist I loved playing that little riff on a basic A chord by varying the notes on the second, B, string; again absurdly simple but absurdly effective if you let the string ring cleanly. ‘Clean’ is what we liked about The Searchers: the close-fitting, clean vocal harmonies and the clean, ringing guitars. This is where The Byrds got their jangly sound and, later, R.E.M. Come to think of it, The La’s lovely ‘There She Goes’ is a less than distant cousin.

         The Searchers were rivals of The Beatles in those far-off days, and between 1963 and 1965 had half a dozen Top 10 hits, including a third number one, ‘Don’t Throw Your Love Away’. Four albums made the Top 10 LP charts too, but personnel changes and a disinclination to change their style as styles changed around them kept them from progressing as others progressed. After ‘When You Walk In The Room’, now my favourite of all the songs they recorded, and ‘Goodbye My Love’ in 1965, another fine example of their harmonic strengths, I lost touch with them just as I lost touch with many similar groups that emerged in the wake of JPG&R.

         At the luncheon last December for music biz veterans in Barnes that I attend twice yearly, I skipped tables after the meal to chat again with Frank Allen, who became The Searchers’ bass player and lead singer in 1964 on the departure of original member Tony Jackson. Only lead guitarist John McNally is still with the band from that era, but they’ve stayed the course over the years with a relatively stable cast of musicians, nowadays Spencer James (with them since 1986) on rhythm guitar and Scott Ottaway (since 2010) on drums. All four sing, thus maintaining that unique choral tradition.

The Searchers today: Scott Ottaway, Frank Allen, John McNally & Spencer James

         

Frank’s been a regular at these Barnes luncheons for longer than I have, and he told me that after a three-month UK tour in the early 2019, at 75 he was hanging up his bass and quitting the road, thus bringing the group’s long career to an end. “The two hours on stage are still magic,” he told me, or words to that effect. “It’s the other 22 when you’re touring that I can’t handle anymore, the travelling, the hotels, the hanging around. I’ve had enough.”

In Melbourne in 1997 I visited a gigantic casino, a temple to Mammon of cathedral-like proportions that revolted and fascinated me in equal measure. It seemed to go on for miles, like the size of two football pitches, dark for the most part but with tiny coloured lights flashing everywhere, and rows of croupiers leaning over green felt tables as far as the eye could see; cards, wheels, dice, keno, fruit machines and, every now and then, screens where sport was being watched by men, always men, in easy chairs, every sport imaginable, football, rugby, cricket, tennis, golf, Ozzie rules football, athletics, horse racing, snooker, darts, the lot, and you could bet on the outcome of the games, or even on what might happen in the next two minutes, or five minutes, or half-hour. Such was the variety of betting on offer that it wouldn’t have surprised me if you could place $10 on which droplet of rain might slither down a window and reach the bottom first.

         Looking around me, I saw that most of the customers were Chinese or at least Eurasian, and it was very noisy, crowded, and smoky too, for this was before cigarette smoking was outlawed in public. It seemed to me that I had been pitched into a vision of hell, an inferno where greed is king, luck is a faithless mistress and the bookmaker laughs all the way to the bank. As we walked past table after table, an Australian friend told me harrowing tales of how the foolhardy who’d lost everything and ended up in penury hurled themselves into the adjoining River Yarra from where their bodies were dredged the following day. To prove his point he drew my attention to those pitiful souls who lingered outside the doors on the casino’s perimeter, rattling cans for change as they shivered in the chill of this cold Australian August night.

It was about five years ago when I happened to sit next to Frank at another of the Barnes lunches, and it was then that we spoke for the first time. He told me that twice a year his group undertook tours of Australia and New Zealand and in Melbourne play at the Crown Casino, and when he told me this and spoke of the vastness of the Crown I put two and two together and realised it must have been the same casino I visited in 1997 but whose name I had forgotten. We talked about it for a while, and about how welcoming Australia was to The Searchers and other groups of their vintage.

         I mentioned to Frank that in my opinion The Byrds and R.E.M. owed a big debt to The Searchers, that their wonderful vocal harmonies and jangly guitars almost certainly influenced these groups. Frank agreed, telling me he’d met both Roger McGuinn and Michael Stipe, both of whom admitted to him that his group had been a role model.

         Frank turned out to be an amiable chap, a muso of the old school, who looked much younger than the 70 years he boasted then, perhaps because like another bassman, Beatle Paul, he is slim of stature and, on this occasion, drank only mineral water, and I told him that when they were first released I’d bought ‘Sweets For My Sweet’ and ‘Needles And Pins’, for which he thanked me graciously, unnecessarily, and we went on to talk about ‘When You Walk In The Room’, which was written by Jackie De Shannon. I told him this song had become a favourite of mine thanks to The Searchers but that I thought Agnetha Fältskog – another trivial Abba connection to The Searchers – had recorded the best version, a big Phil Spector-style production. Instead of bristling with indignation that I preferred Agnetha’s version, which if the push comes to the shove sounds very much like an Abba recording, to The Searchers, he said he reckoned Paul Carrack’s equally grandiose version was the best, so we argued amicably about this for a while, musing on whether the song was best interpreted by a girl or a boy. Eventually we agreed to disagree – but one thing we didn’t disagree on was the nature of the Crown Casino, the horror of it all.

         Frank told me he’d be back there the following February, playing with The Searchers for the Casino punters in a concert room somewhere within its vast confines, and I wished him all the luck in the world on all his antipodean tours but cautioned him not to bet on the green baize. I don’t think he needed to be told.