BOWIE & THE MEDIA - Part 1

I wrote this piece for Q magazine’s David Bowie special about 15 years ago. I’ve divided it up into three parts.

A whiff of hedonism lingered amid the dense fog of cigarette smoke inside the top floor suite of Detroit's luxurious Ponchartrain hotel. David Bowie sighed, dismissing Iggy with some reluctance, as I set up my cassette recorder on the coffee table, amidst the empty glasses, bottles and ashtrays. There was business to be done; another interview, another confession, or was it to be another stream of carefully prepared inexactitudes that would guarantee another headline. David pulled hard on his Gitane, drank his Michelob straight from the bottle and took a deep breath.

          “I'm broke,” he said, flicking his hand through his blonde hair and sending a stream of ash over his crisp white shirt. “I'm just doing this tour for the money. I never earned any money before, but this time I'm going to make some. I think I deserve it, don't you?”

It was March 1, 1976, and David was 19 gigs into what would become known as the Station To Station World Tour. He didn't look broke to me, not in the sense that mere mortals might use the term, as in having to borrow a fiver to go down the pub until the wage packet arrived on Friday. It was an expansive suite and trays of food and beverages had been discarded casually on pristine surfaces. The wardrobe contained designer suits and freshly laundered linen. A Mercedes 600 Pullman limousine waited downstairs for when David required transport. But the admission that Bowie was broke screamed ‘headline’ to me and I wasn’t about to question it. So instead of saying, “Pull the other leg mate, you’re a rich rock star, everybody knows that,” I said, “Tell me more, David. Tell me more.”

“The other tours were misery, so painful. I had amazing amounts of people on the road with me. I had a management system that had no idea what it was doing and which was totally self-interested and pompous…”

And so it went on, probably one of the best interviews I ever did and I barely needed to interrupt this flow of remarkable quotes, almost all of them worthy of headlines in themselves.

No doubt about it – Bowie gives good interview.

It began, somewhat preposterously, on November 12, 1964, on the Tonight programme hosted by Cliff Michelmore, with David, the leading light in the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Long Haired Men, being interviewed about how its members were taunted for the length of their hair. It was almost certainly a press stunt, a little light relief along the lines of the dead donkey, but it was valuable publicity at a time when this currency was thin on the ground for Davie Jones, the lead singer of the King Bees.

          In the four decades since that auspicious debut, few, if any, performers working in the rock field have enjoyed such sympathetic media treatment as David Bowie. With the possible exception of the flat period in the late Eighties that encompassed the Glass Spider/Never Let You Down phase and the ill-advised Tin Machine diversion, Bowie has had reporters eating out of his hand, and magazines of all types the world over clamouring to feature him on their covers. He belongs to a small, select group of superstars who’ve managed to successfully tame the media, and it’s no exaggeration to say this has sustained his career almost as much as his constant, chameleon-like talent for reinvention.

It wasn’t always the case. 

          “When I started he knew nothing about it,” says Ken Pitt, who although not David’s first manager was the first to give him serious guidance in the art of pop. Pitt had been a press agent before he got into management and was therefore in the perfect position to offer his client sound advice from the beginning. “He would always listen to me on the phone when I was taking about PR and giving advice to people. Also, he was very nosy… inquisitive, always looking at papers on my desk.”

          Pitt denies that he sat David down and lectured him on the art of giving a good interview – “He’s got to take the credit because he had a lot of natural charm” – but the older man’s wisdom in this area was clearly the primer from which David took his cue.

          “I certainly gave him advice from the very beginning,” says Pitt. “He was anxious about what to say. I would tell him exactly what the interviewer’s interests were, and I told him that whatever you do, don’t argue, don’t get into a heated conversation. I told him you’ve got to try to anticipate the interviewer, tell him or her what they want to hear, and adopt a different style according to the different types of media.”

          Pitt was not slow to realise that David’s charms might appeal to women and shrewdly lined him up for interviews with BBC radio DJ Anne Nightingale and with Penny Valentine, Disc’s star writer, whose intuitive eye fell upon David even before ‘Space Oddity’ became a hit. “She fell for him,” says Pitt. “It got around amongst journalists that he was a very bright boy, a lot of fun to interview.”

          Crucially, in the light of what came next, Pitt adds: “But I never put him up to saying anything that wasn’t true.”

ABBA - A GOLDEN LEGACY, Part 2

The second part of my intro to the sheet music for Abba Gold. If parts of this read a bit like the intro to Bright Lights Dark Shadows, that's because Carl Magnus Palm and I worked on both together. My thanks to him for this and for opening up the world of Abba to me by writing his book all those years ago.

As is the case with all groups that enjoy such spectacular success, all four members of Abba contributed crucial elements to the whole. Björn Ulvaeus was a natural leader and pragmatic decision maker, and also a keen, imaginative and slightly quirky lyricist, while Benny Andersson was a naturally gifted composer of pop melodies, schooled on the accordion as a child by his father and grandfather. Frida’s gift was also inherited, in her case from the family of the mother she never knew; a superb mid-range singer, Frida brought a wealth of experience, both professional and personal, to bear in her interpretations of Björn and Benny’s songs. Blonde Agnetha Fältskog’s higher register was crystal clear, verging on the operatic, and although she was perceived as the group’s sex symbol she often sang her lines with an air of wistful pathos that found empathy with forlorn women everywhere. This trace of cool, Ibsen-like Scandinavian melancholy that permeates much of Abba’s work, even in songs that appear on the surface to be quite cheerful, is among their most distinctive – and unique – traits.

  Although Stig Anderson is generally credited as being the fifth member of Abba, an equally worthy candidate is engineer Michael Tretow who, being a bit of an electronic boffin, rose to the challenge that Björn and Benny offered him and in doing so discovered Abba’s ‘third’ voice. This was the inimitable sound of Frida and Agnetha singing together, layer upon layer of overdubbed backing vocals creating the rich, all-enveloping choral landscape that became another of Abba’s distinguishing attributes. Coupled with exemplary musicianship from Björn and Benny and the best Swedish session players available, the result was pop perfection.

         Just as it does today, Abba’s music transcended fashion at the time it was released. In the UK and continental Europe punk was all the rage during Abba’s glory years while in America new wave and disco were battling it out with mainstream rock delivered by men with beards in faded jeans, check shirts and cowboy boots. The bright, often garish, clothing that Abba chose to wear was idiosyncratic to say the least, while their romantic pop, based largely on European melodic traditions, seemed out of phase with the times, though towards the end of their career they did produce some fine disco workouts.

         Reluctant to tour until it proved impossible to refuse, Abba became pioneers of the video boom, astutely realising that producing short films of themselves singing their hits for distribution everywhere would preclude the need to perform hundreds of concerts throughout the world. In the end, of course, they succumbed, with predictable results – ticket riots, administrative chaos and general feelings of discontent and homesickness that placed an insurmountable strain on the relationships that held the group together.

         Nevertheless, Abba’s fame was truly international. Shrewdly, they recorded many of their songs in Spanish and German as well as their native Swedish, with the result that their music reached countries where most other western pop has failed to penetrate. ‘Dancing Queen’ was a US number one. In Australia their popularity was, and remains, second only to The Beatles. Huge crowds gathered at airports and outside hotels wherever they went on their memorably chaotic 1977 tour down under. Famously, that same year London’s Royal Albert Hall received a reported 3.5 million ticket applications for a total of 12,000 tickets available for two concerts.

         The group survived the breakdown of Björn’s marriage to Agnetha and, since Björn was the group’s lyricist, it is generally assumed that Abba’s more heart-rending songs, tracks like ‘Knowing Me Knowing You’, ‘One Of Us’ and the peerless ‘Winner Takes It All’, were written from personal experience. Somehow, the shifting relationships within the group added another, distinctly poignant, string to their bow. By the time they last appeared together in December 1982, Benny’s marriage to Frida was also over. 

         Abba had run its course. Björn and Benny wanted to write musicals together; Frida, the only member of the group who enjoyed performing live, wanted another shot at a solo career; and Agnetha wanted nothing more than to be left alone to raise her children. But the music remained, heard at parties, at nostalgia festivals and, most notably, in discos frequented by the world’s gay communities. There emerged a plethora of tribute bands, memorably led by an Australian outfit called Björn Again whose shows became instant sell-outs. Pete Waterman of the eighties chart-ruling team of Stock/Aitken/Waterman, singled out Lennon & McCartney, The Beach Boys, Motown and Abba as the ultimate role models for anyone who wanted to make hits, and when Waterman created the boy/girl group Steps in the late ‘90s his homage to Abba was never more overt.

         By now many of the hippest stars from the next generation – U2, R.E.M., even Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain – had all endorsed Abba. The icing on the cake was Mamma Mia!, the musical based around their songs which, having now been seen by over 30 million theatregoers worldwide, has become the most successful musical of all time. The movie version, directed by the musical’s original director, Phyllida Lloyd, and starring Meryl Streep and Pierce Brosnan, received its world premiere in June 2008, and is now on the way to becoming the highest-grossing musical film ever in the UK.

         The ongoing success of everything that Abba bequeathed to the world, the Gold album of songs that have now become standards, the musical, the film, the tribute bands, and the pleasure they bring, is a triumph not just for the group or even its individual members. It is proof positive that the world’s greatest popular music, as is contained within these pages, remains and will forever remain universally loved by succeeding generations for as long as our planet survives, truly a golden legacy.

ABBA – A GOLDEN LEGACY, Part 1

This is the first half of the introduction to the matching folio of printed sheet music to Abba Gold that I was asked to write in 2008, slightly amended for the blog. Part 2 tomorrow. 

Abba Gold is among the best-selling albums in the history of popular music, up there with Thriller and Dark Side Of The Moon, the jewel in the crown of Abba’s diamond-encrusted catalogue. Originally released in 1992, it brings together 19 of the group’s classic hits and is one of those rare collections that returns to the best-selling lists on a regular basis as new fans discover Abba, in recent years the result of the smash hit musical Mamma Mia! and the accompanying film that was released in 2008. 

         Time does not diminish Abba. While the four individuals that made up the group long ago ceased collective endeavour, the music they made together transcends eras and fashion, and has now become a solid gold template for new generations that seek to create pop music at its highest level. ‘Dancing Queen’ is probably the greatest party anthem ever recorded, while ‘The Winner Takes It All’ is regularly cited as the supreme melodic statement about broken relationships.

         These two songs were released during Abba’s golden era, which extended from the mid-seventies to early eighties, but it had taken the four musicians more than a decade to reach this level of finesse. In their home country of Sweden, the individual members of the group had embarked on separate careers during the sixties, coming together in 1972 under the patronage of Polar Music, a Stockholm-based record label and music publishing company run by Swedish impresario Stig Anderson.

         Until this time guitarist Björn Ulvaeus was part of the folk group The Hootenanny Singers, while keyboard player Benny Andersson was a member of the pop group The Hep Stars. Both were among Sweden’s top acts at the time, and when Björn first met Benny in June 1966 there developed a close friendship that would eventually grow into an outstanding songwriting partnership. By the end of the decade, The Hep Stars had split up and The Hootenanny Singers were more or less a studio act at Polar Music. In the summer of 1971, Stig Anderson offered Björn the job of house producer, and Björn insisted that Benny be hired as well.

         Two years earlier, in 1969, Björn and Benny both happened to strike up romantic relationships with singers. Benny met and fell for Norwegian-born Anni-Frid Lyngstad, also known as Frida, while a romance blossomed between Björn and Agnetha (pronounced Ann-yetta) Fältskog. Both girls were former dance band singers who had launched solo careers. By the spring of 1970, both couples were engaged.

         There was a good deal of experimenting in the studio before Abba was born. Björn and Benny recorded together and wrote songs for others, while Frida and Agnetha continued their domestic solo careers with mixed fortunes as well as performing back-up duties in the studio. Björn and Benny’s real ambition was to record English-language songs that would reach beyond Sweden, and in this regard Stig Anderson, whose ambition was matched only by his diligence, was unusually supportive.

         Björn and Benny were well aware of their own shortcomings as singers and couldn’t help noticing that the local hits became a bit bigger whenever they invited their fiancées to contribute backing vocals. After a minor hit in Japan with the English-language ‘She’s My Kind Of Girl’, Björn and Benny felt sufficiently encouraged to record more English pop songs to which Frida and Agnetha were asked to contribute. Finally, on the 1972 song ’People Need Love’, the girls shared the lead vocals equally with the men, and the result was the very first Abba single, although the quartet was credited as Björn & Benny, Agnetha & Anni-Frid.

         Thus it was that six years after Björn and Benny first started working together they and their romantic partners finally decided to become permanent members of a group with the acronym-inspired name of Abba, which would be managed by Stig Anderson. Even so, it wasn’t until the end of 1975, 18 months after their breakthrough with ‘Waterloo’, that the group finally became the musical priority for the individual members.

         ‘Waterloo’ alerted the world at large to Abba, winning the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest, held that year in Brighton. In many respects, winning Eurovision was a poisoned chalice, since few hitherto unknown winners from continental Europe had enjoyed anything like sustained international careers in music. However, the song contained many elements that lifted it beyond the typical Eurovision winner – it was a full-tilt rocker, delivered in the style of classic girl-group pop and produced with a nod to Phil Spector’s magnificent Wall of Sound – and anyone with ears could tell that this group of Swedes had it in them to survive Eurovision’s reputation for creating one-hit wonders and consigning them to oblivion.

         In the event global success was almost two years away, partly because it took them a while to overcome the stigma of Eurovision but also because Abba had decided not to rush things, but to work painstakingly on their songs and sound in the studio with engineer Michael Tretow until they were 100% satisfied with the result. In the long term this far-sighted strategy, this scrupulous attention to quality control, was as responsible as anything in ensuring that several decades after it was recorded Abba’s music would remain as popular as it does.

         ‘Waterloo’ reached number one in the UK charts and several other European countries in April 1974 but Abba had to wait until September of the following year before ‘SOS’ became their next big hit. In doing so it opened the floodgates. Between February 1977 and December 1981, the group enjoyed 17 top five hits in the UK alone, including eight number ones, all but one of which are included on Abba Gold. It was a chart run of dazzling proportions that in terms of quality and consistency over a similar period remains virtually unmatched.    

ABBA - Bright Lights & Dark Shadows

To mark the 40^th anniversary of Abba winning the Eurovision Song Contest with ‘Waterloo’ in 1974, Omnibus Press has just published an updated and substantially revised edition of Carl Magnus Palm’s definitive Abba biography Bright Lights & Dark Shadows. Magnus, of course, is to Abba what Mark Lewisohn is to The Beatles though I didn’t know this when I commissioned the book way back in 2000, visiting Stockholm for the first and only time in my life to do so and making the mistake of hiring a cab to get from the airport to the city. It took over an hour and cost me almost all the kroners I’d brought with me. But I digress…

         It may come as something of a shock to those who’ve been reading my posts, but a weakness for Abba is one of my guilty secrets. This was not always the case, however. During the group’s active career, like most of my rock writer colleagues I regarded them a bit disdainfully, considering them perpetrators of lightweight commercial pop diametrically opposed to my favourites who tended to be muscular rock bands like The Who, visionaries like David Bowie or rootsy groovers like Little Feat. This may have had something to do with the stigma of winning the ghastly Eurovision Song Contest though I do remember thinking at the time that ‘Waterloo’ was better than most Eurovision winners. But my dad liked them and he liked Cliff Richard too, so they had to be naff.

         Then, in 1980, I found myself sitting in a parked car that belonged to Jake Riviera, Elvis Costello’s manager. The driver – not Jake – had nipped into an office and parked on a yellow line, and he asked me to stay in the car in case a warden came along. Now as you would expect Jake had a fantastic stereo system and I was listening to the radio when ‘Chiquitita’ came on, and I was struck by how good it sounded, not the song as such, just the recording, the crystal clear vocals and the state-of-the-art production. When the driver came back I kept this to myself lest he thought I was going soft in the head. 

        And then I forgot all about it. Indeed, I didn’t think much more about Abba until one Saturday night in the mid-eighties when I was on a weekend visit to my then elderly widowed father at his house in north Yorkshire. I’d been out for a few beers with an old friend earlier in the evening and when I got home dad had gone to bed. I didn’t feel like turning in so I poured myself a generous whisky and skinned up a spliff which I smoked in the back garden. Nicely adjusted, I came back inside and switched on the TV but there was nothing much on so I rifled through dad’s meagre record collection to see if there was anything that appealed. Not much, but an Abba hits album caught my eye so I put it on the turntable, plugged in some old cans that I’d left at the house and settled back to listen, fortissimo.

         Well, it was a revelation, just like in Jake’s car only more so. I was gobsmacked. Until that moment, because I’d never listened to Abba properly before, at volume with no distractions, I hadn’t realised quite how brilliantly produced their records were, quite how much attention to detail had been employed, or the debt they owed to Phil Spector; neither had I appreciated the quality of the girls’ voices, whether singly or together, the pitch perfect harmonies, and the obvious craft that went into their songwriting. I must have played dad’s Abba album five times before I went to bed that night, their songs ringing in my ears. Of course I knew that dope-enhanced listening pleasure could be ephemeral and realised in the morning that this might all have been a dream, but when I got back to London I bought a new Abba hits album and listened to it without any such contributory factors. Yes, they still sounded great. 

         Mindful that liking Abba was something many people kept to themselves, I did the same but I couldn’t help noticing in the ensuing years that several quite famous and cool rock stars were unafraid to profess their enthusiasm for the group. (And bearing in mind my initiation to Abba, was it a coincidence that the tinkling piano on ‘Oliver’s Army’ had a hint of ‘Dancing Queen’ about it?) I bought Abba Gold when it first came out and as the nineties progressed came to realise that half the word loved Abba too, and that their record sales put them high up in the all-time best sellers list, maybe even third after The Beatles and Elvis.

         Bearing this and their enduring, seemingly imperishable, popularity in mind, in 1999 I decided to commission a full-scale, objective and very detailed biography of Abba with one proviso – it had to be written by a Swedish, preferably Stockholm-based, author whose command of English was well-nigh perfect, and who could frame the book in the context of Swedish history and culture. I’d done my research and discovered that other Abba books, and there were plenty of them, lacked this important distinction; they were written by British writers from a British point of view and said very little beyond the basic, fairly well-known facts. I also figured that Abba’s perceived blandness as individuals was probably down to English not being their first language – it’s difficult being profound in a foreign tongue – and that back home their interviews (in their native Swedish) were probably interesting and insightful, and that the true story about them and their relationships to each other was far more complex and fascinating than previously documented. At that year's Frankfurt Book Fair I made inquiries among Swedish book publishers about a potential author and not long afterwards flew to Stockholm to meet with Magnus, and over dinner discovered I was correct in my assumptions about the group. Although I say it myself the book Magnus subsequently wrote for Omnibus Press, the one which he’s just revised and now runs to 600 pages, has now become the definitive book on the group.

         In editing the book, I came to learn much more about Abba; about Frida’s journey from her impoverished, orphan past to becoming a real-life princess, about Agnetha’s profound aversion to fame, about the dues paid by Björn and Benny, about their success as individuals in Sweden before Abba and the group’s extraordinary Beatle-like popularity in Australia, about the marriages and divorces, about their ill-fated business dealings – the millions that slipped through their fingers – and about their obsessive, alcoholic manager Stig Anderson who was largely responsible for this. I was also minded to check out much more of their music than simply Abba Gold, with rewarding results, especially the albums they recorded later in their career.

         In 2000 I took my then eight-year-old daughter Olivia to see the Abba tribute act Björn Again at the Shepherds Bush Empire, close to where we lived off Uxbridge Road, and was mesmerised by the euphoric reaction of the audience. Granted it was the week before Christmas but I couldn’t help but notice that while at most concerts the audience tends to come in pairs, for Björn Again they came in parties of seven or eight or more, slightly tipsy but also good-humoured, and there were several groups of dressed-to-the-nines women, all determined to enjoy themselves to the max, mad for it as the Gallaghers used to say. Indeed, I am hard-pressed to recall many adult concerts where the atmosphere was so party-like from beginning to end. The previous Christmas I had taken Olivia to her first ever pop concert, The Spice Girls at Earls Court, which I considered distinctly underwhelming and, since it was on the short side, bad value. On our way home from the Björn Again show, as we walked together along Uxbridge Road, Olivia held my hand and said to me: “Daddy, I preferred the fake Abba to the real Spice Girls.” Too right, I thought, a chip off the old block.

         I’m now happily out of the closet on Abba and to prove it recently wrote the introduction to a matching folio of printed sheet music to Abba Gold. I was proud to be asked, and I’ll post it here – in two parts – tomorrow and the day after.  

JOHN FOGERTY, Hammersmith Apollo, June 29, 2006

I saw Creedence at the Royal Albert Hall on 27 September, 1971, and for some reason found myself sat behind them, on the steps that rise up towards the organ that choirs stand on during classical concerts. It wasn’t the best of views and no one else was sat there apart from a roadie or two but it was hellish loud and it was fabulous to see an RAH show from the band’s perspective, to be able to look up at all the tiered levels and watch everyone grooving away. 

        In many ways this Fogerty show was a CCR show because that’s all everyone wanted to hear. I think I wrote this for Tony Fletcher’s website the day after the show.

Listening to John Fogerty was like listening to an early ‘70s bar-room jukebox banging out hit after hit, most of them less than three minutes long, one after the other, endlessly and gloriously. Since disbanding Creedence Clearwater Revival in 1972, Fogerty has had a sporadic solo career dogged by legal problems with his former record label and unseemly public spats with his former colleagues, and for this reason I half expected to see a rather dour fellow, serious of intent and probably distant from his audience, a bit like Dylan or Van Morrison. In the event, the opposite was the case: Fogerty behaved like a kid who’s unexpectedly found a Gibson Les Paul in his Christmas stocking, grinning from ear to ear, his floppy hair bouncing around, jumping and running across the stage with all the energy of a jean-clad 21-year-old – Bon Jovi with better songs and no clichés. Actually, he was 61 last month.

         Creedence weren’t psychedelic, neither were they prog-rock, glam, metal, hard rock or anything else really. There was a touch of garage about them but at heart they were simply a rock’n’roll band updated from the fifties in sound and style whose leader had a rare talent for writing simple catchy songs that invariably had four chords or less and intros that grabbed you in seconds. They sounded like they came from the South of the US but they didn’t – they came from San Francisco – and their songs about rivers and riverboats and the moon and the bayou earned them a pigeon hole of their very own called swamp rock, but in amongst the good times and toe-tapping dance music was the odd serious song about the Vietnam War. Also, they were a singles band, with nine top ten hits between 1969 and 1971 that still sound fresh today. Thirty-five years later, their hits CD never gathers dust on my shelf.

Aside from a support slot for Tina Turner at Wembley Arena back in the eighties, this was the first time Fogerty had performed in the UK since the latter day three-piece Creedence played the Albert Hall in 1971. So it wasn’t surprising that Hammersmith Apollo was jam-packed and raring to go. What was surprising was the age-range of the audience. I had a standing only ticket but managed to creep down the right aisle where I found myself alongside four twenty-something girls who danced the night away and seemed to know all the words to every song, most of which were recorded long before they were born. Creedence music is truly ageless.

Fogerty bounced on stage and opened with ‘Travelling Band’, after which the hits came thick and fast, at least 20 recognisable songs and a few I wasn’t so familiar with. This music is not difficult to play – the bass player’s fingers barely moved – but was played with skill and enthusiasm; vintage good-time Americana that evokes an era when my life was good and about to get better. No wonder I enjoyed it so much.

Here’s just a few of the songs: ‘Born On The Bayou’, ‘Bad Moon Rising’, ‘Who'll Stop The Rain’ (always loved that one), ‘Up Around The Bend’, ‘Down On The Corner’, ‘Rockin’ All Over The World’ (which he wrote and Status Quo stole), ‘Green River’, ‘Cottonfields’, ‘Midnight Special’, ‘Sweet Hitch Hiker’, ‘Keep On Choogling’, ‘Fortunate Son’ and, of course, as the final encore, the wonderful ‘Proud Mary’ who’s still rollin’ on the river. There was a couple of songs from his his 1985 solo album Centerfield, the title track and ‘Old Man Down The Road’, and the odd lesser known album track, like ‘Ramble Tamble’ which featured a spaced out jam as as the Cosmo’s Factory album

Fogerty fronted a five-piece band but did all the work himself, soloing cleanly but never at any great length, and filling in licks everywhere. Bob Britt, the lanky guitarist in a red tee-shirt played some fine rockabilly runs on both Strat and pedal steel, but the function of the band was to create a great wall of sound, fat and full like the Creedence originals.

Wisely, there was no support, just one hour 45 minutes of great rock’n’roll delivered by a man who knows exactly how it should be delivered but does it all too rarely. I was on my way by 10.15 leaving time for a decent beer in a proper pub and not the ghastly Carling lager that is all that’s available at what used to be the Hammersmith Odeon until Carling took a franchise on it.

THE DAY THEY CHANGED AMERICA

Today marks the 50^th anniversary of The Beatles US debut, the day they flew into New York to an airport welcome not unlike what had been happening at Heathrow during the past year, which must have set their pulses racing.  It was the final item on last night’s 10 o’clock BBC TV news, the now familiar b&w footage of them walking down the steps on to the tarmac, the cops staring at them because they’d never seen hair like that before on men, the press conference at which they charmed the media, the desperate girls with their placards outside the Plaza Hotel and, of course, their iconic appearance on the Ed Sullivan show, the moment when America saw them for the first time and said yes. It’s still magic and always will be.

            They also showed some footage from the Washington show a few days later, that mad concert where they played ‘in the round’ and had to shift the amps and drums after every few songs so that everyone could see them. Paul sang 'I Saw Her Standing There' and John sang ‘Twist And Shout’, shaking his head and trying to make himself heard above the screams, and the more he shook the more they screamed. Although it wasn’t shown on TV last night, Brian was at the back staring down at his boys, Neil and Mal were on guard at the sides of the stage – yes The Beatles had just two roadies – and at the end The Beatles bowed low, as they always did, that gesture of salute that became as fixed in the mind as Paul's violin bass, George's big, unwieldy Gretsch guitar and John's face-'em-down, legs-apart stance. 

            So it was fit and proper that after the news Lisa and I went across to the Compasses pub where my friend Al Duncan’s band The Beautiful Losers were playing and they closed their set with ‘Twist And Shout’, played in the Fabs’ arrangement, and, at the end, they bowed low, just like John, Paul and George. It was pre-rehearsed, Al told me, and it was a fine gesture to mark the day The Beatles changed America.  

NEIL FINN & CROWDED HOUSE

The promising review of Neil Finn’s new solo album Dizzy Heights in today’s Guardian means I’ll be dipping my hand in my pocket next week to get a copy but the truth is I’d still be dipping my hand in my pocket even if it was a dodgy review as I’ve long admired Finn’s songs, from Split Enz through Crowded House to his albums both solo and with brother Tim.

         One of the things that sets Crowded House apart from most is their quirky sense of humour. At one show I saw Neil got into a heated debate with bassist Nick Seymour about the artwork on their most recent album which, as ever, Nick had designed. Neil suggested that he and drummer Paul Hester looked like nerds but Nick looked cool and handsome. “Was this deliberate?” he asked. Another time he got into an argument with a roadie because his guitar was out of tune. “It’s your own fault,” replied the roadie within range of a mike. “You hit the strings too hard.”

         Tony Fletcher once told me that at a CH show he attended Neil played the same song twice in succession just because he enjoyed it so much, as did the audience. I last saw Crowded House at the Brighton Centre on December 7, 2007, and sent the following review to Tony’s ijamming website a day or two later. It opens with another example of Neil’s dry wit.

“I really fancy a plate of fish and chips,” Neil Finn announced midway through this gig. “If there’s anyone out there who’s not a Crowded House fan, maybe someone’s partner who’s come along a bit reluctantly and isn’t enjoying the show, maybe they wouldn’t mind nipping out and buying some for us. It should be pretty good here at the seaside.”

         Crowded House may have lost their drummer but they haven’t lost their sense of humour and there were no takers for Neil’s unusual request. Not surprising really, for this was a cracker of a gig, a long (25+ songs, I lost count), supremely executed show crammed with all the stuff from CH’s fabulous back catalogue that you would expect to hear, a few surprises and plenty of songs from their new album Time On Earth.

         They opened up with ‘Private Universe’ and closed almost two hours and two four-song encores later with ‘Better Be Home Soon’, by which time everyone downstairs had left their seats and congregated stage-front. The rush forward occurred during ‘Whispers And Moans’ about half way through the set, and prompted Finn to lead his band into some rock’n’roll, ‘There Goes God’, I think, and thereafter feed off the crowd’s enthusiasm.

         In concert CH is a considerably more beefy proposition than on record. Many of the songs, both the better known ones and newer material, featured extended, high energy codas, and new drummer Matt Sherrod adds plenty of muscle at the back. I also got the impression that the band has rehearsed much more material than they actually need, and were thus willing to accede to audience requests for songs from the darker recesses of their catalogue, like ‘Lester’. Just for fun they also threw in ‘I’m Only Sleeping’, John Lennon’s song from Revolver, though Neil stumbled on the words to the second verse.

         Which brings me to the inevitable Beatles comparison. Yes, CH do sound a bit like a modern day Beatles; their melodies and harmonies a bit similar to the snatches of half-formed songs that make up the suite on what was the B-side of Abbey Road, they use the same Vox amplifiers, which makes Neil’s Gretsch guitar sounds a lot like George’s when he plays fills and solos, and when all four of them sing together there was a distinct Fabness about the overall sound (which, by the way was pristine clear and uniformly well mixed throughout). But this is no bad thing, and I’m sure Neil won’t mind the comparison one bit. Indeed, my mate Andy Neill, also a Kiwi, recalls swapping Beatles bootlegs with the Finn brothers 30 years ago.

         There are so many wonderful Crowded House songs that it was difficult to keep up with the flow – ‘Fall At Your Feet’, ‘When You Come’, ‘Fingers Of Love’ (very erotic those two, as is ‘Whispers And Moans’… think about it!), ‘Distant Sun’, ‘Don’t Dream It’s Over’, ‘Pineapple Head’, ‘Weather With You’, It’s Only Natural’, ‘Four Seasons...’, ‘Chocolate Cake’, ‘World Where You Live’, the list is endless – but they played them all and played them well. American all-rounder Mark Hart seems to be the band’s secret weapon, slipping between keyboards, pedal steel and regular guitars, and even bassist Nick Seymour took a turn at the electric piano, though for most of the gig he was walking purposefully from one side of the stage to the other as he played. He was also the butt of Neil’s humour during the frequent exchanges of self-depreciative remarks, not least when he swigged from a large bottle of coke and prompted Neil to comment on his weight.

         Seymour, of course, designs CH’s artwork, and the constantly changing backdrop featured a slew of wonderful surreal imagery, all brightly-coloured and floating by in perfect syc with the music. At one point the letters that make up the band’s name – hundreds of them jumbled up like alphabet spaghetti and repeated endlessly – swam across the backdrop. It was all quite lovely, even the gaudy caravan that moved across the backstage during ‘Weather With You’ and the strange inflatable skyscrapers that popped up from time to time.

         There was much audience participation, encouraged by Neil, and CH fans seem to be pretty tuneful singers on the whole. I refrained from joining in, not wishing to spoil things, but I did yell for ‘Into Temptation’, another song with a hint of erotica about it and Mrs C’s favourite CH song, but they either didn’t hear me or ran out of time (though they have done it on this tour). And that, I think, was the only tiny disappointment from an otherwise five-star gig.

BLACK SABBATH - Transport Issues

The name of the man who became the manager of Black Sabbath – once they started making serious dosh – was Patrick Meehan. The name suggests he was an Irishman, but in reality Pat Meehan was a dapper, fast-talking, quick-thinking Londoner from a showbiz family background, and very likeable he was too, very engaging, good company.

In early 1974 I would travel with him and Black Sabbath in America, on a 12-seater private plane from St Louis to Chicago, to see the group in concert in both cities. This was the first time I’d ever flown in such a small plane and it was fantastic, and thinking about it now reminds me that methods of transport figure highly in my memories of Black Sabbath.

Here’s why.

I first became acquainted with Pat Meehan in February 1972, over lunch in a Chinese restaurant with Ozzie for company, during which arrangements were made for me to write a story about the group for Melody Maker. At this time Meehan had offices just around the corner, in London’s Lisle Street between Leicester Square and Chinatown, and he told me he owned three expensive cars: a pale blue Rolls Royce Silver Shadow, a white Aston Martin DBS and a red Ferrari Dino. Over sweet and sour king prawn and special fried rice it was decided that a day or two later I would travel with Meehan to Manchester to see Black Sabbath in concert at the Free Trade Hall, then journey on with them the following day to Newcastle for another show at the City Hall. Somewhere along the way I would be granted an interview.

         On the afternoon of our departure from central London, Meehan explained to me that his Aston Martin was in the car park at Heathrow Airport’s Terminal Three. His Ferrari, meanwhile, was being serviced and his Rolls-Royce was parked nearby. Because his wife required it that evening, his assistant would drive us in the Roller to Heathrow, where Meehan would resume possession of the DBS in which he would drive us both to Manchester. His assistant would then drive back to London in the Rolls.

         Alas, on arrival at Heathrow disaster struck. The Aston Martin was found to have been stolen, or at least was not where Meehan thought it was, even though we searched the Terminal Three car park thoroughly, driving up and down and around and around its four floors in the Roller and attracting no little attention in the process. When we couldn’t find it, Meehan seemed less concerned about the theft or loss of this expensive car than the resulting loss of a briefcase left within that contained documents of some importance to his company, World Wide Artists. Once resigned to the loss of his Aston Martin, Meehan decided to rent a car from the Terminal Three Hertz counter and opted for a Jaguar XJ6, the most expensive vehicle the company offered. But when he tried to do so he was told he already had another Jaguar XJ6 out on rental. There was an exchange of views about this with the Hertz girl, with Meehan denying all knowledge of this and producing a fat wallet bulging with credit cards to prove his creditworthiness, but after some discussion with his assistant he realised that this Jaguar had been left in a car park at Dover some days before and abandoned after the employee driving it had embarked on a ferry for Calais. He apologised to the Hertz girl and informed her of its whereabouts, saying they could collect it at any time from this location, whereupon, as a valued customer, he was allowed to rent a second XJ6.

Thus equipped, we set off for Manchester at least an hour later than intended, heading towards the M1 from Heathrow via Denham, Rickmansworth and Watford. On the outskirts of Watford, however, disaster struck for the second time. A stone was thrown up against the Jaguar's windscreen, which shattered as a result. Meehan tried to drive on but couldn’t, so he produced the car’s jack from the boot and smashed the glass out entirely. It being a cold winter’s night, it was impossible to drive without a windscreen. Trapped in Watford at tea-time, Meehan found a pay-phone, managed to locate another Hertz office and requested another Jaguar. All they could offer was a Ford Granada, which seriously displeased him. A man who owns a Rolls Royce, a Ferrari and an Aston Martin and is by and large unimpressed by Jaguars was likely to be even less impressed by a humble Ford.

As we were both very hungry by now we took tea in a nearby transport café while we waited for the beleaguered Jag to be exchanged for the Ford. Meehan, a man used to haute cuisine of a somewhat higher standard than was available at this eatery, was sanguine about the situation. “When you’re up, you’re up – when you’re down, you’re down,” he said, biting into his bacon sandwich.

Darkness fell. We were now very late and in order to try and reach Manchester in time for the gig, Meehan thrashed the Ford mercilessly on the M1 and M6. It was well past show time when we screeched to a halt around the back of the Free Trade Hall. Yet even though we seemed to have reached the end of our wearisome journey, fate had a further trick up its sleeve.

In his haste to exit the car, Meehan accidentally locked it with the key inside, an action that necessitated breaking in so that he might extract some contracts relating to the evening’s show. A Sabbath roadie was summoned and – as is the way with roadies – he had a jemmy to hand. He obliged his boss by wrenching open the driver’s door, which henceforth refused to close. Having thus incapacitated the Granada, Meehan abandoned it in a side street, its unlockable door hanging open. We had now missed almost the entire concert.

An hour later, back at our hotel, Meehan was on the phone demanding yet another vehicle from Hertz’s central Manchester office, only to be told that this was out of the question. Another exchange of views followed. He now had three cars out on his Hertz credit card, all abandoned, two in states of disrepair. There are limits, I suppose.

The following day, somehow or other, Meehan did manage to obtain from Hertz a blue Ford Capri to drive to Newcastle for the next show on Sabbath’s tour. I didn’t accompany him on this journey, so I don’t know what terrors he visited on the Capri. I suspect the worst. I travelled in a sort of mini-coach with the group’s tour manager and guitarist Tony Iommi, interviewing him along the way. I did see Meehan’s Capri parked outside our Newcastle hotel, looking none the worse for wear. But outward appearances can be deceptive in the car business. Either way, Meehan abandoned it at Newcastle and, the following morning, flew with me back to London, where we were met at Heathrow by his assistant in the blue Roller. I have no idea whether he informed Hertz about the car he abandoned in Newcastle but, like the Jaguar discarded in Dover, I suspect it remained outside the hotel for some time, no doubt attracting umpteen parking tickets.

Thus, when anyone mentions Black Sabbath to me these days, I think not of ‘Paranoid’ or Ozzy’s peace signs or Tony Iommi’s missing finger tips. I think of the wilfully casual attitude their manager had with regard to rented cars and the probable cost thereof. It didn’t come as much of a surprise, therefore, when some years down the line I heard on the rock grapevine that there wasn’t much cash left in the Sabbath kitty.

When you’re up, you’re up; when you’re down, you’re down.

MY GENERATION - A Strange Tale, Part 3

It is important to realise that Shel Talmy's treatment of The Who was no different from that meted out to other artists by record producers and labels at this time. The Beatles were on a rotten deal from EMI and the Stones were rescued only by the intervention of Allen Klein whose tough talking put the wind up Decca but whose hiring they would come to regret in the fullness of time (as would The Beatles, but that’s another story). Also, Talmy took on The Who when no one else wanted them – they'd been rejected by EMI – and the records he made with them were fantastic, the hits that put them on the map. The fact is he got lucky, firstly by signing a group that would develop into one of the world’s all-time great rock bands – and the odds against this happening were about 10,000 to one – and secondly by facing in dispute inexperienced management so desperate to jettison him that they sacrificed far more than everyone involved ever bargained for.

         But jettison him they did and back in 1966 The Who now found themselves recording for Reaction, switching to Track (Lambert and Stamp’s own label) in 1967, and to Polydor (and its subsequent owners) from 1975 to the present day. Due to their estrangement from Talmy, its producer, the My Generation album went out of print in the UK within 12 months of its release and nobody seemed inclined to reissue it in Britain until, curiously, Virgin picked it up in 1980. (This issue was pressed on inferior vinyl and appears to have been copied directly from the album, not from Shel Talmy’s master tapes. It disappeared at the end of its meagre print run.) It was a different situation in the US where Decca kept it available domestically throughout the sixties and, when MCA bought out Decca in the early seventies, The Who Sings My Generation (its US title) was reissued in a budget double-album package with the substandard US-only compilation Magic Bus – The Who On Tour. MCA released the album on CD in the States in the early eighties without altering the track listing.

In the meantime The Who became superstars, playing on stage with breathtaking panache that continued, by and large, until Keith Moon’s death in 1978. All of them eventually married and had young families, bought big houses and fancy cars and, despite the penance they still paid to Talmy, by 1970 there was no longer the financial pressure to tour with the regularity of times past. Roger created the prototype classical rock God, replete with bare chest and golden curls; Pete found a guru and became a deeply enlightened rock sage, perhaps the most sought-after interviewee the genre had thrown up after Lennon and Dylan; John Entwistle was the archetype bassist, superbly proficient, much respected in the trade; and Keith was, well, Moon the Loon, the prototype of the hedonistic, swashbuckling rock star whose appetite for self-destruction eventually consumed him. They were individuals and they were a band, for a while the most popular and respected group in Britain. Never the most prolific of recording artists, they nevertheless released a further nine albums up until Keith’s death, and a further two with Kenney Jones on drums up to their first ‘retirement’ in 1982. Their reputation and fortunes secure thanks to performing live, after a shaky eighties The Who were well on the way to rock’n’roll beatification by the nineties.

         So it was that after a lifetime of being a fan, writing about them extensively for Melody Maker and in a couple of books, and amassing a sizeable collection of Who records, in 1993 I talked my way into helping the group put together a 4-CD box set. It was the hope of those involved that all the tracks would be remastered from original masters, and not from secondary sources. Pete’s tape store inevitably yielded everything but the Shel Talmy three-track masters which he had hung on to for three decades. When access was sought we were rebuffed, evidently because MCA and Polydor were unable to reach an agreement re advances and royalties. We were thus obliged to use mono-tape copies that we found in Pete’s library. In a compilers’ note included in the booklet that accompanied the CDs I wrote: “Unfortunately, owing to a long standing difference of opinion with Shel Talmy, who produced all of The Who’s work in 1965, the master tapes to this music (which includes 'I Can't Explain', 'Anyway Anyhow Anywhere' and all of the My Generation LP) were not available for a thorough re-mix or for conversion into proper stereo. That's the reason why The High Numbers actually sound better than the early Who.”

         I’m happy to say that the box set was well received, so much so that I then initiated a programme of wholesale reissues of The Who’s back catalogue on upgraded CDs, complete with bonus tracks and 24-page booklets. We didn’t do this in chronological order, opening the series with a new Live At Leeds (1970) and cherry picking our way through the catalogue until every album, up to and including It’s Hard (1982), had been upgraded – everything, that is, expect My Generation.

         Eternally narked at what he saw as an unforgiveable slight on the part of Kit Lambert and The Who back in 1966, the difference of opinion with Talmy was intensified by his belief that MCA and/or The Who had been consistently underpaying the royalties he felt were legally due to him. Noting that The Who was capable of shifting concert tickets on a grand scale, he assumed their records would sell in the multiples of millions, like Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon, Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours or The Bee Gees’ Saturday Night Fever, but this was never the case. The Who’s record sales were certainly respectable but they were never in the mega bracket in which these artists, and a few others, found themselves in the seventies. Talmy, it seems, was unable to comprehend why The Who could sell out multiple appearances at large sports arenas, perhaps even more so than the Floyd, Mac and BGs, yet did not sell gargantuan quantities of albums, and therefore assumed he was being hoodwinked. It was an ironic situation when you consider that The Who’s box-office power was due entirely to their status as stage performers par excellence, a state of affairs that the situation with Talmy had done so much to foster. Either way, the result was stalemate when it came to getting the producer to surrender the tapes in his possession.

         And that’s how things seemed likely to stay until, to everyone’s surprise, Shel Talmy placed his ad on e-Bay offering to sell The Who’s three-track masters as sort of high-end memorabilia. I heard about it through The Who grapevine and contacted Pete. He said he wasn’t interested in paying $500,000 for the tapes and neither were The Who collectively; nor were The Who’s record labels, MCA and Polygram, soon to merge under the Universal Music banner. The problem was the price. Terrific though My Generation is, it wouldn’t recoup $500,000 in royalties as a re-issue at this late date; indeed, it’d be lucky to recoup 10% of that. It was clear that a mediator was needed, someone without an axe to grind who could bring both sides together.

         Enter David Swartz, a successful American businessman and a notable Who collector. At my prompting David visited Shel Talmy in Los Angeles and explained to him that his demands were out of the question. He also explained that The Who’s tapes in his vault were a diminishing asset; that in five years’ time they would be worth less than they were worth today, since The Who’s fan base was not getting any bigger.

         This did the trick. Talmy reduced his price to something between $50,000 and $100,000; Pete got in touch, so did the record labels. The deadlock was broken, a deal struck. My Generation, remixed by Shel, found its way into the record racks as a pristine double CD, with bonus tracks, last September. What was probably the longest running feud in rock was finally resolved.

         “It’s been sad in one way,” said Pete when I asked him how he felt about its reissue after all these years. “We discovered that some guitars were added during the mixdown, standard practice at the time for three-track. So some of the tracks are incomplete. I have not been involved at all in the controversy or haggling. I knew that Shel owned the tapes and copyright, nothing could be clearer. He just needed the right deal.”

         Which is more than The Who ever got from him. 

MY GENERATION - A Strange Tale, Part 2

And so the summer of 1965 dragged on. The Who played 26 shows in May, 26 in June, 12 in July, 17 in August, 10 in September (pretty slack going lads) and 17 in October. It wasn’t until October 12 and 13 that the band saw the inside of IBC again, and this time they recorded a slew of Townshend originals, again with Talmy producing: ‘It’s Not True’, ‘A Legal Matter’ (with vocals by Pete – and he can’t remember why), ‘Much Too Much’, ‘La La La Lies’, ‘The Good’s Gone’, ‘The Ox’, ‘The Kids Are Alright’ and ‘My Generation’, the latter two cut during a midnight session on the 13^th. All of these recordings made the final cut, together with ‘Out In The Street’, ‘I Don't Mind’, ‘Please Please Please’ and ‘I'm A Man’ from the earlier sessions.

         ‘My Generation’ was released as a single on 29 October and would make number two in the UK singles chart, the highest the group would ever reach in their long career. The album was released in early December, and made number five in the LP charts. For the iconic picture of The Who gazing skywards that was used for the UK album sleeve, Decca staff photographer David Wedgbury took the band to Surrey Docks, near the site of what is now Surrey Quays Tube Station. Wedgbury was dangling from a crane when he took the pose that Blondie copied in an almost (there were five of them) perfect pastiche 12 years later.

         So what memories does Pete Townshend have of this period? “They're all bad I’m afraid,” The Who’s mainman told me in mid-June of 2002, taking a break from rehearsals at his Boathouse studio for an upcoming US tour with the 21^st Century Who. “I felt rushed and the songs felt unpolished. The sessions were short. I spent far longer on my home demos. The atmosphere in the band was not great at the time either. We were still young but I lived in a different world to the others. I socialised with The Small Faces and old art school buddies, and on the road survived mainly by taking pep pills.

         “I did not push myself,” continued Townshend. “I made demos because I had nothing else to do [well, you did play around 200 gigs in 1965 Pete, more than most bands manage in three years today – CC]. Kit was a driving force in this matter. He pushed me hard but I didn’t realise to what extent the other members of the band might find my songwriting difficult to swallow.”

         If anyone found Pete’s songwriting difficult to swallow it was probably Roger Daltrey who during the year had seen his leadership of the band ebb away in favour of the songwriting guitarist. Indeed, Roger’s frustration boiled over in September when, following a gig in Helsingor, Denmark, the singer apparently struck Keith Moon, reportedly because of the drummer’s wilful drug intake. He was fired and for ten days ruminated on his position before fortuitously returning to the fold with promises to curb his temper.

         Within The Who’s immediate circle there was another whose temper was by now reaching boiling point: Kit Lambert. “I suppose Kit wanted to play a part in the creative process,” says Pete with some degree of understatement. “He was full of ideas, Glyn [Johns – Talmy’s engineer] didn’t take to Kit’s presence in the control room either. I know Kit was really worried that not enough time was being given to help Roger develop his own voice. He was copying Howlin’ Wolf and James Brown – brilliantly – but Kit and I knew he had his own voice. It never emerged on this record. Later the rift became legal in nature. We were too busy touring to know what the hell was going on.”

         The rift was between the band, abetted by Lambert, and Talmy. They wanted out and after considering the alternatives took the risky decision to wilfully break their contract. Between the recording and the planned release date of their fourth single, two new Townshend originals ‘Circles’/’Instant Party Mixture’, the situation reached crisis point, resulting in its release – scheduled for 11 February – being cancelled.

         Meanwhile, his muse cresting seriously, Townshend took the band into Olympic Studios in Barnes and recorded ‘Substitute’, which he nowadays takes personal credit for producing. On 18 February the group announced they’d taken their wares to a new label, the independent Reaction founded by their booking agent Robert Stigwood, and distributed in the UK by German-owned Polydor which until now had specialised in releasing records from continental Europe. (Polydor’s only previous chart action had been in 1963 when ‘My Bonnie’ by Tony Sheridan and The Beat Boys, aka The Beatles, reached a lowly number 48.)

         The Who’s decision to walk away from their contract prompted a predictable reaction from Shel Talmy who on 8 March could be found in the High Court claiming that he had sole rights over The Who’s recording career. The judge, who initially thought that WHO stood for World Health Organisation, agreed, ‘Substitute’ was withdrawn and the World Health Organisation was banned from recording until the case was settled.

         To pour salt into the wound Talmy persuaded Decca to release a spoiler single ‘A Legal Matter’ (an appropriate choice), backed by the song at the centre of the argument, ‘Circles’. Like The Who’s own version, to be found on the reverse of ‘Substitute’, this too was misleadingly titled ‘Instant Party’, not to be confused with ‘Instant Party Mixture’, a different song entirely in the doo-wop mould.

         To get around the legal matter, Reaction re-issued ‘Substitute’ with yet another B-side, this time an instrumental by another of Stigwood’s clients, the Graham Bond Organisation (but credited to ‘The Who Orchestra’), provocatively titled ‘Waltz For A Pig’. The court later removed the injunction against the original ‘Substitute’, and Reaction was able to distribute their remaining stock, thus giving The Who their fourth consecutive top ten hit.

         In the short term The Who and Lambert got their own way by getting rid of Talmy but ultimately it was the producer who triumphed. Indeed, Pete and the band weren’t to know how much this cost them until 1969. “[It was]… when we started to make money on Tommy and saw him taking his share even though he had not contributed directly,” says Pete ruefully.

         And therein lies the real reason for the long delay in the CD reissue of My Generation. In a nutshell, Talmy had given the Who a miserly 2.5% (soon raised to 4%) royalty and was therefore ideally placed to play both ends against the middle, securing for himself a royalty from Decca far in excess of this. Thus, even before the split, he was making considerably more than the group, let alone the individual members who, as it happened, were also paying 40% of their cut in management commissions to Lambert & Stamp, who now had to settle with Talmy for breaking their contract. The Who and Lambert might have reckoned they could make better records and more money without him but in the end Talmy, in an out of court settlement, was granted a 5% royalty on all The Who's records and singles for the next six years, up to and including Who's Next in 1971. While Lambert and Stamp were now able to negotiate a new record deal that assured them more income collectively than they had received from Talmy, when the money was divided up the individual members of the group would earn considerably less in royalties from their record sales than Talmy who, henceforth, made a fortune at their expense and did sod all to earn it. Even today, over 35 years later, Shel Talmy still collects royalties on every track The Who recorded up to 1971.

        But no-one cared much about their long term future in an era when no pop band, not even The Beatles, had established the concept of a sustained career in this field. Pop groups were evanescent in 1965 and no-one could have known, or even dreamt, that The Who would still be going strong in six or 16 years’ time, let alone become the kind of million dollar superstar touring rock attraction that they eventually did. So The Who, like so many others, signed away a big chunk of what was rightfully theirs in the adrenaline rush to get into the recording studio. It doesn't take a great leap of imagination, therefore, to realise that The Who have never received a just reward from their best-selling work, and that the only way for them to survive was to work hard on the road, performing live as often as possible, perfecting the show and pocketing the increasingly large fees they could command.    

        Such survival tactics thus turned The Who, at their peak, into the greatest live band in the world. Indeed, with the possible exception of the Grateful Dead, The Who are probably the only legendary rock band of their era whose wealth was derived more from live work than record royalties – though in time they would be joined in this regard by other ‘legends’, most notably Paul McCartney and The Rolling Stones, who came to realise that while their new albums sold only a fraction of their classic work, vast sums could now be made on the road.