Still Whispering After All These Years Read online

  For Trudie

  And with heartfelt thanks and love to my family and friends, who have made the events in this book so special

  First published under the title The Whispering Years in 2001

  This fully revised and updated edition first published in Great Britain in 2015 by

  Michael O’Mara Books Limited

  9 Lion Yard

  Tremadoc Road

  London SW4 7NQ

  Copyright © Bob Harris 2015

  All rights reserved. You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978-1-78243-360-6 in hardback print format

  ISBN: 978-1-78243-361-3 in e-book format

  www.mombooks.com

  Cover design by Patrick Knowles

  Designed and typeset by Design 23

  Contents

  Foreword by Robert Plant

  Introduction

  ONE A Passion for Music and Radio

  TWO ‘DJ Wanted ...’

  THREE Old Grey Whistle Test

  FOUR The States, the President and Punk

  FIVE ‘Who’s Out for ’78?’

  SIX Rex Bob Lowenstein

  SEVEN Return to Radio 1

  EIGHT ‘The World Ends on a Whisper’

  NINE Music City USA

  TEN A Rocky Road

  ELEVEN Still Whispering …

  Acknowledgements

  Picture Credits

  Index

  List of Illustrations

  Foreword to the 2015 Edition

  THE ROCK’N’ROLL DOCTOR OF SEVENTIES MUSIC TV MOVES THROUGH the years with style and grace. His own excitement and love of music and his infectious enthusiasm to bring his audience the rhyme, reason and sounds of a new world is a work of heart.

  He champions the unknown, the obscure and the legendary with equal zest and detail. He has stayed the distance – the good times and the others – with character and resilience, always digging deep and deeper.

  ROBERT PLANT

  Introduction

  FOR AS LONG AS I CAN REMEMBER I’VE ALWAYS LOVED MUSIC, A passion that has largely defined my life. I’m extremely fortunate to be able to express that passion through my work. I’ve visited many of the major music centres in Europe and America, seen some of the great concerts and spent time with some of the biggest stars in the world. I’ve interviewed John Lennon in New York, Led Zeppelin and Bruce Springsteen in Los Angeles, The Rolling Stones in Munich, the Bee Gees in Miami, the top country stars in Nashville and found myself in situations most could only dream of. I’ve toured with T. Rex, David Bowie and Queen, compered at most of the major festivals. I’ve met royalty and an American president, produced records and presented on television and radio in what has sometimes seemed to be a cavalcade of once-in-a-lifetime experiences. But it hasn’t all been good. My personal life has been through crisis, I’ve been so ill I nearly died. I’ve been threatened and derided. I’ve had to completely rebuild my career no less than four times. I’ve been a bankrupt. The following pages are the story of it all, beginning at a time when optimism was still a national characteristic.

  ONE

  A Passion for Music and Radio

  HAVING BEEN ENCOURAGED TO MOVE TO THE SMOKE BY JON BIRD, a boyhood friend, I have to say, 1966 was a fantastic time to arrive in London. Jon and I met when my parents and I moved into the house next door to the Bird family when I was about 11 years old. Like our previous home, No. 63 Greenfield Road in Northampton was a police house. My Dad was in the local force, retiring in 1967 as an acting detective chief inspector, having spent most of his career in the CID. I’m an only child, so it was a great feeling to discover this terrific kid at No. 61.

  Jon was a year older than me and was already a talented artist and sculptor. I remember a painting he did in the third year at school of horses pulling a plough across a field and away into the sunset, a typical country scene and the subject matter of many pictures before and since. But this painting was really memorable, particularly the use of colour. Jon was not afraid to take risks, and the gold, brown, burnt orange hue he’d created was particularly striking. He had a tremendous talent and soon qualified for the Central School of Art in Holborn, taking up his place there in 1965.

  My own scholastic career ended rather less impressively. In the summer holiday between sixth form and my final year at Trinity High School, I was spotted by one of my teachers drinking a half of lemonade shandy at the bar of a local pub. The pub was on the outskirts of Northampton at Weston Favell, where I used to cycle to hang out with some local friends and go swimming in the lock near the mill house. I returned to school in September to find myself on report and summoned to the headmaster’s office, where I found him red-faced in anger and brandishing his cane.

  ‘Bend over, Harris,’ is all he said. With all efforts at explanation summarily dismissed and in the knowledge that were this to happen I would be the first sixth-former in the school’s history to get the cane, a sense of personal dignity and righteous indignation dictated my response. I turned tail, walked out of his office, cycled home, packed my saddle-bags with all the school books I could find, went back, dumped them on his desk and left. I hadn’t enjoyed school anyway, except when I was on the sports field. I walked away from my education with two O levels, Art and English.

  ‘Brilliant,’ said Dad, who was waiting for me when I arrived home. ‘What are you going to do now?’ My father had been brought up in the depression-hit south Wales mining community of Pontardawe in the 20s and 30s, when a good education meant escape to university and a decent job, away from the pit closures and poverty of the valley. The punishing hours of a detective’s life seemed a reasonable trade-in to a man schooled in the philosophy of hard work.

  We spent many summers visiting relatives there when I was a child, although I always felt slightly claustrophobic, hemmed in by those tall, purple mountains. But the people were fantastic, a closely knit and truly supportive community. I spent a lot of time with Mair Jones, the girl who lived next door to my Mumgu and Dadcu in Edward Street, and with my cousin, Mary Hopkin, who lived higher up the valley in Altwen. Dad already knew how much I wanted to be on the radio, but a career in broadcasting seems a million miles away when you’re 17, living in an East Midlands boot and shoe town, haven’t got a job and have just walked out of school. Dad and I did a deal. He was very keen for me to follow in his footsteps. ‘Have a go at it, Rob,’ he said. ‘Join the Police Cadets, have a look and see if you like the life. When you’re 19, make the decision. If you’re still determined to get into the music business and honestly decide you don’t want to take up a police career, I’ll back you one hundred per cent, but on one condition. You must give it everything for the next 18 months.’ We shook on it. I joined the Northampton County Police Cadets, stationed at Wellingborough. And it wasn’t too bad, particularly on the sports side.

  I’d played in my school first XV at centre three-quarter, wearing the No. 13 shirt and modelling my game on that of Mike Weston, an England International of the time who, along with the great Richard Sharp, was a massive hero. Rugby was a major part of my life in the Cadets and I was given a lot of time off for games, training and trials. In the winter it seemed as if I was spending more time on the rugby pitch than at the old-fashio
ned plugs and wires switchboard I was detailed to answer, which was fine by me. (My other major duty was making endless pots of tea for station officer PC Gray.) I even reached Midland Counties level, playing under floodlights in Stratford-on-Avon in front of six and a half thousand people, one of the few times in my life I’ve been genuinely nervous.

  I completed my Duke of Edinburgh Award with an outward bound course in Eskdale, Cumberland (now Cumbria). Part of the course was an expedition that took us to the top of Scafell Pike, the highest mountain in England, which, to be honest, was a huge anti-climax. It’s just a flat bit of shale with a plaque. We were shrouded in cloud, so I can’t comment on the view. I just remember this ruddy New Zealander appearing out of the mist, wearing shorts and a short-sleeved shirt, sickeningly hearty while we stood shivering.

  The other good thing about the Cadets was getting out in the cars on motor patrol, the big treat! The worst part was the monthly drill training and the fact that I had to keep my hair short to avoid the sergeant major screaming in my ear. But I can honestly say that I had a good time. I bought a Citroen Light 15, complete with running boards and three-speed dashboard gear change, from a bobby at the Wellingborough nick and have always been proud that it was my first car.

  But I knew the life was not for me and although Dad was disappointed he was as good as his word and has backed me fully ever since. Bizarrely, his police work and the music industry had already overlapped. It was Dad who arrested P.J. Proby onstage at the Northampton ABC, during Proby’s notorious trouser-splitting tour in 1965!

  Proby was a Texan, brought to England by producer Jack Good in 1964 for a Beatles television special. A man of manic energy, Good’s contribution to the development of British rock’n’roll was immense. He’d joined the BBC from Oxford University in 1956 as a trainee and, intrigued by rock’n’roll and the media’s fear of it, devised Six-Five Special, the first British television pop music show. Having got the show on air by hoodwinking the Corporation into thinking it was to be a magazine show for young people, he moved across to ITV and unleashed the hysteria of Oh Boy! onto our screens in 1958. Recorded in front of a theatre audience of hundreds of screaming girls, the show helped launch the careers of Cliff Richard, Marty Wilde, Billy Fury, Adam Faith and a host of other UK Elvis-inspired lip curlers. The show was raw and fabulously exciting, showcasing some of the authentic American rock’n’rollers, among them Gene Vincent, who appeared clad in his customary black leather and wearing the leg iron that was a legacy from a teenage motorcycle accident. Good was the definitive opportunist and, as Vincent approached the microphone at the front of the stage and came into camera range, his Oxford accent could be heard clearly above the screaming girls, as he shouted his instructions to the afflicted singer. ‘Limp, you bugger,’ he implored. ‘Limp!’

  Following his appearance on The Beatles Special, P.J. Proby’s career took off. Within a year he’d had five Top-20 hits and in early 1965 set off on a package tour of ABC theatres, with Cilla Black topping the bill. I found it hard to see his appeal. He had the voice of a pub singer, face contorted with sincerity as he wheeled out excruciatingly overblown versions of already melodramatic ballads, ‘Somewhere’ (‘Thar’s a per-lace foor wusss/some-a-where a per-lace foor wusss’) and ‘Maria’ from West Side Story. But he had an image – ponytail and breeches. The problem was that the breeches kept splitting in the middle of his pelvis-swaying set and he didn’t believe in wearing underwear. The first night he got a warning to cool it down or face being thrown off the tour. The second night he got massive press as public outrage, Eminem-style, was ignited. There were young children in the audience! The third night was the ABC Northampton and as Dad made his way across the stage, the curtains closed on the Proby career. Off the tour, he was a bankrupt three years later. Dad also arrested my future wife.

  Sue Tilson was really cool. Everyone I knew seemed to know her name. She was three years older than me, had beautiful long, auburn hair, pale white skin and always dressed in a black rollneck sweater and jeans. She was a Beatnik and hung out with a whole crowd of arty, seemingly interesting people, some of whom were gay, all of whom dressed more or less the same as she did. They were mostly into John Coltrane and the Modern Jazz Quartet and read the Beat Poets, Jack Kerouac or J.D. Salinger’s Catcher In The Rye. We met at a party, me stepping in when she was being hassled by some bloke she didn’t want to know. She invited me to meet her and her friends at the Sunnyland Jazz Club, held weekly at one of the pubs near where she lived. She was a fantastic dancer and a wonderful person and I was drawn to her. She cared about people and talked passionately about her work with mentally handicapped children. She was politically aware and liked to discuss the issues of the day, most of which were beyond me. To start with, I was probably something of an embarrassment for her, this rather lovelorn police cadet hanging around in full view of all her cool friends. It took a bit of time to win her confidence, but we gradually began to see more of one another until finally I invited her home.

  Like many of her friends, Sue had joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and had taken part in a major demonstration that had closed Mercer’s Row and brought chaos to the centre of Northampton. 1963 was the time of the Aldermaston marches, and protests on both sides of the Atlantic about the Cold War America/Russia stand-off over Cuba. For a while we really did feel that there was a finger poised above that red button. Although it was all happening on what seemed like the other side of the world, we felt the implications and were aware of the potential consequences of the nuclear muscle-flexing that was part of the early-60s East/West political relationship. We were scared of it all and Sue had been one of the people sitting in the middle of Abingdon Street with the protesters, refusing to move even when Dad and other members of the Force arrested her and several of her friends. Blissfully unaware of all of this, I took her home to meet my parents. It was a very cold and difficult atmosphere when she and Dad finally stood face to face in the front room of our house! Still, despite everyone’s initial reservations, she and my parents began to forge a friendship and affection that survived throughout the years. Sue and I got married in the summer of 1967.

  Jon Bird had been regularly in touch, telling me how fantastic life was in London, that I must get up to town and visit him at his flat in Hampstead. ‘The house is great, you’ll absolutely love it,’ he told me. And he was right.

  Built in 1846, the building sits at an angle to the main road, taking up the entire corner of Rosslyn Hill and Hampstead Hill Gardens, which curves around and down at the back of the house. It was constructed across different levels, three stories at the front, four stories at the back, with a basement extension curving round into the small side garden. Inside, it seemed like a labyrinth, with little staircases and corridors linking the various sections of the house. The interior design was random, with lots of rooms of different sizes, some at opposite angles to one another, with big sash windows and loads of nooks and crannies.

  The house was run by Hetta Empson, wife of author William Empson, famous for Seven Types Of Ambiguity, regarded as an important literary reference work at the time. I only met him once. He was a lecturer at Sheffield University and was away most of the time. Hetta lived on the ground floor and rented the rest of the house, a room here, a flat there, to students. The place always seemed to be packed with people, mostly from the London School of Economics (famously militant at the time). Jon shared a flat with a photography student called Roger Perry and the whole house had a vibrantly creative feeling. The atmosphere struck me as being totally amazing. I was desperate to move to London anyway and began regular visits to plug into the feeling.

  Eventually one of the students vacated a small room on the first floor, just about big enough for a bed, a chair and my record player. I painted the walls purple, put up a couple of posters and moved in. It was £4 a week. I had no money at all, no real plans and certainly no prospects. But suddenly I was in London. I couldn’t have felt more excited.

 
Recently I went to see the house again. I was looking up at the window of my old room when a woman strode purposefully across Hampstead Hill Gardens towards us, two teenage boys trailing behind. ‘Why are you looking at that house?’ she demanded.

  ‘I lived there in the late 60s,’ I explained. Her expression softened.

  ‘Did you know Hetta?’ she asked me.

  ‘Yes, she was very kind,’ I ventured, adding she would let me off the rent if I didn’t have the money in return for doing a bit of cleaning in the hall and the stairwells.

  ‘Hetta wouldn’t like it here now,’ she told me. ‘The house has changed completely. It’s all been renovated and split up into modern flats, something she never wanted to happen.’ She went on to tell me more of the recent history, before introducing the two boys. ‘These are Hetta’s nephews,’ she said. I asked her why they were there.

  ‘Like you,’ she said, ‘we’ve just come to have a look.’ It was a strange coincidence.

  The memories came flooding back. Hampstead village was just a short walk up the hill and was so pretty to look at, with its narrow, cobbled streets and flower baskets. The residents looked colourful and interesting; the High Street buzzed with life. The wide open spaces of Hampstead Heath and Parliament Hill Fields were on the doorstep, the latter via South End Green, with its grocery shops, patisseries and pavement cafes, the former overlooked by Jack Straw’s Castle, at the time one of the best pubs in London. There were galleries and bookshops selling the latest editions of new-generation publications like International Times and Oz. And there was the Everyman cinema.

  I didn’t see it immediately as it was tucked back, just behind the main crossroads at the top of the High Street, but eventually I noticed the glass-fronted cabinet on the outside wall of the cinema, full of stills of the featured programme, a film by François Truffaut. I’d never heard of him before, but the pictures looked great and I wandered in – to be spellbound by Jules et Jim starring Jeanne Moreau. I’d never seen anything like it before, the story of a ménage-à-trois, and was fascinated by the style and gentle pace of the film. I wanted more of this, and with time on my hands, for a while I was able to see just about every new film that was featured in this beautiful, tiny cinema. I saw Fellini’s 8½ and La Dolce Vita, discovered the Jean-Luc Godard movies Alphaville and Masculin Féminin and thought Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina were a sensational couple, radical, dangerous and cool. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing on the screen. Sex, controversy, self-absorption, excess, revolution, existentialism. Previously I’d had no idea films like these existed. You certainly didn’t see them at the Essoldo in Northampton, despite the row of double seats for the snoggers at the back of the balcony. The most exciting thing on screen had been the occasional naturist movie with an X certificate. But celluloid was the least of my culture shock.