Golden Mile

The multinational music empire cuddled me to its corporate body with a five year, worldwide deal, insulating me from the icy bitch of existence with a ReadyBrek glow. I was on E.M.I., the Beatles label!

Suddenly I had an annual retainer to clear all my debts and five hundred pounds from Artist Development to blow on clothes. A suit was being fashioned for me from yellow shot silk. Vidal Sassoons’ dyed my hair blond.

I was waiting outside at nine the next morning to dye it back. I’m not a blond person.

A&R started talking Producers.
“David Hentschel’s interested.”
“David who?”
“Producer of Genesis.”
David had a sensitive tax situation so I was forced to record in Paris. I was given a suite at the Hilton and a twenty-four hour stretch limo. It felt a bit big, I must say, after our Ford Escort.
“Qui avez vous au derriere last semaine?” I asked chauffeur Jean Claude, sending the electronic partition up and down.
“Rod Stewart.”
I felt a bit nervous. I’d never had a chauffeur before. I didn’t know how to treat the guy. When we got to the hotel I gave him the night off. Er…wrong.

“I shall be ‘ere,” he said disappointedly, “waiting in ze foyer for when you need me.”
I bulleted up to my penthouse suite to change then sneaked down in the service lift, out the back entrance and down onto the Metro. But you soon adjust to luxury. By the end of the week I was phoning Jean Claude at three in the morning to come and open bottles of beer with his teeth!

What an imposter I felt, feet up on the mixing desk in Studio One with Thin Lizzy in the far smaller Studio Two. Howie Casey was in the booth, slaving over a hot saxophone. Howie Casey – only The Beatles’ bloody horn player! On the sofa behind me waiting their turn were drummer Dave Mattacks from Fairport Convention and the awesome Pete Wingfield. Chas ‘n Dave came in for a couple of numbers, reminiscing about the jellied eels you used to be able to get off a stall in Edmonton. It was just the kind of conversation Chas & Dave should be having. It was beautiful. Here they were, and more, to fill in the missing colours on my newly minted, paint by number songs – until now a dog eared collection of scribbles and chord symbols in notebooks, or snatches of piano and singing on back pocket cassettes full of fluff.

Then it fell to me to take back to London the giant spool of multitrack holding the masters of the four songs recorded so far.
‘Whatever you do’, cautioned David, ‘don’t put it through the X Ray machine’.
At the airport, after tipping John Claude every last penny I had in the world, I watched, traumatized, as the multitrack sailed towards the scanner. The French fuckers had forced me to put it through. I wondered how the record company would feel about me returning with a blank tape.

Pat picked me up at Gatwick and automatically I climbed in the back.
“Get out of it!” she snorted. “You can bloody drive.”

Nero appeared in his doorway and beckoned me in.
“Great album,” he gushed, “I can honestly say it’s one of the best four albums ever delivered to me!”
He beamed. I beamed, I’ll say I did! The ReadyBrek overcoat was back on.
“Great album….” then he frowned “…with one fatal flaw. It doesn’t have a single. And until it does, we can’t market it. I was thinking, would you be willing to co write with someone else? I’ve spoken to B.A. Robertson about this one. He loves what he’s heard. He’d be delighted to help.”
“No, it’s okay,” I said lightly.
“He’s got one hell of a track record as you….”
“I can do this myself.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah.”
The breeze turned chill.

“Okay, I want you in the basement studio here every Monday morning, with a new song. We’ll keep going until you come up with a single.”
The more I had to write a single, the less I could. After a month of Mondays I thought I’d never write a decent song again. The only tune I could hear in my head was the toll of doom. I had two more mouths to feed now – Leon and Jody (sons of course, for the family business!) not to mention Pat’s mum Dorothy, who’d moved in with us recently.