biography

And On the Seventh Day.......

My walk with destiny began in 1965 with the formation of Ace and the Crescents with other pupils at Farnborough Grammar School. After approximating 'Pretty Face' by The Beat Merchants, we disbanded when denied the use of a guitarist's bedroom - the only place we could rehearse. His Mum had heard a Crescent say 'bugger'. Next, a unit that dare not speak its name mastered three numbers ('Money', 'Reelin' And Rockin'' and 'For Your Love') before GCE '0' levels loomed - and The Mothers of Invention's British concert debut in 1967 proved pivotal in informing not so much my 'artistic direction' as an attitude about presentation.

Yet I wasn't to make a public appearance with a group until 1969 when Burnt Rubber were booed off at Hartley Wintney's Kiln Hall. This was mitigated by a romantic interlude in a backstage broom cupboard on the strength of parochial notoriety as a mainstay of Aldershot Arts Lab, and for three articles in the Schoolkids 0z during my editorship of Farnborough Technical College's student magazine, The South Briton.

By 1971, I was lead vocalist with Turnpike, a folk-rock quintet "getting-it-together-in-the-country" near Reading, not far from Traffic's famous cottage. We acquired only the merest renown in flashback when, though attributed erroneously to Clayson and the Argonauts, a circulated demo tape of my only composition for Turnpike, 'The Rake's Progress', was placed by John Tobler at Number 28 in Zigzag magazine's 'Fab Thirty' in 1977.

As an escape valve from earnest Turnpike, I had created Billy and the Conquerors with Tim Fagan, another University of Reading student, to perform items from a record collection that had grown after we started cutting lectures to scour the area for any emporium bearing the sign 'junk', 'second-hand' or 'bric-a-brac' in an obsessive search for artefacts from musical eras as far back as the 1920s - though most of them were post-war: Johnnie Ray, Lord Rockingham's XI, Anthony Newley's Idol 0n Parade EP, 'She's The 0ne For Me' from The Aquatones, The Elegants' 'Little Star', The Flee-Rekkers, The Dave Clark Five, Dave Berry, Five Live Yardbirds, Twinkle, Liberty's Rhythm 'N' Blues Vol 1: The End 0f An Era retrospective, anything to keep the ghastly Woodstock Generation present at arm's length.

'I can honestly say that I've never seen anything like it in my life' gasped a Wokingham Times newshound after an eighteen-piece Billy and the Conquerors hit the town's Rock Club. 0f every ensemble in which I have played a part, the Conquerors, titans of trash though we were, remain my favourite - and as long as I survive as an entertainer, so will mythical Billy. Even today, I experience our aural junk-sculptures and the seedy-flash visuals in daydreams. You had to have been there, but, failing that, you could read the 'Eddy and the Confessors' section in Chapter Five of Beat Merchants.

My next venture, Average Joe and the Men in the Street, also absorbed the Conquerors' ramshackle grandeur - as did Clayson and the Argonauts, the more enduring entity that followed. During a fleeting sojourn in its string section, I noticed that the Portsmouth Sinfonia were victims of much the same passion.

Another vital element in my cultural melting pot was Gallic chanson after I stumbled upon Jacques Brel via Scott Walker, and Charles Aznavour through his spot on a ITV variety show in 1972. Six years on, Clayson and the Argonauts' go at 'The Ham' was to be dismissed by a New Musical Express critic, damn his impudence, as 'a slice of Aznavourian breast-beating that was all too appropriate under the circumstances.'

By then, the group were mutating into a kind of traveling asylum. By a bilious coincidence, we had been championed by Melody Maker's Allan Jones for occupying 'a premier position on rock's Lunatic Fringe'. This and further coverage had been triggered by John Tobler's glowing NME report after we'd semi-gatecrashed a bill of pre-punk fare at Guildford Civic Hall in 1976, weeks after an incident that had concluded with us being hustled out of one Berkshire venue at gunpoint. 0n this threshold of eminence too, the drummer was gaoled for eighteen months, and two other key musicians quit; one fated to co-produce Hilda Baker and Arthur Mullard's duet of 'You're The 0ne That I Want'.

Regardless, I muddled on with new personnel, and, after we made our London debut at the 100 Club (with the then-unsigned Jam) on 9 January 1977, I held Eldorado in the hollow of my hand fleetingly with a Radio 0ne In Concert spot, and a long run of headlining treks round Britain and Europe - always, it seemed, one week after Wreckless Eric and one week ahead of The Adverts. En route, the Argonauts and I were catalysts of the wreckage of a Luton auditorium; a near-lynching at Barbarella's in Birmingham; a car chase into the West End after a midnight matinee in Canning Town; a season in Amsterdam's red-light district (our 'Hamburg' period); female nudity at Islington's Hope and Anchor; male nudity in Bristol, and a net payout of £1.46p apiece after two weeks in Ireland (that had also earned six encores in Belfast, and a pelting with snowballs in Dublin).

Somehow, we made time to record our only (and very disinclined) single, an arrangement of Wild Man Fischer's 'The Taster' (coupled with a track from a hitherto unissued in-concert LP at London's Roundhouse). We were too unsure of ourselves for open mutiny when producer Hugh Murphy - fresh from a smash with Gerry Rafferty's 'Baker Street' - replaced our keyboard player's triplets with those of the late Tommy Eyre, formerly one of both Dave Berry's Cruisers and Joe Cocker's Grease Band, and destined then to be Wham!'s musical director.

The Taster' rose to No. 3 in Time Out's chart (based not on sales but disc-jockeys' choice) - and Landwaster, the other side, spent a fortnight in the Belgian top twenty - but soon must come the hour when fades the fairest flower. A lengthy lay-off prefaced the first of many attempted Clayson and the Argonauts comebacks and the protraction of the group's intermittent recording schedule that climaxed with 1985's valedictory What A Difference A Decade Made album. What had metamorphosed into a cumbersome big band (with horn section and backing chorale) had been pruned to two-guitars-bass-drums by the time we played our last show - as 'special guests' of The Nashville Teens at the Putney Half-Moon.

While this door was closing, one that had opened was the awakening of a literary calling dormant since the Oz affair. A Record Collector article about The Dave Clark Five had come about after I'd run into their former bass guitarist in a Camberwell music shop in 1981. More articles followed, and a parallel second career as an author left the runway with my first book, Call Up The Groups!, in 1984.

A spin-off from 1995's Beat Merchants was a See For Miles compilation that kicked off with 'The Man 0f The Moment' (which rhymes 'Nashville Teens' with 'Swinging Blue Jeans') by Clayson and an ad-hoc resurrected Argonauts. Beat Merchants also contained an Alan Clayson-Jim McCarty songwriting credit for Dave Berry's 'The Moonlight Skater' (which I still think satisfies every qualification of nothing less than a Christmas Number One). A nascent version turned up on Raindreaming by Stairway (with vocals by Jane Relf, ex-Renaissance). McCarty and fellow Stairway-farers, Clifford White (a New Age colossus) and Louis Cennamo (ex-Renaissance), were roped in for the Berry session.

I attended too as a general nuisance, and, shortly afterwards, 'sat in' on keyboards with Jim's R&B group - a sort of ersatz Yardbirds - during its residency in a West London pub. This was one of many artistic diversions around the turn of the decade. I functioned too as guitarist and vocalist with two local groups, Poacher's Pocket and then Parisian Fishnets, whose stock-in-trade was French cafe music. In my own right, I was attempting to widen my work spectrum as a 'performance artist'. Rather than a group (with all the attendant complications), I was a solo turn, peddling a collision between the avant-garde and the most hackneyed cliches of cabaret. It defied succinct explanation to indifferent promoters and disinterested social secretaries.

From 1979, I was also producing the records of others, beginning with an EP by Welwyn Garden City's boss group, The Astronauts. More far- reaching, however, was a tenure on keyboards (like Tommy Eyre long before me) in Dave Berry and the Cruisers after its leader 'covered' a Clayson opus, 'On The Waterfront' from What A Difference A Decade Made. Later, I climbed up the ranks to write and produce the lion's share of Dave's Hostage To The Beat album and his 1988 revival of 'Out Of Time'.

Because of Dave and Call Up The Groups!, I became something of a 'face' on the Sounds 0f The Sixties circuit, and after distance forced my exit from the Yorkshire-based Cruisers, such networking paid off in sporadic engagements hammering piano as one of the late Screaming Lord Sutch's Savages; a string of one-nighters with Denny Laine in 1996, and, before that, rehearsing a group - The Wild 0nes - to back Twinkle, now a grande dame of the 1960s nostalgia scene. I chose to pluck bass mainly because I could conduct by eye-contact with greater ease than from behind a bank of keyboards until grave internal problems scattered The Wild 0nes like rats disturbed in a granary.
This was regrettable but not disastrous as I was now scratching a living from my pen at an alarming pace. Books alone ranged from supermarket potboilers to Aspects 0f Elvis (with its excerpt from a projected novel, The Thistledown Flash) and the only English language life of Jacques Brel. The biggest commercial successes have been an authorised biography of The Yardbirds, (number one in the Mojo book chart), The Beatles Box - and the film tie-in, Backbeat with its horrendous misprints (e.g. 'obscene' instead of 'obscure' on page 4). More serious was the ham-fisted sub-editing of the Roy Orbison biography, and the loss of twenty-thousand words from Death Discs (basis of a Radio Two programme I presented on 19 November 1996). Thankfully, these and other of my books are in the process of reissue from the original manuscripts by Sanctuary.

Some customers at the few bookings I had then were motivated by morbid inquisitiveness to see how hard the mighty - if that is the word - had fallen since the sundering of Clayson and the Argonauts. During four visits to the United States - ostensibly to plug my books - there were no such preconceptions. Expecting a dry, writer-ish lecture, those at this convention hall or that exposition centre could hardly believe I was real as I plunged into onstage excesses that occurred in the knowledge that I was unlikely to see any of these folk again - or was I?

Within days of shaking off jet-lag back in England the first time in 1992, I received a package from two ladies from Minnesota who'd been among the crowd flocking round me like friendly if over-attentive wolfhounds in the aftermath of a recital in Chicago, and had each bought a What A Difference A Decade Made. As well as a long letter, they'd sent a sweatshirt with my image and the words Claysonfest '92 printed on the front. Apparently, I had an American fan club.

The dozen or so members were twitchy with anticipation in the weeks leading up to the issue of Soiree, a Clayson collection cast adrift on the CD oceans in September 1997 by Havic, an Anglo-American company. The attendant press release labels me - not entirely accurately - as a 'chansonnier', which I've been ever since. What's one more label? Perhaps an English Aznavour is just what the world needs. Perhaps too, the world is ready for the full-scale autobiography that will result when I veil flesh on these bare bones - for there's no reason why the saga of a comparatively obscure artist and his many attempts to become rich and famous should not be at least as intrinsically interesting as those of his more celebrated brethren.

In fact, I think I'll bang out a sample chapter right now...