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NORTH
EAST Alan Clayson reports
on his
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It
was intended as a series of three one-nighters in the north-east with Screaming
Lord Sutch, that would climax with the recording of a ‘live’ album for
Newcastle-based One Louder Records. His Lordship and I were also expected to
make ourselves pleasant at a charity record fayre at the University of
Northumbria. My motives, for partaking in this jaunt were not entirely selfless
as it presented an opportunity to plug my soon-to-be published Jacques Brel
biography (mostly via regional radio shots), and sell and autograph records and
earlier books. I was looking forward to the ego-massage of being a celebrity
again after hermit-like months of driving myself into a clinical depression over
bloody Brel. A
fortnight before the first show on 1 March, however, promoter John Esplen was
told that, with enough domestic problems to start World
War III, David Sutch couldn’t make Denny
was the first pop star I ever met too. You may think I’m making it up, but he
signed the back of a Lord John boutique card after I’d spotted him emerging
from a Carnaby Street tobacconist’s in spring half-term 1965, just as his
Moody Blues’ ‘Go Now’ was slipping from the charts. I came up to his
shoulders then, but he came to mine when I ran into him again thirty years later
at a hospital fund-raising event. We
became friends, but I couldn’t help but feel a frequent sense of wonderment -
as if both
Denny and the situation weren’t quite real - during
our venture to the north-east, an area relatively unknown to me, despite having
worked there many times in the late 1 970s with Clayson and the Argonauts.
Scarborough, Huddersfield, Middlesborough, you name ‘em -
outlines dissolved simply because
we usually arrived and departed by night; most contacts with any given town’s
street life occurring only during the time it took to cross from kerb to venue
doorway in early evening lamplight. On
the way up to my engagements with Denny, I was tempted to investigate
Chesterfield with its fantastic crooked spire, but I pressed on to pay my
respects to the Grand Old Man. The seasons may change, but Dave Berry Then
it was on to Morley where I benighted myself upon the family of Ian Drummond,
research assistant for most of my books. Part of the evening was spent in
licensed premises with Chris Kefford -
with whom I’d remained in touch since April 1994 when I received an
unexpected telephone call from him to invite me to his Bradford flat for an
interview after he’d decided to break a press silence over the quartercentury
since he quit the Move in 1968. What
sickens me about Chris is that, despite the rough road he’s travelled, all his
hair remains on his head and is untouched by silver threads. He’d grown fuller
of face since I saw him last, but still had the build as someone half his age.
As yet, he’s made no full-time return to either stage or studio, but there
have been sporadic bookings in local pubs. I
was doing one myself the following night. Admission was free, and there was no
stage at the Malt Shovel in Middlesborough. I was half expecting a party of
supporters up from Hull, including Jane Reif who’d sung my lyrics on a version
of ‘The Moonlight Skater’ by Jim McCarty’s Stairway. If they’d appeared,
I might have come across as less of a background noise, interrupted by a woman
who kept barging into the playing area and bawling into the microphone at
irregular intervals until the landlord chucked her out. With this problem
removed, I went the distance. A small contingent had been with me all the way,
but I only reached the rest during my big finish. Predictably,
Denny went down better by pandering admirably to assumed audience desires with
‘Go Now’, ‘Say You Don’t Mind’, singalongs (including a ‘Mull Of
Kintyre’ finale)
from his
decade in Wings, a couple of Dylan numbers, and a ‘Blackbird’ that
would’ve given Paul McCartney pause for thought had he heard it. For me,
however, his finest moment was the unreleased ‘Ghost Of The Scrimshaw
Carver’, a self-penned sea shanty impressive for its instant familiarity. Denny
was also recipient of the most lionizing afterwards. A memorable conversation I
had was with someone who began with ‘are you the same bloke who
wrote Beat Merchants~ When I assured
her that he and I were one and the same, she expressed astonishment that not
only was I an entertainer but also that I was not bearded and venerable as she
imagined a proper author ought to be. That
night, I was billeted in a Newcastle suburb, namely the house of Ray and Avril
Nichols, who, while serving as
unofficial road managers, were,
with their son Mark, perfect hosts, attending to and often anticipating my every
wish - including
a swiftly-acquired taste for stottie cakes, a delicacy peculiar to the region. Avril
and Ray also manned a stall at the record fayre where my standing as a
‘personality’ at an assigned table was undermined by so many requests for
directions to the toilets that I scrawled a sign giving same and stuck it on a
nearby notice board. The
bash that Saturday evening at the Archer, a tavern a stone’s throw away,
brought uproar from a mixed crowd ranging from undergraduates to Sid the Sexist
types. Somehow it encapsulated my entire career as a performing artist. There
isn’t space to detail why, but my recitals are inclined, as John Esplen
remarked afterwards, to ‘provoke extreme reaction in people’. Outbreaks of
barracking punctuated laughter and applause as I walked an artistic tightrope
without a safety net -
but with a malfunctioning PA system. Midway,
a strapping lass beckoned me to the lip of the stage to utter an eye-stretching
but flattering proposition in my ear. This helped spur a bravura exuberance
that resulted in me being cheered back on for an encore that I did not deliver
owing to some hard case clambering up to inform the assembled populace that, to
give his foul-mouthed insolence a polite translation, my music was not so good.
I retaliated by enquiring off-mike,
but loud enough for his mates to hear, about whether he was having trouble with
his hormones. After
‘Mull Of Kintyre’ just over an hour later, I was stunned when the idol that
a provincial schoolboy had encountered in Carnaby Street in 1965 called me from
the dressing room to duet with him on his encore, a medley of olde tyme rock
‘n’ roll. Twenty-four hours later, this honour was bestowed once more -
and with interest -
when,
following a looser set in which Denny dredged up favourites from as far back as
the pre-Moody Blues era, a more subdued concert at Dr. Brown’s in Huddersfield
closed when Chris Kefford resurfaced as the third member of what one wit present
christened the ‘Beverley Brothers’ for ‘Roll Over
Beethoven’, ‘Baby Let’s Play House’, ‘Whole Lotta Shakin”, ‘Hound
Dog’ and all the rest of them. Before
we parted, I asked Denny the question I’d been dying to ask him since
Middlesborough: am I crap? If tentative rebookings in Tyneside and thereabouts
for October smoulder into fact, the north-east
will be provided with another chance
to consider the accuracy of his one-word reply. (reproduced with thanks from "The Beat Goes On")
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