Janis Joplin

It was 1985 when I got my first glimpse of where pop stars were headed. I was at the Brits (before they became ‘The Brits’) and Prince turned up to collect an award.

He came through the back of the room, a tiny figure, surrounded by seven or eight really big guys who – in the absence of any prior experience of such a thing – we had to assume were ‘bodyguards’. It looked and felt utterly ridiculous.

I’m a big admirer of Prince. In my iTunes library he ranks fifth for number of tracks, after The Beatles, Bob Dylan, the Stones and…..John Howard, about whom I wrote last week.

But it is still beyond me why he felt the need for this show of muscle at an industry event. Only music industry people were present (back then, the public was not allowed in). And it was held in a London Hotel (not Earls Court or the 02). Prince was literally showing off.

Nevertheless, he showed us where things were going. No-one is surprised today when even the most minor pop tarts turn up with an entourage and a list of demands.

The last time I saw Paul McCartney was about four years ago in London’s Denmark Street. He got out of a car (admittedly driven by someone else), and went alone into a shop that specialises in bass guitars. He emerged about an hour later, happily chatting to the guitar-maker, stood on the pavement for a while and got back into his car.

(I was there by chance: at the time, I was importing guitars from America and they were being sold from one of the shops in the street. I was visiting my instruments.)

Between him getting out of the car and getting back in, everyone in the street had been tipped off that “McCartney’s on the street!”. But no-one bothered him; no-one approached him; no-one hassled him.

You might think that at the height of Beatlemania, things would have been a little different.

The first time I saw Paul McCartney in the flesh was when my sister insisted we had to go to Wimpole Street where we might catch a glimpse of him. We were on holiday in London, and I had no idea how she knew where a Beatle lived.

But sure enough, we stood on a corner looking up Wimpole Street, and in no time at all, a Mini pulled up, and out got McCartney and Jane Asher. This was probably 1964, definitely after I Wanna Hold Your Hand, and around the time A Hard Day’s Night came out.

It’s only looking back that I can see, comparing today’s pampered and protected celebrities, how almost ‘normal’ The Beatles lives were. One night in 1967, sometime after Sgt Pepper’s release, I was walking into the Bag O’Nails club, and coming towards me were John Lennon and Paul McCartney. They were deep in conversation, heads almost touching. At the time I thought, “Wow, they’re much smaller than I imagined”. (Publicity had led us to believe they were both 5ft 11in, while George was 5ft 10 and Ringo was 5ft 8. You could probably knock two or three inches off all of those).

It didn’t feel weird or unusual at the time. But looking back, how amazing. No entourage, no security, no surging crowds. Just two of the most famous people on the planet, strolling, oblivious to everything but each other.

At this time, and for at least another 20 years, the only person I saw surrounded by an entourage was Janis Joplin. At an event to publicise Cheap Thrills, instead of mingling and chatting to journalists – as was expected – she sat on the floor, bottle of Southern Comfort in hand, surrounded by a circle of a dozen or so hippies. She looked sour and unhappy, cutting herself off from the record company executives and journalists who were there to help her sell albums.

Contrast that with the night in 1969 when, finding myself in the company of Les Perrin – a man you might enjoy Googling – he insisted we stop off at the Albert Hall. With no challenge from anyone, we walked through the stage door, and made our way to the dressing rooms where Jimi Hendrix was preparing to go onstage.

With about three minutes to go before he walked up the tunnel to the stage, Hendrix emerged from the toilet, zipping up his crushed velvet pants. He smiled broadly when he saw Les, clearly pleased to see the man. Les said: “Jimi, this is Paul Phillips from Music Week”. He turned to me with another dazzling smile. “Oh, hey man, good to meet you” and he shook my hand, apologised for keeping it short, and off he ambled to play his now legendary gig.

Things have changed phenomenally. We can’t, of course, forget the fact that because John Lennon was used to walking around unprotected it was easy for Mark Chapman to murder him.

But the pop star who lives in my house is going to have a very different life from those of my era. And I can’t help thinking it’s a shame. Fame today means being cut off from anything remotely normal. Did you see the One Direction film? One of the mothers has a cardboard cutout of her own son in her house, because she has rarely seen him since the 2010 X Factor final in which, let us not forget, 1D came third.

All of which provides a very tenuous link to this week’s song, More Like That. Yes, I do wish that some things were a bit more like that, a bit more like they used to be. But that’s not what this song is about.

It’s about a day I spent with an old friend on the coast after a very unpleasant divorce (is there any other sort?).

Her kindness that day, listening to me babble about all my problems, prompted me to write a song in which I wished that my ex could have been “more like that”.

But all’s well. Events of that day are the reason I now live on the coast, and how come there’s a pop star that lives in my house. And things are, now, more like that; more like they should be.

One of the great things about getting into record production in the mid-70s was that, with the exception of Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin, most of your heroes were still around.

Some of my heroes were likely the same as yours. But there was a second tier of people to whom you might not give a second thought. For me they were fascinating.

So it was, for instance, that I booked David Mason, the guy who played piccolo trumpet on Penny Lane, to come and work his magic on a track I was producing, the Mister Men theme song as performed by a duo with the unlikely name Bugatti & Musker.

On the same session I had Captain Mainwaring, disguised as Arthur Lowe. I stood by his side as he listened back to his contribution. He muttered to himself: “Silly old c***”, before turning his head slightly sideways, giving me a knowing smile.

Or you could book Tommy Reilly, the harmonica player you’d known all your life – the man who played the theme tune to Dixon Of Dock Green.

Amazingly, you could also call on the services of Geoff Emerick, who won a Grammy for his engineering work on Sgt Pepper.

As a journalist, I’d known Geoff for a while. He was a quiet, gentle and unassuming guy – excellent credentials for an engineer, a job that required the patience of Job whilst employing deep knowledge of all that was required to create sound out of thin air.

It probably never occurred to you – did it? – that while The Beatles were spending six months (an unprecedented amount of time back then) creating Sgt Pepper, there were people up in the control room, spending hours, days, weeks, months of their lives waiting to turn on the red light; having to remain focused for take after take after take of songs we now regard as classics; but which for them became like Chinese water torture.

There’s a track on Revolver, the Beatles’ seventh album, called Tomorrow Never Knows. It sounds like an engineer’s nightmare. For starters, John Lennon wanted a sound like “a thousand Tibetan monks chanting on a mountain-top”. This was Geoff Emerick’s first song as engineer on a Beatles track. By George Martin’s account, Geoff got stuck in, and was specifically responsible for the, at the time, very strange sound of John Lennon’s vocal.

If you were paying proper attention to The Beatles, Tomorrow Never Knows was the final confirmation that the Mop Tops had gone, to be replaced by an exciting enigma that was exploring music and recording in ways that no-one had ever done before.

Geoff Emerick made a massive contribution to that. You don’t win Grammys for just turning up. I’ll talk about working with Geoff in a future post.

But all this Beatle talk, and Revolver in particular, reminds me that when I first heard Yellow Submarine it struck me with a sense of profound melancholy. I didn’t hear it as a singalong, but as an other-worldly excursion into all sorts of sub-conscious emotions that I couldn’t put my finger on.

I know what you’re thinking. Oh yes I do.

But in 1966, in Wolverhampton, we didn’t even know drugs existed. We could just about afford three pints of scrumpy on a Saturday night.

Fast forward eight years, and my next appointment walks in. He’s a guy named Pete Bennett, and he records under the name Rhys Eye.

Usually, in these situations, you were handed a tape, or a cassette, and you’d listen and then say “No”. Very, very occasionally you would say “Yes”.

But Pete Bennett was extraordinarily nervous. “I’ve got this brilliant idea.”

“Well, let’s hear it then”.

“Trouble is, it’s so simple, if I let you hear it, you’ll nick it”.

To cut a long story short, we finally agreed that he would come back the next day and I would present him with a signed statement to the effect that, whether I liked it or not, his idea was his idea and I would do nothing to compromise his ownership.

Which is how I came to record a cover version of Yellow Submarine that exactly fit with my own emotional reading of the song.

This is a version which might never have seen the light of day. I made the mistake of giving a copy to my contact at ATV Music, which by then owned the Lennon-McCartney publishing rights. I calculated that they would love this new lease of life for a song that was hardly built for cover versions, and would add their weight to promoting it.

How wrong I was. A few days later, he called me and asked me not to release it. “Why on earth not?” I asked. “Well, I’ve played it to John and he doesn’t feel it truly represents the song he wrote.”

To this day, I have no idea what this sham was about. Here was a publisher turning down a cover version and – get this – lying to me! No way had he played Rhys Eye’s version to John Lennon. (In any event, it was Paul McCartney who wrote the song, as John related in a 1980 interview).

But at the time, I had to make a decision. Effectively I was being told I would be defying John Lennon’s express wishes. In other words I would be upsetting one of my greatest heroes, and one of the world’s biggest and most revered stars.

Well, obviously, I released the record. I loved it; still do.

But no-one need have worried. It really didn’t see the light of day. Never got a play on Radio One, died the proverbial. If you’re still out there, Pete Bennett/Rhys Eye, I kept the faith.

DRIVER 67

Prince vs The Beatles: when the entourage hit town

Saying ‘no’ to John Lennon – not sure about that!