Is Jeff Lynne Kevin Turvey? Or is he a genius?

Do you remember Kevin Turvey?*

He was from Solihull and, frankly, you have to be from Solihull or thereabouts to fully appreciate his pedantry. “I got some milk out of the fridge and I poured it on my cornflakes. Well, not all of it. Obviously.”

People from there or thereabouts will go into excruciating detail to ensure you get the full measure of whatever story they’re telling you. It’s a rarely remarked upon ethnic eccentricity.

I was reminded of this reading an interview with Jeff Lynne this week. He was asked if he’d like a cup of tea.

“Do you want a cup of tea, Jeff?”

“Yeah, I’ll have the same again.”

“The same cup of tea?”

“No, I can’t have the same cup of tea, obviously, ‘cos I’ve drunk it. But some tea. In the same cup.”

Well, it made me cry laughing, but perhaps you had to be there. Or thereabouts.

Another comment I love from Jeff was when Tom Petty pulled up next to him at some traffic lights in LA. “Hey Jeff, we should hang out,” said Tom. “Which was nice,” said Jeff, recounting the story later.

Of course, but for that chance meeting (Tom Petty had been planning a sabbatical) we might never have had The Traveling Wilburys. So ‘nice’ doesn’t begin to cover it.

I saw The Electric Light Orchestra at Fairfield Halls, Croydon on what may have been its first major outing (after a pub debut at The Fox & Hounds (also in Croydon). As a Beatle nut, an entire band dedicated to recreating the sound of I Am The Walrus, cellos and all, seemed an entirely brilliant concept.

But all was not sweetness and light. Backstage after the gig, I saw manager Don Arden line the group up against a wall and walk up and down, shouting at each of them for some invented slip-up. It was a control mechanism. He even punched a couple of them.

No wonder tensions ran high. Not long after, Roy Wood scarpered with a couple of other members to form Wizzard. To those of us who had imagined that the whole Walrus thing was Roy’s idea, ELO seemed like a dead duck.

But Roy wasn’t the creative midwife. Jeff Lynne was. So after a long apprenticeship, going back to 1965, when he first met Richard Tandy, Jeff finally had centre stage and a vehicle for what turned out to be a stunning talent for timeless pop tunes and a mastery of studio techniques.

I’m not going to go on and on about how brilliant Jeff Lynne is. But let’s just think about his timeline – The Idle Race (legendary but rarely heard), The Move, ELO, George Harrison, Tom Petty, Roy Orbison, The Traveling Wilburys and then, a career crowner you’d have thought, The Beatles!r

But Free As A Bird and Real Love were 20 years ago. Oh, fuck me!! Really? Yes indeed. And you can’t keep a restless and creative soul like Jeff Lynne under wraps for 20 years. I bought his 2012 album Long Wave, which is a joy.

And now he’s in the process of releasing a new ELO album, though it’s really a Jeff Lynne album, Alone In The Universe. I’ll be buying it.

I know some of you won’t. There are a lot of ELO haters out there. Though you’re not in the same class as the Phil Collins haters. Just deviating for a few seconds (without hesitation or repetition) I personally cannot see the point of hating Phil. I’m not a fan, but for God’s sake, the man is a brilliant drummer, much sampled by the Hip Hop community who revere him. And he’s written some great songs. His music career alone (preceeded by a five-year spell as a child actor) has lasted nearly 50 years.

But hating ELO at least comes with the possibility that you don’t also hate Jeff Lynne. I bet every one of you has a favourite record tucked away that has Jeff Lynne all over it. Surely no-one can hate Roy Orbison and George Harrison and Tom Petty and Dave Edmunds and Olivia Newton-John and Paul McCartney and Duane Eddy and Regina Spektor and Joe Walsh and The Beatles and The Traveling Wilburys?

If you hate absolutely every one on that list, please spare me your rationale. Instead, make a doctor’s appointment and ask to see a consultant. You’re clearly unwell.

Meantime, in case you’ve missed the buildup, here’s a gorgeous taster of Alone In The Universe, due for release late next week, I think.

*Kevin Turvey was one of Rik Mayall’s earliest inventions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnhT1UdNEa4

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Michael Jackson: a magpie, not a genius.

I’m sitting in my regular coffee bar, reading the latest John Grisham. It’s about massively important issues – strip mining, public health and workers’ welfare.

But that doesn’t stop my brain becoming alert to the music playing in the background.

I can tell it’s Michael Jackson. But it’s also Horse With No Name – the America song that sounds like Neil Young, but Neil Young with glossy makeup and a permanent wave.

I never rated Michael Jackson except as a singer and performer. Ooh, I can hear the multiple intake of breath from here!

But let me ask you, seriously – without Motown’s Corporation (a quartet of writers formed by Berry Gordy to write Jackson 5 material), the Holland brothers, Quincy Jones and Rod Temperton where would Michael Jackson’s reputation be?

And that’s not to mention Don Black and Walter Scharf who wrote the wonderful Ben, which gave MJ his first solo number one.

It was album five of his solo career before MJ even got one of his own songs on one of his own albums.

Off The Wall opens with Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough. I’d hesitate to call it a song. It uses fives notes, in two repeated patterns, over two chords. That’s not a song; it’s a riff.

What Don’t Stop is, though, is a great track. And that’s down to Ben Wright’s thrilling strings and Quincy Jones’s arrangement and production. All those wonderful string and guitar riffs that stick in your head, the driving rhythm and the superb scoring for strings and brass.

Now before you get too far on your high horse and start sticking pins in my effigy, a little perspective.

Elvis Presley was 21 when he recorded Heartbreak Hotel, the same age Jackson was when he made Off The Wall. And, in a world where singers sang and producers produced, Elvis produced Heartbreak Hotel, as he did most of his records from there on. And he did it with musical giants such as Floyd Cramer and Chet Atkins in the room.

If you want to use phrases like ‘revolutionary’ and ‘ground-breaking’ (as have been used about MJ), let’s be sure we give them full meaning. What Elvis did with Hotel, and Blue Suede Shoes, and Teddy Bear, and Don’t Be Cruel, and Paralyzed – that was revolutionary. With only a couple of years studio experience under his belt, Elvis Presley turned the system and popular music on its head.

Mind you, I’ll grant you that Elvis never wrote a song that was worth a damn. So let’s look at another 21 year old and what he’d achieved by the age of consent.

Paul McCartney was born in 1942. Before his 22nd birthday he had recorded three albums with the Beatles, all but 13 of the songs written by him and John Lennon. They’d topped the charts on both sides of the Atlantic and – like Elvis before them – turned the music world upside down.

And every one of those chart toppers, and their B-sides, were written by McCartney and Lennon. In the next six years they wound up the gold standard to heights that have never been equalled, experimenting, pushing boundaries, testing their own abilities, testing their own sanity, and pushing everyone around them to previously unimagined heights of creativity and achievement.

Now – Michael Jackson.

Well, he’d been performing since he was six years old. He was an absurdly talented entertainer and right from the off – when he sang lead on I Want You Back at the age of 12 – you were clearly listening to a natural born singer.

He had his first solo release at the age of 13 and continued to make albums with his brothers.

But it’s eight years, five solo albums and 10 group albums before he gets to record one of his own songs.

You have to ask yourself: was MJ totally unambitious; or was he just a really slow learner?

Or was it the case, as I believe, that he just didn’t write terribly good songs?

Let’s not forget that his Motown stablemate, Stevie Wonder, was 15 when he cowrote his second international chart record, Uptight. He also co-wrote I Was Made To Love Her at the age of 17. Age 21, he wrote the entirety of his Where I’m Coming From album with Syreeta Wright. We know that Stevie had to fight all the way for artistic control with Motown. But he did fight, and he did win.

Go and listen to Never Dreamed You’d Leave In Summer. Did Michael Jackson ever in his life write such a gorgeous, technically accomplished song?

And he also never managed a ‘classic period’ such as Wonder’s, which started with Music Of My Mind (every song by Wonder, one co-write with Syreeta), continued with Talking Book and ended, arguably, seven years and six albums later with The Secret Life Of Plants. During this period, Wonder wrote, arranged and produced everything – with some help, but still …

Can anyone argue that Michael Jackson really ever did anything to match that? While you rage and fulminate, let’s talk about his dancing.

Fact: Michael Jackson was a great dancer. Really? If so, then what were Bill Robinson, Pearl Primus, Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly? There aren’t the superlatives to cover the distance between MJ and their talent.

And, back to Elvis, who personally choreographed the iconic Jailhouse Rock sequence in the film of the same name. Look at that sequence again and tell me it wasn’t the prototype for every classic pop and rock posture.

MJ had about six moves, none of which he invented. Even ‘the moonwalk’ wasn’t his. Watch this clip if you don’t believe me. There’s Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson, Cab Calloway, Bill Bailey and a bunch of others, some of whom you will recognise.

Maybe you’ve never seen some of these entertainers; but that doesn’t mean MJ hadn’t. He knew the move existed. He asked dancer Jeffrey Daniels to teach him how to do it.

So my point is, Michael Jackson was a great entertainer. But he was also vastly overrated as a musical artist, as a songwriter and as a dancer. He had a lot of help, and even by the time of Thriller he wasn’t able to fill an album with his own songs. Four songs out of the nine are by MJ. Thriller itself was written by Rod Temperton.

Thriller was released three years after Off The Wall; Bad came nearly five years after Thriller. That’s three albums in eight years. Stevie Wonder managed six classic albums in seven years, all self-written and co-produced.

Which brings me back to my coffee shop and this song that’s nagging in my head. Turns out it’s called A Place With No Name.

Horse With No Name/Place With No Name. I swear it’s even in the same key. By the stuff you leave on the shelf shall you be judged. It is beyond unoriginal, shamelessly filched and completely beneath a supposedly great artist.

And I find another song on the same album called Slave To The Rhythm. But it’s not the Grace Jones song. (I’m gonna write a song called Heartbreak Hotel – why not?!)

He was a magpie, Michael Jackson. He collected other people’s dance moves; other peoples riffs and song titles; he feathered his nest with great songwriters; and with Quincy Jones and, frequently, Rod Temperton. And only when this team had fed, raised and trained a new song was it allowed to leave the nest. At which point, MJ got all the credit.

So let’s celebrate a great entertainer and performer. But let’s cut down a little on the ‘genius’ side of things. And just to illustrate my point about how little of a ‘song’ there is in Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough, have a look at this.

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John Lennon not a genius. Ooh-er missus! But that’s not what I’m saying.

The biggest problem Paul McCartney has with his career is that he lived.

The comparisons with John Lennon are so highly coloured by Lennon’s early death that McCartney is mocked just for surviving.

Here’s the accepted wisdom: Lennon was the soul of The Beatles; the tough rocker; the genius with words; the psychedelic heart of the more experimental days.

Now here’s the truth: Paul McCartney wrote, undoubtedly, some of the greatest songs of the 20th century.

Alongside his more sentimental songs, he wrote songs that made your parents sweat – Why Don’t We Do It In The Road, Helter Skelter.

And it was McCartney who was ‘underground’, who stayed in London and mixed with the cultural avant garde while the other three Beatles retired to their Surrey mansions.

Sgt Pepper was entirely his vision.

He was also the greatest rock ‘n’ roll singer Britain ever produced. Listen to his version of Long Tall Sally, or I’m Down, the b-side of Help.

On the other hand, if you think John Lennon was incapable of sentimental pap, you clearly haven’t registered that he wrote Goodnight, specifically for Ringo to sing. It has to be the single most saccharine song the Beatles ever recorded, with the possible exception of ‘Til There Was You, which they didn’t write, so I’m not counting it.

For every Lennon rocker, I’ll give you a Macca roller. For every Lennon gem, I’ll give you a McCartney diamond. For every genuine Lennon-McCartney classic, I’ll just give thanks.

This whole ‘Lennon the genius’ vs ‘McCartney the crass’ argument is such arrant bollocks. When you say ‘crass’ or ‘sentimental’ or simply ‘rubbish’ are we talking about the same man who wrote Penny Lane, Yesterday, Fool On The Hill, Blackbird, Hey Jude, Let It Be, I’ve Got A Feeling, We Can Work It Out, Drive My Car, Get Back, Here There & Everywhere?

It’s often forgotten that McCartney, having been in the biggest band the world has ever known, followed it up by forming – erm – the biggest band in the world. Again.

Wings were HUGE. For a generation born too late, Wings IS Paul McCartney.

You might say, well John never had the chance. But he did. By the time John was murdered, Wings had been on the road for nearly 10 years.

John Lennon made, for me, two stupendous albums – Plastic Ono Band and Imagine. Which is not to forget the wonderful Rock’n’Roll – an album beset by Phil Spector’s increasing paranoia and John’s legal problems over Come Together. (His early mantra, ‘If you’re gonna steal, steal from the best’, came back to haunt him).

But it was an album of covers, John’s last album until Double Fantasy in 1980. So it seemed, at the time, a last lazy throw of the dice by an artist who had run out of steam.

And it’s forgotten, at this late stage, that Double Fantasy was seen on release as corny, sentimental and just not a fitting comeback for the onetime Picasso of Pop. The first single, Starting Over, struggled to number 8 in the UK top 10. A week later it had dropped down to 21. In America it peaked at number six.

And then John was shot, and all critical and commercial bets were off.

Now Starting Over was a tragic swansong for a cultural hero, and the album – even Yoko’s bits – was seen in hindsight as a post-modern expression of domestic bliss and parental devotion. And history was rewritten in the blink of a bullet.

So let’s remember some other incongruities: There was a brief period post-Beatles when Ringo Starr had the most successful solo career. What! Really?

Yes.

And George Harrison did more, all at once, with All Things Must Pass than the other three combined. He also had the first post-Beatles number one with My Sweet Lord.

None of which, of course, addresses the question of quality. McCartney had the first number one album (in America) post-Beatles with McCartney. Now there’s an underrated piece of work. Maybe I’m Amazed, Every Night, Man We Was Lonely. The final track, Kreen Akrore, is the sound of a man still stretching himself, experimenting, seeing where things will go rather than pushing them. It’s not entirely successful, but that’s not the point.

The follow up, Ram, is still an incredible piece of work. Without even listening carefully, you’ll hear The Beach Boys, rock’n’roll, The Beatles (showing how much McCartney shaped the later sound of the Fabs) and, for those looking for a darker side, a little biting satire. Too Many People is a message to John which is a lot subtler than John’s own How Do You Sleep – where he tells Paul, “The only thing you done was Yesterday”.

Nearly 30 years later, well into phase two of his solo career (post-Wings) he was beset by poor reviews and the burgeoning view that he was nothing without Lennon. Mull Of Kintyre and The Frog Song became emblematic of a man derided as having his eye only on the crass and commercial.

Well, I’ll tell you something about The Frog Song. It’s a very sophisticated piece of work. My guess is that most average musicians couldn’t even pick out the chord sequences. I’m not a fan of the record, but I’m an admirer of the talent it required.

And then, in the middle of this miasma, and nearly 30 years after the Beatles split, he released Flaming Pie – an album my youngest daughter picked up on, unbidden by me, and became in her own right a bona fide Macca fan. She’s 23 this year.

It’s too much to ask that everyone take the time to re-evaluate McCartney’s later career. But I’m telling you now: when he dies, you’ll wish you’d listened to Flaming Pie. Even now, Little Willow – written for Ringo Starr’s first wife, who died of cancer – will make you cry.

And you’ll also realise you should have listened to bits of Chaos & Creation In the Backyard, and to most of Memory Almost Full. Even New, his most recent solo album (2013), has songs to warm the heart of Beatles fans. But it also contains tracks any writer would be proud to have created.

So, can we buck the trend, and appreciate McCartney’s continuing ability while he’s still alive?

Or do we have to wait till he kicks it?

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Through The Door At Apple Corps (Episode 2)

Paul McCartney. Height of The Beatles. In your village, Sunday afternoon. Ooh, got a new song. Let’s all go down the pub. Hey Jude…..

This is my favourite Beatles story, which I first heard from my friend Alan Smith.

Alan was a Liverpool journalist who journeyed south in the wake of The Beatles. He went on to become an iconic editor of NME. He took it from a 16-page weekly, struggling to sell 50,000 copies to a veritable door-stopper that topped out at 272,000 copies a week. He achieved this stunning turnaround in 18 months. He also hired Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons.

Anyway, he told me the story about the day in 1968 he had been driven up to Yorkshire with Paul McCartney and Derek Taylor. Derek is often referred to as The Beatles’ publicist, but he was so much more than that. We’ll get to Derek.

Up in Yorkshire, McCartney was producing Thingumybob by the Black Dyke Mills Band.

On the way back down the A1 (it might have been the M1, but this isn’t a Monty Python sketch) Paul asked for the road map. They needed a break, maybe some food. He looked through the names of nearby towns and villages. Decided he really liked the sound of Harrold, in Bedfordshire.

They went to Harrold.

According to Alan Smith (and I later read in Derek’s book, As Time Goes By) Paul strolled through the village, chatting to the locals who were doing their weekend chores – clipping hedges, mowing lawns, washing cars.

They all ended up down the pub, and McCartney sang – for the first time to an audience – Hey Jude. What would you give to have been in the Oakley Arms, Harrold, on June 30, 1968? To know that you were the first people in the world to sing along at the end – “Na na na nana na na”?

Alan’s first wife, Mavis, worked at Apple. She was a tiny, beautiful girl who could be quite fierce, but also vulnerable. She it was who named Hot Chocolate, whose first recordings were released on Apple.

There’s Errol Brown and his chums, in a crowded office. Someone says, “Name this band.”

Erm….

“Hot Chocolate!” says the secretary on the middle desk.

Done. And a 40-year career is launched.

And at the centre of this chaos was Derek Taylor. His office at 3 Savile Row was always what used to be called a ‘scene’.

But Derek appeared calm, above it all, languidly, wittily having his way with the world.

One time a bunch of us were just passing time. Derek was having fun with one of the writers from Disc magazine who had described Apple’s offices, in print, as “swish”.

“Well,” says Derek, “you do know what ‘swish’ means in America?” Always sardonic. “As long as you think you know what you’re doing……”

And before he can finish the thought, in walks George Harrison, trailed by a ragged band of colourful folk.

John and Paul were smaller than their publicity (I wrote about that here). George was even shorter. But the charisma emanated from him like testosterone from a prize fighter. By his side, Phil Spector seemed insignificant.

“Derek, I don’t know if you’ve met Phil Spector?”

So much musical history in that one sentence. Here was Phil Spector, in town at Allen Klein’s behest (if you believe Allen Klein) or George’s and John Lennon’s (if you believe Wikipedia) to rescue the Get Back tapes from a locked cupboard and turn them into the album that became Let It Be.

Later, Spector would produce George’s stunning solo debut, All Things Must Pass, and then John Lennon’s first two solo albums. Although Ringo remembers it rather differently, commenting that he barely witnessed any input from ‘Phil’ on the Lennon sessions. No such doubts with All Things. Spector was all over it.

So, this was the world that whirled around Derek Taylor. A difficult man to describe. Urbane, witty, charming – but none of that will get you close to the experience of his use of the English language. Almost poetry on the hoof.

There are rare instances of him caught on YouTube. But nothing gives you the flavour of a man who could make even a mundane statement sound like Edward Lear thinking out loud.

Once, confronted with a transatlantic telephone call from a radio station ‘checking that Paul was dead’, Derek pointed out that “the best possible proof of Paul McCartney still being alive is that he is, in fact, still alive.”

And no, he didn’t believe Paul talking to the station in America would prove anything. People would just say it wasn’t Paul.

“The only proof we need that Paul is alive is that he is. You don’t have to produce yourself, or appear on television, or speak. You just have to be alive.”

With this kind of directness of tone, but also a beautiful lyricism, Derek wrote a memoir, As Time Goes By, which is about more than his time with the Beatles. This is a guy who came down from Liverpool – where he was an experienced and established journalist, eight or so years older than John and Paul – and ended up working not only with The Beatles, but in America with the Byrds, The Beach Boys, Harry Nilsson and, one of his own favourite moments, The Monterey Pop Festival of 1967.

From the age of about 30, his entire life was like that day in Harrold in 1968. If you like this story, there are plenty more like it in It Was 20 Years Ago Today and As Time Goes By, both available from Amazon. Put them on your Christmas list. They’re not cheap, but well within stocking filler range.

Meanwhile, all this talk of the 60s made me nostalgic, so I made this cover version of one of my favourite pre-Beatles songs. It’s made with loops of electronic chill music. But my guitar and vocals drag it back from contemporary to slightly cheesy. Hope you find it an interesting version.

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The Illuminati. Oh Lord, Really? Conspiracy theories are so tiring!

Paul McCartney, as we all know, was killed when he crashed his Aston Martin on his way home from Abbey Road studios late one night in 1966. A very sad night.

His place in the Beatles was taken by William Campbell, a lookalike-soundalike about whom nothing much is known except that he is the singer of every ‘McCartney’ track on every Beatles single and album post-Revolver. Who wrote those songs is not really discussed.

Buddy Holly, on the other hand, didn’t die when his plane crashed in 1957. He was just horribly disfigured and didn’t want his public to see him. So he hid out in a secure house in a remote part of America. He’s never been seen in public since.

Elvis Presley, of course, has often been seen in public since his death was announced in 1977 – in supermarkets and by sightseers around his Memphis home. Well, where else would he be? A real home-boy, our El.

I mention all this because of an increasing belief among young people that the music industry is controlled by the Illuminati.

I say young people. Actually, I know some of their parents also believe this and won’t hear a word of argument. It’s all over the internet, you see. There are videos on YouTube, some of them even showing artists and executives explicitly admitting that, yes, it’s true.

Except, of course, no-one is explicitly saying anything of the sort.

And it’s not true.

I prefer the older conspiracies myself. Paul is Dead is a stonker.

That William Campbell. What a bloody nerve! It was him broke up the Beatles you know. Can you believe the sheer brass neck of the man?

At one point, on the Let It Be sessions, he even tells George Harrison not to play on one of the songs. It’s there, on film! George says to William, “Well, if you don’t want me to play, I won’t play”. And Campbell says, “I seem to have a way of upsetting you”.

Bloody right. Coming in here with your airs and graces, thinking you actually are Paul McCartney.

What an ungrateful sod. He gets the opportunity of a lifetime to step into the shoes of a Pop God. All he has to do is play his part and become stinking rich.g

Instead, he sows discontent, refuses to acknowledge Allen Klein as manager, tears Apple Corps apart and then announces he’s leaving the group. “I’m leaving the group,” he told the Daily Mirror in 1970.

Not long after, he formed a new group, this fake McCartney, and bugger me, Wings became the biggest band in the world!

Lennon, Harrison and Starr must have looked on in wonder and asked themselves: “How the fuck did that happen?”

In the meantime Campbell/McCartney writes a song (Too Many People on the Ram album) in which he tears John Lennon off a strip, saying, “You took your lucky break and broke it in two. Now what can be done for you?“.

That’s just cold, isn’t it? Not to mention a pot, a kettle, and the colour black.

John struck back. In How Do You Sleep? (on the Imagine album) he tells William Campbell: “The only thing you did was Yesterday“.

See what he did there? He took Campbell back to the actual Paul and let him know that he, Campbell, couldn’t write a song as good as anything by Paul.

Anyway, in the immortal words of Jimi Hendrix, “Enough of this rubbish”.

Professor Diane Purkiss, Professor of English Literature at Oxford University, had this to say last week, on the subject of conspiracy theories: “All conspiracy theories are dangerous.”

Her thesis is that the more you feel that they are not listening to you, the more you feel that they are keeping the truth from you. And that’s where conspiracy theories are born. But they’re more dangerous than we might imagine.

“Conspiracy theories excused most of the genocide that took place last century – the idea” (for instance) “that the Jews are conspiring against everybody else.

“Stalin’s purges were part of a conspiracy theory. You take action against the people who are supposedly conspiring against you. If we’re lucky, we end up with a Mark Chapman. If we’re unlucky we end up with a Hitler or a Stalin.

“Conspiracy theories are one of the greatest menaces to democracy. Where it gets dangerous is when you decide that people are deliberately keeping the truth from you, and to resolve that, you have to kill them.”

So come on kids. Listen up. True dat, what the Prof say. Ya feel me?

The Illuminati of legend has been around since 1776. Having, according to rumour, fomented the French Revolution, the Wall Street Crash and the Second World War, wtf do you think they’d be doing messing around with pop music?

The irony is that the original Bavarian Illuminati – which was real – had the aim of opposing superstition and prejudice. They also wanted an end to religious influence and abuses of state power. They even – in 1776 – spoke up for gender equality, starting with the education of women.

So, again: wtf, kids!?

Go in peace and listen to your music, free of superstition and prejudice. And if you want some real fun, I heartily, absolutely and totally recommend you read the Illuminatus! trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson.

I can think of at least three current conspiracy theories that are a direct result of feeble-minded people actually believing that Shea and Wilson’s satire was, in fact, contemporary history.

And while you’re waiting for that corporate behemoth Amazon – surely bent on global domination of a much more sinister kind – to deliver your books, have a listen to Paul Is Dead on the BBC iPlayer. It’s all sorts of fun, and all sorts of interesting.

And, obviously, it’s also part of a conspiracy to convince us there is no conspiracy. If you meditate on that too long, your head will explode.

So here’s a little fact to calm you and ground you. Paul McCartney’s house in St John’s Wood was less than 10 minutes walk from Abbey Road Studios. Who in their right mind would drive to the studio, smoke pot and drop acid all day and then drive home…….oh……….I see what you’re saying, man.

Yeah. Heavy.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04l0tvb

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Prince vs The Beatles: when the entourage hit town

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.

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Daddy, was your childhood in black and white?

I am Driver 67 and I am a one hit wonder.

There, I’ve said it. After 35 years of frustration and embarrassment, my friend John Williams told me last year: get over it; embrace it; use it.

So I started to plan this blog where, each week, I will put up a song and tell you the story behind it.

And then, a couple of weeks ago, BBC4 started replaying the old Top Of The Pops I had appeared on. Suddenly the pressure was on to get the blog out there. I was trending on Twitter, according to the BBC.

So here it is. The Driver 67 Blog.

Some of the songs will be old; most you will never have heard. One a month will be new. Most will be my own, but occasionally I will talk about songs by people I know, or have worked with.

I’m kicking off with a new one, just so you know I’m still capable. Plus, if I’m going to blog about writing and recording songs, I thought I should start with a song that was pretty easy to write. That way it’s easy for me to explain the process.

Also, I imagine that most of the people reading this will be of a certain age and will relate to the lyrics, which is another good reason for kicking off with this particular song. (If you’re not ‘of a certain age’, welcome. I’m flattered!).

Mind you, ‘lyrics’ is pushing the definition a bit. What happened is this. I started to make a list of things that had happened in my lifetime, starting with childhood and working through to the present day. The headline to this blog is something my youngest daughter Lily said when she was about six. I was driving on a motorway and trying to explain there had been no motorways when I was her age, and that I remembered the first car in our street. And that’s when she asked the immortal question: “Daddy, was your childhood in black and white?”

Well, no it wasn’t, obviously. But where I grew up, in Wolverhampton, there were still – in the early 50s – streets lit by gas. One friend even claimed to remember the ‘knocker-upper’, the man whose job it was to extinguish the gas lights as dawn broke and tap on the windows of those whose shift was about to start.

The milk and bread were delivered by horse and cart. (Milk and bread were not the only commodities the horse carried with him. The gardeners in the street, my Uncle Jack among them, would be out in the street, early mornings, waiting with bucket and shovel: if the horse crapped outside your house, that was your manure for the week).

Of course, because of the war, there were no bananas, and television was a totally unknown entity to us. No-one we knew had one. I think I was nine before I even saw a tv, let alone watched it.

So my list started like this:

– Gaslights
– Horse and cart
– No bananas
– No TV

We were Irish. We were working class. Is the Pope a Catholic? Church was demanded. On Monday mornings, the nuns who taught us would ask each class, “Who didn’t go to Church yesterday?” There was no point lying. Lying about going to Church was a mortal sin. You’d rather suffer the cruelty of the nuns than imagine the Big Black Mark on your Immortal Soul which such a lie would surely cause.

So the list continued:

– Church on Sunday
– Nuns on Monday

I looked back on those days, and then looked at the world we live in now – computers, iPads, exploring Mars, instant communication, instant gratification – and I couldn’t help but ask the question:

How did we get from there to here in 60 years?

And, Bingo! There’s the song.

By the way, in case anything I say should sound like a complaint, let me say I LOVE the progress we’ve made in my lifetime. Of course I could moan that no-one’s going to pay me for writing this blog; and that I’m putting music out there for people to listen to for free.

Well, that’s my problem. I still haven’t worked out how to make this free-for-all pay for my life.

But just look at what I’m doing. I’m publishing my thoughts to the entire world. How many will read them is down to me and how clever I can be using Twitter, Facebook, Google etc.

And I’m putting music out there that I’ve recorded, on my own, in a room, in my house. How cool is that? No studios to pay for; no engineer getting in my way; no musicians to pay for; all the time in the world to make my mistakes and no-one else around to make me feel embarrassed by my inadequacy.

So this first song, This Is A Life, is a celebration not a plea for commiseration.

It takes us from gaslit streets to global communication, and simply asks: How did we get from there to here in 60 years?

It also has a couple of significant nods, mostly to Arcade Fire, whose almost retro approach to production and arrangement gave me the confidence to record this song exactly as I wanted to. I imagine seeing AF live today is like seeing Springsteen in the 70s.

Also, Paul McCartney has a song – That Was Me – which is really worth a listen.

And finally, a nod to my friend John Howard, who has shown that it’s possible to write about being older without being maudlin. More of that in a later blog.

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