How do you solve a problem like Maria? And other musical family matters

What do you suppose it feels like to be the runt of the litter in a family of super-talented people?

Well, I’ll tell you. Because I am that runt.

I’ll start at the beginning, which is when I met my dad.

What?

I met my dad when I was fourteen. He and my mom had split up when I was about 15 months old. She took my sister and me back from London to her home town, Wolverhampton. I never saw him again till I was a teenager.

Anyway, in my milieu in Wolverhampton, I was pretty hot stuff musically. Aged 8, I’d won first in class in my first competition at the Wolverhampton Music Festival.

Later, having achieved a distinction in my Royal Academy Grade 5 exam, and a credit at Grade 6, I was two grades away from a home run.

And then I went to London to meet my dad. Of course, I had to play for him. I can’t remember what I played, but what I do remember is that when I’d finished, he came over to the piano and said: “Have you thought of trying it like this?”

He sat down next to me on the piano seat and proceeded to deconstruct my whole view of what a musician should be. It was the best piano-playing I had ever personally witnessed. I was mesmerised. I couldn’t get enough of it.

Families, eh? Nobody had told me. The man was unbelievable. He knew the entire Great American Songbook, with chords even Cole Porter hadn’t thought to use.

And he could boogie woogie like nobody’s business. To this day people say to me, “Come on, you must like Jools Holland!”, and I say, “You never heard my dad”.

When I got back home to Wolverhampton, I refused to attend any more piano lessons, and insisted my mom buy me a guitar. Within three months, Beethoven, Mozart and the piano were forgotten. I could play the three guitar chords required to form a group and rip up the Milano Coffee Bar in Queen Street.

I might now be only the second best musician in my family, but the flame still burned.

Fast forward a few years, and on a train from Dublin to Killarney I meet an American named Pete Zorn. He’s just been signed to a record deal, and we hit it off famously. Then he meets my sister, and they hit it off even better, so they get married.

Now I’m the third most musically talented person in my family. But there’s a long way to go yet.

Because then it turns out that my brother, Dudley, instead of studying at university, has been sitting in his lodgings playing bass all day. He’s been doing this for some time. He is, in fact, the embodiment of the 10,000 hour rule. If you don’t know it, it’s a theory that says the people who are best at anything (music, writing, computers, sport) have put in a minimum 10,000 hours of practice before they break through.

Dudley, the little bastard, had put in his 10,000 hours and then some. Not only is he a brilliant bass player – you might have seen him here and there with the likes of Mark Knopfler – but his understanding of jazz and harmony is such that he lectures at the Guildhall in London, and other places around the country. He plays the piano better than I do, and he’s a bloody bass player!

So by the time I’m 30 (Dudley’s 12 years younger) I’m now the fourth most talented person in my family.

And we’re not talking slim margins here. We’re talking aeons. We’re talking the difference between you running the 100 metres, and then finding yourself in a race with Usain Bolt, Carl Lewis and Donovan Bailey.

Still, we’re not done yet. Because I made the mistake of bequeathing a bunch of instruments, the makings of a primitive recording studio and 30-odd years worth of vinyl albums to my then 16-year-old son. And how did he show his gratitude? You guessed it – by becoming a better musician and a better songwriter than me by a factor of, ooh, about 20.

He worked his way so quickly through my albums that by the time he was 18 he had put away childish things and was ingesting Steely Dan and Frank Zappa like they were his mother’s milk.

Now I love Steely Dan, but frankly they’re in a different league musically and it’s beyond my ken. Still, I know the songs, and can even dance to some of them.

Frank Zappa on the other hand – well, nice bloke and all, but some of his music is so complex it makes my head hurt. I’ve certainly never found myself tapping my foot and humming along.

Not my son, though. Somehow or other, Noel decided to teach himself composition and harmony. Next thing I know he’s leading a band of pretty amazing players and he is the Frank Zappa figure, the master of ceremonies, the writer, the arranger, the almost virtuoso keyboard player. It’s stunning. A revelation.

Worse than that, I’m now the fifth most talented person in my family, and in terms of the 100 metres race, it’s all over before I’m out of the starting blocks.

And believe me, it’s not going to get any better. Two of my grandsons are already showing promise – one as a drummer, the other as a guitarist. And one of my granddaughters is already ‘making up’ her own songs which, while they’re never going to get played on Radio 2, would certainly make the nether regions of weirdness on Radio 6. She’s 8.

There are moments when I’ve just wanted to give up. In fact I did give up, for about 30 years. But I can always cheer myself up by reminding myself, “You’re the one who made the Top 10, you’re the one who sold half a million singles, you’re the one who appeared on Top Of The Pops.”

And then there are the moments like the time Noel, then in his mid-20s, played me a song he’d written and recorded called Maria. At first, I felt the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. And then about one minute in there’s a moment that just overwhelmed me, and the tears started.

Sometimes, being the runt of the litter has its advantages…

So here’s Noel’s 20-year-old demo of a song I believe would by now be a stone classic if he’d ever signed a deal and recorded it.

https://soundcloud.com/driver-67/maria

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Not dazzled by the Headlights

No-one ever sets out to be a one hit wonder.

When I was first offered a record deal Car 67 hadn’t even been conceived, let alone written.

The song everyone thought was going to be the first hit was Headlights. I certainly did. So did several record companies, the music publisher and all the musicians who played on it.

Headlights was part of a package of songs that Pete Zorn and I had amassed over a three year period. There wasn’t a novelty song among them.

We were what the industry back then regarded as an ‘album act’. Pete Zorn wrote seriously complex and brilliant songs about creeping urbanisation, friendship and the American desert.

I tended to the more commercial – songs about love, heartbreak and longing. It’s very rare for me to write a song about something that has nothing to do with my life, or the way I feel.

But Headlights is a straight up story. It came to me in a dream and was in my head when I woke up in the middle of the night. I always kept pen and paper by the bed, and I quickly scribbled down the words that appeared to be on a radio playing in my head. Then I fell groggily back to sleep.

A test of a song’s strength is when it takes up residence in your head. When I woke up next day, it was still there.

Also there in my head was the atmosphere and feel of it: moody and threatening, set on one of those mysterious back roads in American horror films that start nowhere and go nowhere. The sides of the road are thick with trees, and the full moon occasionally spills through to illuminate the tarmac.

For some reason, a girl is stranded on the road and is picked up by a truck driver. As the song progresses, he decides she’s easy prey; she tells him to back off and show some respect. He persists in his advances.

Somehow – I didn’t even try to resolve the means – the girl escapes from the truck and the rest of the song has the asshole driver following her and menacing her: “I can see your fright in the dead of the night. I can pick you up in my headlights”.

I think it took no more than 20 minutes after picking up a guitar to write the whole thing down and figure out how the guitar could set the mood: kind of JJ Cale style. The process was thrilling – I was convinced this was a top 10 song in the making. When we recorded the version I’m posting here, guitarist Mart Jenner said that in all the sessions he had done and in all the bands he had ever played with, he was never more sure that he was playing on a hit.

The original deal I negotiated with Logo Records was for me and Pete Zorn as the mainstays of a project we called Tax Loss. Headlights was the jewel in its crown.

But while the album deal was being negotiated, I wrote and demo’d Car 67 and the record company wanted it right here, right now!

I knew they were right. I knew it would be a hit. But I had no idea what the consequences would be for my future.

Oh dear. If we could take back time…

Barely stopping for breath after the success of Car 67, in May 1979 we released Headlights in a special sleeve on luminous vinyl. Once again Radio One demonstrated its awesome power.

One play on the station drove Headlights straight into the Top 75.

But that was the only play it got. Here’s what happened.

The dj introduced the record by saying, “If you thought Driver 67 was a one hit wonder, think again. Listen to this and see if you agree with me that we’ll be hearing a lot more from him”.

At the end of the record, the dj came back on and said, “Ah, it appears we won’t be hearing that record again”.

And that was that. No explanation, no intervention by the record company. My own interpretation was that the brass at Radio One had decreed that Car 67 was a novelty record, and as such constituted a one hit wonder. This dj hadn’t got the memo, but his producer had intervened while the record was on air.

Others thought differently – that Headlights was unsuitable for a teenage audience; that they couldn’t play a record in which the protagonist appeared to be threatening rape.

I really want that to be true, and it is credible. Terry by Twinkle had been banned because it was about a boyfriend dying; similarly Leader Of The Pack by the Shangri-Las.

I’m not going to post-rationalise Headlights. It’s a horror film in three minutes. It’s not a pleasant subject. But then neither was They’re Coming To Take Me Away Aha, or Midnight Rambler, or Cold Turkey. What it was was a bloody good record.

I’d put money on it being played on Radio One if it had been by Eric Clapton (I Shot The Sheriff), or the Stones (Brown Sugar), or Gary Puckett (Young Girl). And all of these songs predated Headlights by between five to ten years. So it’s not like I was carving out a new frontier.

Whatever the reason, Headlights was stopped in its tracks, and the record company didn’t have the clout or the gumption to challenge the decision. Shame. If one play could put it in the top 75, imagine what 10 plays would have done. And then I’d have had a very different career.

Apart from my home demo version, I recorded Headlights three times with different musicians. I was never completely satisfied, but the closest we came to what was in my head was the version that was eventually released in May 1979. That was in large part due to Mart Jenner’s playing. There’s real menace in his guitar parts.

Listening to it 35 years later, it still sounds like a hit to me. Judge for yourself and check your answer here:

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The Beatles were very badly managed. Discuss

You look at The Bee Gees now and – setting aside the tragedy that only Barry is left – you’re looking at a stellar career that started 55 years ago. In retrospect, it all looks golden.

You certainly don’t hear anyone complaining that Robert Stigwood did a shit job of managing them.

But there’s a lot of hindsight and second-guessing when it comes to Brian Epstein and The Beatles.

When The Bee Gees started out, there were five of them. In addition to Barry and the twins, Maurice and Robin, there were Vince Melouney on guitar and Colin Petersen on drums.

Colin Petersen had an extraordinary career until he met me.

After that it all seems to have gone pear-shaped.

In 1973, shortly after I joined CBS Records, Colin turned up to work alongside me in the a&r department. No-one told me he was coming, but I knew who he was.

He was instantly recognisable as the kid who had played Smiley in the hugely popular 1956 film alongside Ralph Richardson. It had always been slightly disconcerting to see that famous face behind the drums on New York Mining Disaster and To Love Somebody.

So, after a career like that, what the hell was he doing working for peanuts at a record company?

I say peanuts – CBS had doubled my Music Week salary and given me a car. I was a pig in shit.

But surely that wasn’t comparable to being a film actor, or a pop star?

Some say Brian Epstein was a poor manager of the Beatles. Here’s what I think: anyone who, in hindsight, says they could have done better is a fantasist or a liar.

And in support of this view, I give you Robert Stigwood.

Fully five years after Epstein signed the Beatles to EMI, Stigwood negotiated a deal every bit as bad – or indeed good – for the Bee Gees at Polydor. The previous year, 1966, he had negotiated a similarly good/bad deal for Cream, the first ‘supergroup’, with Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker.

Now, I don’t know this for a fact, but Colin Petersen told me that both the Bee Gees and Cream started on a royalty rate of 1.5% – that’s 0.3% for each of the five Bee Gees, 0.5% for each of the ‘superstars’ who made up Cream.

At the time I had no reason to doubt it. I still don’t. Ten years later I was offered a starting royalty of 3% for myself and Pete Zorn as Tax Loss. I turned it down and walked away. It was another year before I finally signed a deal for Driver 67/Tax Loss at a rate of 8%.

The penny a record that EMI paid the Beatles (one farthing each) in their early career was absolutely par for the course. Every deal Brian Epstein constructed – whether it was for record sales, concerts, television or merchandise – was either par for the course, or trailblazing.

It’s easy to look back now and say that the 90% he gave away on Beatles merchandise was stupid, but – pre-Beatles – where was the business model? The fact that five years later managers like Stigwood were still following or, perhaps, slightly improving on the Beatles model puts Epstein in a better context than looking back 25 or 50 years later and second-guessing him.

When I met Colin Petersen, he had accepted £10,000 to buy him out of his contract with Robert Stigwood and to relinquish all rights to anything Bee Gees for ever more.

Now, if you want to be a clever dick, you can look back 45 years later and say, “Wow, that was stupid”. But consider this: only two years after they had their first hit, the Bee Gees consisted of Barry, Maurice and Colin.

Vince Melouney had already left, and Robin had huffed off complaining that Robert Stigwood was favouring Barry as the front man. Stigwood was also trying to get rid of Colin.

A year is a very long time when you’re young, and a year in pop was even longer back in the 60s. Even the Beatles didn’t expect to last more than two years.

As for an afterlife of Golden Oldies, 24-hour a day pop radio and royalties in perpetuity – these were way off in the future, unforeseen by all but the most prescient. You certainly wouldn’t want to bet your livelihood on it. It really did seem to be all over for the Bee Gees.

So who among you would like to have been the one to advise Colin Petersen not to take the £10,000 on offer in 1970?

And who among you would now like to present the case for the prosecution against Brian Epstein?

And remember – no hindsight, no second-guessing.

You have to imagine yourself managing the family record store in Liverpool, mad about the boys, being turned down by every record company you approach.

And then you find yourself in charge of a phenomenon, the like of which has never been seen before. (Don’t use Elvis as a prosecution exhibit. He never left America, and Col Tom Parker, his manager, was no role model for anyone but sharks and charlatans).

All of which leaves me no time to construct a clever link to this week’s song, Slip Away, except to say that that seems to have been what Colin Petersen did, slipped away. Looking around the internet, what little information there is about his life more recently suggests a man who bitterly regrets his decisions.

The only YouTube clip for a Colin Petersen is here, but it’s a different guy, talking about religion and his local Church.

Slip Away, on the other hand, is about getting drunk and ending up with the wrong person – nothing to do with God, nothing to do with Colin Petersen. Get over it.

And here’s a clip of The Bee Gees in happier times, as an intact five-piece. That’s Colin Petersen on drums, Vince Melouney – looking for all the world like he also could have been a Gibb brother – in the white trousers, on guitar.

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From Dylan to The Sugababes: art and the production line

Did you ever imagine there would be song factories? Poor saps writing in teams and dreaming of getting one of their lines on a big hit, so they can share in the writing royalties?

Cold as this sounds, the results can be phenomenal. Xenomania, for instance, has produced 20 top 10 hits for Girls Aloud alone; others for Sugababes, Kylie Minogue and The Saturdays.

These factories model themselves on the old Motown concept, including having a house band ready to provide backing tracks for new material.

Motown, in turn, modelled itself on New York’s Brill Building, where songwriters like Burt Bacharach & Hal David, Carole King, Leiber & Stoller and Neil Diamond banged away at pianos all day turning out hit after hit.

Many of them turned out to be pop classics. The factory approach can work artistically as well as commercially.

At the other end of the spectrum, Bob Dylan would sit at a typewriter and hammer out words for hours on end. His ‘stream of consciousness’ was carefully crafted. Lennon and McCartney used to bunk off school and sit with their guitars, trading ideas. Less than a song a day was considered a wasted day.

Others, schooled in the art of composition, will go about it in a more formal way. My old music partner Pete Zorn can notate a song (write it down, to you and me) like the old composers. My son Noel taught himself composition and approaches it all with a Frank Zappa-like contempt for the factory approach. But he maintains a sense of wonder for the occasional dazzling pop record, the most recent of which was Happy, by Pharrell Williams.

There’s still room, though, for the old instinctive method. The pop star who lives in my house writes her own songs. She is also keenly sought out by producers who not only want some of her writing magic – which she can produce seemingly at will in the studio – they also want her voice on their tracks. She’s 16 and completely unschooled in music theory or technique.

It’s all a long cry from the notion of some tortured artist with a guitar, pouring his or her feelings onto the page – James Taylor say, or Joni Mitchell. That used to be my model. Sit at the piano until inspiration hit.

But if you open your mind, songs can come at you in surprising ways. This week’s example emerged from a very different process.

It started with an exhibition of paintings by the artist Veronique Maria.

I know nothing about visual art, so my response to paintings is visceral and subjective. Mondrian, Pollock and Rothko affect me in ways I don’t understand, but the feelings they provoke are deep and profound.

Veronique’s series of paintings under the heading Orogeny set me back on my heels, took my breath away. The exhibition walk-through included a video in which the artist explained the process that went on in her head as she created these works.

I was so struck by the poetic nature of her words that I asked if I could put them in a song. She didn’t hesitate to say yes. Not because she was flattered, nor even much cared, but simply, she said, “They’re out there” (the words) “so they’re no longer mine.” I found this an extraordinarily generous response.

The first two verses of this song, then, are Veronique’s words, pretty much as spoken in the video (link below).

The third verse is me marvelling at the way “she works paint on a canvas“. As you watch the video you will see new universes appear. “She surrenders to the unknown“, a state of mind I can only dream of.

As luck would have it, about two years before I was inspired by Veronique Maria, I had been doodling on the guitar and fallen on a rather lovely picking pattern, which I quickly recorded and then filed away.

I wrestled with Veronique’s words for some time, and then one day I found this forgotten guitar pattern tucked away on my computer and I instantly knew the two belonged together.

So that’s how this particular song came into being.

It’s fair to say that Veronique, having been so insouciant about her words being “out there” reacted quite differently when she heard them in this new context. She finds it, she says, “strange”, partly because she hadn’t expected me to quote her word for word. But also, oddly, she sees no connection between her work, her intentions, and my use of her words. Which, for me, makes it a more generous act on her part to let me go ahead.

Click here to see the interview and film that inspired this song. The film maker is Mark Birbeck.

At the beginning of 2014, Veronique put up a new video work, and threw out a challenge – which I took up – to write a soundtrack for it. So this week, you get two of my recordings for the price of one, and you get to look at two sides of Veronique Maria – the painter and the video artist.

I’ve never done anything like this before. The soundtrack piece is ‘ambient’. It follows the film, and works hard not to be intrusive, but at the same time attempts to be interesting enough to enhance your enjoyment of the film. You be the judge.

Watch the video here, particularly if you’re stressed. The combination of images and music is something like meditating.

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