grips with washing my hair in the bath—why don’t they have showers in this country, was all I kept thinking? My plans were somewhat fluid, as I only anticipated being in London for six months, which certainly made me determined to enjoy every minute of my stay and not miss out on a single experience. Professionally my goal was to learn how they made records with alchemy rather than with equipment. On the cover of the Magical Mystery Tour EP were some words about four wizards and a grand wizard, alluding to the Beatles and George Martin—I took this literally. I knew, as I walked down Fulham Road to the tube station, that I loved London—the people, the funny money. I was in a movie, my own A Hard Day’s Night. I knew I was in way over my head but something inside me kept saying, you could get ahead in this city; with hindsight I suspect that everyone else was too. I kept telling myself, I will learn the arcane arts of British recording and someday I’ll be a mover and a shaker here. I was what would later be called ‘driven’—back then I was just a crazy Yank.
It was confusing to me that most London streets only went on for a few blocks before they ceased to exist. New York is a grid city, mostly. I grew up on 74th and 11th; I went to school on 79th and 16th; the subway was on 69th and 11th. In New York I always knew where I was and where I was going. It took me months to get familiar with my London surroundings; in the first few weeks I walked a lot.
London accents were probably the hardest to fathom. I saw A Hard Day’s Night and Help! a total of 30 times or so, and I knew the Scouse accent of course; I just wasn’t prepared for the Cockney accent. Even a thick Glaswegian accent was easier to understand. I would tilt my head sideways like a dog and try to understand this new, twisted English.
I noticed that there weren’t many young kids that were dressed like the Beatles or the Stones. Most people just had ordinary jobs and dressed rather dowdy. But I was totally impressed when I saw a long-haired guy wearing a military jacket from Portobello Road—that’s what I expected to see—but the ratio of hipster-to-square person was about the same as New York at the time. I wore my hair long in London and I was stared at and sometimes sneered at by the older generation. Girls in miniskirts drove me crazy. Skirts were short in New York but in London girls were wearing their skirts unbelievably short, maybe just an inch or two below their most delicate parts. I’m sure I strained my neck many times—before I was joined by my wife.
The food was awful. The Wimpy burger tasted like dog meat. Coffee was as bland as dishwater. Fortunately I liked tea, as my mother used to make it with milk and sugar although most New Yorkers took it with just lemon. I realized very quickly that I had to learn words for food, like chips for French Fries, etc. I wasn’t used to eggs fried in oil either. They tasted disgusting. But I did like British sweets and cookies, known as biscuits. I discovered digestive biscuits with and without chocolate covering and often made a meal of a packet. I loved English milk, it was far tastier and richer than American milk.
The British money system just didn’t make sense at all. I’m sure I was taken advantage of in the first few weeks. Not only were there 240 pennies in the pound but each coin also had a few different names to memorize. There was a half crown, but there was no crown. There was a ten shilling note that was referred to as a ten bob note, and a sixpence piece, that many called a tanner. None of this made sense. Just when I became familiar with the system Britain went decimal.
Of course I couldn’t take a shower wherever I lived. Washing my hair was an ordeal; I don’t think I ever satisfactorily rinsed it out with a saucepan or two of water.
Television and radio were very disappointing. Radio hardly played rock or pop. I had to tune into Radio Luxembourg for the hour or so that they played music in the evening. Radio Caroline was okay although the signal was weak. But the DJs were awful; they sounded old and had a patter like vaudevillian comedians. The television was all of three channels then and they flickered off between 11 p.m. and midnight. That’s it, all of Britain was meant to go to bed like well-behaved children. If I wasn’t working in the studio everyday with Denny Cordell I would’ve gone back, there was nothing else exciting to do in those first few months.
One thing that was very obvious was English reserve. In the ’60s in New York you could make a good friend within 15 minutes of meeting the person. Americans were always more informal than the British and the heady Flower Power made us ‘all one’. This was not so in London during the same period. My wife was told at a Sunday tea party that we were not of their ‘set’. I think it took a year to make a good English friend, although it was easier to be more casual with musicians.
Denny Cordell became a good friend the first day we met, and during those early days in London I went everywhere with Denny and learned his routine, although there was little routine about it—it was insane. Denny was a guy who couldn’t say no. He was also at the top of his game, which made everything possible; he couldn’t turn down anything, especially if it was cool and lucrative. He was recording Manfred Mann, the Move, Procol Harum and Denny Laine simultaneously at sessions catered with tea, digestive biscuits and spliffs. These Jamaican-styled hashish joints were a revelation to me and despite their strength Denny could still recite the table of elements while he smoked. My tolerance was far less and cocaine was not yet in fashion. Being at Denny’s beck and call twenty-four hours a day was very definitely worth it for the experience. It allowed me to infiltrate the sanctity of British recording studios and I was a quick learner. During my first month in London I heard a white label of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and that alone was worth the price of admission.
Records like Sgt. Pepper were the result of all night sessions and so there was a downside to all this. As budgets grew larger, tempers grew shorter. To this day I am still dealing with the anxiety of recording artists who want to sound great, and better than their competition. It was ever thus, but as a novice in 1967 I had to learn about this. Recording in New York was still a superficial process compared to the depth and attention to detail that was going on in London. But I said to myself, ‘if this is the way the Brits do it I have to learn.’
Denny had recently become an Associate Producer at Deram, a division of Decca Records, which is how I met Tony Hall. He was in charge of Deram’s PR Department and for a while he put me up in his flat; I moved up from a sofa to my own bedroom. Tony had been a radio DJ in the early ’60s and he was working hard at promoting the careers of the Move, Denny Laine and Procol Harum. The contrast between Tony’s two-floor flat in Mayfair’s Green Street and Denny’s basement flat could not have been greater. I was only just getting to grips with London’s geography and had no idea about the demographics of London neighbourhoods, but I quickly realized that Mayfair was ‘posh’ (another new word for me). Tony was a lot more conventionally British than Denny. He wore cardigans and suits as an executive for Deram, but most amazing of all—he had short hair. Then again he must have been in his forties, which to me, aged 23 (just), was ancient. But he said something that made it all right with me to live at his place: ‘I went to George Harrison’s home in Henley-On-Thames. When I arrived along with some other people George opened a little Indian pill case he was wearing around his neck. He pulled out an acid tab and popped it into each of our mouths. I had no idea what I was taking, but soon found myself on a ten-hour acid trip. I had the most awful time, people’s faces became grotesque; it was my first and last acid trip.’
Maybe so, but dropping acid with a Beatle made you instantly cool in my mind.
It was through Denny’s deal with Deram that I began working with Denny Laine, who was so easy to get along with by comparison to the Manfreds. Twenty-three-year-old Denny had been the lead singer with the Moody Blues who had a No 1 in the UK with a cover of Bessie Banks’s, ‘Go Now’. The band had split up in late summer 1966 and while they had reunited with new members, Justin Hayward and John Lodge, almost immediately, Denny pursued a solo career.
There must be something in the name Denny because DL was as adept at making spliffs as DC. I became close to Denny L early on, especially as Siegrid did not arrive in London until the latter half of May. I would go to his flat over a Greek deli in Moscow Street, Bayswater and work out things with him; I wrote the string arrangements for his Electric String Band. He had a guitar stringing ritual that always amazed me. It started with rolling a giant spliff. Then he’d put the first string on, wind it up to the correct pitch and improvise