living room was down there. Upstairs was another living room and a second bedroom where we kept instruments and a writing table for Siegrid. It may sound quite nice but the walls were damp and there was plenty of mould. It was a furnished flat with furniture that would have been old around the start of the War. There was a small bathtub, a larder but no fridge, and the electricity worked only when we put a shilling in the meter; we had never seen anything so primitive. The bath water was never hot enough and we often ran out of shillings to keep the electricity running. An electric fire in every room, which ate about three shillings an hour, emitted the heat. Luckily it was summer and there were many beautiful days when the windows stayed open and the fires stayed off.
One day, not long after we moved in, Tony Hall called and asked if we wouldn’t mind taking his cats for a few weeks while he went on holiday. He said he was impressed by how we took to the cats and how much they liked us. In the States we had three cats so we welcomed these furry guests. The cats were never out of their flat and were totally freaked out during their first few days with us. One gorgeous day we left the top floor living-room window open and the cats sat on the window ledge watching the birds in the trees. There was a ten-foot jump from the window to the garden; a leap we assumed the cats would never attempt. The fat, black cat didn’t, but the Abyssinian was a mean, lean cat machine; after she made her leap we scoured the area for her but never did find her. Tony Hall was so pissed at us when he came back, he told us we might as well keep the fat cat, Shoshone, named after a Native American tribe. She stayed with me until 1971.
London continued to cast a weird spell on me. Once I was walking with Viv Prince, the drummer in a group called The Pretty Things. This was the first time I witnessed the chasm between the young and the old. Viv was a wild man who partied to the hilt, and he was dressed in a flowery shirt, very tight trousers, Cuban heeled boots and a kind of Edwardian velvet jacket. His hair was dyed yellow (not blond) and he wore pink-tinted glasses. Of course he was stared at. He would get back at the gawking passers-by by shouting and hooting at them, which I found embarrassing. We turned into Fulham Road underground station and Viv stomped down the escalator, causing everyone to turn to see the commotion. As we were passing a fragile OAP, Viv pulled a rubber spider out of his pocket and waved it in front of the old man. He retorted quickly in his London accent to Viv, ‘They don’t frighten me, I’ve seen ‘em before you git!’ This was my version of a Beatles movie—the old man resembled Wilfrid Brambell. It was hysterical—Viv had no come back.
Denny’s bread-and-butter band was the Move, although I don’t think he ever took them as seriously as Procol Harum. In Denny’s mind they were just a pop band, but with both Carl Wayne and Roy Wood as lead singers, and Roy’s incredible melodies and hook-laden songs I think they were much more. I was called upon to write string parts for them.
My first string session was for a song called ‘Cherry Blossom Clinic’; it was about an insane asylum. The string writing was the easy part; the hard part was conducting the twelve string players. Having loved the fabulous strings on ‘Eleanor Rigby’, it was clear to me that none of the players I had were from that group; mine were a tough lot. They refused to wear headphones so we had to play the track quietly on the studio speakers; we couldn’t allow the drums and other instruments to ‘bleed’ into the microphones for the strings. They seemed to be old school players who were used to classical conductors. In that world it is customary to conduct ahead of the beat because they play with a delayed reaction. Pop musicians respond to the throb of the beat and I was conducting in that fashion, with the result they lagged behind. It wasn’t going well until the lead violinist came up with the suggestion: ‘Perhaps you should hold a pencil in your right hand and tap the beat on the palm of your left hand, that way we can follow easier.’
This reduced me to a human metronome stick but it got the job done. It wasn’t so much that I was a bad conductor, although I probably was; their refusal to wear headphones had made it come to this.
My next session with the Move was my biggest accomplishment in those first months. I wrote a score for a small wind quartet for ‘Flowers In The Rain’. Denny was unhappy with the track and felt that his production and performance didn’t nail it; especially the bridge that lagged behind, almost imperceptibly. Denny’s solution was to trash the track—with no plan of re-recording it. But I loved the song; I said I thought it was a hit single and my wind quartet arrangement would smooth over the rough edges. I persuaded Denny to indulge me. I convinced him that we could one-up the Beatles and George Martin (who changed the sound of pop with classic instrumentation on songs like ‘Yesterday’) and choose an instrumental combination that they hadn’t yet thought of. Instead of the usual string section I chose a quartet of flute, oboe, clarinet and French horn. My logic was simple—the song had a pastoral theme (albeit through the context of magic mushrooms). I used instruments that Mendelssohn would have used, paying homage to him by quoting the Spring Song in the outro. I asked Denny to record the quartet at half speed during the dodgy bridge to create a very special effect; the instruments sounded like they were played by pixies sitting on mushrooms in an enchanted forest. The Move and Denny, and even the very staid session musicians, thought the experiment was a success.
The crowning glory was when ‘Flowers In The Rain’ reached No 2 on the charts and all for the relatively small expense of hiring four classical musicians at £12 each. It was kept from the top by Engelbert’s ‘Last Waltz’ but had the distinction of being the first ever single played on the BBC’s new ‘pop’ station, Radio One by Tony Blackburn shortly after 7 a.m. on Saturday 30 September 1967. ‘Flowers In The Rain’ became the first release on the resurrected Regal Zonophone label, which EMI used exclusively for Denny’s Straight Ahead Productions. The label originally dated back to the 1930s but had been used in the early ’60s to release records by the Joy Strings, the Salvation Army’s very own pop group.
That Engelbert Humperdinck kept the Move from the top of the charts was a stark reminder that 1967 was a year of very contrasting musical styles. There we were, stuck in the middle of ‘the summer of love’ with a man wearing a dinner jacket and bow tie topping the chart. Britain was not quite as I thought it was going to be from 3,000 miles away.
One of the guys that worked for Essex Music told me, ‘I’ve got the arrangement for the new Tom Jones single.’
‘Can I take a peak?’ I was amazed. It was in three-four time and I could see the chorus was absolutely crass cabaret mush. The song was ‘Delilah’, which would become a No 2 hit for Tom early in 1968. Two years earlier he had blown us all away with ‘It’s Not Unusual’. It all seemed very strange.
There was an interesting, and costly, postscript for both the Move and Roy Wood in particular as well as Regal Zonophone. The group’s manager, Tony Secunda, decided to send out a flyer with a caricature of the Prime Minister performing a sexual act to promote ‘Flowers In The Rain’. Unfortunately Harold Wilson took the offending promotional postcard somewhat to heart and sued Regal Zonophone. The judge found in favour of the P.M. and he decreed that all royalties from the sale of the record were to be paid to charity, a situation that is still in existence. All rather unfortunate for the song’s writer, Roy Wood, who, like the rest of the band, was unaware of the management’s little scheme, as he does not receive a penny from it.
On another session for the Move, I was conducting some string players when a stranger walked in on the session. Denny quickly walked up to my podium where I was standing and whispered in my ear, ‘He’s from the Musicians’ Union, cool your American accent.’ I had not yet received a work visa and it was potentially a tricky situation. I proceeded to communicate with the string players in mime or very hushed tones. It seems so trivial now but I could’ve easily been banned from ever working in Britain if the M.U. representative had worked out that I was an illegal alien.
I gained a lot of confidence working with Denny and the Move. It was on those sessions that I learned how to get a great drum sound. At one of them Denny just couldn’t get the sound to his satisfaction and he made poor Bev Bevan play his kick drum for three hours. Bev actually broke down in tears.
‘My leg’s so fucking tired I can’t even play the song now.’
Denny seemed not to care, but we attended to Ace Kefford’s bass sound, which took almost as long, so