threat from China, a country with a population growing so fast, he said, that it would soon dominate the entire planet. This sparked the idea for my first opera, later entitled Rael, whose plot deals with Israel being overrun by Red China. Over the next year I developed the story, and planned to complete it as a major full-length operatic composition outside my work for The Who. I hired a Bechstein upright piano from Harrods and installed it in Karen’s bedroom in her flat in Pimlico. I wrote the first orchestrations there for Rael using a book called Orchestration by Walter Piston that I still refer to today.
After a summer of professional lunacy that included The Who’s first appearance in the beloved Palace Ballroom of my childhood, in the Isle of Man, I completed and assembled demos for a number of tracks intended for The Who’s still untitled second album. I bought a cello and played it on ‘Happy Jack’, a nonsense song I wrote about a village idiot from the Isle of Man. This is Paul McCartney’s favourite Who song – tellingly, because it was partly inspired by ‘Eleanor Rigby’, which I thought was a small masterpiece.
Happy Jack wasn’t old but he was a man
He lived in the sand at the Isle of Man
The kids all would sing he would take the wrong key
So they rode on his head on their furry donkey
But they never stopped Jack, nor the waters’ lapping
And they couldn’t distract him from the seagulls’ flapping
These are the original words, slightly altered on The Who’s version; the atmosphere of the lyric is meant to be Kafkaesque.
Kit and Chris drummed up a deal to get publishing advances for New Action, their own new music publishing house. They told me the advance was contingent on John, Keith and Roger contributing at least two original songs each to the album. I went along with the scheme, since my songwriter earnings on The Who’s hits had protected me thus far and I was happy to help. I’m pretty sure the band members never got the money – it was swallowed up in the enormous debts we all had by this time.
I explained my working method of making demos to John Entwistle, who bought himself a kit like mine and wrote and recorded his first song, ‘Whiskey Man’, in the tiny bedroom at his parents’ house in Acton that he still used as a base. I was the first person in the band he played it to. A week later John added ‘Boris the Spider’ to his list. I loved both songs. I helped Roger demo ‘See My Way’ in my Soho studio; a Buddy Holly-style piece, it was easy to work with. But this time Roger didn’t get any further than that one song, although he later wrote one more for The Who and went on to write quite a few in his solo career.
Keith got John to help him scrape together a lyric for Keith’s song ‘I Need You’, inspired by seeing The Beatles at the Ad Lib club in London, and I recorded the demo with him in Soho. It was a nightmare trying to work out the melody, as Keith’s singing was so tuneless. His second song, a rip-off from a film score banging around in his head, he merely whistled at us. We all knew we’d heard it somewhere before, but couldn’t place it at the time (it turned out to be ‘Eastern Journey’ by Tony Crombie). This became ‘Cobwebs and Strange’, a bizarre marching-band tune that was great fun to record because we actually marched around the studio while it was taped. John played trumpet, I played banjo, Keith a big bass drum and Roger the trombone – quite brilliantly, I thought. We overlaid the band over the marching track. I added penny whistles, and with Keith’s cymbals it ended up sounding like the accompaniment for a circus act.
I had been discouraged from submitting any additional material to The Who’s second album in order not to upset the necessary balance for the New Action publishing deal, so none of our recent hit singles appeared on the album. In a mad rush to fill the gaps left by this default, we added ‘Heatwave’, a Tamla song we always played on stage, but there was still a ten-minute hole. Kit came to see me at my Soho studio and I played him a few works in progress, songs about rabbits, fat people and ‘Gratis Amatis’, the opera dedicated to Kit and our beloved mutual friend the composer Lionel Bart. Kit asked whether I could put together a more serious pop-opera piece with several distinct strands, perhaps based around ‘Happy Jack’. If I could, this would fill the entire hole in one fell swoop, and the record could be released quickly.
Quick, quick, quick. ‘A Quick One’ became our new watchword and the title of the new album when it was finally released. I scribbled out some words and came up with ‘A Quick One, While He’s Away’. This became known as the ‘mini-opera’, and is full of dark reflections of my childhood time with Denny.
Since so much of this music bubbled up urgently from my subconscious mind, I’m left to interpret it much like anyone else. The music begins with a fanfare: ‘dang, dang, dang, dang’. Someone has been ‘gone for nearly a year’. This could be ascribed to the dereliction of both my parents, neither of whom saw much of me while I lived with Denny. As a result, ‘your crying is a well-known sound’. That crying was mine as a five- and six-year-old, night after night, for my parents, for my friends from Acton and my freedom from Denny.
A remedy is next promised: we’ll bring your lost lover to you, ‘we’ll give him eagle’s wings, and he can fly to you’. At this point in my own story Rosie Bradley observed my suffering and quietly promised me she’d phone Dad and explain how crazily Denny was behaving, and he would surely come and rescue me. Suddenly the lyrics darken: ‘Little girl, why don’t you stop your crying? I’m gonna make you feel all right.’ This is chilling to me even today: the implicit threat of abuse unless the child cooperates with the abuser. But ‘little girl’? In my mind I was never alone when I lived with Denny – my imaginary constant friend was a twin girl who suffered every privation I suffered.
Ivor the engine driver may well represent my abuser: ‘we’ll sort it out back at my place maybe’, and ‘better be nice to an old engine driver’. Denny took in men from the bus garage and the railway station opposite her flat all the time, and I still have nightmares in which my bedroom door opens in the middle of the night and a shadowy man and woman stand watching me, the perfume of eroticism in the air.
Finally the grand orchestra takes over: ‘cello, cello, cello, cello’; a great celebration. The rescuer has arrived. In fact my reluctant rescuer was Mum, with her lover and Jimpy in tow as peacemaker. Dad was waiting at home to see whether Mum would relent, dump her lover and take him back, or fight him for custody of me. As cellos soar, the subject of the opera proclaims: ‘Do my eyes deceive me, am I back in your arms?’ I know I felt as though I had been rescued from Hell itself.
Then, there is an elucidation: ‘I missed you, and I must admit, I kissed a few …’ (Perhaps this refers to Mum’s affair.)
Most disturbing of all is the line, ‘[I] once did sit on Ivor the engine driver’s lap, and later with him had a nap.’ Then suddenly, everyone is ‘forgiven’, not once but a thousand times, over and over – as though there’s not enough forgiveness in a single line. When I sang this part live on stage, I would often become furious, thrashing at my guitar until I could thrash no more, frantically forgiving my mother, her lover, my grandmother, her lovers, and most of all myself.
During one of the October Quick One sessions I met Jimi Hendrix for the first time. He was dressed in a scruffy military jacket with brass buttons and red epaulettes. Chas Chandler, his manager, asked me to help the shy young man find suitable amplifiers. I suggested either Marshall or Hiwatt (then called ‘Sound City’) and I explained the not-so-subtle differences. Jimi bought both, and later I chided myself for having recommended such powerful weapons. I had no idea when I first met him what talent he had, nor any notion of his charisma on stage. Now, of course, I’m proud to have played a small part in Jimi’s story. Kit and Chris snapped him up for Track Records – their first new signing.
Apart from ‘A Quick One While He’s Away’ I wrote one song for the Quick One album, ‘Join My Gang’, which I didn’t even submit, having overfilled my quota. Instead I gave it to Paul Nicholas, a singer on Reaction who was at that time going under the pseudonym of ‘Oscar’ and who was managed by Robert Stigwood (‘Stiggy’). It’s a witty song, and I was sad it wasn’t a hit. David Bowie, then