The Songaminute Man: How music brought my father home again. Simon McDermott

the same track twice. He’d always make sure he listened to up-and-coming songs right away, often sending his younger sister, Joyce, down to Woolworths with enough cash to buy a new record and a bag of broken biscuits as a reward for helping him out. In truth, ‘that bloody record player’ (as it was known) could have blown up the house, as at the time there were no plug sockets upstairs. That meant Ted running the cable to the record player through a light – essentially running a naked wire straight from the light fitting in the ceiling. It was just as well that no one was aware how dangerous this was, because it definitely took the idea of dying for his music to a whole new level. In fact, although Ted was known for helping out in any way he could, the one area that he was encouraged to keep away from was DIY. Hilda lived in fear of him trying to fix anything. She learned to keep quiet when anything went wrong in the kitchen, particularly if it involved the electrics. If Ted became aware there was a problem, he would drop everything, roll up his sleeves and say to Hilda: ‘Right, what do you need me to do?’, insisting until she felt she couldn’t say no without hurting his feelings. The whole house knew what a disaster he was and Malcolm, Gerry and Karen would often hide behind the kitchen door, laughing as Ted got to grips with the job in hand. Often, if he didn’t have a plug, he would just feed wires straight into the socket with a couple of matchsticks wedged in to stop them falling out.

      The worse of this ‘Heath Robinson’ behaviour was reserved for the new family washing machine. When Hilda was finally able to throw out the tin bath and afford a proper washer (that didn’t involve wringing out wet sheets until her hands were shredded to ribbons), it was among was the happiest days of her life.

      Although the new machine revolutionised Hilda’s life, it kept breaking down – it was second-hand and had been bought through a friend of Maurice’s at The Cora. That meant there was no real way of getting it fixed in a proper shop, so Ted would often volunteer to see if he could sort it out. Hilda would try and hold her tongue as she watched him take the whole thing apart, screw by screw, parts scattered all over the kitchen, messing up the floor that she had just cleaned. It would take him hours to put everything back together again but, without fail, there would always be one piece left over. Danger and lack of expertise withstanding, it was Ted’s way of trying to be useful, and deep down Hilda loved the way he devoted himself to making life better.

      It was around this time, in 1964, that Ted started hanging around the Pebble Mill studios in Birmingham, where the BBC was based. He met a lot of great people, all music lovers like him, all trying to turn their passion into something more, but there were three guys in particular who Ted, aged 28, met at this time and who would go on to transform his life: Ben Beards, Geoff Thompson and Fred Timmins. They were in similar situations to Ted – particularly Ben, who had a day job as a machinist at Wilkins and Mitchell in Darlaston, near Wednesbury, to provide for his wife and three young children. Despite the pressure on him to bring home a decent wage, he also played the piano accordion and used his skill to earn extra cash and help pay his mortgage. Geoff, a 30-year-old drummer, joined him, and the two of them got a regular gig at a pub over in Bilston, where they were joined by Fred, a 22-year-old guitarist: they billed themselves as ‘The Starliners’. Ben cleverly fitted his accordion with a microphone, allowing him to play the bass line and giving them a unique sound. Now and again he would get Fred to do a bit of singing, alongside playing his guitar, and this eventually led to a regular Thursday-night gig at the Friar Park Labour Club. The performances went down well but they didn’t quite have the audience on their feet clamouring for more. Fred’s vocals were OK, but not standout, and they knew deep down that was holding them back – what they needed was a real star to belt out the lyrics. They were in luck when one night, as they took a break during their set, a handsome and well-dressed bloke with perfect hair walked up to the stage and asked: ‘Can I sing wi ya, mate?’

      It was Ted.

      The band often had people coming up and asking to sing, and it mostly didn’t work as it was impossible to get a stranger to hit the right notes with no rehearsal. But there was something about Ted they thought was worth a go as he seemed to know his stuff.

      ‘Do you know “Mack the Knife” in C?’ he asked.

      The band played the intro and Ted started the song flawlessly. The guys were stunned by the quality of his voice and his phrasing. By the time he had finished the whole audience was standing up and applauding – something that hadn’t ever happened to them before.

      Ben turned to Ted: ‘You wanna job, mate?’ ‘Ar, go on. I’ll ’av a go,’ Ted replied.

      ‘That was the night our lives changed for ever,’ says Ben.

      The following week or so, Ben booked a room in a pub to go through some songs with Ted, as well as buying a new portable organ to complete the band’s sound. ‘We only needed one crack at any song. He just got them – he always knew the words straight away, so things didn’t take much practising, it was unreal,’ says Ben.

      After a couple of weeks of polishing their act, the band applied for a spot at the local Entertainers Club. It went down a storm. But there was one drawback – Ben felt Geoff the drummer was letting the band down, so he rang up Ronnie Cox, another drummer he knew, and he joined the band right away. It turned out that Ted and Ronnie knew each other – they’d grown up living a few streets apart, were the same age and had spent some of their earlier years getting into various scrapes and scuffles – and they got on like a house on fire. Ron was a real comic and Ted was constantly in hysterics at some of his jokes. It was strangely freeing for Ted, having someone else take the lead when it came to cracking jokes and keeping the mood up: it meant he could sing some of his best notes and not have to put on such a front. The chemistry worked perfectly and no one doubted that Ted was having fun. Ronnie would just have to make a passing comment to Ted onstage and then the next thing he’d be falling about laughing hysterically.

      For the next few months, the band kept the regular gig at the Friar Park Labour Club to polish their performances and to try out new songs. But they wanted bigger crowds, a higher bar, to challenge themselves with an audience that wasn’t made up of locals who already knew and loved them. Finally, after perfecting their act, they were ready to up their game. Everything was now in sync for The Starliners to move on to bigger things. So they began to spread the net wider, and auditioned at different clubs in the area.

      In the mid-1960s all the other bands were trying to copy The Beatles or The Shadows and were made up of kids ten years younger than Ted and the rest of the guys, who were all in their late twenties or early thirties. Sometimes the crowd didn’t always appreciate the different style of music that The Starliners, with their broader musical influences, brought to the stage. But the rest of the time, their refusal to conform was their best asset, something that became gratifyingly obvious during one particular open audition night at Rugeley Miners Club. This audition night was the one time every month that the Midland’s Entertainment Association – a group of social secretaries who were responsible for booking acts to play the pubs and clubs in the various local areas – were all in the same room and, once business had been taken care of, the night became the perfect shop window for them to witness potential talent first-hand. Bands would be queuing up to perform in front of the decision-makers in the hope of leaving an impression.