2/ Cockney with the Hockney [ Back to excerpts ]

By spring 1975, having attained a certain degree of competence and the confidence that goes with it, we started to promote our own gigs in the back room of a pub, which Rene had found near to the art-college in Twickenham, where she was studying. It was called The Cabbage Patch and we played there every Saturday night for about six weeks. A combination of flyers, free listings in Time Out magazine, posters, friends, college students and word of mouth provided us with an audience that doubled in size each week, and by the fourth week there was a healthy crowd.

We had already started to introduce a rather crude, low budget theatricality into our stage show, using strobe lights, smoke, slide and super-8 film projections and dramatic up-lighting. The music was being played with more attack and less caution, and one Saturday evening in May 1975 we did a show of frightening intensity and fire, a show which transcended all of our technical and musical shortcomings, and which culminated in a spontaneous audience invasion of the stage, as feedback howled and the drum kit was demolished. It sometimes happens that a rock band makes a virtue of all the frustration and aggravation that having neither manager nor agent, neither record company nor budget brings. The set we played that night was a seething rant against our own inadequacies, and the audience had roared back their approval. They had screamed, unmistakeably, 'Yes-we like this'. This was our greatest moment to date. Our coming of age. You only do this job for approval and acclaim, and when you get them for the first time, it is honey-sweet. Afterwards, in the pokey little anteroom, no more than a cupboard really, which served as our dressing-room, we were euphoric, and already longing to play next week's show and to build upon that night's success. It almost made up for the disappointment of that afternoon, when Fulham Football team, the Cinderellas of football for as long as I could remember, played in their first-ever FA Cup final, and froze on the Wembley turf against their London rivals West Ham United, and hardly touched the ball as they went down 2-0

After that show, while winding down with a beer before performing the deflating and embarrassing ritual of dismantling our own stage equipment in front of the audience we had just rocked into a frenzy, we had two visitors to our dressing room. The first one through the door looked sort of familiar, and introduced himself as Jonathan King, who we knew was managing the successful but po-faced prog-rock band Genesis at that time. I was not and am not a fan. He had had a couple of minor hits in the sixties with his own songs. His marketing angle back then was that he was that rarity, an educated pop singer. He was a Cambridge undergraduate. In those days pop singers didn't get university degrees. They didn't need to. They were Gods. But King was different. He had education. My God, never did a man wear so little learning so heavily. Unfortunately, the lyrics to his songs were so brain-numbingly banal that, if a seven-year old from an inner-city slum school came up with something similar today, the school inspectors would sent in and the establishment would be closed down pronto for falling standards. But Jonathan King had education.

Like King, Genesis, the band he now managed, were also being hyped on their Public School/ University pedigree, like prissy little poodles at Cruft's. Jonathan King is that uniquely middle-class English sort of a man who mistakes smarm for charm. Even today he is still wheeled out sporadically to pontificate on some or other new pop phenomenon on soft-core Entertainment TV, and he strains oh-so-hard to be witty, or even mildly controversial, like a constipated stand-up comic trying to shit out a decent punch line. You could weep for him if it wasn't all so perfect. Ah, education.

Our other visitor that night was Bryan 'Morry' Morrison, who had managed Pink Floyd, but had made his substantial fortune from music publishing, with The Floyd, T Rex, and The Bee Gees among his acts. While visually conforming to the most crudely-drawn caricature of a cigar-chomping, East-End Jewish wide-boy, the complete social antithesis of King Wasp, he was in fact a self-educated man of astonishing flair and instinct, charismatic and confident to the point of arrogance, who could be relied upon to turn the most unpromising set of circumstances to his advantage. He had a big, fit, robust physique, and a cannonball head, a close-trimmed beard and expensive teeth. He had already lost much of its hair, but with Morrison it didn't matter. He was polo-playing testosterone on legs, nervously hyperactive and overwhelmingly macho. He filled any room he walked into. I cannot imagine that, in his entire life, he has once uttered those deathless late 20th Century words 'I'm trying to get in touch with my feminine side'.

I told Bryan I was a big fan of Syd Barrett, the founder member of Pink Floyd, who had fried his brains with acid, and been ousted by the band when he no longer knew that his guitar wasn't even plugged in onstage. Bryan's mood blackened. 'Don't talk to me about fucking Syd Barrett. He's doing my head in at the moment.' I asked why. 'He comes into the office for publishing royalties. I say, 'Syd, you're not owed anything till the next quarter. You were in here two months ago and I gave you a cheque for everything we owed you.' Syd says, 'No I wasn't. I don't recognise this room. I've never been here before'. Fortunately, I took the precaution of getting him to sign a receipt for the cheque, cos I knew he was out of his tree. I show him the receipt. Look Syd. You took a cheque two months ago. He goes quiet for minute, and then he says, 'You cheating bastard!' I say, 'What?!' and he says 'That's signed in red ink. I never use red ink. I HATE red!' and storms out of the office calling me a cunt.'

Morrison had a vengeful, brutal streak, which meant that somehow or other he would get even with anyone who crossed him, however long it took and however much it cost him. Years after I met him, I heard the story that he had tried to join the local Real Tennis club near his home in Wraysbury, near Windsor. The Club membership secretary was rather sniffy about letting this parvenue, this cockney with a Hockney, join their exclusive club, and kept him on hold for months. Bryan, by now enormously wealthy, bided his time, made the right contacts, and eventually bought the tennis club and sacked the secretary. Few things in his life had ever given him so much pleasure.

Morrison had started managing rock bands in the early sixties, when rock was still called pop, while he was an art-student at St. Martin's College, in Charing Cross Road. His alma mater has a wonderful pop cultural pedigree, having been attended by such iconic names in the pantheon as Jarvis Cocker, Sade, Gilbert and George, Katharine Hamnett, Alexander McQueen, John Galliano and many others. It was at this time that rock bands, following the Beatles' lead, started for the first time to write their own songs, rather than to have them provided by song-writing hacks from Tin Pan Alley. Morrison realized very quickly that there was a lot of money to be made from music publishing, and set up his first company, Lupus Music. Perhaps it should be explained here, for those who may not know, exactly what music publishing is. Publishing is a separate business from recorded music. It comprises the rights to the written composition of a song or a piece of music, performance rights such as radio airplay, a share of the CD sale, and synchronisation rights for use in advertising or films. To Lupus Music he promptly signed the band he was managing at the time, The Pretty Things, who were reckoned to be the wildest bunch of longhaired rhythm and blues mofos that the London had ever seen. They made the Rolling Stones, their direct contemporaries and rivals, seem positively prissy by comparison. They had a few Top Forty hits, including 'Rosalyn', 'Don't Bring me Down', and 'Honey, I Need', (the first two covered more than a decade later by another former art student, David Bowie, on his 'Pinups' album), before slipping out of fashion and into semi-obscurity.

Their career was re-ignited briefly in 1967 with the release of a highly-acclaimed 'rock opera' album, 'S.F. Sorrow', but despite a rather ham-fisted image makeover the band disappeared into the patchouli oil and incense smoke of the late sixties. In 1964, even more than today, Charing Cross Road was full of shops selling second-hand books and records. It was a great haunt for boho intellectuals and Soho hipsters. While browsing though some second hand vinyl one lunchtime, something caught Morrison's unerring entrepreneurial eye. It was a 78-rpm recording of the Chinese national anthem. To most of us, this would have been unremarkable, but Bryan scanned both sides of the record label, and found that there was no publisher listed for the music. He bought the record and immediately took it home, had a musicologist friend transcribe the music into manuscript form, and registered it with The Performing Rights Society, naming the publisher as Lupus Music. It just so happened that this was the year of the Olympic Games, and every time China won a medal, as they stood on the podium receiving their medal for ping-pong or gymnastics, the national anthem was played and Bryan Morrison, via Lupus Music, received a royalty! As F Scott Fitzgerald wrote: 'Let me tell you about the ve'y rich. They are different from you and me.' (Incidentally, I always liked HemingwayÕs laconic riposte: 'Yes. They have more money')

Five years later, in his 1st floor office, in a town house in Hyde Park Place, Morrison played me a demo tape. It was a song by some school friends of a young assistant he had recently taken on, Mark Dean. Dean hung around the nightclubs of Watford and Bushey with these kids, and when they decided to form a band, he was their obvious first contact in the music business. Morrison slipped the cassette into the machine and said, 'Have a listen to this, my son. These kids want a £150 publishing advance on this single'. The music started. It was a dreadful, insipid, white-boy rap. He asked, 'What do you think?' I said, 'Bryan, save your money. It's awful. It's third-rate fake black music.' He didn't take my advice and that wretched record, called 'Wham Rap', was George Michael's first hit with his band Wham! Bryan still publishes him, and in his best year he made forty million dollars worldwide. When the Bee Gees made their comeback in the seventies with Saturday Night Fever, Bryan no longer had them under a publishing contract. However, one of their old songs, to which he did still hold the publishing rights, was the b-side of the single 'Night Fever'. This could only be attributed to a major administrative blunder on their part. They could have put any song on the b-side and collected 100% of the publishing royalties by setting up their own publishing company for that one song. The single sold 20 million copies worldwide, and since the A-side and the B-side of a single earn the same mechanical (sales) royalty for a publisher, and as at that time a single got to Number One in the UK with a sale of something like 100,000 copies, that B-side earned him total royalties equivalent to 200 consecutive UK Number Ones. He was recently listed as the UKÕs 70th wealthiest individual. Not bad for someone who is completely tone deaf, can never remember the title of a song and who dropped out of school at fifteen, only to learn later that he was dyslexic. Ah, education.

That night at The Cabbage Patch we spoke to both Morrison and King separately in our dressing room. They both admitted to being very impressed by what they had just witnessed, but something puzzled Morrison. 'Why are you wasting yer fucking time playing to eighty punters in a shit-hole like this?' he asked, never one to mince his words.

I told him why. 'Because we want to always be top of the bill. Even if the audiences are small we know that those who are there are there to see OUR show on OUR terms.' What we were doing was different from both the music and the general approach of other bands at that time. We were passionate and uncompromising and raw. We made no pretence at being virtuoso musicians. We werenÕt like those big bands of the day; Yes, Genesis, Supertramp, or Jethro Tull. Our music was not about cut-price mysticism or emptyÐheaded pomp and bombast. We didn't even come from a third generation, three-chord, twelve bar blues background. Our songs were angular, irritable and abrasive. They were downright ugly or, at best, bittersweet. They were about paranoia, control systems and Class A drugs. After a few minutes of small talk both Morrison and King had offered us management contracts on the spot. This was just SO exciting. It must have been like this for the Rolling Stones when Andrew Loog Oldham walked in on them when they were playing a gig in a pub in Richmond, just a couple of miles away and fifteen or so years ago. Barely able to maintain our pretence of 'cool', we told them we would think about it over the weekend and call them Monday. It was no contest, really. We hated Genesis!!!

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