When I posted yesterday the story about my song that the Searchers recorded I forgot to mention that I was actually a member of the Searchers. Ok, just for a day but it left me with a terrific memory.
I had co-produced with John Verity a solo single with Mike Pender. He was still in the Searchers, it was to be a solo single by a Searchers member. The single was “It’s Over” written by David Valentine but John V and I made him do one of our songs “Brothers & Sisters” for the B side. Not one of our better songs and I still feel a little guilty. Check it out in the video below.
When the single was released Mike quit the Searchers and formed “ Mike Pender’s Searchers”. Anyway, he called me up one day and asked if I’d do a TV show with the band. The record relied heavily on keyboards which I had played and the band was a guitar bass and drums line-up. So I travelled to Manchester to do the TV show and that’s where I get my claim to fame of being a member of the Searchers (for a day)
The TV show was a strange affair. We all played live but it was recorded for later transmission. There was no audience but one would be dubbed later so it had to look as if the band were acknowledging an audience. It was strange to see Mike take a few paces forwards and bow into thin air with imaginary applause ringing in his ears
However, that was nothing compared to the peculiarities of what I had to do. I was playing off stage and would not be in camera shot. The band were in suits and ties Searchers style and I was in jeans and T-Shirt. However, various cameramen and dudes with clipboards found my positioning not to their liking and I was asked to move six feet back to be out of camera shot. The drummer counts the song in and we’re off… STOP !!! The stage manager declares “the keyboard player is still in shot”. So I moved further back and we go again. Only to be stopped once more – I was still in shot. So I was moved 50 feet away at the back of the studio. Now, although I had a monitor it was a bit discomforting to be playing with a band that were small figures in the distance. Anyway, off we go again. This time Mike stopped the band “Where’s the keyboards?” I had to shout back “I can’t hear the fucking count in”. I had a monitor by my side but I couldn’t hear the count in. We had to ask the drummer to shout out the count. I was rather surreal.
This is my granddaughter Mia in the video below aged 6 spoofing up one of those “sell your house” TV shows. She tells her viewing public “The man who lives here used to be famous but he’s not that famous any more” Huh – out of the mouths of babes !!
Anyway, fast forward 8 years and she now owns that white guitar and this week she’s been learning to play on the red Strat. When she said she’d like to learn on this visit I thought, a few scales and maybe a chord or two. Then she tells me she’s now into Hendrix, Led Zep, The Doors, The Jam…….. get in !!
I’m remastering the original cast recording of Steel Town. Also there are demos, poems, live cuts & unreleased tracks. http://steeltown.co.uk
Apart from the songs featured in the show there is a wealth of related material including oral history recordings. This will take a little while and in order to accommodate the inevitable cast of thousands I’ve set up a web page to accommodate all this info at http://steeltown.co.uk/revisited.html.
In the early 80’s I was signed to MCA Music. One day I got a call from my mentor there, Pete Waterman. Pete said I there was a big-shot movie producer in town and I was was urgently needed the next day in London to meet up with him. I flew down and arrived in Pete’s office around midday. Pete introduced me to an American guy who’s name now escapes me. He was one of the producers of the movie, Jaws 3D which was nearing completion.
Anyway, this guy treated me to the story of his wonderful new movie and told me all it needs is a killer song. Apparently it’s a “boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl” theme. Except in this case there are no boys and girls involved; the lovers in question are dolphins. He says they have Streisand lined up to sing this yet to be written song. Pete has put me in the frame to write the lyrics and makes his office available to conduct my work. Pete and the American guy went off to lunch saying they will check my progress on their return. As they are leaving the American called back over his shoulder, ( American Accent) “hey kid, gimme a lurve song for two dolphins”
Alone in the office I slid the cassette into the machine. Shit!!!!! How on earth could I turn this orchestral pomp into a song. Still I had been charged with the task so I had to try. I spent the next two hours racking my brain and writing one liners and drawing doodles. Click here to see my handiwork.
The guys arrived back and the American says, “OK Kid, whaddyah got?”
I said, “not much” and passed over the piece of paper and waited to be well and truly spanked. Pete (ever the bullshitter) went into overdrive. “What did I tell you about my boy, F***ing brilliant, just look at this, “sink or swim, I will follow him”, that’s a killer line”. It was just about the only line but Pete was leaving no room for contradiction. He was already on the phone booking a studio for that evening. Then he dashed out of the office and grabed another MCA staffwriter who had a good singing voice. This hapless guy was named Simon Jeffries and he was going to have to sing this crap. Like me, Simon was not going to say no to the guy responsible for signing his yearly salary cheque (publishers advance).
I was therefore obliged to spend the rest of the day making words fit to soaring violins and trumpets. The pain of this was nothing compared to the recording session that evening. I think we nearly killed the poor vocalist. Unsurprisingly, I never heard another thing about my entry into the world of movie themes and as it happens I never saw Simon again either.
However, like many things in our past – it has ended up on YouTube – this is NOT to be taken seriously.
Left Mick Whitaker – Right Steve Thompson, Behind, Ken Goodinson on Drums
This was the Whitaker Band in 1998 or 1999 (can’t quite remember) at one of our favorite gigs – the Cellar Club, South Shields. I took these down from my old site as I had run out of file space. Here we go again.
Vocals: Mick Whitaker,
Keyboards & Backing Vocals: Andy Hawking,
Guitar and Backing Vocals: Steve Thompson,
Bass: Richard Rutherford,
Drums: Ken Goodinson. ( see also this page )
I just wiped my Mac and started to reinstate software. Ableton Live and Propellerheads Reason/Record were fine but Cubase would not recognise the dongle. Same problem with my soft synths Korg M1 and Wavestation (I used to have these synths) and Absynthe. I decided to just use these on the PC and finsh earlier projects on the PC rather than port them over. I´m aware I allow too many distractions to get in the way of finishing projects. Maybe another unfinished project may come to the rescue here. I had planned to explore and documjent a host of free music applications here maybe I could add some free apps to my mac to replace the synths that will not load. I then need to start finishing muic projects and avoid the clutter an distraction.
I’ve been experimenting with different QR code things. Just found this – Share Square – pretty cool. If you recognise the image to the right then you most likely know what to do with it. If you don’t have a smart phone you can still see the results here: http://shsq.re/UB
I was contacted recently by Gordon Roxburgh who runs a website called www.songs4europe.com which is all about the United Kingdom at the Eurovision Song Contest and the Song For Europe competition. Gordon has been commissioned to write a book on the same subject and conducted an online interview with me about my involvement with Eurovision (1983 and 87). The book will not see publication for a while yet so my interview is below (after the pic of my invite to the wine and caviar reception. It appears my answer to Q3 may be innacurate as I’ve found that my English version of the 83 Italian Entry “Per Luchia” did in fact get released. I shall seek it out but I’ve heard of it changing hands on ebay for large sums of money.
Interview 06/10/10
Q1: Your biography on your webpage, says you began your life as a Steelworker, before moving into the music industry. So, what got you interested in composing, and how did you make your transition from steelworker into the music industry, what was your big break?
I always wanted to be in music but everyone in my area just naturally went into the steelworks. I was never fully committed although I learned a lot from the adult world of work. I was serving an apprenticeship in the Steelworks during the day and a second apprenticeship during the nights playing in my band Bullfrog. We got a record deal with Cube records and I just quit the steelworks. Now 34 years later the record we made for Cube records is finally selling – http://stmedia.org/power-glam/ a while back I helped our old drummer make a website about this. You can find it here www.thebullfrogstory.co.uk click on “intro” for my story about the early years. During the band years I was always interested in writing as well as performing and I was a big fan of the Beach Boys and the Beatles in my younger days. When rock stardom didn’t quite happen I concentrated on songwriting and built a career in that. Our first producer was Roger Bain of Black Sabbath fame who was in cahoots with Gus Dudgeon doing things with Cube/Essex music (our label/publisher) Gus who was to play a part in the Eurovision story always claimed to have first met me at the Cube studios but I was only 21 and could never recall this.
Q2: How did you come to collaborate/meet with John Verity? (Can you give me a bit of background info about him?) As songwriters who writes the music, who does the lyrics? Or is it a joint effort on both?
John is a recording artist/producer. He replaced Russ Ballard in Argent. I can’t recall exactly how I came to be working with him, as a bunch of things were all happening at that time. Pete Waterman had signed me to MCA Music and he was managing a producer called Peter Collins who among other recordings produced one of my MCA songs with the Searchers. John also produced another of my MCA songs with the Searchers. I can’t recall if it was my publisher or Johns record company who introduced us. Anyway I did a couple of albums with John (or was it more) co-writing, playing bass and/or keyboards and some drum programming. All the other stuff was additional, I was there as a professional songwriter for the commercialism it was hoped I could inject. As a writer I work on both music and lyrics. When I co-write I may do one or the other but in this instance with John we both worked on music and lyrics Q3: Was the Song For Europe competition something you had tried for before 1987? (If so any details….?) What was the motivation for entering?
I’ll have entered several times before. Most songwriters did back then when it was ran that way. The motivation is the huge careers that have been created out of it for a small number of people. I did actually have a stake in the 1983 contest in Germany as I wrote the English lyric for the Italian entry “Per Lucia”. Riccardo Fogli had actually recorded my version and it was poised for release should he win the contest. The English version would have come out in many territories so I cheered him on throughout the contest. Unfortunately Per Lucia did not do well enough to warrant an international release and my version is languishing in some studio vault in Italy.
Q4: For the song you entered in 1987, you kindly mentioned it started as Show Us Your T*its, so how did it evolve from that into I Want You At what stage was it decided to enter it into A Song For Europe?
John and I were working on his album and during a break in the pub we were discussing Muzak. He said once he’d heard Argent’s “Hold Your Head Up” played by brass band as background muzak in a pub. I think he may have been there with the actual band and mentioned watching their faces as it dawned upon them. “Is that …? – no …! it can’t be …..- you know I really think it is”. So we thought we record something really improbable ad give it to the Landlord. So we recorded a track with really smooth jazz chords and sang “Show Us Yer T*ts all the way through it but disguising our voices using a vocoder (sparkies magic piano). That evening we gave it to the pub landlord who unwittingly put it on the audio system. We then watched people with great mirth as the declared “are they singing …? – no …! it can’t be …..- you know I really think it is”. Crazily somehow the track became Bob Bartons Hit Pick in Kerang and my publishers were obliged to issue a song assignment in the name of “show us your t*ts”
Q5: Can you give me some more information about Mike Stacey? How you met, and did Mike do the demo version of I Want You ?
Mike was doing session vocals on the stuff I was recording with John Verity. We originally had Trevor Walters on the track and Mike Stacey (and Karen Sambrook) were on backing vocals. When we put the song up for Eurovision it was obligatory that year that you had to have a record ready for release etc and there was some issue about Trevor doing it so we put Mike on Lead Vocals.
Q6: What was your reaction to the song making it into the final ten songs? Had you been kept informed as to the progress it was making through the selection process? (ie It’s in the last 50, Its now in the last 20 etc?)
Obviously I was really pleased. I can’t completely recall the process and I don’t think there was much of a build-up – perhaps notification of last 20 and then a week later in the final10. Others may have a better recollection than me.
Q7: How much were you involved in the way the song would be presented, ie image, costumes etc?.
I charted out on manuscript most of the parts on the recording for the orchestrator. It was amazing to walk in on day one and hear your song played by a whole orchestra. The whole thing became a big expense and the outfits were purchased by taking an additional advance from my publisher. I was with Dick James Music at the time on a sub-publishing deal set up with Gus Dudgeon (of Elton John fame). I’d worked with Gus many times over the years and as a special favour he did the live mix in the control room the night it went out. By the time it came to choreography the money had run out so I worked out some moves for the guys in a London hotel room. You’ve got to know me to know how crazy this was – I have two left feet.
Q8: What were your expectations once you heard the other songs? Any favourites, songs you thought were better for example?
All I can remember is I liked some and not others. I cannot now recall one single one, even the one that won.
Q9: Memories of the occasion? reaction to voting and result? (Reactions of John Verity, Mike Stacey?) – Do you know what else Mike Stacey has done since A Song For Europe?
We were disappointed not to win but 5th out of ten isn’t bad. I think the week spent doing this was quite stressful. Mike is now the singer in Smokie.
Q10: Did you try and enter the contest again? (If so any details – ie any songs that didn’t get selected but went onto become hits elsewhere?)
Once and I came quite close but no big stories to tell here.
Q11: I note from your website that amongst the many artists you have written songs for is Celine Dion. Can you give me more details on which song? As Celine Dion herself won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1988, that is the sort of information that readers would be interested in?
In 1982 Sheena Easton released my song “Please Don’t Sympathise”. In 1983 Celine released her version of this song under the title Ne Me Plaignez Pas both as a single and an album track. This was in the days before she started to sing in English and it was a hit in Canada and France. For anyone charmed by the story of how Renea Angelil re-mortgaged his house to launch Celines career, well hid did so armed with one of my songs !
Q12: Did you find that entering a song in the contest either helped or hinder your career
It was a hectic period but it didn’t have much effect one way or the other.
It’s been a while but I’m trying to pick up my various experimental music projects and develop them further. About a year ago I started to produce a piece in Prato, Italy. I decided to call it “The Still Man”. It’s taken me until now to dust it off and upload it. It still needs to go through many iterations. You’ll hear a fountain in the square, a busy café and the Prato Cathedral bell.
Trying to have a tidy up in my studio. I consigned to the attic two TX7 (DX7) sound modules and an Akai S950 sampler. I also took up there some 2 inch 24 track master tapes. These were from sessions I did with my old friend Gus Dudgeon and when Gus died a coupla years back these tapes were found in his garage and given to me. Anyone recognizing any of these items may well appreciate the absolute zero monetary value and yet the priceless nature of these objects. Already up there was an old acoustic guitar on which I wrote my biggest hit “Hurry Home” and an old Casio Keyboard used to record songs covered by Sheena Easton, Celine Dion and Elaine Page. A veritable attic museum!
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A Love Song for Two Dolphins
I’ve been experimenting with different QR code things. Just found this – 
