TWO - ELO (and UNCLE JOE)
Yes my uncle Joe alternated between being the court jester of the house,
supplying song, dance and seaside postcard jokes, while other times
taking on the attributes of a zombie: silent, unresponsive, shuffling
past like one of the undead in a B movie.
Everyone scoffed at Joe, and I was at the front of the queue. Joe was
the ‘bag man’ who would go around picking up waste paper from the
street, who would drop everything to help somebody only to be rewarded
with insults. He was plagued all his life by mental problems and
disowned by the rest of the family; he was an outcast to all except his
sister Vinnie. Nobody wanted Joe around, me included. Mom was his only
pal.
Much to my chagrin, Joe lived with us in our two-bed roomed council
house in Tile Cross. For years, Joe and I slept in the same bedroom, a
grudging arrangement as far as I was concerned. When I complained I was
told by mom that Joe ‘has nowhere else to go, I have to look after him.’
And that’s what she did, she looked after him come hell and high water.
Now it amuses me to recollect the connection that Joe had with a cheeky
unassuming teenager who just a few short years later, would climb to the
roof of our world and create a music group that became a household name.
I guess it’s true that many of you will be reading this because you
remember the group ELO - The ‘Electric Light Orchestra’. Yes, they were
a great group!
I got to join them in 1981 and wow, that was a good job to get -
especially as I was on the dole at the time!
Jeff
But I’d known Jeff Lynne, the driving force behind ELO, for more than
fifteen years before that.
I first bumped into him at a church hall in Shard End, Birmingham in
December 1963 – I was playing there with ‘Jeff Silvas and the Four
Strangers’ and he came up in the break to ask if he could have a go on
my guitar (I don't think he owned one then). I stood watching him
strumming the chords to a Dave Clark Five song that was in the charts,
never thinking for a moment that this kid would turn out to be a major
force in world music and have an influence on my life, along with
zillions of others, stretching far into the future. At the time, I never
knew his name.
It was more than a year later, in 1965, when I was in ‘The Chantelles’
that he appeared one day in answer to our ad for a guitarist. I
recognised him straight away as the guy who had strummed on my guitar
before. Jeff Lynne duly became The Chantelles lead guitarist, a dubious
honour seeing as the group was little more than work in progress - I
seem to recall we spent more time rehearsing in the drummer’s garage
than playing gigs. We used to practice these, as I thought, rather good
three-part harmonies. One time, when we were playing a gig somewhere, I
remember singing and thinking ‘these harmonies sound a bit sparse’, and
looking around, saw Jeff stood back from his mic, as if he’d forgotten
he was supposed to sing. I caught his eye and motioned for him to join
in but he shook his head. I confronted him afterwards but he said ‘I
don’t want to sing – singing is for wimps! – I just want to play the
guitar.’
Jeff wouldn’t sing with The Chantelles but I knew he could sing, and so,
much later, it came to pass..
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The bass player of The Nightriders called me up one day to ask if I
knew of a lead guitarist who could also sing. - I gave him Jeff’s
number, and then immediately phoned him up to alert him:
‘Jeff, I just gave the Nightriders your number cos they’re looking for
someone to play guitar’ (The Nightriders were a highly respected local
band – Roy Wood had not long left them).
‘Oh thanks Dave’ Jeff said.
‘And Jeff…’
‘Yeah?.
‘You can sing, right?’
’Yeah,’ he said catching the hidden message with a muted giggle.
Jeff joined the Nightriders, who soon changed their name to the ‘Idle
Race’.
‘The Idle Race! - Why do you call yourselves by that silly name?‘ my mom
once asked him.
Jeff fell silent for a second or two, and then said ‘I can’t be bothered
to answer that!’
Mom seemed quite convinced we were all wasting our time.
‘Time hallows only that which he himself hath made’ she would repeat as
a dire warning to us all.
Jeff lived about two miles from me - I was on Tile Cross Estate and he
was on Shard End Estate - and so we used to pop in on each other, and we
were often on the phone when a new Beatle record came out, fawning over
it usually. On one occasion I went around to play him a new song I’d
just written and we got talking about having a record out, the ultimate
dream. But in my heart that prospect really belonged in fantasyland, and
I said something negative like: ‘I don’t suppose that anyone out there
will ever get to hear my stuff.’
I remember Jeff shot back immediately with: ‘Well they’re gonna hear me
whether they like it or not!’
How true that statement was. How idle words have the power to condemn,
or direct, according to the spirit.
The Move
Then in 1966 a tremor shook the Birmingham music scene, propelled by the
vision of local singer Carl Wayne: If you’ve ever seen the film ‘The Dam
Busters’ you will recall how Squadron Leader Guy Gibson picked out the
cream of pilots from all the other RAF squadrons (upsetting quite a few
people in the process), in order to create his elite team of airmen.
That’s what Carl Wayne did – he went around the Birmingham music scene
like a head hunter checking off the best talent around, and then made
his play. Finally the raid was on and the dam broke - Months of secrecy
were ended and Carl unveiled the new super group from Birmingham - ‘The
Move’.
From Mike Sheridan’s Nightriders he took Roy Wood (at the time, Jeff
Lynne described Roy as the best guitarist he’d ever seen). From The
Avengers, he took drummer Bev Bevan, from Danny King, guitarist Trevor
Burton, while from his own band - the Vikings – he kept bass-player Ace
Kefford. This ‘Move’ reverberated through the Brumbeat groups affecting
many others down the line. For some it meant a disastrous loss, while
for others, me included, it represented an opportunity to climb another
rung up the ladder. The next rung for me was a job with Danny King. For
Jeff Lynne it was a job with the Nightriders.
‘The Move’ were indeed Birmingham’s star group and went on to have many
hit songs, all written by Roy, but after a few years on the road
tensions between them caused first Ace Kefford, and then Trevor Burton
to leave. But that’s another story. - I figured in some of those dramas
and I’ll speak about that later, but for now lets get back to the ELO
family tree: It was during this period that I became friends with Carl
Wayne, and Jeff became a pal of Roy Wood.
Jeff came around one day in 1970 clutching a tape he was really excited
about. It was a recording he’d made with Roy Wood called ‘10538
overture’ (he’d teamed up with Roy as part of ‘The Move’ earlier that
year). He said that him and Roy were thinking of forming a new group
called the Electric Light Orchestra. ‘The what?’ I said, unsure if I’d
heard him right or if it was leading up to another one of his jokes.
The convention of group names had already been smashed wide open: The
‘Beatles’ had led that insurrection. No longer was the star’s name
followed dutifully two paces behind by the group’s name. Identity had
become a point of artistic expression in itself, but the name that Jeff
had proffered was stretching it a bit the other way! An orchestra –
aren’t they full of law-abiding musicians who read the dots and wear
suits and ties and stuff?
Just about the next thing I heard coming down the grapevine was that
‘The Move’ had metamorphosed into the new group with that strange name
Jeff had told me about – The Electric Light Orchestra. Strangely, Roy
left after about six months and everyone expected the Electric Light to
switch off fast without his luminence on board, but it didn’t. Jeff had
bitten hard on the dream, enough to hang on while the setbacks shook
him.
While Jeff kept his nose to the grindstone, I bobbed up and down like
flotsam on the ebb and flow of fortune. I was in and out of various
groups, and in between times in the group known as ‘Her Majesty’s Social
Security’ (in case that actually refers to a real act, let me point out
that it means I was on the dole).
At one point I was a labourer on a building site but that magically
turned into a job playing bass guitar in a night-club residency. That
job gave me enough money to take a private pilots licence course but a
couple of years later, I was back scraping the barrel. In order to keep
off the dole, I found myself working as a metal worker for a friend of
mine named Steve.
The year was 1976 and Steve was making ornamental brass models of
Stevensons’ Rocket, which were somewhat strangely in demand. He had a
tumble-down workshop in a part of the city that was honeycombed with old
Victorian factories, bomb-sites, and slums in the process of being
cleared. It was a filthy place with a brick floor and long heavy wooden
benches upon which I would fetter and polish brass castings. A radio
blared out constantly and one day a song came on that caught my
attention immediately - ‘that was Living Thing by the Electric Light
Orchestra’ - the announcer said afterwards.
It made my day. My mate Jeff, on the radio with a great pop song!
I loved it and I knew he’d cracked it. Jeff, with his ideas of forging a
marriage between rock ’n’ roll and classical music, had eclipsed the
success of all the Birmingham groups before him, and sailed off the edge
of our blinkered world, eventually to become a household name in America
and beyond. Essentially, like the space station on the cover of his ‘Out
of the Blue’ album, he had escaped the gravity of our petty factional
limitations, and was orbiting above, weightlessly unassailable.
For a few years I lost track of Jeff as he toured around.
Meanwhile the flotsam rose and fell on the tide, and amazingly, in 1979,
I discovered I was the writer of a hit song myself. ‘Hiroshima’, a song
that took me all of fifteen minutes to write in my moms house ten years
before, had become a ‘sleeper‘ hit in Germany, staying in the lower end
of the charts for almost a year!
No sooner had I cashed the first cheque than I was off to America. It
was in Los Angeles in 1980, as a guest of Richard Tandy that I met up
with Jeff again. He had a chalet at a hotel in Beverly Hills and one
night we went to the ‘club’ – I mean THE club, the Polo Lounge - the
poshest do in town. I remember they wouldn’t let Jeff in because he
wasn’t wearing a jacket. ‘We can loan you one sir’ the concierge said,
and duly rummaged around the cloakroom to emerge with a jacket about
twenty sizes too big for him – ‘This must’ve belonged to Orson Welles’
Jeff said as we walked in together, giggling. We sat around a table
drinking beers and I told him as best I could how good his music sounded
from the bottom rung of the ladder, where I’d perchanced to hear it from
the working class vista we both knew so well. He was in the middle of
recording the music for the film Xanadu at the time, and while I was out
there, I got to help out on the demo for the song ‘All over the world.’
It was just exhilarating, watching the process of making a record at
that level. Jeff and Richard worked so hard at it, going over the song
time and again, making small changes, patiently listening for that time
when it sits right and doesn’t make you lose equilibrium – you know,
fall off your stool.
But back home in Birmingham I was astonished by the vibes I picked up
from other musicians regarding Jeff’s achievements. Many seemed
scathing, dismissive or cynical, saying he’d sold out, stolen ideas, was
just lucky to be in the right place at the right time, all that kind of
stuff. There was one I remember – a drummer, who saw it differently.
‘Jeff has shown us all the way, he’s really done the business, the best
of luck to him’ he said to me one night in the Elbow Room night club.
The others seemed gripped in a ‘Conspiracy Theory’ mindset that saw
everything as the artefact of some alternative reality - where ELO’s
success had been engineered by big business – or the CIA – or aliens –
anyone!
One guitarist got particularly upset when I told him proudly that I’d
helped out on Jeff’s demo in LA: ‘Did he pay you a session fee?’ he
barked, incensed with the socialist venom of the downtrodden which was
the popular mood of the time.
But I’m being unfair. The fact was, I had known Jeff from way back, and
I’d heard him say audacious, ridiculous things which later gained the
substance of fact. They didn’t know that like I did. I knew he had
dreamed big and not let go, while others, me included, had dreamed a
little and let go a lot.
It was 1981 when Jeff asked me to join his by now, mega-successful
group. When I recount to people now just how that came about I often say
that he asked me to join and I said ‘I’ll think about it - and how much
are you going to pay me?’ to poke fun at the fact I said the quickest
‘Yes’ possible. The fact is, I was a real fan of Jeff’s music – I loved
it and felt I understood it. It was hard work rehearsing but it was
never hard work supporting Jeff playing that music because it had
already built a home in my heart. Playing it was just stoking a fire
before a familiar hearth.
The fool on the hill
A song begins as just a little idea. A fragile thing, like a new-born
baby. You have to be careful who you show it to, who you allow to hold
it - at least until it’s grown up some! In the guise of well-wishers,
people can speak words over your child which can help propel it toward
it’s destiny or else condemn it to sickness and an early death.
I don’t know who Paul McCartney had in mind when he wrote ‘The fool on
the Hill’:
‘Day after day, alone on a hill, the man with the foolish grin is
keeping perfectly still..’
It’s a song about a loner, an outcast, someone who, disregarded by all,
sits alone quietly looking, noticing.
‘the fool on the hill sees the sun going down and the eyes in his head
see the world spinning round…’
But as far as I’m concerned, he wrote it for my Uncle Joe. Not that Paul
McCartney ever met my Uncle Joe you understand, but just because it
describes him so perfectly.
‘And nobody wants to know him, they can see that he’s just a fool’
Nobody wanted to know Joe but mom.
You might be wondering what on earth my Uncle has to do with ELO –
it’s a fair question. If there are no patterns to be found in the chaos,
if we are really adrift on the winds of purposeless chance, there isn’t
any connection at all.
The fact is, Joe used to work at a factory in Tile Cross called ‘EPE’,
and for a time, Jeff Lynne happened to work there too – I think he was
an apprentice. Anyway, Joe used to give Jeff a lift to and from the
‘EPE’ everyday in his car. Mom was never happy with people taking
advantage of Joe and I remember well her confronting him about it: ‘I
hope he’s going to pay your petrol money for going out of your way
everyday,’ Joe replied firmly that Jeff had promised him ‘When I make my
first million Joe, I’ll see yer all right.’ I suppose it’s the sort of
remark that’s just forgotten – but I believe that God heard it and he
didn’t forget, because you see the fact is, Jeff did make his million,
and Joe was all right.
Oh - Jeff didn’t come riding down Briddsland Road with a cheque made out
to Joe. - The connection wasn’t that visible, and it doesn’t need to be.
Jeff gave me a job with his group, I bought my mom’s house. Mom looked
after Joe - right up until the day he died.
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