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Chapter 1: Whiter Shades Of Rhythm’N’Blues – The Paramounts – 1960–1966

5) The House of Lords Appeal hearing re A Whiter Shade Of Pale, July 30, 2009

Foreword

In the time I’m thinking about now – the late, waning sixties – there was no better band to slip you into a long night of dreams than Procol Harum, and no better record than A Salty Dog. ‘A Whiter Shade Of Pale’ had been a big hit just two years before, in 1967, and it was one of those songs that changed the whole map. A Salty Dog, and particularly its title track, was like a further labyrinthine exploration down that new road. You couldn’t know what waited for you around the first turning. Maybe demons. Maybe dragons. Or maybe another new turning.

There was a richness and a mystery about Procol Harum’s music that echoed in on you, magisterial melodies and teasing, enigmatic lyrics you could invest with your own fantasies. For me and all my friends who loved the band, and this album, the songs seemed like a challenge. Where would they take you? What would you find? “A sand so white, and sea so blue, no mortal place at all.”

The point was not so much what the songs were saying, specifically, as what they were suggesting to each of us, individually, where all those sounds and images would lead us, then leave us. The films of Stan Brakhage, Bruce Conner, Kenneth Anger, Bruce Baillie and others worked the same kind of allusive magic, casting a deep spell that only began with the images on the screen.

Procol Harum’s music drew from so many deep wells – classical music, 19th century literature, rhythm and blues, seaman’s logs, concretist poetry – that each tune became a cross-cultural whirligig, a road trip through the pop subconscious. For that time, and for this one too – for any, I’m sure – it was great travelling music. I’ve been on a few journeys myself since the Salty Dog days, and Procol Harum has always been with me.

Introduction

Let’s face it, Procol Harum’s ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ is an odd song. Odd enough that anyone who has been anywhere near a radio, Walkman or iPod in the last 45 years almost certainly would have listened to it.

It entered our lives out of nowhere. To misquote the poet Philip Larkin, it came upon us in the summer of love, between Apollo 1 and The Beatles’ eighth LP. It was a tough time to make a debut, because 1967 was a great year for music. Apart from The Beatles there were Otis, Aretha, Dylan, The Who, The Doors, The Kinks, The Animals and Cream. Pink Floyd went quadraphonic, the Stones were busted at Redlands, Hendrix burned his guitar at Finsbury Park and, miraculously, Britain even won the Eurovision song contest that year with Sandie Shaw.

With all this competition, this brand new band with the funny name and even odder song topped the UK charts for six weeks and it soon became a worldwide hit, selling 10 million records and spawning a thousand cover versions. The BBC says it went on to be the most played song in 70 years. It certainly was the most played song during that summer of love, as I bore witness, with any song from Sgt Pepper coming a close second.

My own connection to ‘AWSoP’ (as the aficionados call it) is somewhat nebulous. Apart from (or maybe because of) being one of the nuts who couldn’t stop playing the song that summer, it subsequently found its way into my film The Commitments and later I had the pleasure of working with Gary Brooker on my film of Evita. And, like many others, it was played at my wedding. Except we were in Austin, Texas and it was sung by the great country-blues singer, Toni Price, with the lyrics taped to a mic-stand and the accompaniment on steel guitar.

In The Commitments, we were a tad disrespectful. Jimmy Rabbitte, the young band’s manager in the story, visits the keyboard player, Stephen, in a church where he is playing the organ. The opening notes of ‘AWSoP’ ring out and Stephen says, “Great intro, eh?” “Yeah they nicked it from Marvin Gaye,” says Jimmy.” “He nicked it from Bach,” counters Stephen. OK, we meant Percy Sledge, a mistake which we turned into a joke later, when Stephen is in the priest’s confessional. Personally I never got the Sledge connection. I was working as a copywriter in advertising at the time and wrote Hamlet cigar commercials, where we used the ‘Air On A G-String’ music played by Jacques Loussier, so I always assumed it was that. It’s not, of course. I was also told it was inspired by Bach’s ‘Sleepers, Awake’. However, I am reliably informed that anyone who throws their hands at an organ keyboard will come out with something owed to Orgelbüchlein – Bach’s Little Organ Book.

After singing the first verse, Jimmy Rabbitte goes on to say, “Poxiest lyrics ever written.” Well, they are vexing, perhaps, or mysterious, elusive, and some think, impenetrable, but frankly, that summer we never worried too much that they didn’t make immediate sense. We reacted to the elliptical poetry the same way we did to ‘A Day In The Life’ – as beautiful words that filled your head with images that just let your imagination fly: the more abstruse, the better. It meant just what you wanted it to mean. Those were the unique times in which the song was born.

That’s not to say people haven’t racked their brains these last 45 years to offer meaning to Keith Reid’s mesmerising poetry. Over the years, people have offered up explanations from drunken seduction, and drug overdoses, to necrophilia, to Arthur Miller’s tale with Marilyn Monroe. My favourite was the one about the violated nuns escaping the Nazis. Sounds like a good movie.

As I got older and more pretentious, I could see the influence of André Breton, Lewis Carroll, Chaucer, Milton and Magritte. And less pretentiously, I think, maybe it’s a grab-bag of juicy references that Reid had jotted in his notebook – like William Burroughs’ ‘cut-ups’, as practised by Dylan and Bowie. Random thoughts, fragments of ideas, clusters of words, fitted together like a surreal jigsaw and scribbled down into four stanzas that became one of the most beautiful rock songs ever written.

When the seldom-performed third and fourth verses came to light it was hailed by one journalist as, “the most useful piece of clarification since the cryptographers of Bletchley Park broke the Nazi Enigma code during the Second World War”. The view was that the last two stanzas explained everything that had gone before, as the metaphors come full circle and the drunken seduction is consummated.

Then I was fortunate to work with Gary Brooker on Evita, where he played Peron’s Foreign Minister, Juan Atilio Bramuglia. Even if you watch the film with your eyes closed it’s impossible not to recognise Gary’s extraordinary, unique voice. On the day he finished filming, the crew gathered round for a drink to say goodbye. They peppered him with questions about ‘AWSoP’ and he sang the final fourth verse, which he said made everything clear. The crew and I stood in a circle surrounding Gary in silence as he finished. All of us, it has to be said, were none the wiser, which for me, is as it should be.

In the final scene of The Commitments, Jimmy Rabbitte, looking in the mirror, has an imaginary conversation with Terry Wogan as to what he has learned from his foray into the music business.

Well, as I always say, Terry: We skipped the light fandango, turned cartwheels ’cross the floor, I was feeling kind of seasick, but the crowd called out for more.

Chapter 1

Whiter Shades Of Rhythm’N’Blues

The Paramounts 1960–1966

For a band whose repertoire includes many an imaginary tale of seafaring, it should come as no surprise that the roots of Procol Harum lie by the English coast. Though over the years their personnel would ebb and flow like the tide, three of the group’s key members grew up to the sound of waves crashing against the shore while the semi-pro band from which Procol developed first stirred amid the heady atmosphere of the seaside.

Basking on the north side of the Thames estuary between Great Wakering and the mudflats of Canvey Island, the Essex resort of Southend-On-Sea has been a holiday destination for East Londoners since the early Victorian era. The town boasts the longest pleasure pier in the world, built in 1830 and stretching out across the sand and sea for over a mile from an esplanade of neon-lit buildings known simply as the Golden Mile. Less than an hour by train from London, Southend-On-Sea has always been a popular destination for day trippers, the Essex equivalent of Brighton and Blackpool, but with a rock’n’roll sensibility; a restrained British version of Atlantic City meets Memphis that is often referred to as ‘The Essex Delta’.

Back in the late fifties one of the greatest places to hear rock’n’roll played loud – as it was meant to be heard – was at fairgrounds, and Southend-On-Sea’s infamous Kursaal and Peter Pan’s Playground were no exception. The brash glamour of the Kursaal boasted two of the largest rollercoasters in Europe, towering high above the waltzers and the dodgems, the candyfloss and the coconut shy, providing the perfect backdrop to a soundtrack of Elvis, Jerry Lee, Little Richard, Buddy and the Everlys. The music was pumped non-stop through cracked speakers at enormous volume on the rides, the 45s were scratched through overuse and you had to shout to make yourself heard above it all – but it was glorious all the same, the soundtrack to an escape from the drudgery of reality, the rock’n’roll roundabout to heaven.

Countless London teens got their first taste of American R&B on day trips to the town’s many arcades, cafes, clubs, and bars. By 1963 this vibrant resort had become synonymous with the Britain’s burgeoning rhythm’n’blues boom.

According to John Howard, “Southend-On-Sea’s social scene post the Saturday morning pictures revolved around the Saturday teenage show at the Odeon cinema, where they played the latest rock’n’roll records, and had live acts like Vince Taylor and Marty Wilde. Then there were the many coffee bars like the Panda, the Shrubbery, the Zanzibar, the Panorama, the Jacobean, the 4Bs, and the Capri – where actress Helen Mirren used to hang out when she was a teenager (then) known as ‘Troika’.”

At a time in British pop history when virtually every teenager yearned to be in a beat group, the best to emerge from Southend-On-Sea during this halcyon period was The Paramounts, a four-piece that was – unusually for the time – fronted by a piano-playing lead singer named Gary Brooker.

Born May 29, 1945 in Hackney, East London, Brooker spent his first few years in Bush Hill Park, Middlesex, before the family moved back to London, settling in Edmonton. Gary’s father, Harry, was a well-known professional musician who played the pedal steel guitar with Felix Mendelssohn’s Hawaiian Serenaders but Harry’s son’s instrument of choice became the piano. Encouraged to start playing when he was five, Gary’s first teacher was prone to hitting her students over the wrists with her pen. Nevertheless, Harry Brooker instigated his son’s stage debut at the precocious age of seven.

In 1954 the Brookers moved to the Eastwood district of Southend-On-Sea where, within two years, Harry Brooker died. His father might have departed but his inspiration remained and the following year Gary started piano lessons with Ronald Meachen, a teacher who would have a profound influence on his playing. Discarding orthodox methods of tuition, Meachen would steer his pupils through a process of analysing chord structures and scales, encouraging them to investigate ‘boogie woogie’ styles. The empathy between Brooker and Meachen led to much progress and self-confidence within his star pupil.

“In the late 1950s Westcliff High School for Boys was an evil organisation headmastered by a simian sadist called Henry Cloke,” recalls former pupil John Howard. “One day in the Maths class Gary Brooker asked me if I knew Chris Copping, who lived a couple of roads away from me, because he’d heard that Chris had a good musical reputation – Chris attended the other Southend-On-Sea grammar school. We both knew that Chris could play a totally accurate intro to Gene Vincent’s version of ‘Rocky Road Blues’ on piano, so I helped the two to make contact. Chris Copping was teaching Robin Trower – then known as Trot – to play guitar; and I remember Robin subsequently got the most amazing electric guitar – the most beautiful one that I’d ever seen.”

“My father got it for me,” says Trower. Born on March 9, 1945, in Catford, South East London, Robin would prove to be a natural on guitar. “It was a Rosetti, what they call a ‘cello’ guitar. I was a big Elvis fan. He always had a guitar around his neck. Elvis is what made me want me to play the guitar. I had a (guitar) book and I seemed to pick it all up pretty quick. It only took me a few weeks. As a kid I never practised (laughs). It came naturally. I never actually sat down and tried to work out somebody else’s thing from their records. I was more interested in making my own things up. I’d hear guitar and I’d absorb it.” (1)

“Rob worked at the Rock Stall outside the Kursaal Ballroom on the seafront,” says John Howard. “His dad, Len, was a window cleaner and had the concession on most of the High Street shops.”

“A few of us attempted to form a skiffle group called The Electrics in 1957, adds Howard. “I had maracas, others played guitars, but I was more interested in records. This was put together by a kid called Dave Lewis and included future Paramounts Graham ‘Diz’ Derrick and Gary Brooker, plus Adrian ‘Ada’ Baggerley who later joined Mickey Jupp’s band The Orioles. We got together regularly at one another’s houses, including Gary’s place in Eastwood.”

The Electrics were all aged 12 and featured Brooker initially playing both banjo and guitar before switching exclusively to piano. For the princely sum of just £1 you could hire The Electrics for weddings and parties. However, the group didn’t last long, and while still at Westcliff High School For Boys, Brooker formed his second outfit The Coasters, whose name was inspired not by Southend-On-Sea’s location but from the black American rhythm’n’blues combo with the very same moniker. The Southend-On-Sea Coasters, however, mainly played rock’n’roll instrumentals.

‘Best band in town’ contests were a regular draw at Southend-On-Sea’s Palace Hotel just above the seafront, attracting crowds of local teenagers to its dance hall, so it was only natural that The Coasters would pitch themselves against other local contenders. Among these were The Raiders, featuring guitarist Robin Trower and, on bass, another Southend-On-Sea migrant, Chris Copping (born August 29, 1945, Middleton, Lancashire). The Coasters and The Raiders both fancied their chances, but got pipped to the post by a group called Micky Law & The Outlaws.

“The Coasters came a close second, but this result was controversial because some people thought that Micky Law had fixed the votes, which had been counted on slips of paper,” says Brooker. “Maybe Micky Law had more pencils than anybody else!”

The evening was not entirely wasted, however, as Peter Martin, the entrepreneur who ran the contest, took note of the talent on display and conceived the idea of putting together a ‘supergroup’ from the cream of local musicians. Martin named the group The Paramounts and became their manager.

Gary Brooker: “Peter Martin put The Paramounts together by dubious means. He’d already got Robin Trower and Chris Copping from The Raiders, Mick Brownlee, the drummer from Micky Law & The Outlaws, and Bob Scott as lead vocalist. They wanted me on piano.” (3)

Copping tells a different story. “Robin Trower and Mick Brownlee both had the original idea of forming The Paramounts together, and as I had started playing with Robin, so I was naturally involved. This was at the end of 1960.”

“My favourite band at the time was The Rockerfellas from Romford who played great rock’n’roll,” says Trower. “I decided that I wanted to have a band that was modelled on them. They had a piano player. I thought, ‘We have to get a piano player’. And the only other piano player I’d seen locally was Gary Brooker.”

“Peter Martin got Robin to phone me and asked me if I could come to a rehearsal one Sunday, just to sit in and help out,” says Brooker. “I told him that The Coasters were playing that night. Rob said, ‘I’ve spoken to [Coasters’ vocalist] Johnny Short, it’s OK.’ So I went to The Paramounts’ rehearsal, and the same thing reoccurred every Sunday for a month. Johnny Short assumed I no longer wanted to be in The Coasters, as I’d been missing rehearsals. I thought Johnny Short no longer wanted me! And, suddenly, I was a Paramount!” (3)

The first gig performed as The Paramounts was at the Palace Dance Studio on November 5, 1960, followed by a series of shows at the Cricketers Pub, also in Southend-On-Sea. At all these early dates Bob Scott was the featured vocalist but when he failed to turn up one night Brooker took over, bringing about a sudden and dramatic change in repertoire. With Brooker in the driving seat, the slower Cliff Richard and Elvis Presley covers were replaced by rock’n’roll numbers by Little Richard, Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, and Jerry Lee Lewis.

Fellow piano player John Denton, who was in the year below Brooker at Westcliff High School and was also part of the Southend-On-Sea group scene, recalls, “Back then groups usually only played at dances, rather than at the kind of gigs where you just went to see the band,” he says. “The first time I saw The Paramounts was at a dance at Leigh Community Centre in Leigh-On-Sea.”

Leigh Yacht Club was another early venue. “I remember setting my piano on fire one night at a dance at Leigh Yacht Club,” says Brooker. “I left a cigarette on the end, and the celluloid on the keys caught fire and flared. The flames got up to ‘A’ below middle ‘C’ before I poured a pint over it!”

In the summer of 1961, now aged 16, Brooker left secondary school and enrolled at Southend-On-Sea’s Municipal College to study botany and zoology. Trower had a daytime job cleaning windows, Brownlee became a bricklayer while Copping stayed on at school to take his ‘A’ levels. It was around this time that Trower’s father, Len, bought the Penguin Cafe on Southend-On-Sea seafront. The acquisition followed a local scandal wherein the previous proprietor had been caught pocketing money from the café’s Cancer Relief charity collection boxes!

“There were cellars below the Penguin Cafe, full of plastic penguins,” recalls Brooker. “It occurred to The Paramounts that this would be a good place to build a club, so we set about burning the penguins, painting the cellar, and building a stage. We bought a piano for £4, and opened up a month later, in late 1961, with a Sunday night show featuring The Paramounts. We called the club The Shades, after Johnny Harris and The Shades, a Southall group, who had recently made several impressive appearances in Southend-On-Sea. Shades was also a new word for sunglasses!” (3)

John Denton: “The Shades was a specialist club, catering for local record collectors, R&B fans and straightforward music fans. They all co-existed without friction in the Coca-Cola, hamburger, and coffee bar atmosphere of the club.”

“The Shades did become filled with mods eventually,” says Mick Brownlee. “There were rows and rows of scooters parked outside every night, and crowds of kids racing up and down the seafront on scooters too.”

“The Paramounts themselves weren’t mods,” indicates Denton. “But the crowd they attracted included some mods.… The Shades… was one of several coffee bars in vogue in Southend-On-Sea.”

Before long, The Paramounts extended their Sunday residency to include Wednesdays. “On the nights we didn’t play we would go to The Shades to listen to the two well-stocked jukeboxes,” says Brooker. “Most of the records in these two machines were the property of Tony Wilkinson, a local R&B collector, who helped us choose our early repertoire of songs.” (3)

Record collecting was an ambitious undertaking in the late fifties and early sixties and Tony Wilkinson was a pioneer in the field. While labels such as London-American and Oriole released product domestically, certain American jazz, blues, soul and R&B records were like gold dust and could only be found in a handful of ‘specialist’ record shops known only to a privileged few. British enthusiasts such as Wilkinson would often pay merchant seamen resident in the Thames estuary to locate these much sought-after American 45s and LPs on voyages to the States.

“I was very lucky!” says Robin Trower. “Tony Wilkinson was importing all these records from Memphis [via Baton Rouge]. I was getting to hear all this stuff that just wasn’t available in England.”

“I got into record collecting and imported countless rare records from the USA,” says Wilkinson. “Rob [Trower] and Gary used to come round to my house and hear these records. Eventually I put this collection in the jukeboxes at The Shades. It was great to hear people play Dale Hawkins’ ‘Suzie Q’ and ‘Dr Feelgood’ by the original Dr Feelgood!”

“I liked people like B.B. King,” says Trower. “I never sat down and worked out what he was actually doing, but I was heavily influenced by him. I also liked Steve Cropper from Booker T. and The MGs, Cliff Gallup with Gene Vincent and Scotty Moore with Elvis, then Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley. Those are the ones that stand out.”

On one occasion The Shades regulars discovered that Ray Charles, on tour in Europe, was being broadcast live on French radio from the Paris Olympia. “We got hold of a good radio set, plugged it into the amps, spread the word, and about 150 of us settled down in The Shades to listen to ‘The Man’,” remembers Brooker. (3)

Len Trower charged one shilling (about 5p today but around 30p in 1961) on the door. “[It was a] dimly-lit cavernous room, formed of two dark areas fronted by a small dancing space and low stage,” remembered Denton. “Behind the stage, a zany mural depicted The Paramounts as cartoon replicas. In the two back chambers, youths sipped cola, while girls danced effortlessly to the jukebox playing the sound of ‘Thumbin’ A Ride’. The dance area was to fill whilst The Paramounts plugged in and commenced to rock. Egg boxes bedecked the walls and ceiling, serving as primitive soundproofing. The cluster of backing vocalist-fans was very effective in this environment, despite the throbbing sound. And the people around the stage were executing what would later be termed ‘the Pogo’ (some 15 years later).” (2)

Tony Wilkinson: “The Paramounts were the best rock’n’roll band in a rock’n’roll town. There was simply nobody else to touch them!”

John Denton: “This was the most exciting music I’d ever heard. Gary Brooker was playing Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard in the true spirit of both men. And he sang their songs better than any other British rock’n’roll singer!”

Another Shades regular was John ‘Kellogs’ Kalinowski who fell in with The Paramounts and became their roadie, spending four years with Southend-On-Sea’s finest and thus embarking on a behind-the-scenes career in rock that would sustain him for almost half a century. “Robin offered Kellogs the job as roadie for £4 a week,” remembers Brooker. “People always had a roadie, even before the word was invented: someone with a van who would drive the group.”

‘Pinball wizard’ Kellogs, on the other hand, insists that his wages were “four Mars bars a week and as much Coca Cola as you could drink!” His predecessor was ‘Greasy’ Johnny Bottle, whose credentials for the job were owning a Dormobile and knowing a little about electronics. “He built us a bass amp, made from a radio cabinet of course, which never worked,” says Brooker. “In his Dormobile, the manifold heated up, and nobody could sit anywhere near the engine. His party piece was to drive along Southend-On-Sea seafront towards the gasworks; he could get out of his window, whilst the van was moving, go over the roof, in the other side, and back to his driving wheel. It was uphill while he was doing it. Kellogs joined us just before we went on that long British tour – the one that lasted four years!” (3)

The Paramounts started gigging further afield across the south east of England. Brooker recalls the first time he met future Rolling Stone Bill Wyman when The Paramounts were on the same bill as Wyman’s pre-Stones group The Cliftons in July 1962. “Four other bands and ourselves played a gig at Greenwich Town Hall in London. It was an old trick by the promoter [to have] a band contest with a small prize. With six bands on, loads of people came to the dance and he didn’t have to pay.” (4)

Around Christmas 1962 Copping decided to leave the group to prepare for a three-year chemistry course at Leicester University and suggested fellow Westcliff High school boy Graham ‘Diz’ Derrick as his replacement.

By coincidence, Brooker knew ‘Diz’ from his days in The Electrics. “Diz had shown great musical ability at an early age. Also he was quite independent financially. He had the support of his dad – unlike the rest of us he had both a mum and dad – and if you said to him ‘get a bass guitar’, one would appear the following day. So Diz got a bass, and his dad put up the money for us to buy a Commer van. We had ‘Paramounts R ‘n’ B’ painted on the back.” (3)

By the summer of 1963 the Paramounts were all aged 18 and Gary wanted the group to become professional, though this didn’t sit well with everyone. Mick Brownlee, who was considering getting married, needed the security of his bricklaying job and quit the group as a result. John Denton recalls that The Paramounts hired various temporary drummers, among them Tony Diamond, who also did service with The Orioles who were successors to The Paramounts at The Shades. When he left Westcliff High School Denton was given the task of booking a band for the end-of-year dance. “I approached The Paramounts and Gary said that they would be pleased to do it, but they didn’t have a drummer.”

Like many a band of the era, The Paramounts used the classified columns of Melody Maker to find a suitable candidate. After the ad ran, Trower decided Barrie James ‘BJ’ Wilson was the best choice. Wilson, born March 18, 1947, in Edmonton (the same North London suburb where Brooker had briefly lived as a child) was duly enlisted into The Paramounts. Being London based at the time, BJ dossed down at The Shades during his first few weeks with the band. Stan Pearson, a Southend-On-Sea friend of Wilson’s, says that BJ’s parents did not approve of their son joining a group, feeling that he should “get a proper job”, but their position on the issue would change as The Paramounts’ career progressed.

With the changes in personnel came a shift in repertoire, seeing the group move towards Ray Charles – ‘Sticks And Stones’ was a favourite – and, slightly later, to the R&B sound of Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland. Although in Southend-On-Sea this music was confined to the underground world of The Shades, The Paramounts were not alone in appreciating American R&B. Throughout the UK, in London, Birmingham, Newcastle and – most notably – Liverpool, other groups of their ilk were playing songs they’d discovered on imported American records. It was to burst into the national consciousness in mid-1963 as the first wave of Beatlemania hit Britain like a tornado. Suddenly everybody was singing ‘Twist And Shout’ or proclaiming “Money, that’s what I want.”

A turning point in The Paramounts’ career occurred on September 5, 1963 when they supported The Rolling Stones at the Strand Palais Theatre in Walmer, just outside Deal in Kent. “[It] was the first time we’d seen the Stones, and they saw us,” says Brooker. “In fact we all ended up hiding in the same room because there was a terrible, terrible fight down there between Marines and East End heavies. It was a staged fight. The Marines had to be taught a lesson. Our manager, who ran the dance hall, brought down these heavies from the Krays’ snooker hall in London’s East End. It was a pretty fearsome battle. ‘Our side’, if you like, were wandering around looking for somebody to kill with baseball bats and chains in their hands. I remember looking out of the window with Mick Jagger, and we saw one of these Marines run into his car and lock the door. One of ‘our boys’ just went up, punched the window, which smashed immediately, grabbed him by the ears and pulled him out and kicked the hell out of him. A vicious brutal fight. The Rolling Stones and The Paramounts were both in the same boat there. We became quite close within the space of an hour because we were all scared together.”

At this stage in their career the Stones weren’t well known beyond London and a few small towns in the south west such as Reading, Guildford, Maidenhead, Windsor and Richmond, where they would sell out any dance floor that they played. “Our manager ran this gig down near Deal in Kent,” says Brooker. “I think it was that week that the Stones’ debut single, ‘Come On’, was released.”

The Rolling Stones’ cover of Chuck Berry’s ‘Come On’ (actually released in June) was heading towards the Top 30 and their TV appearances and newspaper articles were generating interest as well as outrage.

According to Robin Trower, the Stones were particularly impressed with both The Paramounts’ stage performance and their unique repertoire, which differed from other bands on the R&B circuit at that time. Nevertheless, they were certainly among the ranks of a whole new batch of R&B groups based in the south that included Georgie Fame & The Blue Flames, John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, Manfred Mann (or the Mann-Hugg Blues Brothers as they were initially known) and Chris Farlowe & The Thunderbirds.

Gary Brooker: “Wherever we played we made our reputation. Anyway, we started to spread out in 1963 after having played that gig with The Rolling Stones. Up until that point we didn’t know that there were other groups playing R&B. The Stones, who really liked us, were still on Chuck Berry, but we’d moved on to Bobby Bland and James Brown… The Stones were really knocked out with us because we were doing real R&B. And by that I… mean real R & B… We were mainly doing the more obscure stuff, songs like ‘Further On Up The Road’, ‘Chills And Fever’ and ‘Daddy Rolling Stone’, and stuff by Hogsnort Rupert. And the Stones said, ‘Arr great, never heard anybody do that!’ The Stones later came down to Southend-On-Sea to The Shades to see us and I can remember Brian Jones being impressed with the [imported] R&B records on the jukebox.”

Within a matter of weeks – thanks to the success of ‘Come On’ and deft PR moves by their manager, Andrew Loog Oldham – The Rolling Stones would move from clubs and dance halls into theatre tours.

Gary Brooker: “The Stones told Philip Hayward and John Mansfield, who ran the Ricky-Tick clubs, that they should get The Paramounts in. And they said, ‘Well let’s see them!’ And they saw us! So we got that circuit, which was down to the Stones.”

The Stones even went as far as to cite The Paramounts as ‘their favourite R&B group’. In Melody Maker (dated March 14, 1964) Keith Richards informed Ray Coleman, “There are two groups in this country that deserve a mention, Wayne Fontana & The Mindbenders are good. And so are The Paramounts – one of the best groups to come up for a long time. Put that in the Melody Maker.”^*

It was only a matter of time before The Paramounts would encounter the influential disc jockey and scene maker Guy Stevens. “Guy Stevens… was ‘The Man’,” says Brooker. “All he ever did was listen to records! We’d go round his place once a week, and by the end of the evening we’d come out with 10 new songs. He showed us a lot of obscure material like ‘Chills And Fever’ and ‘Mohair Sam’. Stevens was the DJ at the Crawdaddy when it was at Richmond [Athletic] Club. I can remember when I first saw him. I saw the Stones at the Crawdaddy and we played there a couple of weeks later. It was one of the most outrageous clubs for rave-ups, because people swung from the rafters there. They got totally carried away with the music.”

Born in East Dulwich, London April 13 1943, Guy Stevens played a key role in introducing both musicians and fans to the best R&B music from the US. “He played total out and out rhythm’n’blues from his great record collection,” continues Brooker. “He also advised Sue Records on what they should release for a long, long time. That’s why a lot of records came out here [in Britain] that would never have otherwise come out. Sue Records was in turn to influence a lot of bands at the time… Guy would say to us, ‘Listen to this, yeah? Very rare import’. So we always used to pinch a few of Guy’s records and then put some of the songs in The Paramounts’ repertoire!”

Another source of employment for The Paramounts was American Air Force bases where the servicemen welcomed what for them was a ‘home-grown’ repertoire. “Our set was all American rhythm’n’blues,” says Brooker. “If somebody ‘white’ sang a song it was an immediate ‘no-no’ for us with the possible exception of Bobby Darin, who had quite a lot of soul, and a couple of Dion numbers.”

The Paramounts were now gigging four to five nights a week, earning around £30 a show. Kellogs recalls that was the break-even point. “Any less than that and we were in deep financial trouble. So as long as we had enough money to get fuel in the old Commer van to go to, say, Manchester before motorways, we were happy. Then we’d come back to Southend-On-Sea the same night, as staying out in hotels or at Mrs Bloggs’ Bed & Breakfast was an extravagance that we could never afford.”

For all groups at this level, the natural step was attaining a record contract. Brooker recalls an initial attempt when a London session was apparently financed by a lady from Leigh-On-Sea who had an eye for young men, but nothing came from it. Peter Martin arranged attempt number two, a recording of ‘Poison Ivy’, the Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller song originally recorded by The Coasters, along with Bobby Blue Bland’s ‘Further On Up The Road’. The session was taped at IBC Studios in London on October 18, 1963, with staff engineer Glyn Johns. “Peter [Martin] took it to Ron Richards at Parlophone,” says Brooker. “We were against recording a Coasters song, although we didn’t mind playing them live. Peter told us to record ‘Poison Ivy’. I said, ‘That’s sacred stuff.’ In fact if we’d had the choice, we wouldn’t have made a record at all!”

Evidently Richards liked what he heard, for he arranged a further session for The Paramounts on November 1 at EMI Studios, on Abbey Road, North West London, where they re-recorded ‘Poison Ivy’ along with a new B-side, a cover of The Drifters’ ‘I Feel Good All Over’, which originally appeared on their 1964 Under The Boardwalk album. It was the location where all The Paramounts’ recordings would be made.

“We couldn’t believe Abbey Road,” says Brooker. “When we arrived there for the first session, a man in one of those long brown warehouse coats met us at the side door and helped us in with our gear. A very nice man. It seemed very establishment. Our sessions were always at 11 in the morning. We never recorded at night. You knew you were in a great place where great things happened. It was all big. The microphones were huge, the control knobs were huge, and the mixing desk looked like the cockpit of a Lancaster bomber (from World War II).

“We used to get three hours to record two tracks, which involved getting (the right) sound, which was never very easy. Our amps were not in the forefront of technology. We would put down the instrumental track and overdub the vocals. We had no control, but we were allowed to go into the control room to listen to the playback and Ron Richards would say, ‘That’s a good take boys’. We didn’t question it, he was the producer. We never attended the mixes; we’d simply get an acetate a few days later.” (5)

‘Poison Ivy’ was released on EMI’s Parlophone label on December 6, 1963. Two weeks later a news feature on The Paramounts in Pop Weekly (dated December 21) had Richards talking up the group. “The boys have got a very definite edge to their work. It came through on that demonstration disc they sent me. It’s kind of rough and raw, and they can be very exciting indeed!”

The Southend Star of December 3, 1963 announced the release of ‘Poison Ivy’ and promised that The Paramounts would “be appearing on ITV’s Ready, Steady Go! on December 13 followed by a Manchester TV date later” (in January). On December 16, ‘Poison Ivy’ was picked as Record Of The Week for ITV’s Thank Your Lucky Stars Merseyside special which transmitted across the UK on December 21. Liverpool Cavern DJ Bob Wooler awarded the song a maximum of five points and described it as “one of those yeah yeah yeah discs!”

Three weeks later, on January 3, 1964, The Paramounts appeared on ITV’s Five O’ Clock Club. As a result ‘Poison Ivy’ began to edge its way into the singles charts. On January 17 The Paramounts appeared live on ITV’s trendy Ready Steady Go! where Gary was interviewed by Keith Fordyce, the show’s host. It was “a rather nervous” affair, according to John Denton. The appearance led to ‘Poison Ivy’ peaking at a UK chart position of 35.

By January 29, The Paramounts had recorded their follow-up single, a cover of Thurston Harris’ ‘Little Bitty Pretty One’ backed with their rendition of Ernie K. Doe’s ‘A Certain Girl’. This time no TV appearances were forthcoming and the single failed to chart.

Throughout February and March The Paramounts supported The Rolling Stones, John Leyton (of ‘Johnny Remember Me’ fame) and singer Mike Berry on a long cinema package tour. They were also invited to back up fellow EMI artist Duffy Power on his 1964 single ‘Parchman Farm’ and its B-side, ‘Tired Broke & Busted’. “Those performances were probably closer to capturing [The Paramounts’] live R&B sound than any of their official EMI Parlophone singles,” asserts John Denton.

For the third single, released on June 11, the group moved towards a more soulful sound with a cover of Curtis Mayfield’s ‘I’m The One Who Loves You’. “We weren’t aware there was money in songwriting until we came to record our third single,” says Brooker. “Ron Richards asked us if we had any new material for the B-side. We didn’t and Ron suggested we write one of our own. He said, ‘You’ll get a little bit more money then’. We told him we’d never written any songs, but he insisted we have a go. Five minutes later we had written ‘It Won’t Be Long’.” (5)

‘I’m The One Who Loves You’ led to two television appearances in one weekend on ITV: Ready Steady Go! on July 24 and Thank Your Lucky Stars on July 25, but once again the single failed to chart.

Amidst much touring across England, The Paramounts were booked to support The Rolling Stones at Bournemouth’s Winter Gardens on August 23, but they never made it as their Commer van broke down on the way there, according to Kellogs.

October 16 saw the release of The Paramounts’ fourth Parlophone single, ‘Bad Blood’, another Leiber-Stoller song, which had been recorded back on January 15. It was backed with ‘Do I’, a cover of a Maurice Williams & The Zodiacs song that was taped at Abbey Road on May 14. In an extraordinary move by the ever-vigilant BBC, the single was banned from airplay on the Light Programme because ‘Bad Blood’ was deemed to be a euphemism for venereal disease.

These disappointments caused some dissension in the ranks and the first to seek employment elsewhere was BJ Wilson, who accepted an offer to join Jimmy Powell & The Dimensions. However, according to Kenny White of The Dimensions, Wilson soon grew tired of his role and quit after only a few weeks to chance his arm as “a professional gambler on the card tables of the French Riviera”. The episode is clouded in mystery. “BJ’s ‘tall tale’ about gambling is a myth that he liked to propagate to the amusement of everyone who knew him,” says BJ’s friend Barry Sinclair.

Meanwhile, auditions for a new drummer took place at the 2I’s Coffee Bar in Old Compton Street in London’s Soho, the legendary launch pad for the first wave of British rock’n’rollers in the late fifties. Among the hopefuls was drummer/child actor Johnny ‘Mitch’ Mitchell, who would go on to join The Riot Squad then Georgie Fame’s Blue Flames before finding fame with The Jimi Hendrix Experience. Mickey Underwood was the favourite to replace Wilson, but was possibly a little too jazz orientated for The Paramounts. Phil Wainman, who turned up to the tiny 2I’s with his own drum kit, was asked by Trower to attend a further audition at his dad’s coffee bar in Southend-On-Sea.

Wainman, from West London, was duly chosen and on November 12, 1964, made his live debut with The Paramounts on BBC TV’s The Beat Room (transmitted four days later). Despite the radio ban, The Paramounts performed ‘Bad Blood’ along with Bobby Bland’s ‘Turn On Your Love Light’. No more TV appearances were forthcoming and the single failed to chart.

A fifth Paramounts single was recorded across two Abbey Road sessions on January 29 and February 11, 1965. ‘Blue Ribbons’ was a cover of a 1963 Jackie DeShannon demo, co-written by the late Eddie Cochran’s girlfriend Sharon Sheeley. It was also covered in early 1965 by soul singer Dobie Gray on his album In Crowders That Go ‘Go Go’. The Paramounts’ version of this pop-soul crossover was released on April 23, replete with a full string section, backed with a cover of Johnny ‘Guitar’ Watson’s bluesy ballad ‘Cuttin’ In’.

From February 21 until March 11, The Paramounts undertook a UK package tour starring Adam Faith, Sandie Shaw and The Barron Knights. As well as performing a brief set, the Paramounts backed the female star of the show. The fact that the former Miss Sandra Goodrich hailed from Dagenham, Essex helped singer and band gel together. “Sandie used to sit beside me on a stool to sing ‘Lemon Tree’,” recalls Brooker. “We did it as a duet.” According to Shaw’s autobiography The World At My Feet, Gary would ask, “Come here often?” as she sat down beside him on the piano stool. (6) The group also backed former Ready, Steady, Go! dancer turned singer Patrick Kerr, who was being managed by Faith and Shaw’s manager, Eve Taylor.

Gary Brooker: “Patrick Kerr and his wife [Theresa] were friends of ours. Patrick would demonstrate a new dance each week on ITV’s Ready Steady Go!. I used to hang around with him, and we used to go to all the TV shows. At one point I’d go every week. I can remember seeing Chuck Jackson. He absolutely blew me away. I recognise some of the things I’ve seen on the re-runs, and I thought, ‘I was there. I remember that.’ They were really great shows.”

John Denton’s diaries recall ‘The Paramounts’ finest TV moment’ when they were invited to appear on Ready Steady Go Goes Live! on April 23, 1965 performing ‘Blue Ribbons’ [transmitted on the actual day of ‘Blue Ribbon’s release] along with a cover of James Brown’s ‘Dancin’ Little Thing’. “Patrick Kerr’s dancers provided some dynamic moves to accompany the boys; with fantastic vocals from Gary, tight drumming from Phil Wainman, and fine guitar work from Robin Trower, the boys really could do no wrong!”

Phil Wainman’s overriding memory of his tour of duty is of financially tough times when each member had to contribute £2 a week towards petrol for the band’s Commer van. He also recalls a roadie saving cash by “hot-wiring amps into the mains using matchsticks” instead of buying plugs – a move that almost resulted in the band being blown up during rehearsals.

As a band, The Paramounts were, in Wainman’s opinion, “on fire! A favourite album was James Brown’s Live At The Apollo, which we would try and reproduce on stage. This involved rehearsing and then performing a 45-minute non-stop set without any introductions. Gary was a tough taskmaster and any deviation from the original plan where I might inject a drum fill would lead to my getting a small fine, which always went towards more petrol for the van! I remember changing a part of Richard Berry’s ‘Louie Louie’, but Gary never noticed, so I avoided that particular fine.”

Wainman released a solo single, ‘Hear Me A Drummer Man’, and later became a successful producer, making records for The Sweet, The Bay City Rollers, Alex Harvey, and The Boomtown Rats.

By the autumn of 1965 BJ Wilson had returned from his mysterious gambling stint in the French Riviera and rejoined The Paramounts. For the Paramounts it was business as usual with a non-stop whirl of gigs including some backing Sandie Shaw. In her autobiography she writes: “While I was driven in a sleek limousine, they [The Paramounts] crammed into a jolly transit van. I would have done anything to exchange the loneliness and isolation of my world for the warmth and camaraderie of theirs. So I did. After a cold, dreary one-nighter up in Scotland I clambered into their over-crowded tranny for the drive home.

“As we crossed the Highlands, the rusty old van began to belch smoke. Somewhere past Cumbria there was a loud bang and a hiss. The van shuddered to a halt. We all tumbled out into the freezing night to look under the bonnet. The general opinion was that we had run out of water. We looked around in the dark. There were no lights for miles. ‘Give it some Coca-Cola!’ suggested Gary, and poured a bottle into the engine. We all piled back inside and every so often someone would pop out and top it up with another drink. Just past Manchester we ran out of Coke. All the shops were shut. The roadie Kellogs took command. ‘We’ll have to pee in the empty bottles.’ He disappeared behind the bush and took the first turn. Just before Watford everybody had had a go, but me! I began to panic. There was a limit to being one of the boys, and this was it…” (6)

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Chapter 1

Whiter Shades Of Rhythm’N’Blues

The Paramounts 1960–1966