MY EARLIEST MEMORY is of sitting on the pot, in my mum and dad’s bedroom, looking at the walnut wardrobes. Those wardrobes seemed very grand to me, and I suppose at the time we Desmonds were quite a grand family. Unfortunately we were not going to stay that way.
We lived in a nice detached house in Dorset Drive in Edgware, which is a suburban corner of Middlesex. I used to like getting on my tricycle and pedalling along our road pretending I was a bus driver, stopping at all the houses around the little cul-de-sac where we lived.
At the age of 3 I even rode my tricycle to my school, Fernhurst Junior, which was a mile and a half away. Mrs Porter there used to make us lunch, and she always singed the puddings, giving me a taste for burnt food, in particular burnt custard, that has stayed with me ever since.
In many ways we were a typical enough Jewish household of the period, in touch with our roots, keeping the Sabbath and the High Holidays, and looking to make our way in the world. Both sides of my family originated from eastern Europe. My father, the grandson of Latvian immigrants, had grown up in Stamford Hill. His mum and dad had died in the flu epidemic at the end of the First World War, so he and his sister were brought up by their grandparents who were in the fur business and apparently very tough. They sent my father to school at what is now known as the Sobell Centre, but which used to be run by nuns. I don’t think he can have enjoyed it much because in later life, whenever he saw a nun, he would spit.
When I think of my mother back then, I always think of her smiling, which is remarkable because she, too, had gone through some hard times. Her family came from Ukraine, from an area that up until the Second World War had a Jewish community numbering some hundreds of thousands. Few survived the Holocaust and I have to say that when I went back to the town of our origin a couple of years ago with my son Robert, we didn’t exactly feel welcome either; nobody refused to serve us, but they did tend to say things like, ‘Oh I’m afraid the food you want is going to take two hours. Do you really want to wait?’ You can understand why my family left when they did.
My mother’s parents originally landed at Liverpool, before coming down to London and settling in a house on the Mile End Road in Whitechapel. My mother would always say we came from Mile End, because that was posher than Whitechapel. There was no pretending to be posh inside the house, though: the family had to sit on orange boxes because they couldn’t afford furniture.
My maternal grandfather, Louis, made money selling tyres and records, either from a market stall or a cart. He and my grandmother had nine children. Two of them became doctors, one died from cancer, two were with the RAF and got shot down, another was a bit of a Jack the Lad and was in Cobham’s Flying Circus: an amazing aviation display team. Yet another went to America and opened a garage in Los Angeles in the 1930s. My grandfather was very orthodox and constantly at synagogue. But all the daughters other than my mother married non-Jews; one of them even became a Catholic and acquired a posh accent, which broke her father’s heart. One way and another, they were an adventurous family, and, when I look at the photographs now, always very smartly dressed.
As she grew up my mother wanted to help her parents out by getting them a flat in Hendon, but it was not to be. When she was 20, my grandfather died suddenly (she was always upset that she went out that night and never got the chance to say a proper goodbye to him). A few years later her mother passed away too.
As for my father, Cyril Desmond was a proper character. He was also, during his early career, a high-flying media executive, who started out on the Daily Express as a circulation manager (the Daily Express, then, has always been part of my life), before moving to a new paper in Whitechapel called the Jewish News (a challenger to the Jewish Chronicle, it modelled its offices on the Daily Express building). And it was at the Jewish News that he met my mother, who was working there as a typist. They duly married and settled briefly in Mile End. Because publishing executives don’t live in that part of town, however, they moved to Stoke Newington, then to a flat in Regent’s Park which had rats, then to Mill Hill, and so, eventually, to Edgware, to the house with the grand wardrobes.
While all these moves were going on, my dad took a new job at Rank, the big theatre group. And there he met two other Jewish boys, Dickie and Ernie Pearl, who were to play a big part in his life. The two brothers were originally from Swansea but had come down to London first to sell balloons on Hampstead Heath, then to sell advertising on those balloons. They were clever and entrepreneurial, so it was always on the cards that if the right opportunity arose they would set up on their own. The opportunity duly came when they met Bob Dean, a smooth, debonair Christian from Yorkshire. Together, the three of them set up a new company, Pearl & Dean in the Finchley Road, to sell advertising into cinemas, and when they set up an overseas division shortly afterwards, they invited my father to run it. They even offered him a share in the business, but as he had two children at the time he felt it was safer to take wage and commission rather than be a shareholder. I won’t say that was his ruin, but it’s why he didn’t ultimately benefit from his association with them to the extent he could have done. His decision provided me with Business Lesson Number One – where you can, take ownership.
The Pearl & Dean team worked well together. Ernie Pearl was the visionary, the real brains behind the company. Dickie Pearl was the schmoozer. He would travel to somewhere like Wigan, where he’d come across a man showing films in a church hall, and ask him if he’d like to make an extra shilling a week. Dickie would then give the shilling, guaranteed, for two years, if the man agreed to show three minutes of advertising during screenings. Bob Dean was good with the big advertisers, because he was very smooth. And finally there was my father: the master salesman. As the business grew they all moved to a very smart building in Dover Street, in central London, with uniformed commissionaires on the door. Each year they would have a Christmas party, not just for the adults but for the kids too. It was very formal. The adults enjoyed whisky in crystal glasses, cigars – and cashew nuts! Those nuts seemed a very expensive luxury back then.
Eventually, in the early fifties, Pearl & Dean decided that they fancied opening offices overseas. Quite cleverly they avoided America in favour of places like Greece, Singapore and Africa. It became my father’s job to go out to whichever country it was, open up a local office and get it going. I did not see much of him during those successful years: sometimes he would be away for three months at a time. All my memories of him are of sitting in the back of his car on the way to or from the airport and being choked by the fumes from his cigar. Yet I was happy enough. Life was good. My mother had an account at Selfridges, which we all thought was a big deal. On occasion, the Pearls would come round to our house, Dickie in a Bentley, Ernie in his Rolls-Royce. One of the African heads of state visited us too, the first black man I’d ever seen, and the boss of Shell dropped in for tea! As for me, I played cricket with the bloke across the road whose father owned the All Weather Garage in nearby Burnt Oak, and I’d play cars with Michelle Mortner, of whom I was very fond. We’d play in the woods in Edgware, by Canons Drive.
My brother was 15 years older, and he was excited because he was engaged to be married to the daughter of Mr Austin of Austin Suite Furniture. They were one of the big Yiddisher furniture companies but my father would never give them any respect. To him they were ‘f***ing cabinetmakers’. My father, you see, was Cyril Desmond of Pearl & Dean worldwide screen advertising – a media person and man of the world.
Then, when it seemed nothing could go wrong, disaster struck. Out of the blue, my mother called me in. I knew, from the look on her face, that something was badly wrong.
‘Richard,’ she said, ‘I’ve got something to tell you and there’s no easy way to say it. I’ve got to go to Africa because your father … well, he could be dying.’
I couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing. I felt like I’d been hit with a hammer. Apparently, my father had contracted a terrible illness through drinking contaminated water.
My mother flew to Africa with Dickie Pearl, and they brought my father back, by air ambulance, to Hammersmith hospital. He was told there was an antibiotic that might save his life, but that it might leave him blind, deaf or even paralysed. That day he was a Savile-Row-suit-wearing 45-year-old executive who jetted round the world. Everything was great. But he took the antibiotic and the next morning he woke up completely deaf.
It must, of course, have been a real personal ordeal for him to find himself in that condition. What struck me most at the time, though, was that all of a sudden his friends either disappeared or made disparaging comments. ‘After all,’ they would say, ‘he can’t hear, silly old bastard.’ One minute they were all chummy with my father; the next, because he had lost all his influence, they didn’t want to know.
The only real friends that my father was now left with were us, his family. And we really wanted to do our best for him. But we struggled with a far more serious problem than his deafness: his addiction to gambling.
I knew, even at my young age, that this was something he’d always struggled with. In his earlier Pearl & Dean years, I can recall him taking advertising clients to Sandown Park, complete with his top-of-the-range binoculars in a smart leather case (everything he owned had to be top quality), and showing them what a big man he was by placing some huge bet. Of course in those days he could afford it and it was part of the sell.
But after the illness, it was another story. The Pearls tried to look after him financially. Dickie Pearl took my mother up to Dover Street in his Bentley to discuss the future. He offered £100,000 in 1954 so that my father could start a shop of some sort and so earn an income. My mother, however, was horrified at the idea of giving my father such a huge lump sum because she knew he would just gamble it away. Instead she asked that he be given a wage for the rest of his life and they agreed to £3,000 a year – perhaps the equivalent of £500,000 now.
It was a sensible strategy so far as it went but, sadly, it was to no avail. Because of my father’s setback his gambling addiction grew steadily worse. My mother went back to the company and asked if he could be given something to do. They suggested he collect debts. He tried that, and hated it. Eventually he went to see Ernie Pearl and said, ‘Look, I am a salesman, not a debt collector.’
Ernie agreed and so my father went back to selling, perhaps at a lower level than previously but at least that was his first love. I remember once going with him to a very big agency whose clients included brands like Domestos. Of course his deafness made negotiations very difficult, but because I was able to make him understand me, I was able to interpret for the buyers. Years later Dickie Pearl said to my wife: ‘Do you realise your husband was selling advertising when he was five years old?’
I often accompanied my father on his selling trips, and if the company gave him, say, Felixstowe Cinema for the summer, I’d be able to go to Charlie Manning’s amusement arcade while he was working. More often than not, though, I’d be sitting in his Triumph Herald pretending to drive it, while he was in the bookmakers. I sat outside a lot of bookmakers. Spicers in Finchley Road, William Hill, Corals. Eventually, he would emerge, having lost heavily. ‘Bastards!’ he would say. ‘That Joe Coral’s a crook!’
About this time I moved from my private nursery school to Edgware Junior School. Fernhurst, it turned out, would be my only encounter with private education. From then on it was the state sector all the way. Thanks to the grounding I had already had, I found that I was ahead of the rest of the class, but it didn’t exactly make me popular. Nor did my origins. The other kids, from council flats in Stanmore, would make comments like: ‘Oh well, you must be rich, because all Jews are rich.’ Things were not helped by the fact that sometimes I would have to be taken out of school to attend various Jewish functions.
By the time I was eight my father’s gambling debts had become so heavy that we were becoming very hard up indeed. I had to find a way of raising cash. I used what little money I could scrounge or borrow to buy quantities of cheap bubblegum, which broke all my teeth, collected the cards inside and sent off for various things like a camera or a rugby ball. Then I sold them, saved the money and took my mum out, at Christmas, to see a show and have a meal at a Berni Inn.
But of course it wasn’t enough. Things gradually got worse until eventually my father lost everything, including the house. This was the final straw for my mother. I used to wonder whether she left my father because he’d gone deaf or because he’d gone broke. But the heartbreaking truth, I now think, is that she left him because she wanted to save me. She wanted to try and give me a better life.
I can understand that, yet as I’ve got older I’ve also come to feel increasingly sorry for my father. It’s almost unbearable now to imagine what he went through and the frustration he must have had to endure. He was trapped in what had become a loveless marriage, he couldn’t hear, he couldn’t even really have a conversation. On top of it were all those endless and hopeless trips to the bookies, making a bad situation even worse each time.
My mother found a flat for the two of us to move into and she sold the idea to me by saying that it had very nice cupboards – much bigger than the ones we had in Edgware. Then she met me after school one day and took me on the bus to see it. I remember arriving at a block of very old flats. We walked up the stone stairs to No. 16 and opened the door. It was dark inside. One bedroom, a lounge, another bedroom. And a balcony that looked over the backyards of all the shops so you could see the deliveries arriving, and, beyond that, a main road with buses and cars going up and down. You couldn’t open the front windows because they were all rusted up.
Suddenly I felt very alone. I knew nobody. My friends Nigel Sloane and Michelle Mortner were gone, along with David Kestelhaut, with whom I used to play cricket in Green Lane.
By now I was 11 years old and starting at my secondary school, Christ’s College. It was a grammar school, which was supposed to be a good thing, but I thought it was a terrible place. The sort of teaching they did meant nothing to me. Not only did I not know what the capital of Egypt was, I didn’t care. Then you had the woodworking class. I liked maths and history, anything that had a purpose to it. But woodwork? Jews don’t do woodwork. To make matters worse I felt isolated. The kids at Christ’s College were like the ones at my nursery school: they all lived in detached houses in Woodside Park, Finchley Central and Hampstead Garden Suburb. They’d go out for fish and chips at lunchtime at the Three Brothers restaurant round the corner, but I could never afford that, so I felt lonely and excluded.
In fact we could not even afford the uniform for Christ’s College. We were, however, allowed to sew the badge on to a plain blazer my mother found. I had to wear the same blazer to synagogue on Saturday, which led to a lot of teasing and laughter at my expense. Many years later I met one of my tormentors, who by this time was the accountant for my PR man Alan Edwards. He said, ‘Hi, remember me? We used to go to Woodside Park together. We were friends.’ I told him we were never friends and reminded him he used to tease me about the blazer.
My attempts to fit in at school were a failure. I was poor, lonely, a bit fat, and an outsider. I had my talents, but even those failed to help me.
On one occasion they wanted to raise money for a church fête or something similar and they gave all the kids programmes to sell. The one who sold the most programmes would get a pound, and win his class a trip to Southend. So off I went, Saturday and Sunday, up and down Finchley selling programmes. I worked hard at it and it turned out that I was a good salesman. What’s more, it turned out to be great fun because sometimes people would give you a pound and not even take a programme.
Anyway, I raised more money than anyone else, and so won my class the trip to Southend. I felt so proud of myself. When we arrived, I fancied going to the amusements. Unfortunately I was a bit late coming back. I thought they might be understanding but, no, I got the cane from a teacher who looked just like a Nazi when I saw pictures of him in later years – plus a thousand lines: ‘I must not be late’. I couldn’t believe it: without me they wouldn’t have even been in Southend.
By this time my mother and father were divorced. My mother started working for Orlik, a famous company in Archway which made pipes for the gentleman smoker. My father, meanwhile, clearly feeling guilty about what had happened, bought me a bike. It didn’t do him much good: I suppose I’d taken my mother’s side and felt he was to blame for everything. My brother, however, made me go round to see him in his new flat in Finchley Court, which was halfway between where I lived and the school, and my visits there became something of a regular fixture, especially when my mother was working. When I arrived at his flat, my poor dad would invariably announce proudly that he was cooking a chicken for me. He’d be standing there, in his little kitchen, in his Savile Row jacket, with his hearing aid whistling and his cigar ash tumbling on to the food. The chicken was always undercooked. It’s taken me nearly 60 years to come back to eating chicken again.
Far more enjoyable were my Hebrew classes at Woodside Park, where I could meet other Jewish blokes, where the cantor was very warm and friendly, and where there were bagels on a Sunday morning. For a while I thought I might even become a cantor myself. Indeed I went so far as to visit the United Synagogue headquarters in Woburn Place to find out about the training. That’s when I discovered the problem with my plan. They told me I’d have to learn all this stuff, book after book. I, however, just wanted to sing the songs.
So my ambition to be a cantor quickly ceased. But my attraction to music did not – it simply took a different direction. One of the people I became friendly with at Woodside was called Jonathan Portner who had an older brother who was into music. So Jonathan came along every Sunday with a little tape recorder and he played me the Animals and Georgie Fame. Around that time everyone was listening to Beatles songs, but I never much liked the Beatles. They seemed terribly manufactured to me. But when I heard the Animals with Eric Burdon’s voice and the Vox organ I thought they were fantastic.
Jonathan said I should start reading the Melody Maker, too, which was great advice and probably why I still go to him as a dentist.
All in all, it was the beginning of my lifelong love affair with music.
And then I came across live bands. Strangely enough, I had a French exchange student to thank for my first encounter with them. I had been to his home in Paris, where his father had taken me out for an opulent lunch of moules and oysters. When the boy came for the return visit to stay with me, he clearly expected me to reciprocate, but I knew we couldn’t afford to take him out to the country for a roast beef lunch. Instead I decided to take him to see John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, featuring Eric ‘Slowhand’ Clapton. We took the 221 bus to the Manor House, walked up the stairs, paid our 7/6 each, and found ourselves in a crowded room, on a warm summer’s night, with about 30 other people. I went back to the Manor House recently and it’s only a small room, but it seemed big back then. There were windows along one side with curtains, I remember, that didn’t quite fit the windows. A projector was beaming through a piece of plastic and you could smell the plastic melting.
Then this group with ‘John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers’ written on the organ appeared. They started playing and I forgot about French exchange students, family problems, money problems, everything.
I had to hold on to the radiator.
I had never heard anything like it.
WHEN I WAS 13 I forged my date of birth so that I could get a Saturday job at Woolworth’s, earning £1 3s 6d for the day. But my real ambition was to do something in the music world – or, at least, close to it.
One evening I went along to the Manor House to watch Zoot Money play, and got chatting to the cloakroom attendant. He told me that he was leaving and asked if I knew anyone who wanted to take over. I didn’t think twice, especially when he told me that I could earn a pound just for the evening, plus tips, and that if I left the door open, I could hear all the music. I could also meet the musicians when they walked past to get to the toilet – and after all, everyone has to go to the toilet.
The first night I was there my predecessor came up and asked if I’d do him a favour. Apparently, he had been charging people sixpence each to leave their coat, but his uncle, who owned the pub, thought it was only threepence. If I took ten coats and gave his uncle ten times sixpence he would probably give his nephew the taste of his belt. If, on the other hand, I stuck with the existing system, I’d earn an extra threepence a coat and the former office holder would be saved a lot of unnecessary pain.
At the end of that first evening I went down to see the boy’s uncle, who was sitting in the pub having a drink, with his Alsatian dogs around him. The Manor House was not in the East End but it was still pretty rough. He asked me how many tickets I had sold, and I told him: 42.
‘And how much is it a ticket?’ he asked me. ‘Sixpence, isn’t it?’
He knew exactly what his nephew had been up to. I agreed that it was sixpence.
However, later on I learned a good trick. If a couple of punters came up I’d say, ‘Oh you’re together, aren’t you? You’ll only need one ticket.’ I’d then charge for both coats, but put them on one hanger. So far as the pub was concerned, we’d just made sixpence rather than a shilling, and I was therefore able to keep the difference. Later still, I put the price up to ninepence a ticket, pocketing the extra threepence, and eventually, when I realised I was doing all the work and the landlord was having a drink inside, I even introduced my own tickets, which I purchased from a sweet shop in Friern Barnet. They were raffle tickets in green, pink and blue just like the ones the landlord used, which meant that I could control exactly how many of his I gave out and so decide how much money he should get.
I have to confess that I didn’t feel bad about doing any of this. My mother and I really needed the money; I was acutely aware that my family could not afford to do the things others were doing. Other kids were having lavish bar mitzvahs, for instance, but there was to be no bar mitzvah party for young Richard and since I couldn’t invite people to mine, I couldn’t expect invitations to theirs. Today I sometimes think to myself, ‘Remember that, Mr Desmond’, if it happens that one of my daughter Angel’s friends doesn’t invite her back to their home: you never know, maybe it’s because that friend lives in a one-bedroom flat.
My other reason for needing the money was that, by now, I had discovered that listening to music was not enough: I wanted to play, too, and in particular I was desperate to learn the drums. I think I acquired this desire from my brother who was an enthusiast – and from some bongos my father had once brought back from Africa.
Of course I couldn’t afford the £40 I needed to buy a proper drum kit, but – as luck would have it – one of my classmates, whose father worked for a music company, got a new drum kit for his bar mitzvah. I asked him what had happened to the old one and when he said he’d thrown it out the day before, I went round to his very nice house in Finchley Central and gave him £5 for it. It wasn’t much of a drum kit to be honest: a couple of cymbals, a hi-hat and a bass drum. I think it was a blue Broadway, which was made by Rose Morris. But it was something to hit and I like to tell my eldest children, Robert and Angel, the story of those first drums, because when I think today about how many things they have, it’s funny to remember how grateful I was to get something that had been thrown out!
With my job in the cloakroom bringing in a bit of cash, much of my life at this time centred on the Manor House pub. Upstairs at the pub was a club called Bluesville which was run by a couple called Ron and Nanda Leslie. She was a little Greek woman with black hair, who used to shout at all the gangsters who came in: ‘You know I don’t allow you in here!’ They would then look a bit sheepish and mumble, ‘Oh all right, Nanda, all right.’ Ron (who had once been, I think, a drummer) had grey hair in the sort of style favoured by the famous jazz musician turned club owner Ronnie Scott, and always kept a very smart E-type or Mercedes car parked outside. He’d show his cars off to all the groups who played at the club but would then have to go on to say what great bargains they had been, because he couldn’t admit to how much money he was making.
Ron not only ran his Bluesville club at the Manor House but also one at the Fishmonger’s Arms in Wood Green, and others at venues in Brentwood and in Ipswich. All the groups he engaged were signed to a company called the Rik Gunnell Agency. And the way that this company did business fascinated me. Rik and his brother John would sign up Rod Stewart, Zoot Money, Georgie Fame, John Mayall – everyone – and pay the leader of each band £30 a week and the rest of the musicians £20. The reason they could be so confident about their outlay was that alongside booking them at places like Bluesville they also knew they could guarantee bookings at the other clubs they ran, including the Ricky-Tick club at Windsor, which featured in the famous 1960s film Blow-Up. It resembled a little cartel and I thought they were clever.
Eventually, because they liked the way I handled things downstairs in the pub cloakroom, Ron and Nanda asked me if I’d work Sundays and Wednesdays too. I pointed out that I had to be home by 11pm so Nanda arranged that the commissionaire would take me back to the flat on his moped. Now, it seemed, the cash was coming in and I was rocking and rolling. Even so, I was still keen to earn more because my family experiences and our money difficulties left me with a keen sense of what it means not to be financially secure.
The one day of the week I was reluctant to work was a Saturday because that was the night that Ron and Nanda weren’t there to run the club in the evening; instead it was organised by some people from Highbury. And that was the night when things could get quite rough. All through the week the club was full of blokes in reefer jackets, but on Saturday everyone wore smart ‘tonic’ suits and instead of bands they had a soul-music disco, the sort of stuff the girls who hung around with the tougher crowd could dance to in their miniskirts and see-through tops.
However, I happened to be in the cloakroom one evening when some of the Highbury guys came in and asked if I would do a Saturday stint for them. They had heard I was reliable, they said. They would pay me £2 a night, and were prepared to let me carry on with my little fiddle with the ninepence, which they knew all about. So I agreed.
For the first two weeks, everything went fine. But then on the third Saturday four blokes came into the cloakroom, closed the door behind them, pointed at one of the coats, and said, ‘We want that sheepskin jacket.’
I said, ‘What do you mean you want it? You haven’t got the ticket.’
Before I could even think of trying to stop them they jumped over the counter and simply grabbed it. At first I didn’t know what to do. Then I decided to go and tell Wally, who was one of the guys in charge, what had happened. He listened to my description of the thieves, and informed me that they were the Smith brothers, from a local gang called the Highbury Mob. When the owner of the stolen jacket came to collect it, Wally told him what had happened and on hearing that the Smith brothers were involved, the bloke immediately told him not to worry about it. He did ask, though, if I had been in on the theft. I didn’t like that at all. I’d had enough and I told Wally that I didn’t want to work on Saturdays any more.
Wally, however, tried to reassure me. In future, he said, I should keep the door open and blow a whistle he’d give me if there was any trouble. If for any reason he didn’t come straight away because he hadn’t heard the whistle, I should smash the little bottle of cider I normally had by my side, and hold it under the chin of the one who was doing the talking.
‘They’ll all soon back down,’ he said.
I didn’t really like the sound of this at all, but as I was still keen to carry on earning I nodded.
A few weeks later, the gang came strutting into my cloakroom again, closing the door behind them and demanding another expensive coat, a Crombie.
‘Look, you’re not having it,’ I said.
They started arguing with me.
I didn’t reach for the whistle, instead – Smash! – I waved a broken bottle at the one who was doing most of the talking. ‘You’re not getting the coat,’ I yelled. ‘You might take me down, but I’ve got you – now fuck off.’
And guess what? They backed down. I told Wally I thought we should call the police, but he shook his head: ‘No one really cares.’
‘Yes, but I care.’ I said.
I insisted that he call the police, and a Black Maria duly came and arrested the troublemakers. I was told that at some point I would have to go to Caledonian Road police station to give a witness statement.
A few days later, a fellow came into the club, informed me that he knew not only where I lived but where I went to school, and warned me that if I gave evidence against the bloke who had tried to take the coat ‘they’ would kill me. Apparently, the would-be thief was already on probation and would certainly go to prison if convicted. A day or two later, I noticed a big 3.5-litre Rover parked outside Christ’s College. There were four blokes inside.
‘What am I going to do?’ I wondered.
As instructed, I went to the police station, where I told them about the unwelcome visit I had received. Their response was that I had managed to get tangled up with a very dangerous crowd. Obviously, said the inspector, when asked in court who had taken the coat, I should tell the truth. But, he added, looking me straight in the eye, I had to be absolutely 100 per cent sure. If I was even only 90 or 99 per cent sure I could identify the culprit, that would not be enough, and I’d have to say as much.
On the day of the trial I took the bus with my mum to Stamford Hill magistrates’ court. As we walked in, I noticed that all the gang who had come into my cloakroom were sitting there, staring at me. I was asked my age and when I said 13, the place went very quiet: the assumption was that I’d have to be 18 or 19 at least to be working in that club. The magistrate said, ‘Well, son, before you is Mr Smith. You have said he took the coat. Are you 100 per cent sure?’
My heart was pounding. I said: ‘I’m pretty sure … but I can’t be 100 per cent sure.’
The judge told Mr Smith he was free to go, much to his obvious relief. He came up to me afterwards and said that he and his brothers really appreciated what I’d done and that if there was anything they could do for me in return, I should call them – and he handed me his card.
Of course there was no way I was ever going to call them. However, our paths did cross once more. Seven years later, I bought a second home in Wood Green, and one of the people who came round hoping to rent one of the rooms turned out to be Mr Smith, the thief from the Manor House. He obviously didn’t recognise me, and because he only used the room as an occasional bolt-hole I never saw him again. However, he did replace all my horrible old furniture with brand new stuff. It’s funny how everything goes round.
By now I had managed to save enough money for a set of new drums, so I bought a white kit with German-made Trixon fittings (proof, if it’s needed, that I’m definitely not anti-German!).
Whenever Zoot played at the club, I chatted with his drummer, Colin Allen, in the tiny little dressing room. He taught me how to play paradiddles and showed me how, if you put bicycle chains on cheap cymbals, it gives them more of a ring. He also told me I should get drumming lessons.
I looked in the Melody Maker and rang one of the drum tutors who advertised there, whose name was Max Abrams. Max Abrams (originally Max Abramovich) was a very famous drummer, originally from Glasgow, who had played with many of the biggest bandleaders from the thirties and forties including Ambrose and Jack Hylton. The story I love about him is that every night he’d put on his black tie, turn up at whatever function was going on at the Hilton, sit down at one of the tables and have his dinner.
‘Max, you always seem to be in there,’ I said to him years later.
He replied, ‘Well there’s always a spare space, and no one ever asks for your ticket. I have my dinner, have a drink and go home!’
When I approached him for drum lessons, though, Max was unable to help me, so instead I went along to a guy called Frank King who told me that he’d charge me £1 2s 3d for half an hour – exactly what I earned at Woolworth’s for a day’s work. (I always thought of money in those days in terms of the pay for a day in Woolworth’s or a night at the cloakroom.)
I agreed to his terms, started lessons, and found that he and I got on quite well. When I wasn’t having lessons I would practise and practise at home. It must have been terrible for the two old girls who lived in the flats above us. Eventually, I agreed to move my drums to my father’s flat. Obviously he couldn’t hear them, and when his neighbours complained he couldn’t hear them either!
One day I was trying to get to my drum lesson, which took place in a room above Footes drum shop in Piccadilly’s Denman Street, when both the bus and the Tube were badly held up. I eventually struggled in an hour and a half late. ‘What are you doing here?’ Frank asked. ‘I’m teaching another bloke now.’ The bloke he was teaching was Trevor Morais from a band called the Peddlers.
‘Look, Mr King,’ I said, ‘it’s not my fault,’ and I told him about the transport problems.
‘Well, time is money. I’m teaching someone else now.’
‘But I’ve worked so hard. I’d tell you if it was my fault. But it wasn’t my fault.’
Then, out of the blue, Trevor Morais said he’d be happy for me to sit in with him.
I couldn’t believe my ears. What a wonderful gesture! Trevor was one of my heroes. With all due respect to Ringo Starr and Bob Henrit, Trevor Morais was the top bloke at that time. He was a great drummer, and the Peddlers, who were like an early Emerson, Lake & Palmer, were a brilliant band. But I have another reason to be grateful for meeting Trevor that day. The simple truth is that if I’d been turned away from my lesson, if Trevor hadn’t let me sit in with him and taken the time to practise paradiddles with me, I might well have said ‘fuck this’, and given up. After all, drumming was, and is, grief.
Now I started meeting musicians at different gigs or from Melody Maker classifieds and playing in various bands, the first of which was called Rebellion and was a cross between Zoot Money and all the jazzy stuff – which I liked – and Jimi Hendrix and the Who – which the other members preferred. It offered a great excuse to bash around on the drums. We used to go and see Pink Floyd at the Roundhouse and were very impressed with the fact that they broke milk bottles in a dustbin and then played the sound through a PA. We also liked their brilliant light show. Consequently, when we happened to be in Southend a little later, we cut the wires and nicked the lights from the seafront thinking that if we used them they’d make us look like the Floyd. It was shades of the business motto ‘Get on, get honest, and get honourable.’ Unfortunately, on this occasion we didn’t get on because the lights operated on a different voltage so we couldn’t make them work for us.
Our biggest problem was the perennial one that all bands face: getting people and stuff around. Our first manager had an American car, a huge thing that kept breaking down. We used to drive around in that as a ‘superstar group’. He also made use of a waffles van, which was less impressive. Our second manager had a Vanden Plas, but it was always being taken back by the hire-purchase company because he hadn’t made the payment that month. Sometimes we’d come out of a gig and it would be gone.
Over Christmas 1966, we managed to get a four-night residency at the Hercules pub in Holloway Road for the massive sum of £40. To make sure we didn’t eat into our fortune, we’d leave our gear at the pub between gigs and would then walk home, every night, from Holloway Road to Friern Barnet – a long way.
The driver of the rental van who took us to the Hercules on the first night suggested it would be a lot cheaper if we bought our own van, rather than renting one. He recommended a bloke called Mr Goldstein, who ran a business in Liverpool Road. He also offered to look the van over for us.
When we got there, we found Mr Goldstein sitting at his desk, smoking his little Manikin – people like him were always smoking Manikins. He pointed his cigar at a van and said: ‘You can have that one if you like: how much you got?’
We told him: ‘40 quid.’
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I wanted more.’
‘Well we haven’t got any more.’
‘All right,’ he said, ‘give me the 40 quid. I’ll get it delivered to you.’
After what seemed like a very long wait, and not before we’d phoned his place several times, the van appeared. Unfortunately it was being towed.
We were very excited to get our very first set of wheels, of course, but the fact that we couldn’t get it to start was a bit of a problem. I went to see Mr Goldstein, first with my brother, then with his brother-in-law, the cabinetmaker’s son, Robin, who was a lawyer. Mr Goldstein, though, was adamant that he would not take the van back. ‘Sold as seen,’ he insisted.
Then my father said he would come with me. Confronted by a man of stature, Mr Goldstein reluctantly agreed that for £20 more, which we could pay in instalments, we could have another van – and one, moreover, that worked. This was a huge relief, except for the fact that we hadn’t actually got £20.
To drum up some cash, we found a cabaret agent, changed our name to the Rick Desmond trio (which sounded quite slick) and secured some bookings. At a stroke, our fee per gig went from £3 to £30. On the minus side, we had to play songs like ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon’ and ‘Congratulations’. This, I realised, was where we and bands like Pink Floyd differed. They played their own music. We, on the other hand, had to play pop stuff people already liked in order to buy a van. We were getting nowhere.
So I joined a band called Canterbury Glass, who, like Pink Floyd, wrote their own songs. Their members included Steve Hackett (who went on to play guitar in Genesis) and a bass player called Toad (whose father owned Marine Ices, an ice-cream parlour in Chalk Farm).
Toad told me, ‘You’re uncool, man,’ and gave me a very tight, green floral shirt to wear, so that I would be cool and not let the others down.
Shortly afterwards, there was a change in personnel. Hackett left, a guy called Les came in and we also acquired a singer called Jill, who we called Jill The Pill From Muswell Hill. She was a Jewish girl whose parents had a ladies-wear shop.
Canterbury Glass, like Rebellion before it, were on at least one occasion less than respectful of others’ property. One night at a university gig we nicked a big barrel of beer. Unfortunately, we didn’t realise that you have to tap a barrel and do this and that to it in order to get at the beer inside. I was beginning to realise that crime really doesn’t pay.
All through this period I was still struggling on at school, not wanting to learn. My studies – if you can call them that – consisted of playing drums in the cadet hall and then sitting under the cadet corps hut, smoking a fag.
One day, when I was nearly 15, the headmaster called my mother in and told her that I wasn’t learning anything and that I was disruptive, both of which charges were true. He also complained that all I did was drum on the table and talk about groups and music, which was also true. Finally he suggested that I should go off and become a drummer for a year and if it didn’t work out I could either come back to the school or go to a technical college and learn a trade.
Learn a trade? I was horrified! Before, whenever they had asked me at school what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would say – at least before I considered becoming a superstar rock-and-roll drummer – that I would go into ‘the medium’. OK, the word was not quite right, but for the son of the managing director of Pearl & Dean, the ambition was clear enough. Now they wanted me to learn a trade? I did know, though, that drumming wouldn’t be easy – after all, in the time I had worked in the cloakroom and performed in bands I’d only been able to save up £50. But I still wanted to try it.
To this end I joined a group called Winston G & the Soul Set, whose music was easy to play. I thought Winston G was a fine fellow, but it turned out he was quite tight with money and always seemed to think that it was my turn to stump up for the petrol. It came to a head one night, when, after driving back from a gig in Bournemouth, Winston again insisted it was my turn to pay to fill the van up. I refused – at which point he said that he would dump my drums right there on the road.
We were in Finchley by the time he said this, and I knew my friend Jonathan Portner lived just around the corner, so I managed to persuade Winston to leave the drums there instead. Next day Jonathan called me up. ‘There’s only one person who could’ve left a drum kit in front of my house at three in the morning, and that’s you! But don’t worry. My mum’s going to bring them round for you!’
Was it time, I wondered, to put the drums aside and think about what I was really going to do with my life? If I was not going to be the world’s greatest drummer (even though I am, perhaps, the world’s greatest drummer), I needed to find something else to do instead.
The question presented itself one more time when, at the age of 18, three years after I had actually got a proper job, I went to the Regal in Edmonton with Russ Ballard and Bob Henrit to see the Who. Russ has since told me that Eric Clapton was in the dressing room that evening but I don’t remember seeing him. What I’ll never forget, though, is that after the gig, John Entwistle invited us to go down to the Playboy Club in Park Lane with him. We all got into his stretch limousine, and I remember thinking how strange the whole experience was as we sped through the Manor House and Holloway to get there.
During the course of the evening I met a young blonde, Samantha Juste, who was a presenter on Top of the Pops. And she made me an offer which would force me to make one of the big decisions of my life. She knew all the bands who hung out in California, she said; why didn’t I go there with her to pursue my drumming career? What a moment! My head was spinning. I knew that if I went to California, my whole life would change, irrevocably, and that I might well never come back. On the other hand, I couldn’t help remembering, I’d just taken out a huge mortgage of £7,250 to buy a house for my mother and me. I knew that if I went to America she would not be able to afford to live there on her own.
In fact Samantha would end up with another drummer, Micky Dolenz from the Monkees. She lived life to the full, and I was very sad to learn of her death in 2014. Me? I kissed her goodbye that evening.
Then I walked home, on my own, to Southgate, because I didn’t have the money for a taxi.
SO AT THE age of 15 I gave up my dream to become a rock star, and started to cast around for a proper career. And as I found myself wrestling with the issue of what job to go for, something happened to remind me that I’d once thought of working in newspapers and magazines.
It started with an encounter at the club with an important cloakroom customer. In the course of our conversation, I talked about my career dilemma, and he suggested that I should call Tommy Tomkins, who was in charge of the post room at Thomson Newspapers, the then owners of The Times and the Sunday Times. Apparently there was a job going in the post room where all you had to do was walk round handing the post out. There was a canteen and lots of beautiful girls in miniskirts, this being the Swinging Sixties.
When you’re 15, of course, young girls in miniskirts cannot be ruled out as grounds for a career choice, but clearly there was more to it than that because that mention of newspapers reminded me of my father. Aha, I thought, this sounds just the way I had always visualised ‘the medium’. I probably did not think of myself in those days as an entrepreneur in the making, and still less a media entrepreneur, but I had to find something I could take pride in, that would lead somewhere, and where my talents would be appreciated. I might not have known in full what my talents were, but I already knew I had focus and determination – and that a job with a newspaper might play to my skills.