TP:
I have you down with a group called the Bluebottles in 1963.
MP: Shit a brick! How the hell did you know that one?
TP: There are others. But tell us about the Bluebottles.
MP: That was the group I turned professional with. It was a rhythm
and blues band. We used to back Graham Bond before he formed his group
with Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker. He used to travel up to Norfolk (where
I lived) in an old ambulance that had an organ in the back. The
Bluebottles played like Georgie Fame, Zoot Money Big Roll Band -- that
era. We had an organ in the band as opposed to a rhythm guitarist. After
the Bluebottles broke up, there was a guy called Jack Barry who managed
a guy called Boz who now plays with a little skiffle group called Bad
Company. He sent me to London to cut a record and take it to Robert
Stigwood’s office. I sat outside this glass wall while they played and
talked about the record. I was getting really nervous because there were
all these stars walking around. After a while, Jack Barry poked his head
round the door and asked if I’d fancy compering (emceeing) at rock
concerts. I got real mad and started shouting about my music, but when
he told me it paid 100 pounds a week I decided I could compere, sure.
There was this great tour -- I’m so pleased I did it
-- because I
used to open up with three songs before anyone knew I was the compere.
The bill was Chuck Berry, Moody Blues (who hit number one with "Go
Now" the first week we were on the tour), Long John Baldry’s
Hoochie Coochie Men, Graham Bond Organization, and this band called
Jimmy Powell’s Five Dimensions, except that Jimmy Powell split. [Note
-- Rod Stewart had been in the Dimensions, but left before the tour in
question. The group released two singles on Pye in 1964.] They were
backing Chuck Berry and they also backed me for the first three numbers.
After the tour I went and lived with the Moody Blues who had this big
pad. I met the Beatles there -- they used to come around and swim in the
pool, get stoned. After that, I went up to Norfolk to spend some time
with my folks because I’d run out of money.
The Bo Street Runners offered me a gig -- they were doing well on the
R&B scene. Tim Hinkley [Jody Grind, Vinegar Joe and Humble Pie] was
the organist -- he saw me when we supported them -- I was in a band
called the News that was originally called the Continentals -- we wore
red jackets. Tim dubbed me Norfolk’s Chris Farlowe, and got me into
the Runners. He wasn’t an original, but he was the only one that could
play. The rest of them were just past the skiffle three-chord stage, but
since they’d won the Ready Steady Go TV contest for amateurs in 1964,
they were getting work. After that, I formed a band with Viv Prince [see
the Pretty Things in TP #131] called Patto’s People. It had Tim
Hinkley and Louis Cennamo on bass and a trumpet player called Mike
Fellana, a Nigerian cat who played with Graham Bond. This was around the
end of ‘65 or early ‘66. After two months we sat down and very
deliberately named ourselves the Chicago Line Blues Band. We did pretty
well, but one day we stopped at a traffic light and Viv Prince got out
and said, "That’s it, I’ve had enough. No hard feelings."
Then I took up an occupation that I’d always wanted to do -- I sang
with a London Youth Jam Orchestra. We used to do songs that Mel Tormé
or Joe Williams did.
TP: How did you meet Ollie?
MP:
He was in Timebox, and they needed a singer. They’d had this black
American dude who was stationed in England on an air base. They were on
stage one night, and he got taken away by the MP’s. They needed a
singer and John Gee, who managed the Marquee on Wardour Street, dug me.
He was a Frank Sinatra freak and I was a rocker who was singing with big
bands. He figured I had integrity. He got them (Timebox) to come see me
sing with LYJO, which was a 24-piece big band. I got the gig, and the
group trotted along merrily for about two years. We even had a hit
single with a Four Seasons cover called "Beggin’." Decca
kept giving us these demos of songs, telling us what our next single
was. We protested, but they kept telling us that we were young and if we
had three or four hits their way, then we could go off and play our
far-out stuff. When we did that, we got promoters saying "You’re
nothing like your records -- what the hell am I booking you for?"
Then the organist left. I was out in the cafe having lunch and Muff
Winwood came over and said that the group was now called Patto. The
explanation, according to Muff, as to why the group’s name was Patto
was that every European country could pronounce it. All the other guys’
names were too hard to say. Patto went on for four years. When it became
Patto, Ollie switched from vibes to guitar. He’d never played guitar
before. There’s a fourth Patto album that was never released, called
Monkey’s Bum. It was done after the ‘72 tour with Cocker. When Ollie
and I break through IN A BIG WAY (snicker) Island will put it out.
Two-and-a-half years after Patto broke up, it reformed to play some
benefit concerts for the family of one of our road managers who was
killed in Pakistan.
Spooky Tooth was my next band. I joined with Keith Ellis who had been
with Bobby Whitlock in America. We had a day-and-a-half’s rehearsal.
On the first tour I had idiot cards with the lyrics printed on them
pasted all over the stage. Gary Wright wanted me to do a Mike Harrison
impression. Me and Gary didn’t get along too well. I did about six
tours and an album, The Mirror, in the year I was with them. It was
getting to be a good band until I tried to sack Gary Wright. He tried to
sack me -- he told everyone that I was the wrong image for the band.
They came down to my hotel room and said "Gary wants us to fire
you." I said, "Let’s go fire him!" I was writing songs
that didn’t fit his idea of old Spooky Tooth songs. They wouldn’t
take any change. After I left Spooky Tooth I was broke, so I ended up
working as head of promotion for my manager’s [Nigel Thomas] record
company -- Good Ear. That’s what I was doing when Ollie and Tony came
to see me about putting something together. They’d both been playing
with Kevin Ayers. We tried out bass players -- Greg Ridley didn’t work
at all, so we got Keith, and that’s how Boxer started.
Having followed Patto up to date, we turned our attentions to Keith Ellis,
another figure of long historical note who doesn’t look his age. Ollie, who
had lost interest in hearing Patto retell his tale somewhere around the
Bluebottles, was sitting on the windowsill, trying out a new movie camera/toy on
some buildings across the street. We start the story in late 1965.
TP: You were in the Koobas, weren’t you?
KE: Yeah. We did the last UK Beatles’ tour with them. We were just starting
out and I was 18. We had a single out that got to 19 or so. We did more and more
singles and more tours, and gradually decelerated. We were sitting around one
day -- we’d just done our only album (on EMI) -- and we realized there was no
point in continuing. We finished the album, then we finished the band. I went
off and joined Van der Graaf. This was 1968.
The town I come from is really small. There were only two bands in the town
-- we were the Thunderbeats, and the other was the Midnighters. We took the
guitar players out of the other band, and me and the drummer from my band and
formed the Kubas. The name was later changed to Koobas, when it was decided that
the double "o" would be good for designs.
Van der Graaf was a progressive revue band at University. They used a
typewriter for performing some songs. My job was to turn them into an electric
band. I did that for about a year, but it seemed like nothing was happening at
all, so I quit that. I was only on Aerosol Grey Machine. Then I went into
Juicy Lucy. I did that for about two years. After that, I met Bobby Whitlock. I
was with him -- including rehearsing, playing and recording -- for about two
years. Then I was refused entry at Toronto, so the band broke up because I
couldn’t get back into America. I went to England, played around with various
people, then went into Spooky Tooth, which is where I met Patto. Spooky Tooth,
well, Gary Wright didn’t suit me at all. I didn’t like meeting him at
breakfast. I’d stagger down after like two hours’ sleep, and he’d be
sitting there playing with his beads and talking about his weird dreams. Grrr!
When Spooky Tooth finished, I moved to L.A.
Well, with Patto working for a record company and Keith living in L.A.,
things were just about ready for the formation of Boxer, a job credited to Ollie
and Tony Newman, who’d played together in Kevin Ayers’ band. Ollie, who’s
not nearly the talker that Mike and Keith are, took a few questions to get
started. We tried to cover as much ground as possible but it got rather
hopeless.
TP: How did Boxer get started?
OH: I was working with Tony and we got Mike to put the backbone together with
us. I didn’t know what kind of band it was going to be. When I was on the road
in Europe with Kevin, I used to joke with Zoot Money about how incredible it would
have been with Patto singing. Zoot was the keyboard player, Tony the drummer,
and Rick Wills the bassist.
TP: What was your first group?
OH: It was called Pete and the Pawnees. I played drums. Then we were called
the Gunslingers. I was in one called the Music Students. I was in Rhythm &
Blues, Incorporated. That leads up to about 1964.
TP: When did you go semi-professional or pro?
OH: I started semi-pro at the age of 13, playing drums, and went professional
when I got out of art school, at sixteen. We formed a band called Take Five,
after which I went to Timebox. Clive Griffiths, the bass player, asked me to
play vibes, which I’d never played before. I practiced on strips of paper
until I got vibes, then I listened to Milt Jackson records and copied solos.
When the singer we had got picked up by the MPs for being a deserter, I had to
start doing the singing. I was a seventeen-year-old, vibraphone-playing, singing
twit. We were desperate to get a singer, and Patto just appeared. We got along
real well. That band developed, until we got a record contract. Then we chased a
hit single for a while. We did a lot of hard work -- we used to rehearse in a
cinema that our manager owned. We used to write a lot.
TP: How did you get involved with Ayers?
OH: I was in AIR London studios, working on the Tempest album, and Kevin was
there also. I was just sitting around, and Gerry Bron had his pocket calculator
out, fooling around. Kevin came down the corridor and asked if there was a
guitarist in the house. He needed a solo put on a song ("Didn’t Feel
Lonely Till I Thought of You") on the Dr. Dream album. When he got his band
together, we did the English tour, and then the June 1, 1974 concert and album.
With Ayers, I had to hang back until the last number, when I’d do this routine
-- I had a rope attached to the guitar, and I used to swing it around my head,
and drag it across the stage and do all this stuff to generally wreck it. The
song was "Stranger In Blue Suede Shoes." It was pretty frustrating
playing with him because I had to hold back so much of the time -- I was just
doodling about. It’s something I’m good at -- I can play melodically. The
thing I haven’t mastered yet is a high energy thing where I can perform solos
and chord work more spontaneously. That’s the direction I want to go in. I can
play nice licks on solos, sure, but my musical direction is this band.
TP: How did you like playing with Grimms?
OH: It was the same thing as Kevin Ayers, only ten times worse. They’re all
so cynical. They asked me to play like Jimi Hendrix. They asked me to play as
though I were a policeman, or a carpet salesman. You can do it because it’s
easy to do, but I could never let go.
TP: What about the future of Boxer?
OH: We’re going to start writing the second album; we’ve already got
three songs together. I won’t do sessions anymore. It’s like being a
plumber. They get you in to patch up a track.
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