SIX
- All You Need is Cash
Earth
Rise |
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Left
rehearsing at Grimm Doo. -- Below, Richard and Steve Lipson in
the studio.
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Martin,
as always set out first to discover how much of it I would really kill
for, and how much was up for grabs. He took it apart bit by bit, to find
out where the bottom line lay. It
took Martin about a week to capture it and cage it. Then,
at Martin's suggestion, we took a cache of the best songs we'd done and
transferred them onto a 24-track professional format, and worked some
more on them in a London studio. If
I was the dysfunctional parent who constantly turned his kids out onto
the street as they failed to meet their promise, Martin ran the boot
camp that took them in and turned them around through a regime of hard
discipline. It was shock treatment that worked. |
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Wembley
revisited We had just come off stage at Austin, Texas, after the first show of the TIME tour in September 1981. 'Well done guys' said Bev, scanning around to address Lou, myself and Mik. 'Well of course, you've done it before' he added, looking at Mik, 'but these guys haven't.' 'Did you think they would bottle out?' someone asked. Ever the diplomat he was (and he used to be in a group called the 'Diplomats' by the way), Bev answered: 'Hmm well - you can never be one hundred percent sure how someone will react when they're confronted with a mass of screaming kids. But you guys did good. I was watching, you seemed to take it in your stride.' There was the hint in what he was saying that at some point in the past, someone had indeed 'bottled out' during an ELO concert. I didn't ask and I don't know. I was too concerned it might one day be me. Maybe I would notice all those people and suddenly decide to have a change of career…. But I have to say I didn't feel remotely like that at all - not then. Not at all until the day we were at Wembley Stadium, on Saturday afternoon, 5 July 1986. We had played Wembley before - for six days in December 1981. But that was in the arena, the indoor concert hall that seats about four thousand. Wembley Stadium was a different beast - the football pitch, together with the stands, were host to a crowd of sixty thousand people that day, by far the biggest crowd I had ever stood before. We struck up with 'Twilight' as we had done so many times before… A short bit where Jeff sings the verse, and then it was time for me to move forward to help with harmonies on the chorus: Shock, horror! For a full second my legs would not work! - I was rooted to the spot! For one long instant, like a toad caught in the stare of a snake, I was paralysed before the avid gaze of thousands of eyes. I willed my feet one at a time to break their bond with the decking, and then issued mental threats to my legs, before they finally transported me over to the microphone at stage front. It was a shock - I didn't realise how nervous I was until I tried to move! But as soon as the set was underway, I was fine. If Jeff was nervous, it didn't show. There was just the customary fake panic before going on, when he whispered to me: 'What comes after "the visions dancing in my mind"?? (the first line to the first song of the show). It was totally normal for Jeff to forget words. It never seemed to faze him, he would just make some more up as he went along. Once I went to the trouble of writing out the words to John Lennon's 'Across the universe' and pasting them to his foldback speaker so that he could sing the right lyrics for a change. It didn't make a blind bit of difference. That night as I listened with special attention, I heard yet another meandering prose vaguely based upon the original. Before the mammoth congregation at Wembley, Jeff seemed uncommonly relaxed speaking to the audience between songs. It was something he usually avoided doing, but that afternoon he was mustard at it, talking to them naturally in his down-at-the-pub vernacular. |
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Stuttgart 13 July 1986. End of another era. Phil Hatton took this shot of us of ELO in the bowels of the concert hall at Stuttgart just before ascending to the stage for the last gig of the century. |
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Murphy's Law Lou spent the next three hours
programming Beethoven's Ninth into the new string synthesiser using
headphones while we were all practising other things. Finally he
announced it was done and we all gathered around for the first
rendition: All went well until one night in
Germany. Jeff announced we would be doing one more song: 'Roll over
Beethoven.' The auditorium roared with applause and then the lights went
down and the noise melted away to zero. 'What on earth happened to you at
the start of the last song?' Jeff asked the sixty-four thousand dollar
question as we fell into the dressing room afterwards. Lou smiled the
smile of the lampoon The ELO of 1986 was a different ELO from the one of four years before mainly because Martin had replaced Kelly on bass guitar. I suppose Bev must have eyed up Martin in the same way he had eyed up Lou Clark and me on the '81 tour. But Martin just looked like he had played big rock concerts all his life. I remember on the very first gig looking across to see him and Mik Kaminski prancing nonchalantly about the stage as if in some kind of aborigine line dance. Martin was just a complete professional. |
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All You Need is Cash! We
were playing at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham, some
months before, in March 1986. Yes
the second meeting at George's house was no less nerve racking for me
than the first. I felt like I was tripping over my tongue the whole
time, but ex-Beatle George was the perfect host. We
sit around the long table eating and chatting, pretenders to squiredom
in stately residence barely a longboat ride from the earthy seat of the
English realm itself. Called to dine with a King crowned by the renown
of battles won, a Knight of the noble house of Beatle, whose exploits
raised the hearts of men far and wide, whose glory spread to the distant
reaches of the entire globe. After
dinner, we all sign the visitors' book waiting for us in the hall, and
then proceed up the ornate staircase to 'the music studio'. A cassette
tape lying on a desk seems to jog George's memory: 'Ah Jeff, I've had
this tape sent to me… it's an old Buddy Holly song… I'd like to play
it'…. We all listen to 'Peggy Sue got married' and George asks Jeff if
he will help produce a version of it with him singing:
I just looked at him and smiled. It was so stunningly simple, what can you
say?
That night in Henley ended with us all sitting around, beer cans and guitars
at the ready. |
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Hello Robert.. Being part of ELO meant getting invited to parties, many at the sumptuous residences of the famous - As well as Jeff Lynne's castle-cum-home in Meriden there were parties at Bev Bevan's house, at comedian Jasper Carrot's, and then one night at Robert Plant's countryside retreat south of Birmingham. Robert had made the big time as the singer of the supergroup 'Led Zeppelin.' I didn't think he would remember the guy who had been thumbing a lift on the Halesowen by-pass one night in the sixties, and him stopping to give me a lift in his battered old van with 'Band of Joy' daubed on the side in a big coloured script that looked like it had been painted by a three year old. But I remembered him and that van. The inside of it had all the functionality of junk yard - a kaleidoscope of bits of equipment - motoring and musical - amongst which, within which and upon which young Robert and the members of his group, perched like stowaways in the bowels of a tramp steamer. It was cramped, dark, noisy and smelly. We made our acquaintance as we trundled along, exchanging small talk about the local group scene before wending our separate ways into the night. But now he was a megastar and as I walked across the grounds of his Warwickshire home, I could see the unmistakable locks of his long blond hair atop his large frame standing in a glazed porch way, greeting the guests as they filed up to him like it was a royal investiture, which in a way, it was. I studied the protocol: The invitees were presenting themselves in ones and twos while those immediately behind, at the head of the line, stood back a polite distance as private words were exchanged between host and guest. A stream of commoners full of nervousness and expectation, waiting behind the line on the floor to have their passports stamped… We joined them in the ante-chamber of the porch and I fell in behind Richard, knowing that he would be familiar with the drill for these occasions. 'Follow Richard and you can't go wrong' the inner voice said… Richard walked forward and said something, offering his outstretched hand to be shaken. I thought he said 'Hello Richard' but decided I must have misheard him because I know Richard does not say inappropriate things like that. Anyway, it was obvious that Robert Plant knew Richard Tandy because I distinctly heard him say 'Good to see you Richard' as he shook his hand with a warm smile. And why not?, Richard was a star too. Not with the same notoriety of image maybe, but a chap who like Robert had been called up from the gutter to the lofty heights of the new English class that rock 'n' roll had created. I stepped across the imaginary line and moved up. 'Hi Robert' I said - and to my horror he replied: 'Hello Robert, thank you for coming!' and immediately I realised in a moment of smouldering dismay just what the protocol of greeting royalty is: You introduce yourself with YOUR name, not theirs! But anyway it proved one thing. He had no recollection of the fellow musician whom he had given a lift to all those years ago, and even if he did, he now thinks his name is Robert. |
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Publicity foto for release of 'Berlin' on the Sonet label, 1984. Richard and Dave under the name 'R & D.' Photo Copyright Sonet Records |
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Tandy Morgan It was always a problem - what to call ourselves. Richard and I racked our brains to think of suitable moniker which we could live with, and appellations bounced between us like a shuttlecock at a Chinese table tennis tournament. But eventually we tired of all the exotic, convoluted constructions we came up with and decided to render ourselves simply as 'R & D.' Apart from standing for Richard and Dave, this was also shorthand for Research and Development, which nicely described the state of play in our little group. And so under the banner of 'R & D' we had a record out called 'Berlin' in 1984. Two years later when both the 'Action' charity record and the previously recorded 'Earth Rise' album was released by the small Wolverhampton-based heavy metal label that Tony Clarkin had introduced us to, we became 'Tandy Morgan.' Later still in 1992, when the ELO fan club suggested putting out the tracks that Martin and I had put together at Grimm Doo in the late 80s, we added his name to become 'Tandy Morgan Smith.' By this time the Compact Disc had supereceded vinyl records, and the amount of recording time that could be squashed into the new format increased from forty to over seventy minutes. We decided to take advantage of the new technology and give the fans a value for money and used all the available space with 17 tracks of music. Sheila came up with the title for it - 'Why don't you call it the B.C Collection?' she said as we all turned with 'why?' written on our faces - 'you know, BC as in 'Before Christ!'' That was it. The B.C Collection was released in 1992. |