The Spencer Davis Group
As far as I was concerned, the Spencer Davis Group I joined was the Mark 1 version, but strictly speaking, it was Mark 2. The original Spencer Davis Group had consisted of two brothers, Muff (bass guitar) and Steve Winwood (on everything!), with Spencer Davis (rhythm guitar) and Pete York (drums).
At the auditions, there were a few sets of "brother" acts hoping to replace the Winwoods, but all of them were quite awful. There was one outstanding singer, Terry Reid, who I thought would certainly get the job. Terry was a great friend of Graham Nash of the Hollies, who in turn was a great friend of Spencer’s, so it all seemed rather great!
Another contender for the prime spot was Elton John, then known as Reg Dwight. His name actually fitted his appearance, since he resembled an ice cream salesman and his performance sounded like one. Reg (I prefer Reg, because it’s even sillier than Elton) was determined to sing his own material, which in 1966 was not quite as you know him now. Spencer however, was quite taken by the adolescent wailings and we went on to record two of Reg’s dirges, which never appeared on vinyl, nor thankfully on any other format.
Bernie Taupin, the lyricist, was on hand to supervise the recordings and at that time he was a nice guy. I guess he was one of the first victims of luvviedom. I saw him a few years later at the Royal Festival Hall, where Reg was appearing, and he chose to ignore me totally, engrossed in his own impending fame.
Anyway, I got the job with The Spencer Davis Group! After my audition, which was held in the studio section of The Marquee Club in Wardour Street, the first thing I did was run to a phone box in Soho’s Chinatown to pass on the news to my mum and dad. Then I went to Harrods, in an attempt to devise ways of spending my new-found wealth, but bought nothing. This is a fault which I have long since learnt to overcome.
Spencer had given me £100 "to be getting on with", which represented a tidy sum in those days, and I set out on a sentimental journey around my old haunts in London, which for me were never to be the same again. I was totally stunned at getting the job and old video footage from that period shows that I really was completely baffled by the whole thing. The dream had become a reality, but it all seemed completely unreal. Suddenly, I appeared to have friends I never thought I had.
The next thing to sort out was something I knew nothing whatsoever about, namely, contracts. Uncle Freddie and Auntie Maureen, impressed by what they considered to be my inevitable posting, appointed David Jacobs, the top show business lawyer of the time, to act for me. The first major undertaking with Spencer was a lengthy tour of the States, and Maureen suggested that I should make my own travel arrangements and leave the rest of the band to their own devices.
This was a tricky one. I’d started to rehearse with the band, the comradeship was starting to build and I felt that, with this thrown at them, it would instantly dissipate. I had to offend either Maureen or the band and I chose Maureen, but as things turned out, she was absolutely right. Pete York has often remarked that things would have been a lot different had Freddie Foreman stayed in the picture. For sure there would have been no rip-offs, and there were to be many.
During those early rehearsals, Freddie would arrive with an assortment of dangerous-looking minders to watch over proceedings, "just to make sure you don’t get ripped off", but it was really not conducive to making music and it was also extremely embarrassing for me. My association with Maureen and Freddie was therefore discontinued, although I felt terrible to have left them, after all they had done for me. Maybe things would have been totally different had I not left them. The world had opened up for me, there was seemingly unlimited money available and Linda Eastman was appointed to take the first photographs of the new band. The session took place in Berkeley Square, but the pictures were not good.
As far as management was concerned, I was a little, if not a lot, confused. Chris Blackwell, who had managed the band prior to my joining, was our manager for a few days, and then, after some internal wrangling which I knew nothing about, a jocular alcoholic Scotsman by the name of John Martin appeared. His only credentials, as far as I could make out, were the fact that he had instigated The White Heather Club, a dreadful Scottish TV show featuring lots of kilts and the likes of Andy Stewart. On the face of it, this appeared to be a catastrophic move on Spencer’s part, and I reckon it most certainly was, although, since I was a newcomer, I had no influence on any decision.
In spite of this, John Martin and Spencer forged ahead to form Spencer Davis Management and set up offices in Dean Street, Soho. The idea was for Spencer to front his own management and agency company and add various artists to its roster. To Spencer’s credit, he soon had a pretty impressive array of artists, among them The Nice, The Moody Blues, Billie Davis, The Flowerpot Men and Yes, plus of course The Spencer Davis Group itself, which was the only band generating any serious income. Consequently, our band was financially supporting all the rest, unbeknown, of course, to myself and the rest of the SDG.
We first bought two offshore companies to control our money, neither of which was efficient or effective in any way. All they served to do was make us lose our high investment in the purchase of them. Our accountant, to this day, brushes the affair aside, but thousands of pounds were frittered away in an afternoon. As far as the music was concerned, I was still locked into the euphoria of the moment and preparing for the very first appearance of the new line-up at the Empire Pool, Wembley (today known as Wembley Arena).
I was collected from home by a limousine, which subsequently picked up the rest of the band, and we were duly delivered to Wembley. We played two songs, one of which was "Dust My Blues", and were back in the car and home again almost before it seemed that anything had actually happened. I was stunned and sort of shell-shocked.
Pretty soon after, we had an engagement in Paris to record a TV show with Jimi Hendrix. Spencer, in his infinite wisdom, decided that we should all stay at an hotel near Heathrow, as the flight to Paris was an early one. I sat in my room alone, feeling confused and depressed, trying to watch TV, but my brain seemed frazzled and then I just collapsed.
I didn’t have the nerve to telephone the others, so I called my dad, who, in turn, called the hotel doctor, who diagnosed mental and physical exhaustion and gastro-enteritis. Christ, I thought, I’m only months into this, we’ve only played once and here I am out of the match. I insisted that I was okay and duly flew to Paris, feeling dreadfully ill. I was being sick constantly and couldn’t eat. I had no sympathy from the others and had to pretend to be on form. I linked up with Noel Redding from Hendrix’s band, himself very much a newcomer to this degree of, what would you call it? Exposure, stardom, whatever. I have never felt less like a bloody pop star.
Noel sat with me on the roof of the TV station and we discussed our futures. His future we know, mine you probably don’t. Noel had not yet been tipped into the abyss of self doubt and was still acting relatively normally, which was very soon to change. I think we were both scared of what was to come and it struck me at that moment that this kind of life held no pleasure at all. We flew on to Cannes for a few days to play a couple of nights in an up-market club filled with down-market French people. The French were never a good audience for us and now I bloody well live here!
The only thing I ate in three days was a bowl of French onion soup, and I felt like shit when we flew home to England. I can remember nothing at all about the TV show and very little about Cannes, only the rantings of Hendrix because he hadn’t been paid. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve witnessed similar situations since then.
After a few days in the recording studio, working on the soundtrack for the film "Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush", as well as actually appearing in the film on location in Stevenage, and finishing our debut album, we flew off to New York. The recording of the album was completely chaotic, because it never became clear who the producer was (for a while, it was Ron Richards, who produced The Hollies) or, indeed, which record company would release it. It turned out to be United Artists, a company with no clue of the emerging power of the pop/rock market.
In New York, we had a week to get adjusted to the mayhem that would ensue. Life in the city was very, very unreal. One Fleetwood limousine after the other would take any of us anywhere we wanted to go at any time of the day or night. The trouble was that none of us had a clue where to go, only drummer Pete York, who knew of all the jazz haunts in and around the city. The hospitality astounded us all and we revelled in it. It was not until we returned to England that it became clear that all the costs were being deducted from our wages.
Our first single, "Time Seller", had reached No.1 in Holland and also charted in the States, the UK and Scandinavia. As it happened, we tended to ignore England and Europe in favour of the madness of America. In New York, we stayed at The Drake Hotel on Park Avenue, where we each had our own suite. I chose to share with guitarist Phil Sawyer, although the suite was so vast that I hardly ever saw him. Even at this early stage, Phil was already tiring of the pressure and was discussing with me ways to get out. To him, it was like a prison sentence. He had so much wanted this job but didn’t have a clue about what it entailed. Neither, indeed, did I.
We had to have some new photographs done for America, so some dreadful photographer showed up and spent a day shooting pictures that all turned out blurred because he was too stoned to hold the bloody camera still. The Lovin’ Spoonful called to see us a few times, and then The Troggs hit town. They hadn’t changed much from the time in Kingston with A Wild Uncertainty. In fact, they were still wearing those striped suits.
We went to their reception at The Americana Hotel and their tour manager asked me if they were "OK"? I think he meant were they normal? He said that they seemed to think that America was still populated by cowboys and that they had actually asked him where they could find some Red Indians. Eventually, they were sent to Harlem and came back quite happy.
We had American roadies, supervised by our English roadie, Alec Leslie (now promoted to Tour Manager). The roadies were staying at The Holiday Inn while Alec, of course, was at The Drake with us. I can remember two of their names, Grady Koon and Ray Reneri. Grady was from the deep south and incapable of concealing it, while Ray was like an extra from The Godfather. It was the time of the Vietnam war and I reckon they were all lost to its pointless cause, because I never saw any of them again.
I got pretty pally with Grady, who had previously worked on his grandfather’s farm in the South. Grady told me some horrific stories about his past blunders, one being when he chopped all the fingers off his left hand with a chainsaw. Unperturbed, he gathered them up, put them in his pocket, hitched a ride to the hospital and had them stitched back on. The operation was not an overwhelming success, but it did provide him with a party trick: He could make the sound of a football ratchet with his mangled hand.
Grady’s all-time hero was Elvis Presley, who he was convinced would drop by to see us at any moment. He mounted a vigil in the corridor outside our various suites. Of course, Presley never did arrive, but one night, I convinced Grady that he had, and that Grady must have dozed off and missed the whole thing, a piece of news which devastated him. His other passion was surfboarding and he carried the bloody board with him throughout the tour, just in case.
John Martin, with his "White Heather Club" background, was totally unprepared for the world of Rock and was the most un-hip guy you could ever wish to meet. John adopted what he considered to be trendy little sayings, which no one would actually ever dare say. On one of our first nights in New York, he left the hotel with me and asked the taxi driver to "take us where the action is!" He took us to where the action really wasn’t and John slipped him a hundred dollar bill, thinking it was a ten. All the notes are the same size and it can be tricky, but I got to learn my lesson very quickly.
Phil Sawyer’s wardrobe had always been a disgrace and Spencer was constantly on at him to smarten himself up. It came to the point where Spencer would open Phil’s suitcase before we set off anywhere. It rarely contained more than a pair of socks, a pair of shoes and a belt, which didn’t quite go round his waist! I convinced Phil to come out shopping with me in New York and get himself sorted out. He made a bit of an effort, but in the end was more attracted to the idea of buying a pair of enormous buffalo horns and, of all things, a bloody fishing rod, both of which he carried with him as hand baggage on all domestic flights within America. He did actually buy a pair of trousers, sadly slightly shy of the shoe, and another useful belt which didn’t quite do up.
Aside from the music, there were other points of interest. Phil, terribly homesick and wary of groupies (he never did succumb), launched himself into an affair with the wife of a senior executive at United Artists. She was considerably older than Phil, but this didn’t bother him, as he seemed to prefer the older woman. Spencer was shocked on hearing the news and did his best (unsuccessfully) to deter Phil from continuing the relationship. In the meantime, John Martin, the alcoholic Scotsman, was lurching indiscreetly around town with one of the managing directors’ wives. My god, it was absolute chaos.
Sexual abandon was rife in America during the love and peace era, not that that made a blind bit of difference to any of my attempts. The executives’ wives were by far the worst, all trainee Mrs. Robinsons. They were generally middle aged, manicured and very sexy women, intent on sampling the maximum number of young band members that passed through their fat, balding and generally Jewish husbands’ hands. At a reception in Los Angeles, I was accosted by one of these wives. She was real Dallas material and I was terrified. She put a cigarette in her mouth provocatively and inclined her head perilously close to mine for a light. I didn’t smoke then, but suddenly wished I did. I buggered up an entire book of matches trying to assist. She asked where we were staying, took the number and said she’d call later. She never did, and I wasn’t sure whether to be disappointed or relieved.
Then there was the crackpot, middle aged, sensuous, sex-starved woman I actually took out for dinner. She was dressed from head to toe in a skin tight leopardskin trouser suit - the ideal outfit for a discreet night out. When we reached the restaurant, I got out of the car and was practically seated at the table when I realised she was no longer with me. She was sitting bolt upright in the car waiting for me to open the bloody door. Eventually, she glided in and ordered various drinks and items of food I’d never even heard of and really piled on the "experienced woman" bit. She sat with her mountainous silicon breasts (I later found out they had the same feel as a remould tyre) bulging from the leopardskin ensemble as she explained that she was a clairvoyant and that she vaguely remembered me from a former life, in which I had apparently been her husband. This all seemed pretty hopeful, so I told her I had similar powers. She figured out that, as we were, in fact, married, there would be nothing at all immoral in carrying on where we’d left off in our previous life.
In 1967, America was in the grip of flower power and drugs to a far greater extent than England. They were REALLY going for it. The most unlikely people were getting stoned. I personally always found this side of things a bit frightening, especially when kids were brought into our dressing rooms in terrible drug-induced states of confusion. It really is very disturbing to witness.
Drugs played no part in our lives whatsoever, although on one occasion, Spencer and I were appearing on the Murray the K show in New York when some joker decided to "spike" our drinks. Spencer was the worst hit by what we could only presume must have been LSD, and spent an horrific night hallucinating and not knowing when, or even if, the effect would wear off. I just felt vaguer than usual. Spencer did eventually dabble with a drug, marijuana, under the delusion that it was, in fact, a creative drug. The only effect I could ever detect was that he would become extremely boring, after which he’d fall asleep. There would be no "Sergeant Pepper" output from him. It was a time when those who weren’t actually stoned would wander around pretending to be, often with more convincing results than those who actually were. In Greenwich Village, New York, the atmosphere was so laid back that the village had virtually ground to a halt. It seemed to have been completely taken over by the drug generation.
I went there one night to see Frank Zappa, then the leader of probably the most controversial of all the new drug-orientated bands. Zappa himself was a fine musician, though not to my taste, and when I went into the foyer to buy tickets for the show, the guy in the kiosk, who was in a virtual coma, told me that the Mothers of Invention were a crap band and that I’d be better off going to see The Yardbirds at the Fillmore, just down the road.
Pete York and I did spend some time together in the Village, listening to various black stride piano players, who were amazing. We also went to The Rainbow Room to see Duke Ellington, a beautifully melodic player, another night I’ll never forget. We also saw Count Basie, which I just could not get to grips with. His economy with notes was so severe that he appeared to only play the last three chords of anything. Pete was (and is) obsessed with jazz, but I couldn’t muster the enthusiasm he had. Each night, he would go to the Vanguard and other jazz haunts, where he’d sit alone, apparently quite happy with this situation. I learnt a lot under Pete’s influence, but I feel it’s dangerous to become obsessive about any particular form of music, as you can end up becoming blinkered about it.
Buddy Rich was Pete’s hero, and he set about emulating what he considered to be Rich’s perfection. This style of playing was not entirely compatible with our music, and on occasion it was very annoying and just didn’t work. Spencer abhorred jazz with a vengeance and had many fiery rucks with Pete. Spencer was thus absolutely delighted when Buddy Rich was declared bankrupt. Spencer never came to a single musical outing, preferring to be the eternal PR man, attending functions and parties with celebrities.
Meanwhile, I was sharing an apartment with a girl called Denise Gross; in actual fact, it was her parents’ apartment. This was a genuinely platonic relationship. I just preferred the "home"’ atmosphere to that of The Drake, and, as we were due to be away for so long, I reckoned this would be a better bet. Plus the little fact that her parents were away on business in Japan for three months. Denise had a friend by the name of Lorna Luft, a name which meant absolutely nothing to me. It meant even less when I eventually met her. Lorna was a "know-all" American schoolgirl.
Denise and I used to pick her up from school, following which we would drink gallons of Coca Cola, courtesy of United Artists (or so we thought). One afternoon, Lorna had to go and see her mum and asked whether Denise and I would like to accompany her. This wasn’t a particularly attractive prospect, but somehow I was talked into going along. Mum lived in the crappiest part of Chinatown.
We walked into a tip of an apartment to find "Mum" hoovering and drinking gin at the same time. She did not look on top of the situation and seemed relieved to have some company. Being extremely sociable, she offered us all a drink and threw open the fridge door to reveal nothing but gin, gin and more gin. She was a tiny woman with not much hair, but was very jolly and seemed pretty clued-up on music, both past and present. She asked me what I did, to which I replied that I was in a band that she’d probably never heard of. I was wrong. She had!
She told me she knew a little about the business, but then of course everybody does. In the car on the way back to Denise’s apartment, I made a few enquiries about her. It rapidly emerged that "Mum" was, in fact, Judy Garland. I was completely stunned, as I recalled the many times when I’d played "Over The Rainbow" with John and Geoff. It all seemed so very far away. So much had happened and was continuing to happen, far too quickly. I called my mum later that night and told her I’d just met Judy Garland. Mum said, "Yes, of course you have, dear. Anyway, how’s the tour going?"
There were to be further social gatherings with the Garland tribe. The tip in Chinatown was replaced by two suites in the New York Plaza, which Judy Garland quickly transformed into a replica wreck of the aforementioned abode. The Garland family at that time consisted of Lorna and Joey, a baffled young boy who happily played amongst the omnipresent debris.
Judy Garland’s birthday came around and I was invited to the bash, which was to be held at The Plaza. I asked Pete York to come along, because he knew precisely who she was. I thought Pete might brighten up the conversation, as he was far more familiar with the musicians of her era than I was. The party was a quiet affair. The only guests turned out to be Pete, myself, Lorna and Denise. Lorna had ordered a massive birthday cake, which I knew full well she couldn’t afford, and as the evening wore on, it was evident that none of them could actually afford anything!
Pete wisely withdrew from any risk of being saddled with the bill and left, so I suggested paying for the entire thing myself; after all, I reasoned, it couldn’t be THAT much. Judy could obviously sense the general unease, which became more evident when the bill was eventually produced. I never saw the amount but Judy called the Maître D’ over and enquired whether a few songs might cover it. So sing she did, and, within moments, the ravages of booze and the strain and stress of her life fell away from her face as she became literally possessed by the music, but in a serene, not at all manic way. It was quite a lovely experience; you could actually see and feel the transformation. Most musicians are just "doing a show", but some seem, in certain circumstances, to become transported to a different plane altogether. I read that Paul McCartney, when singing his "Little Richard" orientated songs, psychs himself up into the mood and comes down again afterwards. This I can believe.
I never saw Judy Garland again and within a couple of years, she was dead. It was then that all her alleged luvvy "friends" suddenly appeared, saying what a dear and wonderful friend she’d been and how much they had respected and supported her. They had all totally ignored her at her lowest, and she had been very low. Nevertheless, they suddenly became remarkably communicative when faced with the lure of a pointed camera and a quick TV appearance. In fact, there was no money to bury the poor woman and I recall that it was months before Frank Sinatra stepped in and paid for the funeral.
Meanwhile, back at our base hotel, room service was being exploited to the extreme and it seemed that United Artists would spare no expense to keep us all happy. Our record deal was worth a supposed $250,000 and John Martin, the inebriate Scot, advised Spencer only to take half on account, in order to save on high taxes. Needless to say, the balance was never forthcoming, supposedly eaten away with our expenses and recording costs. We always used New York as a base and made our forays from there, unless, of course, we were on the West Coast, where we stayed at the Beverley Hilton.
One night in Chicago, as we took to the stage, we were confronted by a group of women intent, it seemed, on conversation, definitely not music. Spencer, always the diplomat, walked to the front of the stage, expecting a request ... for a song, that is, The actual request, however, was rather different. The young women politely enquired whether they could make plaster casts of all our penises. These, it turned out, were the now famous Chicago Plaster Casters.
Poor Spencer was so stunned that he took three or four steps backwards, where his leg plunged through a gap in the stage boarding, resulting in him spending the entire performance in the Chicago hospital. We never did get our casts made. I’m not sure whether this is a good or a bad thing. Amazingly, these girls later mounted (so to speak) an exhibition of all the willing participants. Apparently, Jimi Hendrix was the star exhibit.
As the tour continued, we played the East Coast, the West Coast and much of the Middle and finished up in Canada. Audiences on the East and West Coasts seemed to be stoned en masse, whilst those in the middle were confused and mildly disgusted by us.
We returned to New York to recuperate for a few days before we returned to England. There was the mandatory cock-up with all our return flights and eventually I flew home with Pete York, the rest of the band following a day or so later. The in-flight movie was "2001 - A Space Odyssey", which I found very disconcerting to watch in an aeroplane. Added to my tiredness, it screwed me up even further. I just wanted to sleep, which was impossible.
On arriving home, I felt deflated and instantly bored. I had adjusted to a whole different way of life with my "new friends" in the band. While on the road, we were a very insular unit, but at home we rarely even spoke to each other. It was very strange. I was still only eighteen and pretty confused. I didn’t know which life to adapt to from one moment to the next. My home life was so far removed from my working life that it was very difficult to maintain an equilibrium between the two. I don’t think I ever managed it.
I literally tried to become two people. My friends John, Geoff and SPC had no interest in my travels or musical progress, they just wanted everything to stay as it was and, in a way, I wished it could too. But it was proving to be impossible.
I hope I never became big-headed. I don’t think I did, because I was so wary of it happening. I couldn’t go to the pub any more because, after a few Top Of The Pops appearances and similar TV shows, it really became quite unpleasant, with people trying either to ingratiate themselves or start a fight. The four of us therefore decided to spend all our time together at my home and stay out of the public eye. I enjoyed this routine, though I was never at home for long enough for anything to "settle". I began to find myself craving for the next tour, not for the money but for the experience of being in a band which, after my initial horrors, I had grown to love. Just as well, because soon after we came back from the States, there followed a series of trips of varying lengths to Europe.
In a sort of blur, we visited Holland, Belgium, France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Norway and Sweden, Denmark, Italy and Hungary. Work in England was far less interesting and we all definitely preferred to be away. Our management seemed to plan all these trips with no regard to distances, or even countries. In the first two years of touring, the travel bug was well and truly beaten out of my system for ever.
Another terrible error which then occurred was when Spencer was talked into doing cabaret. I think the source came from The Hollies. Graham Nash wisely quit the band before cabaret was attempted. Spencer, however, had been brainwashed into thinking that cabaret had longevity and the pop market had none. Of course, it’s true that pop stars come and go every week but in Spencer’s case, it was a totally different type of music and we were generally considered to be a pretty hip band.
We did one week of cabaret and that was enough for me. We all had a completely miserable time of it. We were booked to play at two clubs the same night, The Stockton Fiesta and The Top Hat Club. There was a 20 minute dash from one to the other each evening, and in both venues, we were confronted with the "scampi in a basket" brigade. The audiences were clueless about what we were doing and most of them consisted of businessmen with their dreadful brassy "bits on the side", getting very quickly and rowdily drunk each night. The waitresses at the clubs were tenth rate, no, twentieth rate bunny girls with laddered stockings and fags hanging out of their gormless mouths. Even Spencer, although he said nothing, was very depressed by the whole affair. Spencer and Pete always made the best of a bad situation, but Phil and I were really playing against our better judgement.
Our accommodation for the week was at a crappy theatrical sort of hotel-cum-bed and breakfast, a million light years away from what we were accustomed to. The other residents were jugglers, acrobats, failed comics and a smattering of doomed musicians, all of them amazed and confused to find us there. They weren’t the only ones: we shared their consternation.
To make matters worse, German TV had sent a crew over to film "A Week in the Life of The Spencer Davis Group". In Germany, we had that kind of "trendy" following, the university bohemian hippy type, so what on earth they must of made of the situation, God only knows. The producer of this exciting documentary was a guy named Thomas Struck, who figured that we were as close as you could get to English "cool" and that therefore we would provide him with the perfect launch into the drug fraternity into which he was determined to break. He also thought that he would have a way into the trendy élite at the same time. Thomas would play "Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band" over and over again, convinced that every track was drug-related.
Well, in London we took him to the right places and I suppose he met the right faces there, but conditions up north were far from trendy and Thomas’ dreams remained unfulfilled. Spencer was suffering from depression at this time and was undergoing a course of Valium and extra strong Mogadon sleeping tablets. Over dinner in our grim hotel, I convinced Thomas that Spencer was carrying some pretty heavy duty drugs. Of course, Thomas declared that he was up for taking a combination of them right there and then!
Spencer soon grasped what I was up to and joined in with enthusiasm. He offered Thomas three Mogadon and a couple of Valium, passing the Mogadon off as LSD. Some of the filming had been done in London, where buses were red, and as the Mogadon started to take effect, Thomas lurched into the streets of Stockton to be confronted by a green bus. He was convinced he was stoned and told me he felt amazing and that many things in life had become clearer to him as a result of the experience. He pressed Spencer for more pills, after which he slept soundly for two days.
Filming continued in Stockton, in and around the horrible Fiesta club. Inevitably, a few of the replica tenth rate Bunny girls were to become the "guests" of our roadies. There was a plumbing fault in the hotel, whereby every room was audio-linked through pipe-work. The sinks all acted as kind of megaphones, with the result that all through the night you could hear wails of ecstacy resonating round the room. We naturally started to record these far from erotic events and re-played them to the embarrassed roadies over breakfast.
After a week that felt like a year, we returned with the film crew to London in order to film a day in each of our lives. I chose Chelsea for my "day" and continued to find what an extraordinary effect cameras, especially ones which appeared to be in the hands of professionals, had on people, particulary minor and even major celebrities. Mick Jagger was around on my day out and Thomas suggested to him that we might create a segment for him in the film.
He was, as expected, arrogant and boorishly rude, although Tom Keylock, his chauffeur, whom I liked a lot, was with him. We talked to him while Jagger sulked in his Mini. Jimmy Tarbuck, a sort of over the top everybody’s mate "boy next door" comic cruised up to us, obviously attracted by the Kodak and pretending to know everybody, but he was abruptly told to piss off.
The sales people in the Chelsea Antique Market suddenly turned into retired actors and actresses and came out with the most amazing bollocks you’ve ever heard and were overwhelmingly friendly. I returned a day or so later, minus film crew, to discover that I had long since been forgotten. So, finally, we ended up with an hour-long documentary which has only been shown in Germany. I’ve seen it, actually, and it makes interesting viewing today.
It was now time to get back to work again, leaving the scampi and chips people well behind. We started a University tour, which was much more like it, as the audiences were intelligent and incredibly enthusiastic. Our guitarist Phil Sawyer, however, was reaching breaking point. Phil was totally discontented and, after our burst of creativity in the studios, all he could see stretching out before him was life on the road. As his marriage was looming, he decided to call it a day. I tried my best to talk him out of it but it was a lost cause. Never mind, he still had his buffalo horns and his fishing rods, the first furnishings of his new home.
Phil played his final concert with us in Rotterdam, Holland, where the rest of the band cruelly chose not to speak to him either before or after the show. I thought, "Christ, I know they’re only too pleased to see the back of him but there’s no need to rub it in!’
For the following morning, Spencer had tactlessly arranged a speedy audition with Ray Fenwick. This event was held, far too hastily, in the hotel reception area, with all of us about to leave for London. Spencer hired Ray there and then, in front of Phil, which I genuinely feel was an act of pure spite. It was a very callous thing to do, and also a decision which was made in too much haste. After all, we hadn’t even discussed the matter as a band.
However, as things turned out, Ray was a great player, and in time I got on with him really well, but I don’t like being thrown into these situations. In the event, Ray and I went on to collaborate as songwriters, writing two albums for Spencer and all the subsequent singles. Our pleasure came from writing what we considered to be memorable melodies and on a good night we would put down three songs or more on tape in demo form. Our writing was all done with Ray on acoustic and me on piano in a darkened room at my home in Champion Hill, South London.
Spencer, my initial writing partner, soon became miffed by our prolific output. I guess he realised that his act of callousness had come full circle and landed at his feet. He dubbed me and Ray Gilbert & Sullivan. Spencer subsequently decided to erase Phil’s contributions, wherever possible, from the recordings we had made prior to Ray’s joining. This, we felt, was plain sad.
After a few rehearsals, we set off on another round of endless tours. Europe, America and the UK went round and round and round.
There were many disastrous incidents during the course of the various SDG line-ups, and I will endeavour to recount a few that spring to mind. In Sweden, the entire band was arrested for non-payment of some minor bill and were subjected to much of the day in a Swedish nick. During the Swedish tour we all (except Pete) bought guns (which only fired blanks, but very loud blanks). These weapons were to become crucial on our days off. We devised all kinds of entertainment, one of the best being to "plant" a roadie at a bus stop and then drive past and shoot him. Of course, he’d fall to the floor and play dead, while the other passengers would run in all directions. Before the police had time to arrive, we’d pick him up and disappear.
The climax of the gun affair was the day we decided to go to the cinema. We all went to see "The Alamo", which none of us actually wanted to see, but it was the only thing on. The film was in Swedish with sub-titles. We all knew what a battle scene was, so, at the climax of the film, we naturally joined in, guns blazing from the back rows. Pete York was disgusted.
On another memorable occasion, Ray Fenwick stuffed the exhaust of our tour bus full of glue and feathers, which he’d taken from pillows he’d dismantled in the hotel. When it came time to fill up, he crammed the exhaust full of these feathers and a guy pulled up behind us. When the driver got back in and started the engine, a massive wad of feathers exploded from the exhaust pipe and stuck all over the car. Well, you had to be there.
At the end of the American tour, I wanted to go home but in lots of ways, I didn’t want to leave. I had rapidly developed a passion for America, although under the circumstances in which we experienced it, the illusion was probably mis-judged. I had become a bit, if not a lot, tired of the musical restrictions within the band. One afternoon in America, totally out of the blue, as we were doing a soundcheck and were working on the organ sound, I started to mess around with the Beatles’ song "Norwegian Wood". As I improvised, Pete York just kind of crept in and started to play along. It was like a breath of fresh air and it also sounded great.
There had been unrest within the band for some time, Pete’s drumming had become too jazzy and we were definitely not a jazz band. Spencer had begun "discreet" rehearsals with other drummers. It was all beginning to get too secretive and childish for my taste, so on my return to England, I started rehearsals with Gordon Barton from A Wild Uncertainty. I’d written piles of songs and had knocked them into good shape with Gordon, but I still lacked the balls to quit The Spencer Davis Group.
On Ray Fenwick’s instigation, I think, they found a new manager by the name of Peter Walsh, who also managed The Tremeloes, The Move and Fleetwood Mac. Walsh was doing pretty nicely, but I took an instant dislike to him. He was another Northerner (after my experiences at the Stockton Fiesta I was still a bit shell-shocked) but his background, far from being musical, was in fruit and vegetables. I have nothing against Northerners, by the way, it’s just that this particular one should have stuck to fruit and veg!
A summit meeting was called and it was announced that Pete was out. In contrast to what had gone before, this was not secretive and childish at all, it was laid on the table there and then. It seemed that Ray had assumed control of the group. Spencer said little and I’d had enough as well, so I announced, "Well, actually, I’d like to leave as well". Spencer was completely shattered and tried to talk me out of it, but Ray merely said, "No, Spencer, let him go". There was bad blood between Ray and me for some considerable time after that.
So there we were: I’d finally done it, maybe in haste, as ever, but I felt free and now I really had the opportunity to get motoring musically. After my departure, Spencer pulled in Nigel Olssen on drums and Dee Murray on bass, both of whom were later to work with Elton John. They did a few tours of America, released a duff single and soon fell into disarray. Spencer hit the bottle and later teamed up with Peter Jameson as an acoustic act.
Meanwhile, I rehearsed with Gordon Barton! Gordon was a great drummer, very much in the style of Ringo Starr’s son Zak Starkey, but we found it was a hard act to sell. Pete York was at a loose end and totally depressed after his unceremonious sacking. We kept in touch and he eventually talked me into letting him replace Gordon, which I was loathe to do, and becoming Hardin & York. The rest, as they say, is history.
Royalties, indeed all aspects of a group’s earnings, were, and I’m sure still are, an enormous problem for any band. Spencer, twenty-five years on, is still fighting for his money. There was certainly a great deal of money around during our working period but the problem was that much of it appeared to have been eaten up in hidden costs. Enormous amounts of cash would vanish on equipment hire, maintenance, air fares and general transportation costs. In those days, the scale of a concert was nothing in comparison to nowadays, and I would imagine that most of today’s concerts produce no profit whatsoever, indeed, more like further debt. They are totally dependent on outside sponsors, TV rights and live recording rights. At least, that has certainly been my experience.
We were each drawing about £200 per week in my time with Spencer, which for 1967, and being only 17/18 years old, was okay, I suppose. The advantage was that we were never in any one place long enough to spend it and, secondly, all travel and other expenses came off the top. Management was the major expense, being 25% and in some instances even 30%. That was before expenses and also included 30% of all record royalties. Spencer and I had the benefit of songwriting royalties, which made an enormous difference. Try as they might, I managed to keep 100% and give the management nothing of this, but they did have a good attempt at depriving me of some of it.
To sell Spencer was a breeze for these managers and agents. Spencer was, after all, a world-wide name, so all they had to do was pick up a phone and send him off on tour, normally with no regard to logistics. That effectively was the sum total of their costs, a bloody phone call. If any problems cropped up, we were on our own; we were always the ones who paid. The group’s finances ended up in total turmoil and were "locked" for about a year after I’d left the band.
Spencer gathered a strange bunch of "friends" around himself. Some were American and others were just general no-hopers, but they told Spencer everything he wanted to hear and, as he was paying, it suited all of them excellently. He dabbled in the film business, again dealing with a notorious rip-off artist who sold him film scripts. The same person later tried to sell me the same scripts! In America, the guy who started out driving us and collecting the money, had moved into Park Avenue and was now managing and ripping off some major acts.
I was really quite relieved to be out of all that and at last in control of my own destiny.

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