1980s – Bayswater
In the 1980s, I worked in a shop in Leinster Terrace, Bayswater, and this man would come in every lunchtime to buy the first edition of the Evening Standard. While waiting for the van to arrive with the newspapers, he would chat to the shop staff, including me, and his routine was to mention something notable that happened on that day of the year. I can’t remember any examples, but it would be things like ‘On this day, Margaret Thatcher was born.’ I don’t know if he ever said that, but he was certainly a fan of Margaret Thatcher.
The other members of staff found him annoying, plus they typically had no idea what he was talking about. I could find him a bit annoying, too, at times, but I knew about a lot of the things he mentioned, so he latched on to me. Eventually, I had some longer conversations with him.
He was in his eighties, and my memory is that he was originally from a somewhat well-off background. I think the family owned a business of some sort, but he’d either fallen out or lost touch with his relatives. Or maybe they’d all died, I can’t remember. He’d never married, but he mentioned girlfriends he’d had when he was young. (He had fond memories, he said, of ‘lying down in a cornfield’ with one.) I can’t remember what he did for a living earlier in life (or maybe he never told me), but he’d lived in that part of London for many years. At that time, his home was a bedsit or hotel room somewhere close by, but he mentioned that in the 1960s, when the Profumo scandal blew up, he was living in Sussex Gardens, near Paddington station, in a room in the same house where Mandy Rice-Davies was also living, across the hallway.
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New Burlington Street, Mayfair, London; 28.3.2021
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28 March 2021 – Mayfair
Flamingo Records was part of Carlin Music UK, based at 14 New Burlington Street, down here on the left. Carlin was an American publishing company. Its UK arm, and the Flamingo record label, were run by Mike Collier. We were introduced to him by producer Steve Gilmore, who had heard and liked an earlier version of “Walking Rhythm” we recorded at Wave Studios in Twickenham.
Mike Collier was quite persuasive. He was full of stories about his life in the music business going back to the 1950s. (He had something to do with “Shout” by the Isley Brothers. I can’t remember if he produced it or signed it up, maybe both.) He would flatter you as well, and buy you drinks, make you feel like you were on the way up. I remember him saying, obviously to impress, that he had just written out a cheque for £18,000 in royalties to John Rocca from Freeez, whose publishing he held. But his contracts were far from generous. Still, it doesn’t matter now, it’s so long ago.
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I did this (drums, keyboards). Recorded at Airport Studios, Southall.
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