KALEIDOSCOPE / FAIRFIELD PARLOUR
THE DEFINITIVE HISTORY OF THE WORLD`S FAVOURITE `LOST` BAND FROM THE SIXTIES
www.chelsearecords.co.uk
RETROPHOBIC MAGAZINE INTERVIEW with Peter Daltrey
**Hi Peter, welcome to Retrophobic, going back to the origins of your musical adventure, would you share with us your recollections about your background;
at what age you did develop interest in music ? What about your early musical experiences ?
Let`s go back to 1962; I think that`s early enough!
My mate Les and I used to go to see the rock shows that toured Britain, appearing at the cinema chains. You`d see five or six acts on the same bill.
Each would do their hit and a couple of other songs and then scuttle off stage to make way for the next latest sensation. Again, my memory fails me.
I would love to recall the acts I saw but they`ve vanished into some dingy corner of my soggy cerebellum. I know we saw people like Chuck Berry, Del Shannon, Dion,
and I can`t forget two acts in particular: Gene Vincent and Billy Fury.
An electric, palpable hum of expectation preceded Vincent`s appearance. He was announced to a blacked out theatre; we all cheered and then we heard this scraping sound.
Then the spots came on and their was Gene with his trademark crooked-man pose hanging onto the mike stand:"Be bop alloola, she`s ah my baby..." What a cool guy.
Greasy quiff, Chiseled craggy white face. Baby blue satin shirt. Tight black pants -- and a shimmering metal brace holding his leg together. Vincent had been in the car
the night Eddie Cochran got mashed. Old Gene, he busted his leg good `n proper. So now he had to drag it around like some death trophy, a constant reminder of the night
the Grim Reaper took the great Cochran up the three steps to heaven.
The night we saw Billy Fury is engraved in gold lame on my brain. Again, a rumbling hush of anticipation. The announcement. The plush red curtains pull back, the band
kicks in -- and there is this glimmering dazzling blindingly handsome creature: Billy Fury. He`s wearing a bronze silk Italian suit that ripples like holy water.
He`s better looking than Jesus. He sneers like an angel. The girls are dying. The boys are open-mouthed not believing what they`re seeing. His perfectly unkempt golden quiff.
The devil glint of his eyes. His genuine rock voice: cool, broken, aching. And his very tight trousers! My God! What`s that!? The management pulled the curtain on him.
After what must have been a heated discussion in the wings the show started again, with Fury slightly less furious in the pants department. What a night.
So -- yes. Like a million teenager boys I`d dreamt of being in a band. No -- that`s not true. I`d dreamt of being center stage, blinded by the spotlight, writhing
against the silver mast of a microphone stand, a thousand girls screaming: mine for the taking. Nancy boy dreamer.
In many ways I have achieved that dream that engulfed me when I was eighteen: I`m a singer, albeit mostly unheard by the masses. That`s ok. I still have ambitions.
I want to write just one song that is half as good as anything that Buddy Holly recorded. He is my musical hero. A brilliant artist cut down literally in his prime.
You can listen to any Holly track today and it still sounds as fresh as on the day poor Buddy stood up in the studio and sang his heart out. (Listen to `Dreaming of Holly`
on `Tattoo`).
**In which way you get in touch with Eddie Plummer and the other guys ?
Most fans will know the story by now -- by reading about the whole damn thing on my website (www.chelsearecords.co.uk) -- but for those who don`t:
In late '64 I started work at ABC Television in Hanover Square in London, just a hop, skip and a flip from Oxford Circus. I worked in the post room.
One day a new boy joined our merry crew: Eddie Pumer, tall, thin, blonde, little nose, cheeky grin and no sense of fashion whatsoever, resplendent in an
old bloke`s suedette driving coat with the required fake wool collar. We used to run in and out of Soho, ferrying cans of film back and fore to the distributors.
We had lunch at a grotty dive in this back water called Carnaby Street. Their was one boutique in the street at that time: a dodgy place selling silk underpants
to guys with eyes only for guys.
To attempt to cut this enormously long story short; OK -- Out of de blue Ed suddenly asks me if I`d like to join his band.
His band!? I didn`t even know he had a bloody band! Like an idiot I said yes. What was I getting into? I couldn`t sing -- for that was the position he was offering me.
I agreed to come along to the band`s next practise session. It was my eighteenth birthday. I rode up on my trusty -- but now unfashionably decked out Lambretta -- to a
grubby school hall in the back streets of Acton Town just west of London.
And there was the band: three young guys sat around their few battered boxes of equipment -- Hope already burning its way irrevocably into their hearts.
They didn`t know it yet, but a slow-burning quest of innocent ambition was about to change their lives forever -- and my life along with theirs... Ed: the band`s musical rock.
Dan: the conscience and confidence of the band. Steve: ever cheerful, happy to tag along in any direction, the butt of all our jokes, his sad destiny already inscribed in The Book.
And me: Stood precariously on the edge of a cliff, my heart in my hand, about to step into a future that would
never let me forget the past. The Sidekicks.
**If i'm not wrong in the early days you were a mod inspired band, what kind of material do you usually play in your live set ?
We played Stones and Muddy Waters stuff. Easy-peasy. We loved Mose Allison. But we were aware of this new band The Beatles. They wrote their own songs.
Wow! Could you do that? So we gave it a try. It naturally fell to Ed to write the music and me to write the words. We came up with this daft ditty called `Drivin` around.`
A blusey pop hybrid that any school kid could have written in his lunch break whilst snogging the blonde from the sixth form and revising his maths. But we loved it.
It was dreadful.
We lived and breathed The Beatles. The Beatles were everywhere, everything, we were conscious that they were out there writing recording making history --making
the youth revolution a reality.
So we began writing more songs. And we left behind all that blues stuff. After all, what did we know about the blues? We were on a natural high. We were flying.
And with that we realized we needed a new image. Change of name: The Key. New clothes all sort of frilly around the edges.
**You told about the importance of The Beatles at that time. Was it strange to walk along with inspiring people with (more or less) the same age as you and not older "idols"?
The establishment didn`t like The Beatles or rock `n roll or pop music or youth culture or teenagers or fashion or long hair. The older generations were trying to
preserve the rigid class system that had prevailed for hundreds of years. They were at the top. We were at the bottom. The ones in the middle
wanted to be like the ones at the top so they also looked down on us with explicit contempt and disdain. But they were all glued to a stuffy world of manners where the
lower classes still doffed their hats to them and didn`t speak unless spoken to and knew their place and were down there with the crumbs they caste our way.
This was the monochrome world of Harold Macmillan Tories, bowler hats, ex-Army Colonels, blue-rinsed matrons, black cars, detachable starched collars and undetachable
starched stiff upper lips. They were blind.
By now Carnaby Street had erupted in a florid flush of boutiques with loud music and mini skirts and Mary Quant rip offs and lace shirts and high-heeled boots for men
and see-through dresses and spend spend spend! Teenagers had money and they were going to spend it. Records. Clothes. Alcohol. Cigarettes. Drugs.
Holidays in Spain. Hairdos. Cheap food. Magazines. The tide was turning. The colonels were drowning. We were going to change the world. And we had our own leaders,
thank you very much: John Paul George and Ringo.
**You lived the "magic era" of the British late Sixties, meeting people and doing things in that wonderful environment. What was your vision of the future at the time
(both musically and personally and in general terms)?
To be honest `the future` was the last thing on our minds. Everything was happening `NOW`! Somehow we all knew we were living in a moment and that moment had to be captured.
This was a time when the very air we breathed vibrated with a sense of `something is happening...` My girlfriend (now wife) and I used to trawl the Kensington Antique Market
and the Chelsea Antique Market for clothes; ancient velvet dresses, uniform jackets once worn by some terrified hero, glass jewel-encrusted evening shoes that were once
waltzed across some talcum-powdered spotlit dance floor. It would be here -- as we rubbed shoulders with other shoppers like Donovan or Marianne Faithful and inhaled copious
amounts of incense-rich air -- that you would over-hear snatches of conversation, that you would see posters and flyers for everything from the biggest gig to the smallest
get-together of some tribe of well-meaning dreamers who were congregating next Wednesday at midnight in Hyde Park to hum the world into a state of perpetual
touchy-feely peace; "Hum for Peace. Bring an umbrella."
At the Portobello Road market on a Saturday morning we`d buy turn-of-the-century broaches and scarves. We wound in and out of the labyrinth of shops and stalls.
Further down the road the locals would be buying their fruit and veg from the traditional market stalls, the stall-holders shouting out their wares just as they did centuries before.
We`d buy a couple of apples if we had the money and wander back up the road to where the fledgling dandies rummaged hopefully through piles of cast-off clothes.
A few tourists would snap away happily, capturing images of colourful chaotic '67 London to shock their families back home in Wyoming.
As I say: we never thought beyond `today` -- but as a band we were on a mission and impatient for recognition. Looking back I guess we were somewhat confused by the concept
of `time.` Perhaps it was going too fast and would pass us by, leaving us like so much unsuccessful driftwood in its wake. Or perhaps it was going too slowly and
we would be forever getting to where we wanted to be... But when you`re young stuff like that doesn`t mess your head up for long. You wake up -- it`s a new day -- everything
is possible -- you`ll never grow old -- grab `life` by the scruff of the neck, shake it and let it know you`re alive. Then try to work out where your next half a crown is
coming from for a cheese sandwich and a cup of tea!
**Let's talk about music production in the Sixties... was there something you did not like? I mean instruments, arrangements,
studio tricks you did not want to use with Kaleidoscope?
Hmmm... Recording for the BBC. Not my happiest memories.
We now have countless radio stations beaming endless pop music at us twenty-four hours a day.
Back
then all we had was Radio Luxembourg coming at us through a pea-soup of interference and the BBC Light Progranmme. In '67 Radio One was launched.
Our first national pop station. The pirate boats competed, moored out in the North Sea offering a more varied musical menu. The Musicians Union stipulated that a
certain percentage of broadcast output must be performed by their members, live musicians. So lots of bands recorded at London`s many BBC studios, diluting the amount
of needle-time as required. We made countless appearances on these shows. The problem was that the BBC staff were old-school, one foot firmly planted in the steam-driven
era of Empire and Oxbridge and crumpets for tea. And the studios were pre-war museums of Bakerlite knobs and engineers in starched white coats and creosote-coloured
tea and everything governed by the clock. I never liked these recordings. They never even approached capturing our live sound. Don`t be fooled by those recordings.
**Your first album "Tangerine Dream" is probably one of the finest moments of the whole british psychedelia, the way the music reflex the lyrics is simply amazing!
Do you want to talk a bit about the recording process?
On the 24th February 1967 we had our first recording session as Kaleidoscope at Philips` Stanhope Place studio just a giant leap for mankind from Marble Arch.
Although nervous, entering this mysterious, subterranean dimly-lit cavern, we knew that we could not allow anything to go wrong. We recorded `Holiday Maker` and `Kaleidoscope.`
Unlike every recording session we`d ever had before -- in egg-box dives -- we were not disappointed with the results. In fact we were stunned by the clarity of the results,
fascinated by the recording process and pleased to find that the engineers were friendly and co-operative. The actual recording process was taken out of our hands and was
something of a mystery: we did what we were told in terms of levels and retakes. The arrangements were down to us, although Dick did have some input via carefully phrased suggestions.
We were always willing to listen and incorporate inventive ideas. But all the songs went into the studio fully-formed. We never wrote in the studio like some bands.
Our songs were very carefully written, rewritten, arranged and polished long before recording sessions. Dick produced, obviously aware of the beating of our novice hearts,
allowing us time to settle down, to accustom ourselves to the cathedral studio. In fact, the studio was so enormous that when we set up our equipment we only occupied
a small area, but this was how we preferred it -- reminiscent, perhaps, of our nights rehearsing at the school hall in Acton not so long before.
A memorable day indeed. We experienced for the very first time that dream-like state as we stepped from the cocoon-twilight of the studio into the outside world -- like
travellers returning from a voyage of discovery. You blink and find yourself back in the real world where life goes on. Difficult to explain; you should have been there.
Although there was much going on behind the scenes, our next recording session wasn`t until the end of April. Dick wanted to hear some new songs.
We played him, `The Murder of Lewis Tollani,` but he balked slightly at this unusual offering. We spent the day recording, `Mr.Small, the watch-repairer man,`
a song about Ed`s dad who mended watches in a tiny workroom under the stairs at their house in Acton. We also recorded, `Move,` a song that always went down well on stage,
but did not transfer so well to tape. This was our first indication that our louder, heavier songs would have difficulty finding their way onto our albums.
Although crowd-pleasers, the recording process had trouble accommodating the high decibels of a simulated live performance. No doubt different today, but
back then the engineers were always suggesting tactfully that we might like to try it again at a lower level; this killed the dynamics of the song.
**What's the story behind such wonderful songs like "The Murder of Lewis Tollani" or "Dive into yesterday" (two of my all-time favourites), how do you recreate
all the shades of your sound on stage?
Blame it on the brothers Bee Gee. I`d bought a copy of `Horizontal.` `Lemons never do forget.` But it was the single, `New York Mining Disaster 1941,` that
made us sit up and listen. `Lewis Tollani` was written as a direct result of hearing that song. I`ve no idea where the story came from. OK, I suppose if I`m honest
it was a conscious effort to produce something `weird` but that was all part of the learning process for a writer. You listened -- you learnt -- you took in what
affected you the most -- and adapted, moving on in a growing, developing way. Obviously we were influenced by everything that was happening in the Sixties: the music,
the fashions, the social and cultural revolution that was changing Britain from a monochrome bombed-out post-war wasteland ruled by pipe-smoking stiff-upper-lip
politicians in tweed suits who were anxious to preserve the status quo of the class system hierarchy that kept them and their like at the top and the rest of us
down there with the obedient, cap-doffing plebs. It was becoming a Technicolor world and young people were leading the way, slicing through the dusty drapes and
letting the light in. Nothing could stop us.
`Dive into Yesterday` and many of our other songs, lyrically and musically, grew out of all this. `Dive into Yesterday` has proved to have the most apt title of
all our songs: a perfect clarion call to our new generation of fans.
As far as reproducing our recordings on stage: We were a noisy band. Perhaps not on record, but certainly on stage. Tragically no recording of our live act exists.
But listen to `(Love Song)For Annie` or `Diary Song` from `White-Faced Lady` and both tracks come close to reproducing our live sound. We were very much a live act.
Don`t forget that unlike many bands today, we`d paid our dues, we`d been gigging for years before we got our recording contract, we`d dragged ourselves in and out of a
hundred dives, worn out plenty of rubber on the pot-holed back roads of England, eaten enough greasy-spoon breakfasts to clog a thousand miles of arteries.
To put on an exciting show we had to give it some wellie. Fey little fairy-tales wouldn`t get the punters up on their high-heeled feet. But there were favourites
from our albums that we incorporated in our live show: `Snapdragon`, `(Love Song)For Annie`, `Music` and `Faintly Blowing.` It was quite a show.
I would give anything to go back in time and stand in the
audience at Mothers Club in Birmingham and watch one of our gigs...
**I recently read on Federico Ferrari's excellent "All'Ombra di Sgt. Pepper" (an italian publication about British Psychedelia) you uset to set up performances
during your gigs, you had tabla players and girls reading poetry onstage... how did you organize such colourful things?
We used to have a girl in a mini skirt sitting on stage with us. She sat there reading a book of poetry throughout our set. Ed and I would eat an apple during one number.
Probably meant to be very symbolic and mysterious but just made it difficult to sing with a mouthful of apple mush. And then during our finale number -- the explosive
and now long lost `Face` -- I bit on a plastic blood capsule and collapsed on stage just as the last chords were fading. It caused a right old riot and we were chased
out of the building by the gig organizers who had called an ambulance, completely fooled by my Oscar-wiining on-stage death and they felt pretty silly having to
explain their donkey-brained mistake.
On stage the band was a real powerhouse. We blew up countless amplifiers! Dan was a really powerful manic drummer, in stark contrast to his diminutive stature.
Steve thumped away happily, adding the all-important bottom end to the music. Ed was a guitar-genius, a master of feedback that he used skilfully and to great effect on stage.
Later I played some keyboards on stage, but I was always happier with a mike in my hand `performing` -- ever the frustrated Billy Fury and Gene Vincent fan.
**By the time of the release of your second album "Faintly Blowing", your sound and songwriting changed a little bit. In my opinion it became more progressive and at the
same time more melodic in a folky-way. What's your opinion about it?
The album is a reflection of our growth as songwriters. Writing of any kind develops and matures with time. Being able to write is a precious gift: but you use it or lose it.
Ed and I never stopped writing. We were very prolific. But we were also honest with self-criticism. If a song did not come up to our standard we let it wither and moved on.
Before we went into the studio we would have studied which songs were ready; maybe a couple of dozen songs, many already incorporated into our stage act. So by the time we
got into the studio the songs had already been through several editing processes.
The songs on `Faintly Blowing` -- my own favourite of the two Kaleidoscope albums from the Sixties -- were very carefully written, arranged and recorded.
With `Tangerine Dream` we -- Dick included -- were anxious to get into the studio and start recording and finish the first album to get it out behind the first single.
With `Faintly Blowing` it was a more carefully-considered process, with various meetings to decide which songs would go on the album; close scrutiny was also given to the
running order of the tracks to present a good listening experience from beginning to end.
At this stage Fontana -- and Dick in particular -- still thought they had the next Beatles, so we had a big budget for the album which included orchestral arrangements
for some of the songs. Naturally, we were very excited about this; I was particularly pleased as Donovan`s arranger, John Cameron, was chosen to work with us.
Donovan was a big influence on my lyrics; his `Storybook` album is still one of my favourites and one of the very few that I still listen to occasionally.
I like the variety of styles -- lyrical and musical -- on `Faintly Blowing.` Ed and I were maturing as writers and the album is a good showcase of the different
genres we were tackling. The whole album has a better sense of attention to detail than the first -- although the first still has that appealing freshness, a youthful naivetè.
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