Suggs and the City: Journeys Through Disappearing London (21 page)

From the late 1920s up until the mid-1950s Denmark Street remained pretty much unchanged, with the big singers of the day making regular visits to Tin Pan Alley in search of new tunes or to hear songs that had been especially written for them by a trusted songwriter; performers very rarely wrote their own material in those days. There’s an intriguing short film about Denmark Street made by Pathé at the tail end of 1950 that shows the whole process of making a record in those days and I urge you to try to find it online.

In the film, the hottest group on the block, the Beverley Sisters - a sort of Girls Aloud of their day, but more twin-set than fishnet - roll up on Denmark Street in pursuit of a new song. The commentator informs us that Tin Pan Alley is the ‘birthplace of melodies which have kept Britain singing in good times and bad’. If my memory of the Beverley Sisters is anything to go by, I imagine times were mainly bad. Publishers, managers and popular songwriters of the day gather on the street for a chinwag to demonstrate what a jolly friendly place it is. What’s immediately striking is that most of these men look like wartime spivs. None of them is under the age of 60, by my reckoning, and some look as if they might’ve been around at the birth of music hall. The old ‘Daddy of Tin Pan Alley’, Lawrence Wright, looks like Captain Mainwaring’s father.

What is also fascinating is the make-up of the street back then. The retail outlets we see today stuffed with more instruments than you can shake a drumstick at have windows full of sheet music. Seemingly every property belongs to a publisher, and their shop fronts appear to be a showcases for the songs that have brought them renown. It all looks strangely drab and office-like, but maybe the fact that the film is in glorious black and white doesn’t help matters. Once we go upstairs into the various rehearsal rooms of publishers - like Campbell Connolly, Sun Music and Southern House - you see what a hothouse of musical creativity this little street was back then. At Leeds Music (number 25) the camera goes from one audition room to another, where the likes of Mantovani, Joe Loss, Vera Lynn and Anne Shelton are trying out new songs.

At the Peter Maurice Music Company at number 21, an impossibly young Petula Clark is captured trying out a song called ‘Have I Told You Lately That I Love You?’ Not only is this the title of a later song by Van Morrison, it has a similar lilt to it too, until Pet tells her pianist to ‘make it go a little quicker’. Thereafter, the tune ceases to be a ballad and becomes a roll-out-the-barrel-style singalong. ‘That’s better!’ exclaims Pet. Well, she was young, to be fair. It would be years before she got her act together and went ‘Downtown’. The film ends with a group of arrangers writing down musical scores who look as if they’ve been locked in their cramped office since Champagne Charlie was doing the rounds. It all looks terribly twee, old fashioned and in need of a sharp knee in the crotchet.

Tin Pan Alley continued to be run by venerable old-timers for many years to come, but in 1954 a jazz violinist by the name of Ralph Elman looked to the future, which hadn’t yet begun, and opened one of the first independent recording studios in the country at 22 Denmark Street. Up to this point, songs may have been composed, arranged, auditioned, rehearsed and finely tuned in Denmark Street, but it wasn’t where music was recorded. This part of the process was pretty much a closed shop, carried out in the studios of the big record companies such as Decca or EMI’s Abbey Road.

Of course Abbey Road and its studios are famous because of their link with the Beatles - Sir Paul on the zebra crossing with no shoes and all that. Elman himself later enjoyed 4.44 seconds of fame by playing violin on ‘I Am the Walrus’. The Fab Four revolutionised popular music, but Elman’s own little studio on Denmark Street was also pretty revolutionary, and a very risky financial venture at the time to boot. All made possible by the invention of magnetic tape, because prior to its arrival, and the accompanying reel-to-reel tape recorders, music was cut direct to disc. Not only were tape recorders cheaper than disc recorders, they were simpler to operate and easier to incorporate into a studio. As technology progressed, multi-track recording on tape liberated producers from the ordeal of having to get a faultless ‘live’ performance from the assembled musicians in one take. All in all, magnetic recording greatly reduced the start-up costs and logistics of commercial recording and afforded independents the chance to do battle with the big, established companies. Elman’s studio opened doors for performers and independent producers that would otherwise have remained tightly shut.

When the 60s began to swing, many more studios opened on the street and could be hired by the hour by anyone wishing to make a record. And over the next couple of decades, an endless procession of nobodies beat a path to the street’s studios. Well, they might’ve been unknown when they arrived, but their anonymity didn’t last long. The likes of the Kinks, Small Faces, Elton John, Donovan and Paul Simon recorded in the studios of Tin Pan Alley during the 60s. Even those subversive so-and-sos who’d got Britain all hot under the collar by taking a leak on a garage forecourt - scandalous - hit the street’s studios.

The Rolling Stones recorded their first album in Regent Sounds Studio at 4 Denmark Street in January 1964. Regent Sounds first pushed play and record in 1963, and Sir Jumpin’ Jack Flash & Co cut a demo at the studio soon after. The group was then snapped up by Decca, who were anxious not to miss out on the next big thing, having turned down the Beatles in 1962 on the grounds that guitar groups were on the way out. Now, as bad decisions go, I’m struggling to come up with one to top that.

However, when the ‘Forecourt Five’ began recording their first album at Decca, they didn’t get on with the strait-laced studio set-up with its tie-wearing producers and engineers. Having decided that Decca’s studios were not to their satisfaction, they decamped to Denmark Street where they resolved to record the album at the homely Regent Sounds Studio. The fact that they had the freedom to do this was down to their first manager and guru, Andrew Loog Oldham, who, in turn, had learned a trick or two from his hero, the legendary, now disgraced producer Phil Spector. Picking up a tip from Spector, Oldham negotiated a deal with Decca whereby he and the group retained ownership of the master tapes and leased them to Decca. Being an inveterate hustler and ultra-confident 20-year-old, Oldham also took on the role of producer despite having no experience whatsoever, something that the emergence of independent studios gave him the chance to do. Spector himself turned up at Regent Sounds to lend Oldham a bit of spiritual support during one of the recording sessions, arriving with a few bottles of brandy. Indeed, Spector is listed as playing maracas on the track ‘Little by Little’, although legend has it that he was actually hitting an empty brandy bottle with a half-crown coin.

The band apparently loved the atmosphere of the cramped Regent Sounds Studio, with its primitive egg-carton sound-proofing and less-than-state-of-the-art recording equipment. Over the years the album, simply called
The Rolling Stones
, has consistently been adjudged one of the greatest debut albums of all time and, to be fair, it’s got a fantastic live feel about it.

Today, the former Regent Sounds Studio is a guitar shop called Regent Sounds, so even I can spot it, and if you wander in, after admiring the restored ‘Regent Sounds Studio’ painted sign above the shop, there are still traces to be found of its former incarnation, most notably the window located at the end of the showroom that used to separate the studio from the producer’s mission-control area.

The rise of independent studios and producers, along with artists who were beginning to write increasing proportions of their own material, began to take its toll on the Tin Pan Alley old guard, most of whom were hopelessly out of touch with contemporary music. When a young, London-based Paul Simon tried to flog a handful of songs he’d written to Mills Music at 20 Denmark Street in 1965, he was told his compositions were uncommercial and was sent homeward bound empty-handed. Considering ‘Homeward Bound’ was one of those songs, along with ‘The Sound of Silence’, I’d say that was a bit of an oversight, given that both feature on albums that are among the biggest sellers of all time. I think the experience must’ve deeply traumatised Paul Simon because soon after he formed his own publishing company and called it Charing Cross. To make matters worse for Mills Music, they had an office boy working for them at the time by the name of Reg Dwight who was trying to make his way in the biz. He was paid £5 a week at the time but failed to make an impression. A few years later, having changed his name to Elton John, he was to become responsible for two per cent of the world’s entire record sales. I think that puts Mills Music a close number two to Decca in the hotly disputed ‘duffest decisions made in music’ chart.

The consensus among the whippersnappers of pop that Tin Pan Alley publishers were out of touch and losing the plot is perfectly summed up in the Kinks’ song entitled, strangely enough, ‘Denmark Street’, in which a budding musician takes a journey to the famed road only to have his song and hair criticised by a pen-pusher, but is signed up anyway, just to be on the safe side.

The balance of power increasingly shifted away from Tin Pan Alley’s old guard as the 60s became the 70s and the publishing houses began to downsize or moved away from the street altogether. For others it was the last waltz. It’s no coincidence that I use that metaphor because it links very nicely to my favourite Tin Pan Alley(ish) story, which features Engelbert Humperdinck’s song ‘The Last Waltz’.

‘Enge’, as he was known to his close friends, or Arnold George Dorsey, as he was named at birth, was managed by a successful bloke by the name of Gordon Mills, who worked for Denmark Productions at number 25. Mills also managed the Welsh foghorn Tom Jones. The song was penned by the songwriting partnership of Les Reed and Barry Mason, who wrote tons of hits and were a music publisher’s dream in the 60s before pickings became slim.

‘The Last Waltz’ got to number one in 1967 and Barry Mason tells the story of being so proud of his first-ever chart-topper that while he was having a pee in a hotel urinal, he noticed the bloke next to him was whistling the song and he felt he just had to put him in the picture. He proceeded to tell the stranger that he’d written the song he was whistling, but unfortunately for him, the chap was a fairly knowledgeable record-company executive. ‘What’s your name then?’ the stranger enquired.

‘Barry Mason,’ came the reply.

‘I thought Les Reed wrote “The Last Waltz”,’ said the disbelieving exec.

‘Well, he did,’ replied our Barry. ‘He wrote the music and I penned the lyrics.’

‘Yeah, well, I wasn’t whistling the lyrics,’ came the response from the still-peeing exec.

Also, somewhere in the windmills of my mind (sorry, couldn’t resist that one), I seem to remember a documentary from around 1972 entitled
Whatever Happened to Tin Pan Alley
which looked at how the street had changed since the days when artists looked to publishers to provide them with a hit. At the time, the place was considered a wasteland and its demise was summed up by the songwriter Nick Chinn, who went on to write stacks of glam rock hits with Mike Chapman for producer and RAK Records owner Mickie Most. Chinn said that he and Chapman gave up playing their songs to publishers who didn’t understand what they were about and went to RAK Records to seek out someone who was making hit records. It was the end of the road for Tin Pan Alley as a place for music publishing, but the street had reinvented itself as a home for independent studios and, later, instrument shops. In reality, it never really lost its appeal to mad-keen musos.

The street’s studios continued to flourish in the 1970s and were a Mecca for artists hoping to lay some tracks on wax for the first time. Some would spend their days hanging out at number 9, otherwise known as the Giaconda Cafe. Legend has it that the Small Faces were sipping coffees at the Giaconda when they decided to turn pro, and it was where David Bowie met the musicians who would later make up his band the Lower Third. The cafe remained the place to tune in, turn on and drop crockery throughout the hippy era, and also became a popular haunt of punk bands such as the Clash and the Sex Pistols, who moved into a flat at number 6 in late 1975. That must have put paid to any quiet nights in for the folk in the next-door flat.

Throughout this time, the Giaconda served as a sort of rock’n’roll job centre as opposed to the real employment exchange that sits at the position all popstars covet, number one. The cafe closed many years ago and has gone through several incarnations, but last year number 9 reopened to great reviews as the Giaconda Dining Room. Just what the rockers of yesteryear would make of their old greasy spoon being reinvented as a classy joint serving up such gastro delights as pumpkin risotto, God only knows.

In time, the musical instrument shops that dominate the street today began to replace the publishing houses and one of the people responsible for that transformation is the founder of the Orange Music Electronic Company, Cliff Cooper. Cliff launched a host of specialist instrument stores in the street in the 1970s, as well as the famous Orange brand of amps, speakers and guitars, whose users over the years have included such luminary rock figures as Jimmy Page, B. B. King, Noel Gallagher and Stevie Wonder. Cliff’s a pretty unassuming fella, but like many of the characters you meet in Tin Pan Alley, where Cliff still keeps an office, he has a wealth of stories to tell. The most intriguing of which is that of his association with the brilliant but doomed record producer Joe Meek.

Cliff Cooper was in a band called the Millionaires and recorded with Joe Meek at a small flat-come-studio above a leather shop at 304 Holloway Road, a place which has become a must-see for pop pilgrims on the London rock-heritage trail.

Meek famously wrote and produced the huge instrumental hit ‘Telstar’ (named after the telecommunications satellite that was launched in the same year) at his ‘studio’ flat in 1962 and made number one in the US and UK. Meek was a true innovator who recorded thousands of hours of material with a hugely diverse range of artists, some of whom would later become big stars, like Rod ‘The Mod’ Stewart. Most of these recordings never saw the light of day. The troubled producer died in tragic circumstances, shooting himself after shooting his landlady. He died broke, having never received the royalties from his five-million seller, owing to a protracted lawsuit brought by a French composer accusing him of plagiarism which was resolved in Meek’s favour a year after his death.