This was October 1964, and ‘Melody Maker’ was pretty much a jazz paper, so they wanted a younger writer to write about pop and R’N’B. On my first day, I went out for a drink with one of the older guys on the paper and he was a bit sourfaced and negative and said, “Oh, you know all this pop business is finished! ‘Melody Maker’ is going to close down!” I thought, ‘Oh, no!’, got horribly drunk and was sick outside the office in Fleet Street!
It had been news day as well, which was really hard, because deadlines for a weekly paper are just as bad as for a daily and people were shouting at you to get news stories. There were no press releases then. The news editor would say, “The Beatles are off to the States – ring John Lennon at Heathrow Airport and get a story.” So you had to page John Lennon at the airport – and on one occasion, he did actually come to the phone! “Er – what’s your next single going to be?” “Argh – ‘Ticket To Ride’!” But you didn’t have to write reams of copy. Tape recorders hadn’t been invented then, so you were writing very tight copy – 600 words maximum.
By the second day, I thought I was going to leave. I thought, ‘I can’t stand this – there’s too much pressure and everybody’s horrible!’ But when I went back on Tuesday, there was no one in the office. One old chap turned up and said, “Oh, they’re all down the pub” – it was the day when no one did any work – so I thought I’d stay until the end of the week. I ended up staying 18 years!
Once I got going, it was so much fun, it was just unbelievable. Looking back at the Sixties now, every day was different and nobody knew where it was going. And of course, being at the heart of it and being told to go out and get drunk – well, no, go out and see bands - was great!
I was a pop writer then, I wasn’t a rock writer. In my first couple of weeks at the ‘MM’, I interviewed Burt Bacharach, The Shangri-La’s and the Yardbirds – and later, Tom Jones, Sandie Shaw, Lulu, Cilla Black, Dusty Springfield…They were all new then and they wanted to be written about.
And of course, by night, you had to go to all these clubs where the stars were. It was like being the Piers Morgan of the Sixties!