Seize the Day (33 page)

In 2003, I had a call asking me if I’d be interested in writing the book for a musical based around the music of the Village People. It’s never wise to say yes to anything and everything, but I’d always liked the theatricality of the group and their songs and duly scooted off to Paris for a
tête-à-tête
with their producer and co-writer, Henri Belolo. We got on well. I threw a few ideas at him, he threw a few back at me and after a rather robust
déjeuner
, I Eurostarred myself back to London bursting with creativity. I was going to enjoy this. ‘In the Navy’ became a major dance number featuring the waltz, tango and cha-cha, while ‘YMCA’ was sung classically as well as in the style that we know and love and to which we do misspelled hand movements. Of course ‘Go West’, ‘San Francisco’ and ‘Macho Man’ were in the mix, as was a humorously staged version of ‘Sex over the Phone’. The storyline worked really well, but I needed a song about the New York police that reflected ‘YMCA’. I had the audacity to write one. I used one of Elgar’s marches,
Pomp and Circumstance No. 4
, which he’d first performed 100 years earlier, back in 1907.

I assumed the melody must have had a lyrical setting at some point, although I’d never been aware of one. Calling the song ‘NYPD’, I used the word ‘liberty’ to great effect, only to discover a year or two later that A. P. Herbert had written words to the tune during World War Two, calling it ‘The Liberty Song’. How weird is that? I wasn’t sure how Henri would respond on my next visit to Paris. He’d written all the Village People hits and more. There was a good chance
he’d dismiss an interloper out of hand, but he didn’t; he surprised me by embracing the song and agreeing that it’d be good for the musical.

On one occasion, probably when things started to look seriously good, Henri took me, his son and his son’s girlfriend out to dinner. We discussed the project at length and Henri became so animated, in the Gallic style, at one point that he got to his feet and, gesticulating in my direction, shouted, ‘Mike, you must fuck us … you must fuck us…’ The other diners, intrigued by whatever Parisian perversion was on offer in this
ménage à quatre
, stopped their conversations and swivelled their heads, only to be bitterly disappointed by Henri’s son’s swift rejoinder, ‘Dad, the pronunciation is “focus”.’

The project floundered after the production companies we approached felt that the Village People hadn’t had enough hits to make the show viable. Just because the Queen, Abba and Madness musicals were full of hits didn’t mean that this one wouldn’t work. It was theatrical and colourful, it featured some great songs, and the audience would have dressed as members of the group.

I was recently approached by a UK producer who loved the script, the whole presentation, and wanted to tour it. He offered Henri £500,000, but he turned it down. Crazy in my opinion. No point in having a shelf full of dreams.

There was another single in 2006 when ‘England My England’ was released to coincide with the FIFA World Cup. W. E. Henley had written the magnificently stirring words in 1892 and I’d added the music over 110 years later. It had been at Jeremy Beadle’s insistence that it came out, after he attended one of the
Dead Poets
shows (see below). He thought it was a wonderfully patriotic marriage of words and music and deserved to be heard. I grafted on some anthemic Elgarian chants and a soupçon of the old Elgar/Parry classic for good measure and the press picked up on the song. They also picked up on the other fifty-three artists and writers who’d had a similar idea for a football anthem. Elliott Frisby handled the lead, with him, Steve Etherington and me doing the backing vocals. I’m sure the rather nifty
video that we made, which included some classic footage from old Wembley matches, helped ease the song into the all-time top twenty football songs as featured on Sky TV. Let me tell you, it’s good to be in any chart! The
Daily Mail
quoted odds of 100/1 on it reaching number one, making it a far more inviting bet than the Cumbria Tourist Board’s single, ‘Baarmy Sheep’ at 50/1 or Leicester City FC’s ‘Swinging For England’ at 33/1. The
Daily Star
printed the lyrics to ‘England My England’ with the comment ‘What the FA want us to sing’. A little premature perhaps, but it was to point up the Englishness, as the other half of the story was Germany asking the Kaiser Chiefs to record an anthem for their team. We were deemed to have a better chance of topping the chart, though, than Showaddywaddy at a grossly unfair 125/1.

I’d met Elliott on a ship in the Caribbean in the early 2000s. He was performing and I was giving talks. Elliott’s voice was exceptional and after chatting one evening on deck we wrote a couple of songs. Now you can’t just write songs with anyone, it doesn’t work like that, but with us it did. There were many cruises and we wrote a new song most evenings. They seemed to come very naturally, they were unusually varied and there was hardly any friction. In fact there was usually a wagonload of humour in the mix.

I guess we have about forty or so pretty strong songs that so far haven’t seen the light of day, although a new female singer has recorded ‘Just a Little Bit Crazy’. The idea for the song came from a story I’d remembered about Nelson’s youth. In his mid-teens while serving as a midshipman, he had an encounter with a polar bear at Spitzbergen and was lucky to escape with his life. The ship’s captain described him as being, ‘just a little bit crazy’. The song isn’t about Nelson, but about a fictitious relationship; ideas, however, can come from anywhere. Two of our collaborations were released on a charity single for the Shooting Star Children’s Hospice, now Shooting Star Chase. Elliott and I had been discussing Christmas singles over a pot of tea and came to the conclusion that every title and angle had been
covered, but on a journey to Hull later that day I had time to reflect on the fact that Christmas cards had somehow become less important than they were when I was a lad. Then there was the excitement of the cards dropping through the letterbox, the anticipation, the opening, the revelation (who was it from?) the reading of the message and the decision where to put each one. All part of a festive ritual that was fast disappearing. For many, the thrill of the Christmas card has ceased to exist. Cards have been largely eclipsed by presents and group emails, Skype or texts. I mused on the fact that Christmas Eve was no longer represented by sleigh bells ringing, but by mobiles pinging. So why not send a song, I thought. Forget robins, snow scenes, and shepherds with their flocks … let a song be the Christmas card. I worked on it all the way to the banks of the Humber, stopping periodically to update Elliott … or ‘Slacker’, as I perversely call him, because he works so hard. Within a few days we had the song finished and demoed. I couldn’t help feeling that part of the verse was reminiscent of something. I was sure it was one of Wizzard’s songs, so I emailed the demo to Roy Wood, who’d written them all. It did indeed turn out to be similar to ‘Angel Fingers’. He was delighted to be credited as co-writer, confessing that I’d rounded the verse off in a way that he hadn’t managed to back in the ’70s. What a gracious man, and one of our great British songwriters in my opinion.

Karen Sugarman, who headed up Shooting Star, was delighted for us to release the song for the children’s hospice, so I started to think of ideas for a video. In the end, Andy Park, known to all as Mr Christmas, came to the rescue with an offer that we couldn’t refuse. His house looks like Christmas Day all the year round; decorations and cards are displayed for 365 days and his larder groans with foodstuffs that would be the envy of Billy Bunter
and
Mr Toad. Elliott and I were joined by Mr Christmas, in a starring role of course, Dave Hill from Slade, my fellow DJ David Hamilton and Scott Ottoway, who is now drumming with the Searchers. We tipped our hats to the charity by calling ourselves the Shooting Stars and the single picked up a
fair amount of airplay as well as notching up almost 20,000 hits on YouTube. The Slacker and I wrote a second seasonal song as a bonus track for the CD, ‘Christmas Day’. We agreed that we didn’t need a third, but we wrote one anyway. Unlike Henry I with his surfeit of lampreys, we overindulged and survived. Our festive song count is now five and rising. We struggle to determine our favourite.

I also worked on stage with Elliott between 2006 and 2008 on
The Dead Poets
’
Society
, a piece on which I’d collaborated with many great wordsmiths, including Byron, Kipling, Shakespeare, Auden, Masefield and Wordsworth. It’s terrific working with these legends: no arguments, no contrary moments, no hissy fits. I used two narrators (me and an available actor) with Elliott singing and playing guitar and Steve Etherington on keyboards. I staged it at the Gatehouse Theatre, Highgate, the Frinton Library Festival and Home House, London.

I once asked Neil Sedaka which of his songs were his favourites. ‘Oh Mike,’ he beamed, ‘they’re
all
my little babies. I send them out into the world and they send me money home.’ I thought of that recently when the contract came through from Cherry Red for the inclusion of ‘What the Dickens’, a song I wrote between O-levels and A-levels, which was being released on the compilation album
Love, Poetry & Revolution
. Far out, man, peace and love, power to the people and let’s light another joss-stick. Coolly juxtaposed with the likes of the Spencer Davis Group, the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, the Alan Bown!, John’s Children and Fat Mattress, I’m joined on drums by future Atomic Rooster and Spinal Tap drummer Ric Parnell with Virgin Sleep’s Keith Purnell on lead guitar. A song I’d started work on at school is still sending me money home. Not as much as Neil Sedaka’s send him, of course, but the same principle applies.

I was thrilled to write a song with my old friend Robin Gibb near the end of his life and I’m very moved that it’s appearing on a posthumous album later this year. I never discussed Robin’s illness with him. It wasn’t what he wanted to talk about. He wanted to make plans, discuss the future and pretend that everything was fine. He was still
planning tours of places like Australia for goodness sake, but what a positive mental approach. I understood that. He also liked to imagine that Maurice, his twin, hadn’t actually died but was living on some vague island somewhere overseas. That was how he dealt with it, and as John Lennon said, ‘Whatever gets you through the night, it’s all right, it’s all right.’ We talked about and watched documentaries on the US Civil War, discussed English history and politics, swapped books and sometimes sang classic songs. He dragged me off one afternoon to look at a disused aerodrome that had last been used to land planes bringing soldiers back from World War Two and wandered round in wonderment gazing at rusting fuel pipes and worn markings. We had the same sense of what was a great song, a good song or simply an average song. Robin was adamant that one should never aim to write a number two, always a number one. It worked for the Bee Gees. In not wanting his illness to become public, his team often had to come up with some wild tales to disguise the truth, but Robin battled on relentlessly whenever he could. I directed the video for a re-working of ‘I’ve Gotta Get a Message to You’, which he had recorded for the Official Poppy Appeal 2011 with a trio of serving Army soldiers known simply as the Soldiers. The day of the shoot, Robin made a herculean effort to get out of his sick bed, dress and give 100 per cent for me, the Soldiers, the camera crew and the press.

If his positive approach appeared to wane, I sometimes gave him a gentle kick up the backside. We were due to talk to Peter Andre about the song we’d written that he was going to record but Robin’s wife Dwina said he was very tired and probably wouldn’t make the trip. I decided he might need a little incentive, so I wandered into the garden, stood underneath his bedroom window and shouted, ‘Gibb, get your backside down here now, the bus is leaving.’ There was no bus of course, we were going in his Range Rover, but there’s nothing wrong with a hint of weak humour if you’re ailing. The terminology wasn’t along my usual eloquent lines, but I felt it might hit the mark for that reason. He was downstairs within ten minutes.

‘I didn’t sleep much last night, there was a fly in my room,’ he said.

‘Why didn’t you swat it?’

‘I shouted at it.’

Brilliant. ‘Get dressed and we’ll head off.’

‘I’m still tired, let me have another hour’s sleep and then we’ll go.’

‘Half an hour.’

‘Forty minutes.’

‘OK, forty minutes.’

Within ten minutes he was back down, dressed in a roll neck and jacket and ready to go.

‘That was a quick forty minutes.’

‘The fly was back.’

All the way there and back Robin was in fine form; we sang, the surreal humour flew, we discussed the world in general and I’m sure that was far better medicine than lying in bed, being crowded from all sides by unbidden and unwanted thoughts. When we went back to record the demo with Peter, Robin was very impressed with his voice. I think Peter’s range and interpretation surprised him. Peter in turn was, I think, a little apprehensive at having to record in front of Robin. I was pleased to be able to introduce them and that mutual admiration and respect was the result. Peter came to Robin’s funeral to pay his respects and later we erected a blue plaque on the gatehouse of Robin and Dwina’s home, The Prebendel, in a small ceremony with Tim Rice and me offering a few words.

When the news from the clinic started to look pretty grim, I began to write a little song, which was my personal way of saying what I wanted to say. It was really a letter to Robin. Songs are how we do it. Taking Robin’s way of dealing with bereavement, I wrote ‘This Is Not Goodbye’. There was one verse that hit my tear ducts every time and I couldn’t get past it, which was about his favourite dog, Ollie, waiting patiently for his return and the empty chair outside the studio where he’d sit in the sun. Sunny days seemed to cheer him. I was still concerned about being able to sing those lines when I demoed it at
Elliott’s studio, but I got through it. A few days before he went into the clinic for the final time, Robin had asked me to film him in the garden. He instructed me how to use the machine and I attempted a few atmospheric sequences while he posed in his frock coat and trademark blue glasses and looked moody. I used that final footage, in slow motion, to go with ‘This Is Not Goodbye’ when we put it on YouTube.