Barnsbury Boy - Paul Kenealy: Music: Movin' on
The Cardinals. A Band
Although John Walker lived in Highbury New Park, he went to school in Ladbroke Grove, a world away from my Islington homeland. After our first meeting, John and I met a few more times at his flat and then mine. He played lead and I played bass. Once again the influences were mostly Shadows and Ventures. After a couple of weeks John introduced me to the other members of the band. We all met up in one of the big houses on Seven Sisters Road opposite Finsbury Park. This was the home of Paul McKenna, the drummer in the band. The other member was an Irish guy called Dennis Sheehan, who played guitar. Together we made a pretty good noise. Paul McKenna’s folks had a big flat in an old house, and they were quite happy to have us play there.
John, Paul and Dennis all went to Cardinal Manning Catholic Boys School in Ladbroke Grove and we were invited to play at their school Christmas concert. The headmaster came on stage and said, “and now we have our school band, The Cardinals” and that was that, The Cardinals were born.
We played only one other gig with this lineup. With John and Dennis’ connection to Ladbroke Grove we got a booking at a youth club in Lancaster Road. The place was run by an affable West-Indian guy, I don’t remember his name, but he had a set of vibraphones that he played, and he sat in with us and played a kind of west London version of ‘Watermelon Man’. I think John and I got there with a lift from John’s dad in his Ford Consul. John’s dad would sometimes oblige in this way. Also at this first gig was Billy Dean. Billy lived at the opposite end of Lancaster Road, just under the Metropolitan Line station at Latimer Road. Bill was a drummer, and a couple of years older than the rest of us. Bill sat in on Paul’s kit. The next time we all got together Paul had left and Billy Dean was our new drummer. Bill had a smart ‘Roger’s’ kit, with his name painted on the bass drum skin.
Now we had two Islington boys and two Notting Hill boys. None of us was old enough to drive except Bill, and he wasn’t interested. John and I had to schlep our gear over to Notting Hill on a regular basis. This was the time when I first learned the intricacies of the tube system. Arsenal to Kings Cross, change on to the Metropolitan Line to Latimer Road, being careful not to get the Circle Line or you ended up at Notting Hill Gate (a good walk to Latimer Road with a guitar and amp) and would have to change trains, go back to Edgware Road and start again.
We practised in Billy Dean’s mum and dad’s council house in Latimer Road. Billy had a sister who was married to a big guy a few years our senior. They all lived together in this small house. We used to practice in the downstairs front room. Bill’s mum would supply us with cups of tea, bacon sandwiches, home made cake, and a kip on the sofa if we got tired.
This was late ’62 when The Beatles were starting to dominate the airwaves. Everything Liverpudlian was cool, the old American copy cat rockers were history. It soon became obvious that if we were to ‘make it’ we would have to get with the Merseybeat sound. It turned out that Dennis and I could sing after a fashion. John wasn’t interested and Billy didn’t have a voice. So Dennis and I it was and as it happens we weren’t that bad. Dennis had a higher voice than me and could sing harmonies. We started with a few Every Brothers, Buddy Holly and Ricky Nelson songs. We were influenced by The Beatles, but they were in turn influenced by black American singers like Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, so we were doing songs like Memphis Tennessee but sounding like a poor imitation of the real stuff.
Somehow or another we managed to get together a set list which ranged from Buddy Holly to Chuck Berry with a couple of Shadows favourites to make up the numbers. Billy Dean’s brother-in-law Bert started acting as our manager, road manager (driving us in his FX3 taxi) and general factotum. Bill was always careful that his bass drum would face out of the taxi, ‘cos the bass drum bore the legend ‘Billy Dean’. Bert got us an audition in a club downstairs of a coffee bar in Westbourne Grove. The place was called Chez Artistes, and was full of art student types, hooray Henry’s, swingin’ 60’s chicks and looking back, gay boys. The place was run by an ex army major, Dick Morton.
We passed the audition and were awarded a gig the following Friday night. At the time I was still at school, aged 15. John and Dennis were 16 and Billy 17. The club had a sound system of sorts, so the microphone problem was solved. I think we got ten pounds, we played for a couple of hours from about eight o’clock, when we got to the end of our set list we would start again, hoping that the customers had changed from the beginning of the evening. We couldn’t have been too bad though, because we were booked for the following week. On Saturday afternoons, Dennis, Bert and I would go to Soho, looking for clubs where we could get a start. The first place we looked at was The Two I’s coffee bar in Old Compton Street. We went in and bought a coffee and sat in the café and looked at the pictures on the wall, and at the people coming in and going downstairs.
This was that place where Tommy Steele, Cliff Richard, Screaming Lord Sutch and others had made their début, and been discovered. Eventually we got to see the manager. Tom Littlewood was one of those old fashioned ‘show business’ types. Full of confidence and bluster, everybody wanted to talk to him because he had influence, but at the end of the day he was just a coffee bar manager. He agreed to give us an audition the following Sunday afternoon.
In hindsight his ‘audition’ was a ruse to get a free band for an hour or so to fill in the dead hours of the day. The regular band for a Sunday evening was ‘Wee Willie Harris’. He was a great rocker, and I saw his band a few times. We were not in his league, but his type of lead singer rock ‘n’ roll band was on its way out. We played the ‘audition’ for about an hour and a half. Tom Littlewood took Bert’s phone number, we never heard from him. I went down to The Two I’s the following Sunday afternoon with Griff Lewis and guess what, there were another four teenagers trying their best, just like we did.
Meanwhile our Friday night residency at Chez Artistes was going well and we were getting a bit of a following. We would listen to the juke box, and Dennis and I would sit there working out the chords in our head, then the next time we rehearsed we would introduce the newest addition to our set list. We always had reluctance from John, because he couldn’t be bothered to learn new songs. If it didn’t start with a Chuck Berry lick and had more than three chords, he wasn’t interested. It wasn’t that he couldn’t play, he was shit hot, but he was lazy. Dennis and I however, wanted to get some of the more complicated Motown songs, like Heatwave, Midnight Hour, Knock on Wood onto our play list. John though, just wanted to play 12 bar blues. But between us we were getting together a pretty good set list. All covers, but somehow with our own distinctive sound. Round about the summer of ’63 Dick Morton became our manager. He had the contacts and the manner to be able to approach other club owners to get us through the doors. Sometimes we would get a booking without the obligatory audition just on Dick’s word. One of these bookings was at a club not far from Dick’s Chez Artiste called the ‘Bedsitter’ which was located in Holland Park Avenue. Once again in a basement, but this time under a fried chicken restaurant.
This however, was not the sort of place where the punters would buy a coffee upstairs, and just drift downstairs. No, this place had a separate entrance and the punters had to pay to get in. We were offered a residency there on a Friday night, so Dick Morton switched us to Saturday at the Chez artiste. Dick put up the money for our first PA system. A 50 watt Vox amp with a couple of Speaker stacks and two Sure microphones. He also kitted us out with ‘uniforms’. We had red corduroy jackets, black trousers and black and white polka dot shirts. We must have looked awful. Now though, we had two regular gigs every week, and the people who wanted to see us could just walk up the road from Westbourne Grove to Holland Park Avenue. We were getting quite well known in W11.
One Friday night in November of ’63, John and I were getting off the train at Latimer Road, on our way to Billy’s house where his mum was preparing our usual pre-booking tea of eggs, bacon, sausage etc. We were usually greeted by a group of boys of about ten years of age. ‘Ere mister, you play in Billy Dean’s band, don’t yer. Piss off you cheeky git, was John’s usual reply, but this evening was a different event. ‘Ere mister, Kennedy’s been shot. Yes, this was the evening of November 22nd 1963. As we were on our way from Arsenal tube to Latimer Road tube the news had come through on the TV’s of the nation of Kennedy’s assassination. The ten year old boy had broken my dream. In December 1959 watching a TV program about the decade to come my imagination had been taken by J F Kennedy as a sign that the world was going to change. Now he was dead. What would happen to us, would there be another war. I was only 16 at the time, but had fears of a war between USA and Russia, with us in the middle. We ate our tea with the Dean family, watched the news on TV then Bert drove us to Holland Park Avenue in his taxi.
Business as usual; the club was packed and we were our everyday selves. The gear was packed up in Bert’s taxi after and taken back to Billy’s house, all except for John and me and our guitars which we carried back on our walk home from Holland Park to Highbury. It took about two hours, in which time we would chew over the events of the evening. We did this nearly every weekend. Play in west London, then walk home to north London. We did this walk so often, we were joined by Jerome and Griff, taking in the sights and sounds of London. I was starting to learn the ‘knowledge’.
The band was going places. We not only played our two regular residencies in W2 and W11 but started getting gigs all over London. We played in the Flamingo opening the evening before Georgie Fame, Chris Farlowe and the Thunderbirds, John Mayall and others. We played the Marquee, the Goldhawk with the High Numbers (later to become The Who) and the Small Faces. We also played The Scene where the Animals appeared regularly, although we never got to play with them. We never got as far as the Richmond Athletic where The Yardbirds and Stones played, but we were playing three or four nights a week, sometimes twice on a Saturday night, going from the Bedsitter in Holland Park to the St Martins in Leicester Square for the all night session. John and I would often get home at four or five in the morning and many is the time I slept in John’s front room ‘cos my dad would lock me out. By this time we had bought a van, an old ex-post office LD 15cwt truck, and employed Billy’s mate Geoff as our driver/roadie.
I had started work in 1963 with Mathew Hall as an apprentice draughtsman in Royal Oak, and what with playing Thursday to Sunday all over west London, I started to kip down in Dennis’ flat in Ledbury road, right opposite a ‘blue beat’ all-night club on the corner of Westbourne Park Road. Dennis later moved to another one-room flat in Holland Park, right opposite the Bedsitter and this then become our second home. We left our gear there and had keys cut to let ourselves in with. I managed to get the sack from Matthew Hall in July 1964 and as I was earning about twenty quid a week playing as opposed to a fiver as an apprentice, I decided that I wanted to be a full time musician. I moved my few belongings in with Dennis and left home. I was seventeen.
It was about this time we had our biggest break to date. We did another audition for Tom Littlewood, but this time it wasn’t for playing at The Two I’s, but for a tour of American Army bases in Europe. The one drawback was that we had to have a girl singer to get the job. We recruited one who Dennis knew and who then sang with us occasionally; a Beryl or Brenda, I really don’t remember her name, but anyway we got the job. £100 a week, plus travelling expenses. Dick Morton our Manager arranged the travel documents, and we made our way to Ramsgate for the trip to Dunkirk. On the day of our departure the girl singer said her Mum wouldn’t let her go. So it was just the four of us, plus Geoff driving.
On arrival at Dunkirk our van and gear were seized by the French customs, we had Fender and Gibson guitars, a Ludwig drum kit and loads of Vox amps. Thousands of pounds worth of gear that the French authorities thought we were trying to smuggle into France. We had to phone Dick Morton who had to go to the French Embassy and pay a ransom against our bringing all the gear back. The van was parked in a secure shed. We were allowed in France with our meagre possessions, but the van and gear were not. For three days and nights we slept on the beach, eating cheese and ham sandwiches. We had no access to our money which would only be paid weekly when we started playing. Eventually the ransom was paid; about 500 quid as I recall. When all the paperwork was settled we were allowed to get on our way. I think Dick sent us some money to the local post restante so we could buy fuel to get us to our destination which was Nancy in north east France.
We arrived a day and a half later at the Army Base in Nancy and were promptly and not very politely told to ‘get out of here, you load of long-haired hippies’. Not surprising really, we had slept in our clothes for five nights and must have looked like a bunch of terrorists to the GI’s on the gate. The next day we were allowed into the camp and set up our gear in the ‘Enlisted Men’s (EM) club’. Even without the required girl singer we went down well, playing a London variety of rock n roll, blues, RnB, country etc. Dennis and I took turns singing, but the best was when we invited audience members to get up and sing, mostly black guys who loved the way we played.
We did two nights in one base and then off to the next. In all we played five or six bases all in the part of north east France made famous by the First World War. As well as Nancy, which was the US Headquarters there, we played Epernay, Rheims, Strasbourg, as well as in Luxembourg. We mostly slept in the van in our sleeping bags, but occasionally the GI’s would find a room for us. We got paid our money weekly and had to go to the post restante, where we were paid in Francs, which we promptly changed into Dollars on the bases. Sunday nights we were free, so we found little cafes to play in for some extra Francs.
We only stayed four weeks, but it was a great time apart from the fact that Billy and Geoff, who were good mates, started doing their own thing. Geoff wanted booze all night and sleep all day and Billy couldn’t be bothered to practice new stuff. After a while it became clear that Geoff was Bill’s roadie, and he refused to help the rest of us with setting up. John Dennis and I decided that when we got back to England we would find a new roadie. And a new drummer.
When we got back we had a couple of weeks off. I went to Butlins with Susan, my girlfriend. John went home and Dennis went to Ireland for a couple of weeks to spend time with his folks whom he hadn’t seen for a couple of years. We put an Ad in the NME for a drummer and a singer and we were not disappointed. We held auditions in a little club in Oxford Street and recruited Rod Coombes on drums and Steve Mole on vocals and harmonica. Then we completely changed our set list. Now it was all Howlin' Woolf, Jimmy Reed, BB King etc. Playing the same venues, we went down a storm just like before. Management was changed, too. Dick Morton was fine, but only had influence in West London. We wanted to branch out. Mike Davies, a Tin Pan Alley man, became our new manager. He was more our age, maybe a couple of years older, but well connected. We played all over London; north, south, east and west. Some of our biggest gigs were Walthamstow Town Hall, Forest Hill Odeon, (we played Brighton where the mods were) Birmingham, Hull, Hereford but never Liverpool. We didn’t bother with a new roadie as Dennis and I had learned to drive, so we would take it in turns. I moved back with my parents as I now had a vehicle to get home at night. This went on for a year or so. We were always in work, but never got a recording contract. We had a time with Dick James Agency who later handled Elton John, but were always just a ‘covers’ band. We never wrote our own songs and so just drifted along.
An opportunity to get more publicity came in December 1965. We were persuaded by Mike Davies into a hare brained scheme. We would do a week long residency at The Scene, where we had played before, but this time it was one hundred hours non-stop to try to break a record in the Guinness Book of Records, beating a previous record set by a US band. Mike Davies had arranged with VOX to supply a load of new gear FOC, including a 50 watt bass amp for me. The only other person who had one was Paul McCartney. We also had a VOX keyboard which Dennis and I could take turns playing. The rule was that there had to be three of us on stage twenty-four hours a day, but all five would play in the evenings with a fifteen minute break every couple of hours. We started on a Sunday and finished the following Friday having played for about one hundred and five hours.
The publicity was short lived. Nobody seemed interested. We got a couple of lines coverage in NME and Melody Maker, and a short film clip in Movietone News, which probably showed for a week in news theatres, then nothing. That Christmas Susan gave me the news that changed my life. She was Pregnant.
The problem now was twofold. Do I continue trying to be a famous rock n roll star and how do we give the news to Susan’s mum and dad. And mine, come to that. Susan’s dad was a London taxi driver with a famous temper, he would kill me. As it was he insisted on calling me ‘Mick’ referring to my Irish lineage. He also referred to me with Susan as ‘that long haired lazy git’, a bit like Alf Garnet. Anyway, all’s well that ends well, as the Bard once said. We got married and I got a job. By pure coincidence Dennis also managed to get his girlfriend Pam, pregnant. So Dennis had a son Tim in June 1966 and we had Nick in August 1966. There was nothing else for it, the VOX amp went back and I had to sell my precious Fender Bass to buy a pushchair. We had a small flat in Finsbury park and I fitted tyres in Marylebone High Street until I was old enough to do The Knowledge.
As a postscript to this chapter in my life, Bill Pitt-Jones joined a Joe Meek band called the ‘Blue Rondos’ who had one hit but earned no money. Steve Howe joined another Joe Meek band called ‘The Syndicats’ and also had one hit record and also earned no money. Steve went on to play with ‘Yes’ and now lives in his mansion in Los Angeles with millions in the bank and his collection of 150 guitars. Our drummer Rod Coombes joined ‘Stealers Wheel’ and then Gerry Rafferty’s band and had a great big hit with Baker Street. John Walker became a cab driver, then married an Australian girl and moved to Australia and joined the Australian Federal Police, carrying a ‘44’. Billy Dean ran a tobacconist shop in Westbourne Grove, a stone’s throw from his old home and our first gig and never learned to drive. Steve Mole trained as a hotel manager and now lives in Cornwall. He still plays blues. Dennis left his first wife Pam and carried on in the music biz. He put his guitar away and drove a van for Jimmy James and the Vagabonds. He was poached by a new band in 1968, Led Zeppelin, and on one of his returns to Ireland was persuaded to road manage an up and coming Irish band in ’79. That band was U2, for whom he is now Tour Manager and lives in a beautiful house in Ireland with his fourth wife. He also owns another house in Long Island NY and an ocean going yacht on which I have sailed.
Me? I’m still driving a cab. Je ne regret rein!
Eventually my kids got so fed up with me forever telling them that I gave up a life of fame and fortune to be a good dad, that they bought me a Fender Acoustic guitar for my 40th birthday. I hadn’t owned a guitar for 20 years, but played occasionally when visiting friends who had one. I started playing right away and joined various little bands of friends doing (bad) James Taylor imitations. We moved to a new area in 1995 and my next door neighbour was a singer. One day she came in to see Susan and noticed my guitar. She then asked if I would like to accompany her as she used to sing in a band in her teens. So there we are, I now have a small collection of friends who play, and I enjoy myself.
In January 2013 John Walker and family were coming back to the UK for the wedding of his niece. When I found out their dates I contacted Dennis, Billy and Steve Mole on Facebook. They all agreed to come to a reunion I had arranged at a hotel close to me. I arranged all the kit, hired amps, lights, PA and borrowed my son Nick’s drums. On the day, Steve wasn’t able to come, but the original four member of The Cardinals played their very last Gig at the Marriott Hotel on 13th January 2013. All who came said they enjoyed it. Well I should think so, it was FREE.
Postscript
After we left school I kept in touch with Jerome, Griff and Bill. Chuck Berry, one of my heroes, was in England and he was playing a late Friday evening at the Club Noriek at Wards Corner. We all went along, no tickets, just queue up and get in. Chuck would only be paid in Cash and would not go on stage until he has counted the money. The show was terrific, Chuck was backed by ‘Sounds Incorporated’ who were a shit-hot band in their own right. The show started at midnight and as it was far too late for Susan’s mum and dad to allow her out (I usually had to get her home by eleven) I went along with the three musketeers plus my new mate and Chuck Berry aficionado, John Walker.
We got out at about 2.00 in the morning and as there were no night buses in those days, we walked home. Bill by that time had moved to a council house in Edmonton, so he walked north and the rest of us walked south down Seven Sisters Road. We parted with the usual North London goodbye, ‘see you later’ I said him.
In about 2000 after James had started the ‘Barnsbury’ page on Friends United I got a message from Bill. ‘That you Paul? You said ‘see you later’ in 1965: so where the F*** you been for the last 35 years? Dear ol’ Bill. Don’t you just love him?
November 2013
Although John Walker lived in Highbury New Park, he went to school in Ladbroke Grove, a world away from my Islington homeland. After our first meeting, John and I met a few more times at his flat and then mine. He played lead and I played bass. Once again the influences were mostly Shadows and Ventures. After a couple of weeks John introduced me to the other members of the band. We all met up in one of the big houses on Seven Sisters Road opposite Finsbury Park. This was the home of Paul McKenna, the drummer in the band. The other member was an Irish guy called Dennis Sheehan, who played guitar. Together we made a pretty good noise. Paul McKenna’s folks had a big flat in an old house, and they were quite happy to have us play there.
John, Paul and Dennis all went to Cardinal Manning Catholic Boys School in Ladbroke Grove and we were invited to play at their school Christmas concert. The headmaster came on stage and said, “and now we have our school band, The Cardinals” and that was that, The Cardinals were born.
We played only one other gig with this lineup. With John and Dennis’ connection to Ladbroke Grove we got a booking at a youth club in Lancaster Road. The place was run by an affable West-Indian guy, I don’t remember his name, but he had a set of vibraphones that he played, and he sat in with us and played a kind of west London version of ‘Watermelon Man’. I think John and I got there with a lift from John’s dad in his Ford Consul. John’s dad would sometimes oblige in this way. Also at this first gig was Billy Dean. Billy lived at the opposite end of Lancaster Road, just under the Metropolitan Line station at Latimer Road. Bill was a drummer, and a couple of years older than the rest of us. Bill sat in on Paul’s kit. The next time we all got together Paul had left and Billy Dean was our new drummer. Bill had a smart ‘Roger’s’ kit, with his name painted on the bass drum skin.
Now we had two Islington boys and two Notting Hill boys. None of us was old enough to drive except Bill, and he wasn’t interested. John and I had to schlep our gear over to Notting Hill on a regular basis. This was the time when I first learned the intricacies of the tube system. Arsenal to Kings Cross, change on to the Metropolitan Line to Latimer Road, being careful not to get the Circle Line or you ended up at Notting Hill Gate (a good walk to Latimer Road with a guitar and amp) and would have to change trains, go back to Edgware Road and start again.
We practised in Billy Dean’s mum and dad’s council house in Latimer Road. Billy had a sister who was married to a big guy a few years our senior. They all lived together in this small house. We used to practice in the downstairs front room. Bill’s mum would supply us with cups of tea, bacon sandwiches, home made cake, and a kip on the sofa if we got tired.
This was late ’62 when The Beatles were starting to dominate the airwaves. Everything Liverpudlian was cool, the old American copy cat rockers were history. It soon became obvious that if we were to ‘make it’ we would have to get with the Merseybeat sound. It turned out that Dennis and I could sing after a fashion. John wasn’t interested and Billy didn’t have a voice. So Dennis and I it was and as it happens we weren’t that bad. Dennis had a higher voice than me and could sing harmonies. We started with a few Every Brothers, Buddy Holly and Ricky Nelson songs. We were influenced by The Beatles, but they were in turn influenced by black American singers like Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, so we were doing songs like Memphis Tennessee but sounding like a poor imitation of the real stuff.
Somehow or another we managed to get together a set list which ranged from Buddy Holly to Chuck Berry with a couple of Shadows favourites to make up the numbers. Billy Dean’s brother-in-law Bert started acting as our manager, road manager (driving us in his FX3 taxi) and general factotum. Bill was always careful that his bass drum would face out of the taxi, ‘cos the bass drum bore the legend ‘Billy Dean’. Bert got us an audition in a club downstairs of a coffee bar in Westbourne Grove. The place was called Chez Artistes, and was full of art student types, hooray Henry’s, swingin’ 60’s chicks and looking back, gay boys. The place was run by an ex army major, Dick Morton.
We passed the audition and were awarded a gig the following Friday night. At the time I was still at school, aged 15. John and Dennis were 16 and Billy 17. The club had a sound system of sorts, so the microphone problem was solved. I think we got ten pounds, we played for a couple of hours from about eight o’clock, when we got to the end of our set list we would start again, hoping that the customers had changed from the beginning of the evening. We couldn’t have been too bad though, because we were booked for the following week. On Saturday afternoons, Dennis, Bert and I would go to Soho, looking for clubs where we could get a start. The first place we looked at was The Two I’s coffee bar in Old Compton Street. We went in and bought a coffee and sat in the café and looked at the pictures on the wall, and at the people coming in and going downstairs.
This was that place where Tommy Steele, Cliff Richard, Screaming Lord Sutch and others had made their début, and been discovered. Eventually we got to see the manager. Tom Littlewood was one of those old fashioned ‘show business’ types. Full of confidence and bluster, everybody wanted to talk to him because he had influence, but at the end of the day he was just a coffee bar manager. He agreed to give us an audition the following Sunday afternoon.
In hindsight his ‘audition’ was a ruse to get a free band for an hour or so to fill in the dead hours of the day. The regular band for a Sunday evening was ‘Wee Willie Harris’. He was a great rocker, and I saw his band a few times. We were not in his league, but his type of lead singer rock ‘n’ roll band was on its way out. We played the ‘audition’ for about an hour and a half. Tom Littlewood took Bert’s phone number, we never heard from him. I went down to The Two I’s the following Sunday afternoon with Griff Lewis and guess what, there were another four teenagers trying their best, just like we did.
Meanwhile our Friday night residency at Chez Artistes was going well and we were getting a bit of a following. We would listen to the juke box, and Dennis and I would sit there working out the chords in our head, then the next time we rehearsed we would introduce the newest addition to our set list. We always had reluctance from John, because he couldn’t be bothered to learn new songs. If it didn’t start with a Chuck Berry lick and had more than three chords, he wasn’t interested. It wasn’t that he couldn’t play, he was shit hot, but he was lazy. Dennis and I however, wanted to get some of the more complicated Motown songs, like Heatwave, Midnight Hour, Knock on Wood onto our play list. John though, just wanted to play 12 bar blues. But between us we were getting together a pretty good set list. All covers, but somehow with our own distinctive sound. Round about the summer of ’63 Dick Morton became our manager. He had the contacts and the manner to be able to approach other club owners to get us through the doors. Sometimes we would get a booking without the obligatory audition just on Dick’s word. One of these bookings was at a club not far from Dick’s Chez Artiste called the ‘Bedsitter’ which was located in Holland Park Avenue. Once again in a basement, but this time under a fried chicken restaurant.
This however, was not the sort of place where the punters would buy a coffee upstairs, and just drift downstairs. No, this place had a separate entrance and the punters had to pay to get in. We were offered a residency there on a Friday night, so Dick Morton switched us to Saturday at the Chez artiste. Dick put up the money for our first PA system. A 50 watt Vox amp with a couple of Speaker stacks and two Sure microphones. He also kitted us out with ‘uniforms’. We had red corduroy jackets, black trousers and black and white polka dot shirts. We must have looked awful. Now though, we had two regular gigs every week, and the people who wanted to see us could just walk up the road from Westbourne Grove to Holland Park Avenue. We were getting quite well known in W11.
One Friday night in November of ’63, John and I were getting off the train at Latimer Road, on our way to Billy’s house where his mum was preparing our usual pre-booking tea of eggs, bacon, sausage etc. We were usually greeted by a group of boys of about ten years of age. ‘Ere mister, you play in Billy Dean’s band, don’t yer. Piss off you cheeky git, was John’s usual reply, but this evening was a different event. ‘Ere mister, Kennedy’s been shot. Yes, this was the evening of November 22nd 1963. As we were on our way from Arsenal tube to Latimer Road tube the news had come through on the TV’s of the nation of Kennedy’s assassination. The ten year old boy had broken my dream. In December 1959 watching a TV program about the decade to come my imagination had been taken by J F Kennedy as a sign that the world was going to change. Now he was dead. What would happen to us, would there be another war. I was only 16 at the time, but had fears of a war between USA and Russia, with us in the middle. We ate our tea with the Dean family, watched the news on TV then Bert drove us to Holland Park Avenue in his taxi.
Business as usual; the club was packed and we were our everyday selves. The gear was packed up in Bert’s taxi after and taken back to Billy’s house, all except for John and me and our guitars which we carried back on our walk home from Holland Park to Highbury. It took about two hours, in which time we would chew over the events of the evening. We did this nearly every weekend. Play in west London, then walk home to north London. We did this walk so often, we were joined by Jerome and Griff, taking in the sights and sounds of London. I was starting to learn the ‘knowledge’.
The band was going places. We not only played our two regular residencies in W2 and W11 but started getting gigs all over London. We played in the Flamingo opening the evening before Georgie Fame, Chris Farlowe and the Thunderbirds, John Mayall and others. We played the Marquee, the Goldhawk with the High Numbers (later to become The Who) and the Small Faces. We also played The Scene where the Animals appeared regularly, although we never got to play with them. We never got as far as the Richmond Athletic where The Yardbirds and Stones played, but we were playing three or four nights a week, sometimes twice on a Saturday night, going from the Bedsitter in Holland Park to the St Martins in Leicester Square for the all night session. John and I would often get home at four or five in the morning and many is the time I slept in John’s front room ‘cos my dad would lock me out. By this time we had bought a van, an old ex-post office LD 15cwt truck, and employed Billy’s mate Geoff as our driver/roadie.
I had started work in 1963 with Mathew Hall as an apprentice draughtsman in Royal Oak, and what with playing Thursday to Sunday all over west London, I started to kip down in Dennis’ flat in Ledbury road, right opposite a ‘blue beat’ all-night club on the corner of Westbourne Park Road. Dennis later moved to another one-room flat in Holland Park, right opposite the Bedsitter and this then become our second home. We left our gear there and had keys cut to let ourselves in with. I managed to get the sack from Matthew Hall in July 1964 and as I was earning about twenty quid a week playing as opposed to a fiver as an apprentice, I decided that I wanted to be a full time musician. I moved my few belongings in with Dennis and left home. I was seventeen.
It was about this time we had our biggest break to date. We did another audition for Tom Littlewood, but this time it wasn’t for playing at The Two I’s, but for a tour of American Army bases in Europe. The one drawback was that we had to have a girl singer to get the job. We recruited one who Dennis knew and who then sang with us occasionally; a Beryl or Brenda, I really don’t remember her name, but anyway we got the job. £100 a week, plus travelling expenses. Dick Morton our Manager arranged the travel documents, and we made our way to Ramsgate for the trip to Dunkirk. On the day of our departure the girl singer said her Mum wouldn’t let her go. So it was just the four of us, plus Geoff driving.
On arrival at Dunkirk our van and gear were seized by the French customs, we had Fender and Gibson guitars, a Ludwig drum kit and loads of Vox amps. Thousands of pounds worth of gear that the French authorities thought we were trying to smuggle into France. We had to phone Dick Morton who had to go to the French Embassy and pay a ransom against our bringing all the gear back. The van was parked in a secure shed. We were allowed in France with our meagre possessions, but the van and gear were not. For three days and nights we slept on the beach, eating cheese and ham sandwiches. We had no access to our money which would only be paid weekly when we started playing. Eventually the ransom was paid; about 500 quid as I recall. When all the paperwork was settled we were allowed to get on our way. I think Dick sent us some money to the local post restante so we could buy fuel to get us to our destination which was Nancy in north east France.
We arrived a day and a half later at the Army Base in Nancy and were promptly and not very politely told to ‘get out of here, you load of long-haired hippies’. Not surprising really, we had slept in our clothes for five nights and must have looked like a bunch of terrorists to the GI’s on the gate. The next day we were allowed into the camp and set up our gear in the ‘Enlisted Men’s (EM) club’. Even without the required girl singer we went down well, playing a London variety of rock n roll, blues, RnB, country etc. Dennis and I took turns singing, but the best was when we invited audience members to get up and sing, mostly black guys who loved the way we played.
We did two nights in one base and then off to the next. In all we played five or six bases all in the part of north east France made famous by the First World War. As well as Nancy, which was the US Headquarters there, we played Epernay, Rheims, Strasbourg, as well as in Luxembourg. We mostly slept in the van in our sleeping bags, but occasionally the GI’s would find a room for us. We got paid our money weekly and had to go to the post restante, where we were paid in Francs, which we promptly changed into Dollars on the bases. Sunday nights we were free, so we found little cafes to play in for some extra Francs.
We only stayed four weeks, but it was a great time apart from the fact that Billy and Geoff, who were good mates, started doing their own thing. Geoff wanted booze all night and sleep all day and Billy couldn’t be bothered to practice new stuff. After a while it became clear that Geoff was Bill’s roadie, and he refused to help the rest of us with setting up. John Dennis and I decided that when we got back to England we would find a new roadie. And a new drummer.
When we got back we had a couple of weeks off. I went to Butlins with Susan, my girlfriend. John went home and Dennis went to Ireland for a couple of weeks to spend time with his folks whom he hadn’t seen for a couple of years. We put an Ad in the NME for a drummer and a singer and we were not disappointed. We held auditions in a little club in Oxford Street and recruited Rod Coombes on drums and Steve Mole on vocals and harmonica. Then we completely changed our set list. Now it was all Howlin' Woolf, Jimmy Reed, BB King etc. Playing the same venues, we went down a storm just like before. Management was changed, too. Dick Morton was fine, but only had influence in West London. We wanted to branch out. Mike Davies, a Tin Pan Alley man, became our new manager. He was more our age, maybe a couple of years older, but well connected. We played all over London; north, south, east and west. Some of our biggest gigs were Walthamstow Town Hall, Forest Hill Odeon, (we played Brighton where the mods were) Birmingham, Hull, Hereford but never Liverpool. We didn’t bother with a new roadie as Dennis and I had learned to drive, so we would take it in turns. I moved back with my parents as I now had a vehicle to get home at night. This went on for a year or so. We were always in work, but never got a recording contract. We had a time with Dick James Agency who later handled Elton John, but were always just a ‘covers’ band. We never wrote our own songs and so just drifted along.
An opportunity to get more publicity came in December 1965. We were persuaded by Mike Davies into a hare brained scheme. We would do a week long residency at The Scene, where we had played before, but this time it was one hundred hours non-stop to try to break a record in the Guinness Book of Records, beating a previous record set by a US band. Mike Davies had arranged with VOX to supply a load of new gear FOC, including a 50 watt bass amp for me. The only other person who had one was Paul McCartney. We also had a VOX keyboard which Dennis and I could take turns playing. The rule was that there had to be three of us on stage twenty-four hours a day, but all five would play in the evenings with a fifteen minute break every couple of hours. We started on a Sunday and finished the following Friday having played for about one hundred and five hours.
The publicity was short lived. Nobody seemed interested. We got a couple of lines coverage in NME and Melody Maker, and a short film clip in Movietone News, which probably showed for a week in news theatres, then nothing. That Christmas Susan gave me the news that changed my life. She was Pregnant.
The problem now was twofold. Do I continue trying to be a famous rock n roll star and how do we give the news to Susan’s mum and dad. And mine, come to that. Susan’s dad was a London taxi driver with a famous temper, he would kill me. As it was he insisted on calling me ‘Mick’ referring to my Irish lineage. He also referred to me with Susan as ‘that long haired lazy git’, a bit like Alf Garnet. Anyway, all’s well that ends well, as the Bard once said. We got married and I got a job. By pure coincidence Dennis also managed to get his girlfriend Pam, pregnant. So Dennis had a son Tim in June 1966 and we had Nick in August 1966. There was nothing else for it, the VOX amp went back and I had to sell my precious Fender Bass to buy a pushchair. We had a small flat in Finsbury park and I fitted tyres in Marylebone High Street until I was old enough to do The Knowledge.
As a postscript to this chapter in my life, Bill Pitt-Jones joined a Joe Meek band called the ‘Blue Rondos’ who had one hit but earned no money. Steve Howe joined another Joe Meek band called ‘The Syndicats’ and also had one hit record and also earned no money. Steve went on to play with ‘Yes’ and now lives in his mansion in Los Angeles with millions in the bank and his collection of 150 guitars. Our drummer Rod Coombes joined ‘Stealers Wheel’ and then Gerry Rafferty’s band and had a great big hit with Baker Street. John Walker became a cab driver, then married an Australian girl and moved to Australia and joined the Australian Federal Police, carrying a ‘44’. Billy Dean ran a tobacconist shop in Westbourne Grove, a stone’s throw from his old home and our first gig and never learned to drive. Steve Mole trained as a hotel manager and now lives in Cornwall. He still plays blues. Dennis left his first wife Pam and carried on in the music biz. He put his guitar away and drove a van for Jimmy James and the Vagabonds. He was poached by a new band in 1968, Led Zeppelin, and on one of his returns to Ireland was persuaded to road manage an up and coming Irish band in ’79. That band was U2, for whom he is now Tour Manager and lives in a beautiful house in Ireland with his fourth wife. He also owns another house in Long Island NY and an ocean going yacht on which I have sailed.
Me? I’m still driving a cab. Je ne regret rein!
Eventually my kids got so fed up with me forever telling them that I gave up a life of fame and fortune to be a good dad, that they bought me a Fender Acoustic guitar for my 40th birthday. I hadn’t owned a guitar for 20 years, but played occasionally when visiting friends who had one. I started playing right away and joined various little bands of friends doing (bad) James Taylor imitations. We moved to a new area in 1995 and my next door neighbour was a singer. One day she came in to see Susan and noticed my guitar. She then asked if I would like to accompany her as she used to sing in a band in her teens. So there we are, I now have a small collection of friends who play, and I enjoy myself.
In January 2013 John Walker and family were coming back to the UK for the wedding of his niece. When I found out their dates I contacted Dennis, Billy and Steve Mole on Facebook. They all agreed to come to a reunion I had arranged at a hotel close to me. I arranged all the kit, hired amps, lights, PA and borrowed my son Nick’s drums. On the day, Steve wasn’t able to come, but the original four member of The Cardinals played their very last Gig at the Marriott Hotel on 13th January 2013. All who came said they enjoyed it. Well I should think so, it was FREE.
Postscript
After we left school I kept in touch with Jerome, Griff and Bill. Chuck Berry, one of my heroes, was in England and he was playing a late Friday evening at the Club Noriek at Wards Corner. We all went along, no tickets, just queue up and get in. Chuck would only be paid in Cash and would not go on stage until he has counted the money. The show was terrific, Chuck was backed by ‘Sounds Incorporated’ who were a shit-hot band in their own right. The show started at midnight and as it was far too late for Susan’s mum and dad to allow her out (I usually had to get her home by eleven) I went along with the three musketeers plus my new mate and Chuck Berry aficionado, John Walker.
We got out at about 2.00 in the morning and as there were no night buses in those days, we walked home. Bill by that time had moved to a council house in Edmonton, so he walked north and the rest of us walked south down Seven Sisters Road. We parted with the usual North London goodbye, ‘see you later’ I said him.
In about 2000 after James had started the ‘Barnsbury’ page on Friends United I got a message from Bill. ‘That you Paul? You said ‘see you later’ in 1965: so where the F*** you been for the last 35 years? Dear ol’ Bill. Don’t you just love him?
November 2013