Passing glimpses of other people’s lives: The Beatles, Frank Zappa, Keith Moon

Martin, around the time I lived in the flat with him

Yesterday, someone mentioned Martin Lickert to me.

Almost three years ago, I mentioned him in a blog.

When I was at college, I lived in a cheap bedsit. One of the other bedsits was rented by Martin Lickert who, at that time, was John Lennon’s chauffeur. This was before the Beatles broke up and they were still based at their Apple building in Savile Row.

Martin was 21 at the time.

The bedsits were in a flat in Langland Gardens, Hampstead, run by a Jewish Austrian woman called Mrs Gilbert who had fled from the Nazis before the War and who lived on the premises. Martin insisted on calling her Mrs Giblet, though not to her face.

Martin told me he lived in a bedsit because he was rarely home and only needed an occasional single bed to be unconscious in at night. Although, one night, I had to swap beds with him as I had a double bed and he had to entertain a girl called Juliet from the West Country. Bizarrely, the swap was reversed when I met a girl called Karen from the West Country. It was complicated. You had to be there. It all related to the positioning of Mrs Gilbert’s bedroom.

When Martin was around 14 years old, he had started a band.

Robert Plant (later of Led Zeppelin) was the singer, Chris Wood (later of Traffic) played sax & flute and Stan Webb (later of Chicken Shack) occasionally played lead guitar. Martin played bass guitar. They performed at the Seven Stars pub in Stourbridge, West Midlands, for £8 a night.

A few years after we both left Mrs Gilbert’s bedsits, Martin accidentally appeared in the truly awful Frank Zappa movie 200 Motels. He played the part of Jeff Simmons, the Mothers of Invention’s bass player.

In 200 Motels, Martin replaced Steptoe

The real Jeff Simmons had left the group before filming began and Frank Zappa had got British actor Wilfred Brambell (old man Steptoe in the Steptoe and Son TV series) to impersonate Jeff by wearing a wig. Noel Redding (of the Jimi Hendrix Experience) was going to overdub the sound for Wilfred Brambell’s mimed guitar-playing.

But Brambell walked off set in a rage after a few days and Frank Zappa said: “The next person who comes through that door gets the part!”

The next person who came through the door was Martin Lickert, by then Ringo Starr’s chauffeur. Ringo was in the movie and Martin had gone out to buy some tissues for his employer who had a ‘permanent cold’.

According to an interview he later gave, Martin could remember very little about filming 200 Motels. He said:

“My memory is clouded by my habits at the time, but I do remember an evening at a hotel in Windsor where we all stayed. Lucy Offerall (of The GTOs) had the hots for me, and I had gone to bed. My room in the hotel was on the second floor and Keith Moon was in the room next to me. Lucy persuaded Keith to shin across the window ledge, in the pouring rain, and break my window to allow Keith into my room and to let her in. I woke next morning, covered in broken glass and Lucy.

“I never played any live gigs with the Mothers. We were supposed to play the Albert Hall directly after the filming of 200 Motels, but the gig was cancelled after the orchestra complained to the Albert Hall about the bad language. We got as far as the steps. And I was supposed to go to the States with the Mothers after the film, but I was ill and that was the end.”

Martin Lickert the barrister in 1993

After a short period back with Ringo Starr, he worked as a promo man for CBS Records, became a bookmaker (in the UK, that means taking bets on horse races) and then, in 1986, he qualified as a barrister, specialising in prosecuting drug cases for HM Customs & Excise. He must have had an interesting life.

I accidentally stumbled on him online in 2001 and we exchanged e-mails.

He wrote:

“I spend most of my time prosecuting for H.M. Customs and Excise these days. Talk about poacher turned gamekeeper. I am married with two daughters and live in Crouch End. My main hobby is horseracing and I have a horse in training. Last week, a film crew from Meridian followed me around Newmarket when I went to buy a new horse. The item is to be used on Twiggy‘s new chat show which is to be networked on Sunday afternoons. It’s a long story as to how this came about.”

We intended to meet up, but never did.

I regret that.

Martin Lickert died eight years ago, on 7th March 2006, aged 58.

So it goes.

On YouTube, there is a clip of Danny Baker interviewing Martin on a TV show in 1993.

John Lennon, Aristotle Onassis and the famous ballerina who was a gun runner

“There’s nowt as queer as folk,” is a saying which perhaps doesn’t translate too well into American. In British English, it means there’s nothing more strange nor more interesting than people.

So bear with me, dear reader, as I tell this meandering tale of less than six degrees of separation, a Wagnerian concentration camp, John Lennon and hand grenades in Cricklewood, north west London.

In my erstwhile youth, while I was a student, I lived in a Hampstead house of bedsits. One of the other inhabitants was the late Martin Lickert who, at the time, was John Lennon’s chauffeur. He lived in a bedsit because he was rarely home and only needed an occasional single bed to be unconscious in at night. Although, one night, I had to swap beds with him as I had a double bed and he had to entertain a girl called Juliet. He later went on to become a poacher-turned-gamekeeper. Long after I knew him, he trained as a barrister and specialised in prosecuting drug cases for HM Customs & Excise.

His relevance, as far as this blog is concerned, is that he accidentally appeared in the little-seen and staggeringly weird Frank Zappa movie 200 Motels.

In that film, shot at Pinewood Studios, the part of ‘Jeff ‘was originally going to be played by the Mothers of Invention’s bass player Jeff Simmons who quit before filming. He was replaced in the movie by Wilfred Brambell, star of BBC TV’s Steptoe and Son and The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night, who walked off set in a rage after a few days and Frank Zappa said: “The next person who comes through that door gets the part!”

The next person who came through the door was Martin Lickert, by then Ringo Starr’s chauffeur, who had gone to buy some tissues for his drumming employer who had a “permanent cold”.

The co-director with Frank Zappa of 200 Motels was Tony Palmer, famed director of documentaries on classical composers who, last night, was talking about his career in a Westminster library. I was there.

It was an absolutely riveting series of anecdotes which lasted 90 minutes but it seemed like 20 minutes, so fascinating were Tony Palmer’s stories.

He has, to say the least, had an odd career ranging from directing Richard Burton, Vanessa Redgrave and Frank Zappa in feature films to large-scale documentaries on heavyweight classical composers and from making documentaries on Liberace, Hugh Hefner and Peter Sellers to Swinging Britain TV rock shows like Colour Me Pop, How It Is and the extraordinary feature-length 1968 documentary All My Loving, suggested to him by John Lennon and so controversial at the time that it was shelved by David Attenborough (then Controller of BBC2) who said it would only be screened over his dead body – Attenborough denies using these words, but Palmer has the memo.

All My Loving was eventually screened on BBC TV after the channel had officially closed down for the night. I saw it when it was transmitted and, even now, it is an extraordinarily OTT piece of film-making.

Tony Palmer’s film-making career is much like the composing career of Igor Stravinsky (whom Palmer introduced to John Lennon when The Beatles were at their height). Stravinsky saw Tchaikovsky conduct in the 19th century and was still composing when he died in 1971, after The Beatles had broken up. So there are fewer than even six degrees of separation between Tchaikovsky and Martin Lickert.

Palmer – who is currently preparing a documentary project with Richard Dawkins – has had an extraordinarily wide range of encounters from which to draw autobiographical anecdotes.

He directed Michael Palin and Terry Jones in Twice a Fortnight, one of the important precursors of Monty Python’s Flying Circus and he directed the 17-hour, 12-part 1977 TV series All You Need Is Love tracing the development of popular music. Again, that project was suggested to him by John Lennon and he discovered that, though The Beatles had never tried to copyright the title All You Need Is Love, it had been registered by a Hong Kong manufacturer of sexy clothing and a brothel in Amsterdam.

Palmer also advised director Stanley Kubrick on music for his last movie Eyes Wide Shut and has apparently endless anecdotes on the great creative artists of the 20th century.

Who knew that the cellist Rostropovich used to get paid in cash, would put the cash inside the cello which he then went and played on stage and bought refrigerators in bulk in the UK so he could send them back to the USSR and sell them at a vast profit?

I, for one, had never heard that the German composer Richard Wagner, Hitler’s favourite composer and much admired by the Nazis, actually had a grandson who ran a concentration camp towards the end of World War II.

Nor that, in the 1950s, ballerina Margot Fonteyn got paid in cash which she then took to a Cricklewood arms dealer to buy guns and grenades which were channeled though France to Panama where her dodgy politician husband was planning a coup.

It’s amazing that, by now, someone has not made a documentary about Tony Palmer.

I suppose the problem is ironic: that the perfect person to have done this would have been Tony Palmer.