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.

Comedians, coincidences, cocaine and yet another Edinburgh Fringe accident

It’s around the corner in Soho, where other broken people go

It’s a small world in oh so many ways – a small world with lots of coincidences – Prague, television, Bar Italia and the Edinburgh Fringe.

“Hey, John!” Wingman said to me yesterday. “What are you doing here?”

I had accidentally sat down next to him at Bar Italia in London’s Soho.

Bar Italia has been there for what seems like ever – actually since 1949. In I guess the 1960s and 1970s it became legendary among music and film/TV people because, back then, it was the only place open in the wee small hours in the middle of the night when dawn was approaching and people staggered out of recording studios and editing suites in Soho. Jarvis Cocker of Pulp even wrote a song called Bar Italia:

There’s only one place we can go.
It’s around the corner in Soho,
Where other broken people go.

Yesterday lunchtime, I was waiting at Bar Italia for itinerant comedian Matt Roper, back from his travels in the Far East and South Africa.

Wingman and I worked together at Granada TV years ago. Now he is a TV executive, though I don’t suppose he thinks of himself as that. He had been chatting to a colleague called John who had just come back from shooting promos in Prague.

“You worked there, didn’t you?” Wingman asked me.

“Yes,” I said, “for UPC in the mid-1990s.”

Then Matt arrived and Wingman & John left.

Earlier in the year, I blogged about Matt having deep vein thrombosis in Vietnam, Burma and Thailand.

In South Africa, Desmond Tutu (third from left) and Matt Roper as his character ‘Wilfredo’ (second from right)

Now he had just returned from a month in South Africa at the comedy festival and looked very healthy.

While in Saigon, he had had to cancel his Edinburgh Fringe show this year, because the Vietnamese hospital could not tell him when he would be able to fly again. He could have come back to Britain by train via Beijing and Moscow. But, at the time, he had to have weekly blood tests and, he told me yesterday, “I didn’t want to be messing around trying to find Mongolian and Russian hospitals. It was a challenge, but it’s my health.”

“It’s not a challenge,” I told him. “It’s a 2014 Fringe show and you look healthy now. Did you like South Africa?”

“Very much,” said Matt, “though, I only went to Cape Town. We went to a game reserve and to vineyards, sat on an ostrich and then ate an ostrich.”

“The same one?” I asked.

“No. We met the smallest ostrich in the world. He’s there. He’s a Guinness record holder.”

“I’ve never met a nice white South African,” I said.

“I have,” said Matt.

“Like the song says, they really are all a bunch of arrogant bastards,” I said.

“I like them,” said Matt.

He is just about to go off on his travels again – to help a friend research a book – Poland, Ukraine, Moldova, back through the Ukraine, the Czech Republic – Prague – and then fly back to Britain from Austria.

The reason he was in Soho, though, was because he was going to Totnes in Devon.

Frank Zappa on the crapper in 1967

“Robert Davidson lives there,” he told me. “You should meet him. He’s a photographer. He photographed Frank Zappa on the toilet in a hotel room in 1967.”

“He shot that for International Times,” I said. “I saw it when it was published. I wrote for IT a few years later.”

At this point, comedian Chris Dangerfield – oft blogged about here – walked into Bar Italia.

“I was thrown out of Totnes,” said Chris. “I was literally taken up an alleyway by the police and told to leave town.”

“Totnes,” said Matt, “is sometimes like an open hospital ward. It’s full of bizarre people. So to actually have been asked to leave is…”

I was distracted by a group of people clustered outside Ronnie Scott’s jazz club opposite Bar Italia.

Tourists crowd round Ronnie Scott’s club’s bricks in Frith St

“What are they doing?” I asked.

They were just standing outside, looking up at the building.

“It’s a tour,” said Chris Dangerfield. “It’s on the tourist trail. They’re taken to places like that and told: Oh, Mick Jagger once looked at that.”

“They come and look at Bar Italia too,” said Matt, “because John Logie Baird invented television in a room above here.”

“Although he didn’t,” I said. “He invented the wrong system.”

“Who did invent TV, then?” asked Matt.

“I think it was EMI and maybe some Germans,” I said. “But back to Chris getting thrown out of Totnes…”

Matt Roper (left) & Chris Dangerfield in Bar Italia yesterday

“I was the second time,” said Chris. “It was my return to Totnes, because I done a degree down there, so when I went back to sell crack, all the pubs were empty because everyone was spending all their money on crack. And that was essentially what the police said: The local economy has taken a dent because of you. Take your cocaine back to London. So I did.”

Chris then got on his black bicycle and rode off quickly.

“Drive safe!” Matt shouted after him, then turned to me and said: “We’ve never properly met, him and me. We just keep bumping into each other. Coincidences. Life’s all coincidences.”

“I was once,” I said, “sitting outside Bar Italia talking to your chum Grace Gelder and Chris Dangerfield walked by and said Hello and walked on. A couple of weeks ago, I was walking through Soho with someone and I got a text message saying You just walked past me – Chris Dangerfield.”

“Well,” said Matt, “I yelled out of a car window at you once, but it wasn’t you.”

“It’s an easy mistake to make,” I said.

Miss Behave with her heel in London

On my trip home, I picked up a voice message on my mobile phone from comedian Bob Slayer. He told me that  Miss Behave – who is allegedly compering the increasingly prestigious Malcolm Hardee Comedy Awards Show on 23rd August – has broken her heel in Ireland and doctors have told her she should put no weight on it for six weeks.

“She keeps doing this,” I said when I talked to Bob. “She nearly died a couple of years ago just before the Fringe. Now a lame excuse like this. Let’s hope she can do it in a wheelchair or in plaster. Where are you?”

“Leith,” he told me.

“Is there sunshine on Leith?” I asked. “It’s horrible, hot and sticky here in London today. 30 Centigrade. I think that’s about 90 in Fahrenheit. Would-be SAS men are dying on the Brecon Beacons.”

“There is sunshine on Leith,” Bob confirmed.

“Send me a picture,” I told him. “Why are you there?”

Meanwhile the Chief puts sunset and Bob Slayer in Leith… (photograph by Keara Murphy)

“I’ve been buying fridges for my new venue Bob’s Bookshop,” explained Bob. “For all the beer. I have a licence and people can buy beer there. I went into the British Heart Foundation’s charity shop in Edinburgh – they have one for electronics and I bought lots of their stuff. I told them I would give it all back at the end of the Fringe and they  could sell everything a second time.

“I have found Miss Behave a great flat. It’s right next to the venue so it’s very convenient and right in the middle of town, but I’m not sure which storey it’s on. Not good if you have a broken heel and it’s on the third storey up. With luck, she’ll be on the first.”

“That’s another storey,” I said.

Bouncing Czechs & Presidential pranks

(This was also published by Indian news site WSN)

Vladimir Franz – the tattooed face of Czech politics

I worked in Prague a few times, making promotions and press tapes for some start-up TV channels around 1995/1996.

It was only a few years after the Soviet empire crumbled and I thought Prague – and the Czech people – might be a bit grey and dour. It only took me about a week to re-appraise the situation, when I started to think of the country not as the Czech Republic but as Bohemia.

The Czechs are bohemians.

That is not 100% politically and geographically correct, but it is psychologically correct.

Certainly, when I was there, they liked their beer and they liked a party.

I should have realised this earlier because, before I actually worked in the Czech Republic, my sole experience of Czechs was bringing Ernő Rubik (inventor of Rubik’s cube) over to the UK for a couple of appearances on the anarchic children’s TV show Tiswas.

Erno was a very laid-back dude who liked jazz and wore corduroy trousers.

And THAT was under Soviet Communism.

I like the Czechs. They are generally sophisticated, cool and creative.

During my time there poet, playwright and former dissident Václav Havel was President. He had new uniforms for Prague Castle’s guards designed by the man who designed costumes for the movie Amadeus. He appointed glorious rock god Frank Zappa as ‘Special Ambassador to the West on Trade, Culture and Tourism‘ for the Czech Republic.

You have to like the Czechs.

But, like all relatively small countries (population 10.5 million) you have to accept the good (the capacity for eccentric decisions) with the bad (a possibility of corruption). In that sense, it is not unlike the Republic of Ireland.

Which brings me to the President of the Czech Republic.

In the UK, today’s Guardian newspaper carries a piece on Vladimir Franz, a tattooed-all-over opera composer, painter and professor at Prague’s Academy of Performing Arts. He is running for President and, in this week’s Presidental election race, he has an estimated 11% support and is running third. He has been compared (because of his tattooed face) to “an exotic creature from Papua New Guinea”, has no political experience and admits he doesn’t know much about economics.

So, obviously, I asked former Scots comic Alex Frackleton (now living in the Czech Republic) for some background on current Czech politics.

“In the outside world,” he told me, “it is the year 2013 – but, alas, not here where, despite digital television and high-speed internet, it feels like we’re living in the middle ages, circa 1320.

“On New Year’s Day, the out-going president of the Czech Republic, Václav Klaus (known to me as ‘Cunty Baws’) announced a presidential pardon that would see the release of 7,000 prisoners from Czech jails and court proceedings. Among those released are a number of persons either convicted of or in the process of being prosecuted for multi-billion dollar frauds which took place during the privatization process of the 1990s. Purely coincidentally – and I hasten to add this is merely an observational point on my part – Václav Klaus was Prime Minister of the Czech Republic in the 1990s.

“I seem to be alone in assuming that this is merely a coincidence as every single person I know here is furious. Everyone is going mental. Even people who don’t normally care about politics are shouting their heads off.

“To date, 600 Mayors and 500 schools have taken down the President’s portrait in protest at the amnesty. The British equivalent would be removing a picture of the Queen, the Pope or Stephen Hawking …

“Cunty Baws is shouting about how the press/media/his enemies are blowing the whole thing out of proportion. This is the guy who, as a visiting President to a conference in Chile, was caught on camera stealing a pen.

“If he wanted to do something to mark his out-going-ness, he could easily have granted free heating to all pensioners during the three coldest months of the year.

“If ever there was a moment for another ’68 Prague Spring uprising or a real revolution to replace the velvet cushiness of ’89, then that moment ought to be now.”

Star guitarist Hank Marvin used to knock-up mothers on Sunday mornings

I was talking to someone in West Wales today about the Jehovah’s Witnesses, like you do, and the subject of Hank Marvin of The Shadows cropped up.

I don’t know if this is an urban myth, but I have heard it more than once over the years and it has always had the ring of truth about it.

Cliff Richard and The Shadows are famously Christian.

Lead guitarist Hank Marvin became a Jehovah’s Witness in 1973.

Whenever Cliff Richard and The Shadows toured the UK after that – wherever they performed on a particular Saturday night – every Sunday morning Hank Marvin would go round knocking on people’s doors, carrying copies of The Watchtower and spreading the Word of God.

Quite how mothers of a certain age reacted when they opened the door, bleary-eyed, on a Sunday morning to find their teenage pop idol Hank Marvin asking, “Have you ever thought of giving your life to Jesus?” I cannot imagine.

Well, I CAN imagine it and it gives me warm smiles of happiness whenever I do.

Even more surreal is the story that Frank Zappa apparently said Hank Marvin’s guitar style heavily influenced the first Mothers of Invention album Freak Out! and that guitarist Carlos Santana’s early nickname was ‘Apache’ after The Shadows’ famous tune of that name.

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.