Autumn books 2: Chris Charlesworth

Chris Charlesworth has a good memory and loves to tell stories, which makes Just Backdated — subtitled “Melody Maker: Seven Years in the Seventies” — very good value for those with an interest in the rock scene of that era in the UK and the USA, and in the contemporaneous history of the British music press.

He was recruited to the MM in June 1970, shortly after its editor, Jack Hutton, had left and taken many of the younger members of staff with him to start a rival weekly called Sounds. Chris Welch, Alan Lewis and I were among those who rejected his invitation to join them, as did our photographer, Barrie Wentzell. Ray Coleman, a former MM writer, was appointed editor in Jack’s place and set about the job of filling the empty desks and rewarding those who’d stayed put with swift promotions.

Just as Welch, Lewis and I had all come from local papers, so had Ray. He wanted properly trained young journalists, so among his hires were Michael Watts from the Walsall Observer, Roy Hollingworth from the Derby Evening Telegraph, and Charlesworth from the Bradford Telegraph & Argus. We had two things in common: we’d all been in bands, and we’d all written weekly pop columns for our respective local newspapers.

I think their experience was like mine at the Nottingham Evening Post & News: the editors were older men who knew that teenagers were up to something, hadn’t a clue what it was, and so decided that the best people to write about it would be the teenagers on their staff. After that, they tended to leave us to it. So when I showed a sheaf of cuttings to Hutton during my own job interview in 1969, it included pieces on Albert Ayler and the Velvet Underground.

Charlesworth remembers arriving for his first day at our offices on the second floor of 161-166 Fleet Street, the headquarters of IPC Specialist and Professional Press. We were at the far end of a long corridor also housing several other publications: Rugby World, Cage and Aviary Birds, Cycling Weekly and Disc & Music Echo. The last-named, which had been edited by Coleman until his return to the MM, was the home of two female journalists, Penny Valentine and Caroline Boucher, who were great friends and very good company.

On that first day, Charlesworth remembers being told by Laurie Henshaw, the veteran news editor, to call Ginger Baker to ask him about personnel changes with his band, Air Force. He was soon in the swing of things, and in his first full week he interviewed the singer of Free, whose “All Right Now” was heading up the charts.

“I met Paul Rodgers in his poky little flat in a big old redbrick block in Clerkenwell and we chatted in a nearby greasy spoon café,” he writes. “The same issue featured my interview with Don Everly, done in his suite at the Inn on the Park. After I left him, my head spinning at meeting an old hero, I found myself sharing an elevator with Dustin Hoffman.”

That week he also interviewed Cliff Richard on the phone, reported on Jethro Tull adding the keyboards player John Evan, and reviewed gigs by Pete Brown’s Piblokto! and Status Quo. A few days later, he was at the Shepton Mallet festival, listening to Pink Floyd and Frank Zappa and to Led Zeppelin, with whom he was soon spending quite a lot of time. Not as much, however, as he would soon be spending with the Who, once Keith Moon had rung him up to thank him for a kind review of their show at Dunstable Civic Hall.

As we all did, Chris was soon going on the road with these and other bands, and his anecdotes are amusingly illustrative of the rock and roll lifestyle of the time. There’s plenty of drinking, a certain amount of drugging, and plenty of sex — although at the Status Quo gig, in his first week, he turns down their publicist’s offer to bring along “a bird” for him for the night. That PR man was the later-to-be-notorious Max Clifford. As he makes clear, Chris was perfectly capable of finding companionship without assistance.

A quick promotion to news editor was followed in 1973 when Coleman invited him to become the MM‘s man in North America. The paper was selling 200,000 copies a week and could afford such an appointment, although the technology of the day meant that copy had to be typed up and handed to a courier — in a package that also included 10×8 prints of photographs to go with the stories — to be transported by air to London in order to meet the weekly deadline.

Most of the book is taken up by his American adventures, starting with a few months in Los Angeles (where he stayed first in the Chateau Marmont and then in Phil Ochs’s apartment) before he relocated to New York, where he would spend the next three years. From an apartment on the Upper East Side he ventured out to interview Lou Reed, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, Sly Stone, John Lennon, Paul Simon, David Bowie, John Hammond, Bruce Springsteen, Alice Cooper, the Bay City Rollers and countless others, including testy encounters with Neil Diamond and Rod Stewart, and to attend shows ranging in scale from Madison Square Garden to CBGBs, where he encountered the fledgling Ramones, Talking Heads and Blondie (and went on a date with Debbie Harry).

The front page pictured above, from the MM of August 7, 1976, features a story about Lennon winning his fight to stay in the US. That was Chris’s, with his full report inside of the New York hearing and the subsequent press conference. Just another day’s work from an era when you interviewed stars from the next seat in a plane, or in the back of a stretch limo, or in a hotel room with no PR in attendance. There were lots of post-gig parties or album launches where musicians and journalists mingled.

To his regret, at the beginning of 1977 he was told that his US posting would be coming to an end. A revived NME was winning the circulation war, and budgets were being cut. Soon he would be leaving the MM and eventually returned to London to work at RCA, where his duties included Bowie’s public relations. In 1983 he embarked on three decades as the editorial director of Omnibus Press, where he was responsible for commissioning and editing countless music books, including such best sellers as Dear Boy, Tony Fletcher’s biography of Keith Moon, and Bright Lights Dark Shadows: The Real Story of Abba, by Carl Magnus Palm.

There was never anything pretentious or verbose about Charlesworth’s own writing. His memoir reflects the extraordinary boom of the music business in the rock era, the guilt-free hedonism of the time, and the excesses — sometimes amusing, occasionally grotesque — for which somebody else would always be picking up the tab. That somebody, we assumed, would be the record company. In our naivety, we had yet to understand that the bill for all of it — the flights, the hotels, the drinks, the canapes, probably the drugs, too — would eventually be presented to the musicians.

I’ve never been quite sure what I think of the 1970s. When you remember Watergate and Thatcher, not to mention loon pants and mullets, it seems almost as worthy as the 1930s of Auden’s withering dismissal — “a low dishonest decade”. But there was the music, and with the music came fun and games, exactly as my old colleague describes it.

* Chris Charlesworth’s Just Backdated is published by Spenwood Books. His blog is justbackdated.blogspot.com