Lady in Red (Chris de Burgh)

One of the things which I am very thankful for is that I got the opportunity, during my career, to work with lyricist Don Black on several occasions. Don is for my money one of the best old school lyricist going and he is certainly the best this country has thrown up. His credentials are endless; Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals, James Bond title songs, Ben for Michel Jackson, To Sir with Love to name but a few! It remains a travesty that the musical Dear Anyone, which he wrote with There’s a Kind of Hush composer Geoff Stephens and playwright Jack Rosenthal, closed after a very short run. I was lucky enough to see it more than once and can honestly say it was head and shoulders above every other UK produced musical, over the last 40 years. I can remember going to the preview where I met Jack for the one and only time. We were introduced and I was very surprised to discover that he knew who I was. On enquiring as to how he told me that I was the person who’d employed his wife Maureen Lipman on a TV show and was responsible for her getting back to London hours late and in an exceptionally inebriated state but that, as they say, is another story. The only good news for Dear Anyone was that one of its songs I’ll Put You Together Again was a massive hit for Hot Chocolate, which is unusual for a musical which failed at the box office.

 

Don is also one of the nicest people I have ever met and I enjoyed several afternoons in the company of Don and his wife Shirley, when they used to have a flat in Basil Street, just behind Harrods. I remember vividly being at their flat when the Irish terrorist bomb went off in Harrods in the eighties. It was a bit nerve wracking for me as I had left my girlfriend and her mother there just a half hour before the bomb went off. It took me two or three hours to establish that they were ok and that they had left the store to go elsewhere shortly after me. (remember no mobiles in those days!) On one occasion I was at Don’s one time when Whacko Jacko himself rang and suggested that they should work together again. That would have been in about 1985, when he was at the height of his popularity and before he turned into a complete fruitcake.

 

Don introduced me to West-End singing star Marti Webb, whom I think he may have been managing at the time, although I also remember her being managed by a gentleman with the rather brilliant name of Brian Brolley. Exact roles lost in the mists of time! Marti was typical of the sort of performer who had grown up on the West End stage, in that she was a great all-round musical performer with a far better voice than most people imagined. Marti had a lovely, if somewhat scatty personality and always seemed to fall in love with the wrong man. I can remember her describing herself as being ‘on the shelf’ on numerous occasions, in a light-hearted humorous way, but I always got the feeling that she may have thought that was a case of ‘many a true word spoken in jest’. I can’t understand why she felt like that; she was beautiful and successful and should have been able to have her pick of eligible men, but I suppose just because someone is very confident on the stage, doesn’t mean they are anything like as confident in the real world. From what I recall she did enter into a brief marriage after I knew her, but the fact it was brief does suggest it wasn’t particularly successful in normal parlance.

 

As a sort of follow-up project to Tell Me On a Sunday, which Don had written for Marti with Andrew Lloyd Webber, Don came up with a further vehicle for her called I’m Not that Kind of Girl, which again was a themed project written with composer and producer David Hentschel who has worked with Genesis, Elton John and Frank Zappa amongst many others. It was a sort of thirty-something’s Bridget Jones’ musical diary before its time and contained titles like;

 

Seven Outside Mr Chows (the famous Knightsbridge Chinese eatery for those without metropolitan experience), What Would Jane Fonda Do?, Shampoo and a Miracle Please and Dear Janet Reger.

 

Myself and director Roger Cassells decided it would be a nice idea to feature the entire album over the course of the week at the rate of two songs per day plus a set-up interview with Marti and Don on the first show.

 

Our contracts department wanted to treat each daily show as a separate event, which would have cost a fortune on the budget. I managed to track down some ancient contract which had really been designed for radio but could be employed for TV appearances and this was done on a ‘weekly engagement’ basis which made the whole thing a lot cheaper as far as we were concerned. As the whole thing was an excellent promotion vehicle for the album Polydor, the record company, agreed to make up any shortfall on artiste’s fees etc. This sort of thing went on all the time but people pretended it didn’t. My attitude had to be what a record company agrees with its artistes is between the two of them, as long as it didn’t come about as a request from me. The Musician’s Union were very powerful at the time and had very strict rules as to what and what you could and couldn’t do. Had we stuck to those rules, in conjunction with the creativity of our contracts department then it’s doubtful we’d have ever managed to get any artiste worth having. Contracts  were far too respectful of artiste’s agents for my liking. I understand they have to earn a living, but when they actively stop their artiste from working because their cut isn’t big enough then that is wrong. I was criticised on numerous occasions by contracts for speaking to artistes directly. When I did this all I wanted to know was if the decision not to do our show had come from them or their agent. 99% of the time the artiste in question, knew nothing about the show and were more than happy to do it for the fee on offer. Artistes understood the power of  a TV appearance in promoting their careers and ultimately upping their earnings, from which their agent would ultimately get their cut. Old school artiste’s agents could rarely see beyond the fivers they used to light their cigars.

 

For a change this appearance was scheduled quite a long way up front, which gave me a bit of time to work on finessing it. Some of the songs required little set dressing but we decided it would be great to go to town on the Dear Janet Reger number. Janet had been famous for designing beautiful silk lingerie but had gone out of business several years before. Roger and I decided it would be great to get Marti and her backing singers Vicki Brown, Helen Chapelle and Kay Garner to perform the song in the best Janet Reger could offer (well we would wouldn’t we?!!!).

 

With the Janet Reger marque no longer in operation, this proved rather difficult, but I managed to track down the lady who had been responsible for her PR. Ironically she was based just a stone’s throw away from BBC flagship headquarters Broadcasting House, in London’s Portland Place.

She told me she still had a few Janet Reger items on hand and I was quite welcome to borrow them for the show if I wished. We made an appointment and I turned up to her offices a few days later to see what I could salvage. When I got there I was amazed to be shown a complete rail of the most exotic lingerie. I asked how much I could use and I was invited to take the lot as there was no longer any real use for it. Fortunately Portland Place is quite close to the headquarters of the London Rag Trade, so the looks I got as I loaded my car with naughty knickers weren’t as disapproving as they might have been elsewhere!

 

Marti and her entourage turned up early on the Monday morning and we discussed what we would be doing throughout the week. When we got to the part about the Dear Janet Reger section, I explained rather nervously what we had in mind, expecting some resistance. I couldn’t have been more wrong; Marti and the backing singers went positively dewy-eyed when I showed them the array of sexy underwear in which I wanted them to perform. There then became the most enthusiastic, but friendly, cat-fight over exactly who would wear what. On the day of the Janet Reger performance I met them all and was told it had been decided that Marti would perform in a beautiful knee-length red silk camisole and the singers would wear various risqué silk bits and bats. I must say that talking to them in the dressing-room before the show had me feeling rather hot under the collar and extremely blessed. The show went very well, as indeed did the whole week’s pieces. In the green room after the show Marti collared me and sheepishly asked if the camisole had to go back Already knowing what was coming I said well yes, but I could have a word. I was then approached by Vicki Brown who was the wife of cockney rocker Joe Brown and mother of future European star Sam. Vicki asked the same thing, as subsequently did Helen and Kay. When I phoned the PR and she said we could keep the stuff I became the most popular male in TV land. As I had said previously, there was far more stuff than the girls had worn on the show so I became even more popular when I distributed the rest of the gear around the girls in the office. I reckon I was more than responsible for injecting a bit of spice into a few jaded relationships that week!

 

I worked with Vicki Brown on many occasions. She was a great singer, a beautiful woman and an amazing bubbly person. Seeing her resplendent in Janet Reger underwear did, I must admit, have me thinking some seriously impure thoughts but thinking of what a big guy Joe was, sort of dampened my ardour a little. It was an extremely sad day when I heard that Vicki had passed away at the very young age of 51 in 1991.