The night Billy Connolly nearly killed a fan... with his BEARD!
Part Two of legendary Scottish songwriter Bill Martin’s deliciously juicy – and incorrigibly indiscreet – showbiz memoirs HOW JOHN LENNON’S HOUSE SMELLED OF CAT PEE DAD
PERCHED on an armchair in his plush Belgravia apartment, acclaimed Scots songwriter Bill Martin is a long way from the tenement ‘room and kitchen’ he grew up in, writes Kirsten Johnson.
Yet his formative years in the Glasgow working-class community have been omnipresent in his career, inspiring some of his most famous work.
The hit-maker – who penned 1960s Eurovision songs Puppet on a String and Congratulations – remains close friends with old shipyard pals Sir Alex Ferguson and Billy Connolly, and credits their shared experiences of blue-collar upbringings for their continuing work ethic.
Here, we share a second instalment of anecdotes from Martin’s new no-holdsbarred autobiography – Congratulations: Songwriter to the Stars – which the 78-year-old hopes to publish after his one-man show at the Edinburgh Festival in August. From Sunday church sermons led by exprime minister Gordon Brown’s minister father the Rev John Ebenezer Brown, to dreaming up The Bay City Rollers’ iconic tartan outfits, the excerpts – below, in his own words – make for fascinating reading...
I’M Scottish, I’m part of a small nation and even though I changed my name to be in the music business – I chose ‘Martin’ as Dean Martin was my favourite singer – I’m very proud of being William Wylie Macpherson from Govan. Govan is a very important part of my psyche. We only had two rooms at home. My parents slept in the back room which included the kitchen and recess for their bed. I was born in the front room or ‘the hole in the wall’, a little alcove where my brother and I would be tucked in snugly at nights.
Amazingly, our room also had a piano. God knows how it fitted. We shared a lavatory with the rest of the tenement, probably 30 people.
There were trams in the street and everything was hustle and bustle. The noise could be colossal. When people spoke to you, they barked at you. I’ve got a loud voice, I know that, and it comes from living in Govan.
Shang-a-Lang, which became one of the Bay City Rollers’ biggest hits, took me back to the sound of the shipyards when the cranes were lifting the plates of steel, the riveters were bashing and hammering and the cutting machines were slashing and drilling. I used to hear bang, crash, clang, all day.
Nothing much happened in Govan on a Sunday. You went to church. There were no pubs open. I would go to St Mary’s, the nearby parish church, and hear Gordon Brown’s father with his booming voice, so there was not much tranquillity there either.
I attended Sunday school and, while children never went to funerals, weddings and christenings were always grand family occasions.
One of my mother’s friends was having her daughter christened and the minister John Brown asked, ‘and what shall I name this baby?’
‘Spindonna,’ replied the father. The minister carried on, ‘I name this baby, Spindonna’, before the father chipped in, ‘Naw, it’s pinned on her!’
There was a safety pin on her gown with a wee piece of paper that said her name was Annie. There were gales of laughter. As the girl grew up, she was known to us all as Spindonna.
I always wanted to make a success of someone from Scotland. I then had success with two Scottish acts and I couldn’t have predicted either one – The Bay City Rollers and Billy Connolly.
The Rollers needed an image and preferably something to emphasise their Scottishness. Their manager Tam Paton showed me a letter from a fan, who had an idea for doing something different with tartan. It reminded me of the old musical Brigadoon, where everyone wore tartan. I had a secretary, Sheila Lazarus, who said: ‘I can get these clothes made… my mother makes clothes.’
You may remember that the trousers were too short – well, Sheila hadn’t bought enough material.
Billy [Connolly] was always different. He lived in Partick, opposite Govan, and we were on nodding terms as boys. He was loud and tall and always different. He went to extremes with everything he did.
In 1974, I helped Billy to realise a dream. I secured his first big recording deal with Polydor Records and he wanted to play the Alhambra Theatre in Dunfermline. I flew up some BBC producers and a record executive and
told Billy not to swear – as Glaswegians, the likes of Billy and myself, just swear naturally.
He bounded on stage dressed as a teddy boy with a long coat, crepe shoes, a guitar and proceeded to sing the tune of Buddy Holly and the Crickets’ Oh Boy.
At the time I thought he was too Scottish to make it all over the world, but I’m happy to admit that I was wrong.
People don’t realise how hard Billy worked to make the grade. He was on the road a lot and he was very disciplined. He was always there and he was always funny. At the time of his 40th birthday, Billy lived in Fulham in a building that had once been a fish factory. He wouldn’t live in a normal place.
His birthday party was fancy dress. His wife Pamela Stephenson was nine months pregnant at the time and opened the door as Humpty Dumpty. Billy was in some fancy outfit and George Harrison was just in a shirt. The cake arrived and out popped an actor dressed as the Pope and he was very funny. When I was the captain of the golf club in 1980, I told Billy I would like him to be there in a black tie, but he didn’t have to give a speech. There were 200 men at the RAC Country Club in Epsom in Surrey and I put Billy on a table with all my best friends.
I told Billy not to let me down. He turned up in a proper suit with black tie, but he also wore pink socks and slippers. He said: ‘You never told me about shoes.’
I had a great Scottish friend who was also there, Andy Gordon, who was on this particular table. There was raucous laughter and I know it must have been caused by Billy. Andy was laughing so much he fell over backwards. He was covered in blotches and couldn’t breathe and they called the doctor. He thought there must have been a dog in the room but it turned out Andy was allergic to Billy’s hair and beard. I don’t see Billy very often these days but we are always friendly. When he got his toes tattooed, he sent a photograph of his feet to me on a Christmas card. I knew Alex Ferguson at Govan High School. He is two years younger and you didn’t pal up with people who were younger than you. The only reason I knew him was because he was a good footballer.
Alex never worked in the shipyards in Govan, he worked at Remington Rand [a typewriter factory] but he became the shop steward for all the apprentices. If we – that is, Billy Connolly and me – were going on strike, it was Alex who took us out. He knew how to win an argument and he was a top man. John Lennon didn’t use a lot of Kenwood House [his former home in Surrey which Martin bought]. He spent most of his time in his music room in the attic and that’s where many of the Beatles’ songs were written. It still had the same blue windows when we moved in. There was a large, psychedelic eye mosaic in the swimming pool which has since become famous in its own right.
I’m sure that the carpets were as they had been in John Lennon’s day. I know John had several cats and there was still a smell of cat wee.
John sent me a lovely, affectionate letter. He loved Kenwood and he called it ‘an old friend’.