Dark Horse – Mick and his al
TO have made a living in popular music for over five decades is no mean feat.
Having left school at fifteen and completed a five-year indentured apprenticeship in the printing industry, Mick Lawson embarked upon a career as a local professional musician at the age of 22 – and save for a brief foray into sound and lighting production at the ATV studios in Birmingham, he is still hanging in there!
He has toured the UK, Europe and America. He has recorded albums and singles for such prestigious labels as Decca, CBS, Phillips and MGM and has even created his own record label and music publishing company. He has written over two hundred songs down the years and throughout the journey managed to avoid the limited delights of the corporate treadmill. Even so, he has also been ripped off with dodgy contracts along the way – an all too common occurrence in the music biz.
His is a journey that has involved passing through The Shanes, The D’fenders, Varsity Rag, Evensong and The Amazing Dark Horse, before embarking as Emmitt Till in 1980, and remaining so to this day.
The start of the journey began like the rest of us in 1959 as Cliff Richard and The Shadows wannabes – with a generous sprinkle of Elvis, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Fats Domino, Gene Vincent and Buddy Holly thrown in. In fact, the very same formula as The Fab Four who burst onto the scene four years later.
Revellers
Black Country revellers who enjoyed the ‘spoilt for choice’ live music scene during the mid-late sixties would have been unable to have avoided Mick (in one of the above guises) performing at our town halls, pubs and social clubs that once proliferated in our area.
Michael J. Lawson entered the world in the usual way on 13 December, 1944, thus assuring him membership of a unique generation to be known as the baby boomers because of the unprecedented leap in the nation’s birthrate following the war.
However, by the mid-to-late 1950s these boomers were becoming teenagers – a new word and phenomenon, originating in America.
Born in Birmingham of Nottingham parents, his brother Chris was five years his senior. Mick started to dabble in music with his mates from around the age of nine and his brother had already become proficient behind the drum kit. Much of Chris’s musical influences were to have a profound effect on his younger sibling. Mick now takes up the story. “I was around five when I became aware of the HMV wind-up gramophone that played only 78 rpm records. The first record I became interested in was when my dad played Mockingbird Hill by Les Paul and Mary Ford. I played this song repeatedly and then discovered Basin Street Blues by Louis Armstrong along with Bing Crosby and Slim Whitman.
Smitten
“I became smitten with music. The first 78 I actually bought with my pocket money was The Yellow Rose of Texas by Texas Bill Strength. Later, I came across San Francisco Bay Blues by Jesse Fuller in my dad’s collection and this song has been been in my stage act to this very day.
“By the age of ten we had a radiogram and I recall the moment that my brother played Bebop a Lula by Gene Vincent and The Bluecaps and Heartbreak Hotel by Elvis Presley becoming a musically life-changing moment. Following this, the radiogram was belting out Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry music.
“All my pocket money went on these artists. I, like all aspiring musicians then discovered Cliff Richard and The Drifters in 1958. I thought Cliff was pretty cool, so I wanted to be like him.
“My first group was formed in 1959 with me and some mates including my best friend Roy Jones, whom I’d known since I started school. We called ourselves The Shanes after a Shadows’ instrumental number called Theme From Shane – a popular Western movie of the day. Roy was besotted with Hank Marvin and was able to play all the early instrumental hits like Driftin’ Jet Black, Apache, FBI, The Stranger etc. He even wore a pair of horn rimmed glasses as a stage prop even though he didn’t normally wear glasses!
“So I played rhythm guitar and sang (Cliff and Bruce Welch rolled into one) and Roy was Hank Marvin. Our drummer wasn’t that good, but perhaps we weren’t much better. While all this was going on my brother Chris was drumming for what most people regarded as Brum’s top group, The Grasshoppers, who opened at The Adelphi Ballroom in West Bromwich for Gene Vincent, who was backed by London group Sounds Incorporated.
“I was taken backstage after the show to meet Gene in his dressing room. Chris invited Gene back to our house in Ermington Crescent, Castle Bromwich for a sleep over. Chris said to me ‘you are sleeping on the sofa tonight, Gene’s got your bed!’
“Gene was suffering great pain in his right leg following a car crash near Bath in 1959 in which Eddie Cochran was killed. He was on pain killers which were placed on the dressing room table along with a bottle of scotch and a pistol that he always carried with him.”
Beat Boom
We now move to 1963 and what was to become The Beat Boom. The Beatles had broken the mould, but in America a great refreshing phenomenon had emerged called Bob Dylan, who wrote all his own songs and played acoustic guitar and harmonica.
However the reality of being in a provincial pop group was that you had to play covers on the lucrative pub, social club and town hall circuit. At the Golden Eagle pub at the top of Hill Street in the centre of Brum, Mick chanced upon The Rhythm and Blues Quartet (later to become The Spencer Davis Group). He also recalls seeing them at the Bournebrook Hotel in Bristol Road and also at Birmingham’s Town Hall.
“The group had this young kid (Steve Winwood) no more than fourteen and belting out songs like a sawn-off Ray Charles. He also doubled on piano as well as lead guitar and harmonica. Spencer Davis also sang, played twelve string guitar and harmonica and sang standards.
“They put out two albums in quick succession which became the staple of The Shanes’ act. Around the same time, The Rolling Stones released their first album and its contents were well milked for our stage act.”
It is important to note that the three above mentioned