Lud vibrations
This month’s mystery straggler in rock’s afterhours gin mill, a pop-art-jazz-orchestral love letter to Londinium.
FROM FOGGY days in London town to rainy nights in Soho, onto Waterloo sunsets, West End girls and werewolves prowling Chinatown, the UK’s capital has given songwriters no end of material. An undersung example of the form is Suite London, a cabaret-hardened jazz trio and 78-piece orchestra’s impressionistic, day-to-night portrait of the city in its changing humours and aspects. Suite London’s roots lay in The Peddlers’ early days in the city. Dorset guitarist Roy Phillips and Newcastle bassist Tab Martin had recorded as The Saints for Joe Meek in 1963, before moving to Manchester. After meeting powerhouse Liverpool drummer Trevor Morais, formerly of Faron’s Flamingos, they signed for the Philips label the following year, with Phillips now on voice and organ. In 1966 a move to London led to a residency at The Pickwick nitespot on Great Newport Street in Soho. A one-month engagement became 18. “I wrote the songs for Suite London then, over a period of about six months or so,” says Phillips, speaking from his home on New Zealand’s South Island. “I lived in Shepherd’s Bush and I was walking home six nights a week, meeting some quite infamous people, every prostitute, every tramp, on my walk down the Edgware Road at three o’clock in the morning. Sometimes I’d get freaked out and frightened for my bloody life, being threatened by bloody gangsters. But by God it made you grow up damned quick. That’s where the songs came from. It always had that title.” He adds that Pickwick regulars – various Stones, Max Bygraves, Tony Hancock, Marcel Marceau and Yootha Joyce among them – also helped them on their way. “One night Mel Tormé’s mother-in-law Thora Hird was in the club with Margaret Rutherford,” says Roy, “which was bizarre. But we were helped by people like that. Their advice was to write everyday things about everyday people, and not to copy anyone. That influenced Suite London.” However, the songs would not be recorded for four years. A move to CBS led to three albums of robustly accessible pop-jazz-soul and MOR standards-with-strings, driven by Phillips’ bluesy tones and Morais’ hard-swinging drums, all recorded in tight breaks between heavy touring. By 1969’s bead-wearing Birthday they were a chart proposition, with easy-gospel song of thanks Birth reaching Number 17. Then A&R man Ken Glancy, who’d brought them to CBS and since moved to Philips, got in touch about the album of songs Roy had in the bag. A deal was signed. “When Ken Glancy said we could use orchestras, and said, ‘I think we’re going to go for the Royal Philharmonic,’ it frightened the living daylights out of me,” says Phillips. “But it worked beautifully. It was through him we got to Peter Robinson, who was in [Deep Purple-affiliated prog rockers] Quatermass. He did the parts for the orchestra – there was a whole lot of writing with him, he had wonderful ideas.” With Martyn Ford conducting the orchestra, sessions took place over three days at AIR studios overlooking Oxford Circus at a cost, Melody Maker reported, of £14,500. Rhythm tracks were recorded separately, Phillips adding Hammond – modified with a wah-wah pedal – and Fender Rhodes along with the orchestra. “I wanted it to be jazzy, funky and to sound American, not British, like Quincy [Jones] had done something with it,” he says. “It was a ver y raw concept, but I knew how I wanted to do the numbers, for them to make some sense.” Featuring nine songs of doubt, introspection and luminous clarity, plus four linking instrumental pieces of varying lengths, it operates in a zone akin to David Axelrod’s William Blake-inspired late sixties albums Song Of Innocence/Songs Of Experience. As strings, woodwind and brass variously soar, snake and stab, orchestra and group achieve an elegant synthesis. The Peddlers groove on atmospheric, filmic narratives such as questioning, lost-in-the-metropolis opener This Strange Affair and the brassily swinging River Lives, which was sparked by Phillips seeing diesel floating colourfully on the surface of the Thames. Throughout, relative normality is leavened by the orchestra’s atonal extra dimensions, most hauntingly on the sumptuous, dream-like I Have Seen, a vision inspired by a homeless man who lived on Shaftesbury Avenue. “We were so proud of it,” says Phillips of its June 1972 release. “But it sort of fell on its backside. Who cared? It was nowhere.” But the album did survive in a cultural exchange tour to communist Eastern Europe The Peddlers did with Cliff Richard and The Shadows. “We went to Czechoslovakia and Moscow and Leningrad,” he says. ”That was wonderful. We did I Have Seen and This Is It, plus On A Clear Day You Can See Forever with youth orchestras.” (In 2012, the latter song’s original 1968 recording soundtracked the cooking up of cr ystal meth on an episode of Breaking Bad). The group would not release another studio album. By 1974 Morais had left, with Phillips leading a variety of different line-ups during the decade. These days he plays a Korg Pro-Arranger, and has just released the first instalment in his Standard Procedure series, where new songs and covers get the Peddlers treatment, with some archival treats thrown in. “I love London and I’d love to come and do some shows,” he says in parting. “Dirty, filthy old place – it’s still my home, you know?” Ian Harrison
“Thora Hird was in the club with Margaret Rutherford!”