JACOB REES-MOGG is younger than KYLIE MINOGUE!
Just one of the dozens of pieces of mind-bending pop trivia from an unashamedly idiosyncratic collection
parrot, Maurice, who, it turned out, had only ever learned to say one thing: ‘Where’s Eric?’ To me, it’s like a perfect little short story, packed with the comical and the unexpected. But at the same time I can see that it might leave others baffled.
The book focuses more on pop stars than pop music, which is just as well, since Berkmann’s taste in music is singularly perverse. Just like Alan Partridge, he prefers ‘quite a lot of Wings albums to almost every Beatles album’. He devotes a mammoth two-and-a-half pages to praising the dreary Kraftwerk, but finds Bob
Dylan’s voice ‘unbearable’, saying it makes him ‘want to scream and shout and break things’. He is certainly no slave to fashion.
He is rude in passing about two songs for which I have a soft spot. He says he has ‘always hated’ Simon and Garfunkel’s near-perfect Bridge Over Troubled Water and he describes Peter Sarstedt’s evocative Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)? as simply ‘fatuous’. He dislikes the Velvet Underground, while praising the ‘pop brilliance’ of boring old ELO. He also confesses to having ‘always loved’ the blood-curdling screeches of the Bee Gees.
But each to his own, and, happily, Berkmann’s personal jukebox plays second fiddle to good stories, or what he describes as ‘a pot pourri of excess, poor behaviour and unfortunate life decisions’.
Pop music is not yet 70 years old. In that short time, it has established itself as the world’s principal source of demons and monsters, easily outstripping the Borgias, the Tudors and the Mafia.
Many of Berkmann’s tales of are wellknown, at least to pop anoraks like myself, but he can usually be relied upon to unearth a telling new detail. I didn’t know that Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd once kept his girlfriend locked in a room for three days, feeding her crackers under the door, or that Janis Joplin once had a fling with Peter Tork of the Monkees, or that Johnny Cash became addicted to painkillers after an ostrich named Waldo broke five of his ribs.
Some of the better-known stories are well worth a second hearing. It is good to be reminded, for instance, that after the crusty old Rolling Stone Bill Wyman married 18-year-old Mandy Smith, his 30-year-old son, Stephen, decided to marry Mandy’s mother Patsy, then aged 46. This meant that Bill’s mother-in-law was also his daughterin-law, and vice versa.
Tales of bad behaviour are always more juicy when they concern those with spotless reputations. In Berkmann’s jaunty phrase, the avuncular crooner Bing Crosby ‘beat his children like gongs’. In his will, Bing specified that none of his six sons would receive any inheritance until they reached the age 65. His plan backfired: three of them didn’t make it to 65 (two committed suicide), and another died of a heart attack at the age of 69. This leaves the two youngest, who still have a few years to go before they can claim their money.
Another well-scrubbed star, John Denver, was also, it emerges, brim-full with anger. ‘Come let me love you, let me give my life to you, let me drown in your laughter, let me die in your arms,’ runs the sugary Annie’s Song, written for his wife. Eight years later, the two of them were involved in an acrimonious divorce, their battles over property growing so tense that John felt obliged to take a chainsaw to their marital bed and cut it in half.
One or two tales of excess sound too silly to be true. I can well believe that Cher decided to divorce Gregg Allman when he passed out face-first into a plate of spaghetti at an awards dinner, but I find it more difficult to believe that a Rolling Stones manager once shouted ‘Keith! Ron! The police are here!’, causing them to flush their drugs down the loo just before Sting and Stewart Copeland walked in.
Some of Berkmann’s claims don’t stand up to scrutiny. To take one or two examples: Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane never called her daughter ‘god’, Michael Jackson’s brother Tito does not live in Wolverhampton, and Desmond Dekker never lived in Tunbridge Wells. And my investigations suggest that Berkmann is mistaken in thinking that Fleetwood Mac’s Stevie Nicks has always played a dummy tambourine as she has ‘no sense of rhythm’.
But there is still plenty left for pop nerds to chew on. Did you know that Mike D’Abo, ex-Manfred Mann, who wrote Handbags And Gladrags, also wrote the catchy 1980s advertising jingle ‘A finger of fudge is just enough to give the kids a treat’? Or that Leonard Cohen appeared in a cameo in the 17th episode of the second season of Miami Vice? Or that Ozzy Osbourne’s father used to have his milk delivered by Noddy Holder?
Or that Bob Dylan wears the same suede jacket on the covers of Blonde On Blonde, John Wesley Harding, Nashville Skyline and his first album of Greatest Hits?
Or that on Saturday Night Fever, John Travolta was actually dancing to music by Stevie Wonder and Boz Scaggs, as at the time of filming the Bee Gees had not completed the soundtrack?
Berkmann’s Pop Miscellany is unashamedly random and bitty: even the interruptions have interruptions. Every now and then, he inserts a highbrow quiz, calling for the links between various songs, most of which are impossible to work out. His more straightforward questions are much more tantalising. I particularly liked this one: ‘Which 1985 song, written by Bernie Taupin, Martin Page, Dennis Lambert and Peter Wolf, and recorded by a wellknown San Franciscan band, was named Worst Song Of The 1980s in a Rolling Stone readers’ poll of 2011, Worst Song Ever by Blender magazine, and the Worst Song Of All Time by GQ in 2016, which referred to it as “the most detested song in human history”?’ The answer – unexpected but not, I think, unjustified – is We Built This City On Rock ’N’ Roll, by Starship. To be honest, I was hoping it would be Music Was My First Love by John Miles, but you can’t have everything.
All of which brings me to a little quiz of my own. At one point, Berkmann helpfully lists the names of the boa constrictors taken on tour by Alice Cooper. I have muddled together four of Cooper’s boa constrictors with four of the Queen’s corgis. Can you say which are which?
i) Yvonne
ii) Dookie
iii) Angel
iv) Disco
v) Veronica
vi) Pundit
vii) Kachina
viii) Whisky
Answer: the odd numbers are boa constrictors; the even numbers are corgis. Who would have thought that, when it comes to naming pets, Her Majesty is more of a daredevil than Alice Cooper?