Dee Time

I WAS TELLING A FRIEND the other night that a hero of my teenage years had just died. Who was it? Simon Dee. Who is Simon Dee? Never heard of him.

And I suppose if one didn't live in the UK between about 1964 and 1974, one might have completely missed the rise and fall of Simon Dee.

He was born in Ottawa, Canada, in 1935, and his real name was Cyril Nicholas Henty-Dodd. After his national service in the RAF in the 1950s, brief stints as a photographer's assistant, model, labourer, leaf sweeper in Hyde Park and a vacuum cleaner salesman (he reckoned he'd had fifty jobs in his lifetime), Cyril reinvented himself as Simon Dee (Simon was his son's name, and Dee from Dodd) and was one of the two first DJs on Radio Caroline, and his was the first voice heard from the pirate radio ship in March 1964.

I never heard Simon Dee on Radio Caroline, but I did come across his name in the magazines. By 1965 he'd come ashore and was working for the BBC and Radio Luxembourg. Simon hosted Top of the Pops at times, and started to keep some very famous company, and became a celebrity in his own right.

I watched Dee Time, Simon's twice-weekly chat show. His was the first chat show on British television. In fact, I tried not to miss one of Simon's shows as he almost certainly had the most famous and notorious along for a chat. Simon interviewed everyone from John Lennon to Jimi Hendrix at a time when I worshipped these hit-makers.

Simon Dee had a public school education apparently, but his accent was mid-Atlantic. That might have been an attraction for me being somewhat mid-Atlantic myself. He was awfully good looking, took chances, and you had to like somebody who was driven out of the studio after each show by a beautiful woman in an E-Type Jaguar.

Apparently, Simon Dee was the model, the inspiration, for the character Austin Powers. Simon had a few minor roles in films, and was considered as a possible James Bond. He looked the part, having fine features and looking not at all like Austin Powers.

I suppose I had something of a crush on Simon Dee, or a fascination a little beyond my control.

Simon Dee's career had gone tits up by 1970. He had misjudged his employers and his worth, and was soon out of work. He'd been well-paid by the standards of the day, £250 a show, but had spent it all. He went on the dole, worked as a bus driver briefly, and by 1974 was in gaol for tax offences. He had other brushes with the law. And he vanished.

Simon Dee lived alone in a tiny flat in Winchester at the time of his death, very suddenly from cancer, aged 74. He'd become a recluse. He'd been one of the Beautiful People in the 1960s. People who knew him towards the end of his life said he just didn't bother with those days when he'd been a shining star. The way a soldier might not speak of his time on the battlefield.

I find I cannot switch off the 1960s quite so easily.

I Love My Cat

I AM OLD ENOUGH to have bought Cat Stevens's albums the first time around, when Cat was a rather geeky-looking Greek who loved his dog. It pays to love your dog, it went well after that. Cat ditched the mod clothes and grew the trademark beard and hair.

A friend of mine attended a Cat Stevens concert in the USA in the early 1970s and was disappointed. Cat complained about audience noise and threatened to walk off. Frankly, I cannot fault a musician for that. A theatre full of tripping college students wouldn't be my ideal soundboard.

I'll admit I never liked a Cat Stevens album the first time I heard it, perhaps because every one was quite different. It was a bit like hearing a new artist twice a year.

Didn't everyone have the Tea for the Tillerman album? I recall buying copies of Numbers for quite a few friends who were wary of buying it. I listened the second time and was transported. I played Catch Bull at Four at the opening of a four-person art show which featured my work (I rarely paint now, in case you wondered). I played Foreigner over and over and bought the sheet music so a friend could have a go at the piano music in the Foreigner Suite. While sick as a dog, recovering from glandular fever, I managed to improve my mood with Izitso.

A friend with a guitar would serenade us with Into White, still one of my favourite tunes.

Cat Stevens had a difficult early career. Stoned, drunk and cold, as he put it in the song I Never Wanted to be a Star. He caught tuberculosis. He left Britain for Brazil. One day he was swimming out of his depth and was being carried out and under. He says that he prayed that if God would save him, he'd devote the rest of his life to God. A big wave came up behind him and pushed him suddenly ashore.

What next? He auctioned his guitars for charity and funded a school with his song royalties. He changed his name to Yusuf Islam. The Bible and Koran character Joseph (Yusuf) was a favourite of his. And Yusuf vanished pretty much until the fatwa issued for Salman Rushdie. At that time, Yusuf was asked his opinion on the fatwa and he said that the Koran called for such things. He didn't tell Muslims to go out and get Rushdie, though the Press decided that he had. Pretty soon people (particularly the US Government, which has been terrified of bearded men ever since Walt Whitman) decided he was a risk to national security. While being awarded a prize for promoting peace by Europeans, Yusuf was prevented from travelling to America.

A couple of years ago, Yusuf's son brought a guitar home and left it in the family living room. Yusuf saw it there and picked it up. Tempted, one might say. He plucked and strummed and found that even after 25 years he still knew the tunes.

I'd like to think a long night had ended. Not necessarily a bad night, because we all need sleep. Yusuf realised suddenly that making music need not be contrary to Islamic laws and culture. Perhaps the opposite.

The man once known as Cat Stevens has been making music again.

I bought Yusuf's album Roadsinger last week after seeing a preview on the television. The first time I listened to it I wasn't sure that I liked it. Some things don't change. The second time I played it I was over the moon.

The lyrics are peace and love, pictures are painted. Yusuf's voice is not quite Cat's voice, but it is remarkably close to it. The man is my age and he's not been on the road and in the studio for going on 30 years. The melodies and the working of the instruments are, I think, reminiscent of Mona Bone Jakon, Teaser and the Firecat and Tea for the Tillerman. Rather than Matthew and Son or Buddha and the Chocolate Box.

These are songs I'd love to have a friend play and sing to me in front of the fire on a cold winter's evening or in a balmy summer's twilight in the courtyard.

What should you do? Try and listen to the Roadsinger album by Yusuf, the man you might have known as Cat. Listen at least twice.

Rock of Ages Revisited

IN MY DREAMS I revisit my schooldays, my years in one office I worked in (the first, American International Group), the house I grew up in, a friend's kitchen, many friends and family going back forty, fifty, sixty years (I can say that almost).

My trips back were generally most pleasant until quite recently. I now find myself unable to balance accounts at AIG, unable to puzzle out theorems at Warwick Academy and plodding through the snow at the Medway College of Technology, my mother's house crumbles around me as I wander through it and I can usually see the sky from the living room (looking up through the holes in the ceiling). Much to my relief, I can spend time in my friend's kitchen and still enjoy the company, the food and the atmosphere, but those kitchen dreams are not as frequent as they once were.

Some things, some places, do not figure in my dreams. I have never dreamt of being in therapy, or of any of the connected events to forty years of having my brain washed regularly (and subsequently being unable to do anything with it). I rarely dream of my travels, of living in the desert (which I did, after all, for three years). I do not dream of the dogs I've had over my lifetime. I rarely dream of my sisters and brothers as children, though I am often a child in my dreams.

I do not dream of music or musical groups, dances or radio and television programming featuring music, despite having a musical soundtrack running in my head that has been so loud and so intrusive over the years since it started (when I was about twenty) that I've required medication to control it. One would really expect the madman's music to turn up in the hours one sleeps, but it is in my dream time that I get a break from it and can engage in conversation instead, and hear (oh, dear) voices.

In the 1960s I lived for the radio, the record player, the concerts and live bands at dances. This was before the music truly invaded my being. A night out started in silent anticipation, there were a few hours of loud music, and I could come home and think about the experience logically and recall any (or no) music at will.

However, I do not dream of all this music, of the 1960s, of the Savages, the Fringe, the Silvertones, those Bermuda groups; dances at Warwick Academy, St Paul's, St Mark's, the Guinea Discotheque, the Ace of Clubs; school parties (we had a few pretty wild ones); I do not dream of being on the panel of Jukebox Jury on the radio in Bermuda; I don't dream of wild, drunken, drugged parties on New Year's Eves (or of smoking dope and listening to Jefferson Airplane).

Curiously, my exposure to live music during the past three years has been more frequent, but I've found myself revisiting the groups from back in the day. In the past couple of months I have seen several tribute groups in concert. The Cavern Beatles portrayed the Fab Four in their early years (which were not the years I most preferred, to be honest, apart from "In My life"). I also saw a rather good tribute to Marc Bolan and T-Rex, the 1970s glam-rockers. I'd not liked the music in the 1970s; I had religion in the Seventies, poor me.

And a few nights ago I saw a group celebrating the music of Freddie Mercury and Queen. I kind of missed the 1980s, being rather medicated. What I remember of Queen: I hated Freddie Mercury, he repulsed me, but a few of Queen's songs were excellent. I particularly liked "Radio Ga-Ga" (story of my life, really). I was disappointed to find the tribute featured a singer dressing and acting like Freddie Mercury, and an aged guitarist wearing a bad Brian May wig. (I suppose the real Brian May is aged too, but this bloke on stage at the Alnwick Playhouse was seedy in the extreme). I couldn't really bring myself to look at either of those players, so listened and watched the keyboardist.

The show opened with the theatre being filled with smoke from dry ice, and a light show. Later there were live fireworks, which was a bit off-putting (where is the fire door?) The songs were familiar, but I soon realised that I didn't know the lyrics of a single one of them, not even Radio Ga-Ga (which may explain why it's the story of my life, nobody knows my lyrics…)

There were about 15 of us in our group attending the concert; apart from the staff accompanying us, I think we were all at least a tad tamped down for the evening, don't want to get too excited. The general audience in the Playhouse was over the hill. Not a whole lot of dancing in the aisles, but Zimmer frames were rattled, arthritic joints cracked and hips snapped. I had a sudden thought, borrowed from something Groucho Marx famously said: "I wouldn't want to go to a concert aimed at people like me…"

I'm off to see a tribute to the ska music of the 1980s in March, and a Pink Floyd cover band in May. I'll be under the influence of drugs, of course. Don't want me wandering off. The Village Idiot's night out.

In my dreams I fly? No longer. I just add columns of numbers. It's the economic crisis in my head.