Here's Pt 3
of an interview Jeff did with Beatleg Magazine, Japan's
leading magazine devoted to music from the 50s-70s.
Q: So why
did The Outer Limits finish and how did Christie start?
JC: Well, we did the Hendrix
tour in November 1967 and had the single The
Great Train Robbery out, which was produced by Andrew
Loog Oldham, but when '68 came around, there were a couple
of people in the band who had had enough. There was a guy
older than me who was fed up of having no money and his
girlfriend was always paying for him and there was someone
else … you know, the spirit just went out of the band.
It wasn't my decision to break up: people just kind of broke
away because they had had enough of sleeping in vans and
vans breaking down, no money and all that stuff because
it was hard and you have to be very dedicated. I was. I
suggested we go to London, knock on doors and sleep in the
van, live on cornflakes and do whatever we have to do. It
was naïve but anyway, nobody wanted to do that.
Then we did a documentary for Yorkshire
TV which was called Death
of a Pop Group. This was probably late '68 - I can't
remember exactly when the band actually broke up - and I
had started going out with a TV presenter named Liz Fox,
who was the main face of a program called Calendar on Yorkshire
TV and through her I got too meet a lot of TV people, one
of which was a producer named John McFadden. He said he
really liked us and wanted to help us and wanted to make
this film and then there was Austin Mitchell (who is currently
the Labour MP for Grimsby, UK) who was one of the anchormen
of the program. He made this great documentary which was
about 15 minutes long.
Q: It's ironic isn't it that
you received that much exposure through the TV show at that
time in the band's career.
JC: Yes. It was a big show
with a big audience rating. It was a good documentary but
if you look at it you can see how jaded and dejected everybody
was. One of the things that strikes me when I watch it now
is how defeated everybody looks - understandably so - and
yet for some reason, I am quite amazed by my own sense of
optimism. I think I was accepting that this was the end
of the line, I was heartbroken about it but I was going
to try and get on with it. I actually say in there that
I was going to try and make it as a writer because I couldn't
imagine being in another band. At this point, I was about
22 years old and had been playing since I was 13 or 14,
so I had been playing for eight or nine years and was a
bit of a veteran.
Q: When did you write your
first song?
JC: The first attempts were
probably around when I was 18 in 1964. We had failed a record
audition with Decca and the A&R guy told me that we
were a good band but we weren't going to get a record deal
playing other people's songs and that was the catalyst.
I've still got the demos although they are very rough and
a bit wet, you know the 'I love you, you love me' stuff.
It was a starting point and I progressed from there listening
to Motown, Blues and everything. The first record that we
actually did was for Leeds University Rag Week and was called
When The Work Is Through and
was written by a guy called Godfrey
Claff.
It is the opener on the Outer
Limits/Jeff Christie Floored Masters album, I was credited
as a writer which is not really correct even though I did
a little bit of a re-write on it. The next song of mine
that was used was Just One More Chance
and by the time I had got to that, I had been sending
all kinds of songs to our agent in London and he sent a
cable back saying 'That's the one, that's great!'.
Q: We digressed…
JC: Death
of a Pop Group was aired and The Outer Limits broke
up and I got a job playing bass in a nightclub that my dad
was a part-owner in, called the Lido Revue Bar in Leeds.
It wasn't what I wanted to do but I could write songs in
the day and at night play in a trio. We'd be backing strippers
and all types of dodgy cabaret singers and then we'd get
to do a little spot ourselves. This went from late '68 right
up to 1970 but I was writing full pelt and it would have
been in that time, in early '69, that I wrote Yellow
River. I was writing two or three songs a week and
going to see artists at the Batley Variety Club, which was
very famous at that time.
Jerry Lee Lewis was there, Gene
Pitney, Louis Armstrong as well. Batley was just a little
mill town in Yorkshire but they would have all these incredibly
famous international stars and I got to meet these people
because you could get to people back then. Gene Pitney took
a load of my songs away with him but I don't know if he
ever did anything with them. Roy
Orbison was there, The Marmalade, Alan Price and I took
them all these songs and of course The Tremeloes came up
also, whom I had written a song for but they said that the
style of song was what they were trying to get away from
and said they would like to do Yellow
River instead.
Q: So this is the genesis of
Christie.
JC:
Yes. I was committed to writing and playing my own songs
- this is what I wanted to do and the only way I would do
it is if it was my group and everybody knew it - that was
the deal. Now, The Tremeloes sat on
Yellow River for months and months because they couldn't
decide if it was a single or an album track or whatever
but it started to make waves and producers, artist and managers
started coming on to me and then that famous word kicks
in - greed.
The Tremeloes had had all these
amazing hits with other people's songs and they did very
well, making a lot of money but the lion's share is if you
write the song. I wasn't aware of that at the time - that
was part of my naivety - I was naïve about the business,
the fiddles and things. I knew stuff went on but not to
the extent that it was. Anyway, The Tremeloes started championing
me as a new young writer and the association was quite good
at first and as everything they recorded was top 10, I thought
that would be my entry as a successful writer and people
would start coming to me .. and they decided not to do it.
They had already had a hit with (Call
Me) Number One and then did a song called By
The Way which in actual fact was a very nice song,
but it bombed, and while all this was going on, a lot of
other people had heard Yellow River
and thought it was a smash.
Gordon Mills, who managed Tom Jones,
heard about it and I went to see him. He had Tom, Englebert
Humperdink and some others at the time and he offered me
a lot of money for it. I also saw Jonathan King who said
I had some great stuff and he put me onto Wayne Bickerton
at Decca. The story goes that Wayne lost his job because
he turned Yellow River down
but I don't know how true that is.
By now I was a bit depressed because
I was so close to my big break and the song was just languishing
and then suddenly I get a call from Brian Longley who was
The Tremeloes' publicist. He told me that he had heard my
demo and that it was fine and that The Tremeloes had recorded
it but were not going to do anything with it. He suggested
I go down to London, which I did, and he met me at King's
Cross and took me to his house in Sunning Hill, where I
stayed with him and his family.
I got on well with him and liked
him and felt that he was honest. He didn't bullshit me,
told me he couldn't promise anything but also said he thought
Yellow River was a smash hit
and although The Tremeloes had made a great recording of
it, he told me I could do it and that he would like to manage
me. Around the same time, I had gone down to see Peter Walsh
who Brian was working with. Peter managed The Tremeloes
and The Marmalade and many others and I had gone down with
my dad who was still trying to help me.
Before we go on, I must tell you
a great little Hendrix story about my dad. We were doing
the soundcheck at Sheffield City hall and my dad walked
up onto the stage to Hendrix who was sat on Mitch's drums,
out of his head, just tapping away. My dad puts his hand
on Jimi's shoulder and says "You've made it Jimi, my
lad's just starting. Look after him, Jimi."
I was sat in the stalls and my chin
dropped. He did it in such a charming way and I was really
embarrassed but when I look back at it now, it was just
a dad trying to help his son. Jimi looked at him and just
said "yeah man..."
Where were we? Oh yeah… I had
decided to go with Brian but as it came out later, he wasn't
telling me the whole story. Mike Blakely said that his brother
Alan, who was in the Tremeloes, said "We are not going
to do this Mike, so you should do it with Jeff and Vic (Elmes)".
Mike and Vic were both in a band called The Epics who later
became The Acid Gallery, but they were not successful, and
I think Alan thought he could give his kid brother a helping
hand. Before I knew what was happening, I was embroiled
in this whole situation. I didn't have anyone to advise
me so I signed the publishing to The Tremeloes who were
on CBS, CBS were going to put the record out and I was going
to do vocals on the backing track. I didn't want to do it
that way, I wanted to go into a studio and do my own version
of it but the pressure was on as it had already been recorded
by a number of artists and a release date had been set so
they insisted that I just go into the studio and sing. I
went along with it because I didn't really have any other
choice.
Brian then suggested to me Vic and
Mike, saying that I would need a ready-made band for when
the record comes out and I said I knew lots of people that
I could play with, but again there was a pressure to meet
them and this is where Brian played his cards very carefully.
If he could get these two guys in the band, it would be
a readymade group and it would keep The Tremeloes happy.
I kicked against it and I met these
two guys and I didn't like them. They thought they were
hip Londoners and I was the upstart northerner who didn't
know how to look or dress but I was swept along on this
rollercoaster. I felt uneasy about it and I was made to
feel very quickly that I was joining them, not the other
way around, but the record had a date to come out so contracts
were signed.
Q: What happened when the record
came out?
JC: I had no control over anything.
We were spirited away to a house in the country to get our
act together, and as you know the record smashed through
the charts and we were all over the place playing gigs,
doing interviews and on national television. Half the time
at gigs we couldn't hear ourselves because of the screaming
but I knew it wasn't right. The band wasn't good enough
even though I worked them and rehearsed them as much as
I could.
I was unhappy with a lot of things
and we soldiered on for several months but eventually I
said to Brian that it was either them or me. I had to put
a stop to it and rebuild and that's eventually what I did.
Mike was eased out, which caused a lot of trouble with the
Tremeloes and CBS. Mike still gets royalties to this day
from Sony even though he didn't play on anything but the
B-side of the Yellow River
single, Down the Mississippi Line,
because his name was on the contract! It's only in this
last six or seven years that Sony started paying me because
they said they hadn't recouped fees, but that's another
story …
Pt 4
