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Bugger! Neil Finn turned 65 yesterday. No card this year.
Peter Arnett was 91 – Arnett, my hero CNN war correspondent from Invercargill who scored an interview with Osama bin Laden in a cave in Afghanistan. I met Arnett. Yep, I have shaken the hand that shook hands with the architect of evil.
If you were Arnett, what would have been your first question to that guy?
And Peter Blair Denis Bernard Noone turned 78 last week. No card. He’ll be hurting.
Noone, teen idol of the 1960s. He was a nutcase. Called himself Henery VIII.
“I got married to the widow next door, She’s been married seven times before.”
She wouldn’t have a Willy or a Sam. Only Henerys! That Peter Noone – fringed, pretty boy frontman of the pop group, Herman’s Hermits.
I bet if you’re 65-plus, that nonsense song will now be an ‘earworm’ – swirling around your in subconscious for the day. And you will hate me for it.
It was an irritating ditty even then – just eight meaningless, nebulous, lines repeated ad nauseum: “Second verse, same as the first.”
“I’m her eighth old man, I’m Henery.”
It was a re-make of a 1910 music hall song that probably deserved to be consigned there forever.
“Henery the eighth, I am.”
Overly under-produced, and like a skiffle group at an A&P Show talent quest. Incredibly bad, hugely successful.
Blather and balderdash
So why are Herman’s Hermits now demanding attention? It’s kind of a Statler and Waldorf thing –because every morning, long before the sparrows have twitched their tail feathers and pooped, Brian Kelly ‘BK’ wanders out of NZME’s Country Sport Breakfast radio studio into the newsroom singing ‘gold’ songs very badly and sharing stuff with me. Like it’s the anniversary of the Berlin Wall coming down. And I can brag “been there, done that”, went through Checkpoint Charlie in the early-1980s – got seriously frisked by a formidable Frau, an East German border guard, who didn’t appreciate a warm western smile in the middle of a Cold War.
With BK, it’s all blokey one-upmanship and no winners. Two fossils trading banter, opinions, moans and groans. It’s great sport. We’re lucky.
Having a radio studio attached livens a dark, soulless, morning in a newspaper office which, if we let it, can have all the excitement of a walking tour of Greerton.
Unadulterated cheese
When BK springs Noone’s birthday on me, I boast I’m a good mate of Karl Green – the band’s bass guitarist and backing singer. Met him in 1964 after Herman’s Hermits played the Dunedin Town Hall. Cost 17 shillings and sixpence – $35 today’s real money.
What a day – what a night? By afternoon I was in short pants at school and by night dancing wildly in the aisle in Black Watch tartan bellbottoms with white belt and parroting all those simplistic and addictive lyrics. “There’s a kind of hush, all over the world” – the sound of lovers in love of course. Vomitous stuff. “No milk today” because his love had gone away. And “I’m Into Something Good” – he walked her home and, because she held his hand, he knew it wasn’t just a one-night stand. Unadulterated cheese – but we loved the simplicity, purity and fun.
It was also the night I became life-long buddies with the band. Well, that’s overstating it. I bumped into one of them briefly. And 61 years later, I am still banging on about it.
‘Daft ‘apeths’
Karl Green was relaxing after the show with an iced chocolate at a café just off Dunedin’s Octagon. A genuine rock star of the time, on his tod, sucking iced chocolate through a straw. Really? Where was the hired muscle, where were the lines of cocaine, the hard liquor, and hordes of screaming groupies. And imagine, if you can, Keith Richards, Ozzy or Jim Morrison taming their addictions with iced chocolate.
I asked Green for his autograph. And things came undone.
“You got an autograph book?” he asked me.
“Ahh, no.”
“A programme or summat?”
“No!”
“Got a pen?”
“No!”
He laughed and called me “yer daft ‘apeth” which I believe to be both mildly offensive and affectionate at the same time. ‘Yer’ is ‘you’. ‘Daft’ is ‘stupid’. ‘Apeth’ is a ha’penny, a worthless pre-decimal coin – or a stupid idiot. Figure that. The Poms invent a language, then mangle it.
Regardless, tonight I was in the company of celebrity. Tomorrow, I would be back in short pants at school, but I would have bragging rights and I would be insufferable.
Fascinating stuff
Then BK reminded me, it’s exactly 50 years ago that the iron ore freighter, Edmund Fitzgerald, perhaps the largest fresh water freighter of her time, foundered in a fierce storm on Lake Superior. Fascinating stuff. In his long, hauntingly beautiful folk rock ballad, ‘The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald’, Gordon Lightfoot sings that Lake Superior “never gives up her dead”. The 29 hands who perished without trace that night are testament. The story mesmerized me. BK reckons he can play the song on his guitar – all six-and-a-half minutes of it, all seven by eight line verses.
But economy of words is key in this industry – the story could have been told in one line: “Ship runs into storm, sinks, 29 dead. The end”.
Anyhow my mate Karl dumped all that pop band and teen idol stuff in 1980. He traded fame for plumbing and tiling in London town. Got back to his roots. Like his style.