Embarrassingly, the first time they went on stage together they got into a tangle. They’d spent two weeks rehearsing in the flat but had completely forgotten that proper stage microphones, unlike Coke bottles, had electrical leads attached. On stage they kept tripping over them, but despite this technical hitch, the reaction from the audience was generally favourable. The menfolk clearly approved of the way the girls looked. Both of them were blessed with good legs and Pat’s home-made mini-dresses showed them off to advantage.
The girls were soon given a helping hand by Des O’Connor, then forging a showbusiness career as a singer as well as a comedian. They appeared with Des on the same variety bill at the Prince of Wales Theatre in London, and he reckoned they could go places as a vocal double act provided they practised their harmonies. He suggested they call themselves The Poppettes, but they preferred to stay billed as Pat and Olivia. When Olivia told Des they had no practical way of rehearsing their vocals, he took them out shopping in the electrical stores in Tottenham Court Road and generously forked out £12 to get them a tape recorder.
Encouragement came at times from unexpected quarters. They were thrilled when the inimitable French singing entertainer Maurice Chevalier popped backstage on one occasion to offer compliments and wish them well.
Despite beginning to rub shoulders with the stars of the day, the sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll lifestyle of the ‘Swinging Sixties’ somehow passed them by. It’s said that if you can remember the 1960s then you weren’t really there - the implication being that you weren’t really a part of the sixties unless you were habitually too high at the time for banking anything but the haziest of memories. ‘Turn on, tune in, drop out,’ was Timothy Leary’s message for the psychedelic era. Olivia says: ‘I was quite naive then, and although people were doing drugs around me, I never seemed to notice. I floated through on this little cloud of everything being lovely.’ On the road, the girls had fun, but they made sure they looked out for one another and steered each other away from trouble. But it was their basic common sense, and sheer naivety, which essentially kept them away from rock’s debauched excesses.
Life for Pat and Olivia wasn’t always plain sailing. The girls’ most memorable booking, for all the wrong reasons, turned out to be an invitation to perform at the Raymond Revue Bar. The two of them had been appearing at the perfectly respectable Celebrity Club for £25 a week, and Raymond Revue Bar was a sister club which, in their ignorance and innocence, the girls treated as just another booking. The alarm bells began ringing, however, when they found themselves picking their way through neon-lit alleyways in the heart of Soho, past sex shops, sleazy members-only cinemas showing dubious foreign films and hookers in hot pants lingering in doorways, to get to the venue.
The Raymond Revue Bar was no run-of-the-mill club and, as Olivia and Pat rapidly discovered, certainly no club for two teenage girl singers unless they were prepared to take most, if not all, of their clothes off for the male clientele.
Back in 1958, Paul Raymond had caused a sensation when he opened his Revue Bar as the first legal nude cabaret in town. ‘Mr Soho’, as he was known, had neatly side-stepped the existing law over nudity in theatres by making his own theatre a club where girls could disrobe in front of the club members out of reach of the authorities. Raymond, who went on to earn the title of porn baron, became a familiar figure himself in Soho, pulling up in his Rolls-Royce outside the club, and stepping out with a trademark fur coat draped around his shoulders to mingle with members who paid good money to see his gorgeous girls.
The Raymond Revue Bar was infamous in its day, but somehow its notoriety had failed to reach the ears of two young girls fresh in from Melbourne.
The penny didn’t drop until Olivia and Pat stepped inside the venue. ‘It was a well-known strip club in the middle of town, but I really had no idea until I looked round a corner and there was a girl swimming around in a fish-tank with just a mermaid bottom on and nothing else,’ says Olivia, laughing at the memory. ‘We thought this was kind of strange, but thought nothing more of it, being young and naive as we were. But when we went on to do our show in our pretty little pink mini-dresses, there were a couple of guys sitting there in raincoats.’
It didn’t take long for both the management and Pat and Olivia to realise that it had all been a horrendous mistake. On stage the girls gamely went through their set list of song-and-dance numbers in front of a handful of disbelieving men. The girls were as pleased to get off the stage as the disgruntled punters must have been to see the still fully clad backs of them. ‘I don’t think they liked us at all,’ said Pat. ‘We were very cute and innocent, we were too young and we had too many clothes on!’
The whole sorry experience came to an end when Paul Raymond paid the girls a visit backstage. ‘He came in,’ Olivia laughingly recalls, ‘gave me £40, and said: “Thank you very much, but you don’t need to come back. I don’t think it’s going to work out for you here!” The manager thought he had booked two strippers who could sing.’
The girls were soon able to look back and have a good giggle about it. ‘That was kind of the crummiest place we played,’ Olivia says, ‘and it’s hilarious when I think of it now because we had no idea what was going on.’
Fortunately there were plenty of other gigs lined up in authentic music venues. The two girls played ballrooms, pubs, bars and clubs, singing cover versions of hits of the day by such as The Beatles and Dionne Warwick, and they worked into their act a few simple dance routines to numbers like ‘The Locomotion’, which had been a hit for the American singer Little Eva four years before. On occasion they travelled in a minibus to the north of England to appear at working men’s clubs, where they found audiences could be far tougher than down south.
Inevitably there were lean times, and the travelling, in particular, proved a drain on their finances. ‘I used to budget down to the last penny,’ Olivia remembers. ‘We shared the rent, everything, with the other girls. We had a kitty for food, and Pat made clothes for the stage. We didn’t have very much money because we didn’t work every week and we used to have to travel to shows and pay our own expenses. We were very careful, but we never ran short.’ The girls became used to such a frugal existence that they managed to make £50 between them last for a two-week holiday on the Continent, and still come home with some change.
Eventually, as Pat and Olivia honed their act and word spread, they warranted higher billing and were paid higher fees accordingly, and they were thrilled to be booked eventually as a support act for The Seekers. Athol Guy was especially pleased his protégés seemed to be doing well.
Another high spot for the girls was being hired as the opening act for popular English ballad singer Matt Monro for his concerts in South Africa.
Television bookings for Pat and Olivia followed and they made appearances on light entertainment programmes such as
The Dick Emery Show
. But any progress the girls were making was tempered by the knowledge that Pat’s visa was due to run out at the end of the year. Olivia had no such problems; she had retained her British passport, and would not obtain an Australian passport until 1994.
Pat’s visa worries made for an uncertain immediate future: Pat and Olivia’s booking agent was understandably wary of arranging work for them more than a few weeks ahead for fear Pat might not be available unless she succeeded in securing a visa extension allowing her to stay in England.
Pat did in fact manage to win a month’s reprieve on the strength of a booking to entertain British troops in Cyprus where two very pretty mini-skirted girls went down a storm with the squaddies. But it looked increasingly likely Pat would have to return to Australia at the end of the year, which would leave Olivia in a quandary.
To stay in England or to return home became even more of a dilemma for Olivia after she and Pat were booked to appear for a week at Bournemouth on a bill topped by Cliff Richard and The Shadows. There Olivia met a famous guitarist by the name of Bruce Welch - and he fell in love with her more or less at first sight.
Chapter 3
Bruce Welch
‘She was a stunning blonde, very good-looking with a bright and bouncy personality’
BRUCE WELCH OF THE SHADOWS
OLIVIA NEWTON-JOHN had no idea she was talking to one of Britain’s most successful and best-known guitarists when she first said hello to Bruce Welch of The Shadows at a concert venue in Bournemouth in the late summer of 1966.
Bruce was on stage busy checking all the gear in preparation for another sell-out concert by Cliff Richard and his famous backing band, of which Bruce was a prominent member. But Olivia simply didn’t recognise him as she made an interested appraisal of the inside of the theatre where she was booked to appear with Pat Carroll on the same bill as Cliff. The diligent way the casually dressed man on the stage was carrying out his detailed inspection of the equipment prompted Olivia to think he must be an electrician or a member of the road crew. Little did she realise that the man in front of her was the composer of Cliff’s smash hit ‘Summer Holiday’, a song she had sung as a duet with Pat on TV back in Australia.
Bruce’s reaction to meeting Olivia for the first time was somewhat different. He thought she was stunningly beautiful and it was pretty much love at first sight.
‘He seemed quite nice,’ Olivia later recalled of the man who would become the most important figure in her life, both personally and professionally, over the next five years, ‘and after we’d been introduced he didn’t waste any time in asking me out. I knew of The Shadows, but Hank Marvin with his distinctive glasses was the only one I recognised.’
Bruce was somewhat amused that the beautiful girl he’d just met had no idea who he was. There weren’t too many teenage girls who did not recognise him after the eight years of phenomenal pop success he had enjoyed with The Shadows. Bruce decided straight away that he and this young girl should get to know each other a great deal better.
Like Olivia, Bruce had come through a difficult childhood. But his had been deeply unhappy. He was born in the coastal town of Bognor Regis in Sussex in 1941; his mother and father split up when he was small and his mother died of TB when she was only thirty-two. Bruce was brought up in Newcastle by his aunt Sadie, who lived with her Indian boyfriend above the fish and chip shop he owned. The first time Bruce could remember seeing his father was when he was eight years old and then he didn’t see him again for another nine years.
Bruce was seventeen when he discovered that he had been born illegitimate, and he admits it gave him a chip on his shoulder. He found out the truth when he tried to obtain a birth certificate in order to wed his sweetheart, Anne. Bruce later changed his name by deed poll to his mother’s maiden name.
Music had always played an important part in Bruce’s life. At an early age he was given a ukulele, which he learned to play. He listened to popular records of the day on a wind-up gramophone, went to see America’s top singing stars like Johnny Ray and Slim Whitman at the Newcastle Empire and, like many thousands of teenagers in the 1950s, he was swept along on the rock ’n’ roll wave that hit Britain in the shape of Bill Haley and Elvis Presley.
Bruce knew very early on that he wanted a career in music and he saw a chance to gain a foothold when the skiffle craze swept Britain, spearheaded by Lonnie Donegan, the UK’s undisputed King of Skiffle, who had a string of catchy singalong hits.
Skiffle had a simple, homespun quality to it. Thousands of skiffle groups sprang up with a basic guitar sound complemented by the rhythmic finger-tapping of thimbles on a wooden washboard or the bass-like plucking of a cord stretched taut over a broomstick and a tea chest. Skiffle offered everyone a chance to join in and Bruce needed no second invitation. He went out and bought himself a guitar for £4 19s 6d and, after meeting up at the local grammar school with a musically like-minded lad called Brian Rankin, later to change his name to Hank Marvin, they formed a group and called themselves The Railroaders, principally because they used to meet at a café next to Newcastle’s Central Station.
Soon, both aged just sixteen, they headed south to London to seek their fame and fortune. They lived from hand to mouth in a boarding house in Finsbury Park, north London, and ended up drawn to Soho to the 2i’s coffee bar, whose cramped cellar offered skiffle groups and budding rock ’n’ roll singers and musicians a chance to showcase their talents.
By this time, Bruce and Hank were moving on from skiffle and were being heavily influenced in their own guitar playing by the music of Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly. Now inseparable friends, they complemented each other well as guitarists and their voices blended tunefully for Everly Brothers-style harmonies. One night at the 2i’s they were spotted by John Foster, who happened to be looking for a guitarist to back a promising British rock ’n’ roll singer he was managing by the name of Cliff Richard.
Foster offered Hank the job, but Hank loyally said he would only go on the tour if his friend Bruce went too. Foster agreed, signed them both up on the spot and within weeks Bruce and Hank found themselves backing Cliff on his first UK tour to scenes of wild audience hysteria. Soon they became one half of Cliff’s permanent backing quartet The Drifters, before changing their name to The Shadows.
Now, as Bruce, ever the perfectionist, made his pre-concert sound checks at Bournemouth and retuned his guitar for the umpteenth time, he could look back on eight years of unparalleled international success. He’d played on Cliff’s string of hit records, enjoyed smash hits as The Shadows in their own right, and performed at sell-out concert tours at home and abroad, as well as in pantomimes and in movies like
Summer Holiday
. Bruce had also proved himself to be a prolific songwriter of chart hits for both Cliff and for his own band. Among the hits he’d co-written were chart-toppers like ‘Please Don’t Tease’, ‘Bachelor Boy’ and the theme song from ‘Summer Holiday’.