Norman Stracey: “We never wanted to be pop stars, we wanted to be musicians”

Part 1 of 2. 

The author with Norman Stracey (right), 8th March 2023.
Picture is ©  Eddy Bonte

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1 Rock and Roll

Norman Stracey:
“I have always put rock’n’roll to one side. You see, I appreciate a wide range of music: opera, classical, modern jazz, anything. I don’t care what it is, as long as it’s well done. But to me rock’n’roll isn’t necessarily the good side of music, it’s about enjoyment. People enjoy it and a lot of people I know are dancers who enjoy the music but for dancing. They do not or seldom listen to the words, for instance. They are not really into the music, only into the beat and the song and they can appreciate it at that level. It doesn’t go any deeper. Rock and roll is an enjoyment rather than a music thing. I’m not a snob, but I look for something deeper in music. It could be the lyrics or the harmony or something that is done well but is different and takes a deeper appreciation”.

2 The trigger

EB:  What was your appreciation of music before you started to play pop music and what triggered you to play pop?
Norman Stracey:
“My father was a good musician and so was his sister, a pianist who went to the Royal College of Music in London. My father was a very good pianist and used to play the organ in the church. My mother could play the piano and my dear departed sister also got a good level of classical music. There was always music in the house. And of course, come the late fifties I heard Lonnie Donegan and the skiffle, like everybody else. My poor father was horrified (laughs) and I got no encouragement from him whatsoever, entirely the opposite, but I started listening to all that skiffle and one thing leads on to another, doesn’t it? You start thinking ‘the piano is yesterday’s instrument’, there was no electric piano, so if you wanted to play the piano you played the one in the hall, wherever it was, it might be out of tune, it might be awful, but that’s what they used to play. With the guitar, that’s different: it’s portable, you can tune it up, there are different qualities of guitar. And so, like everyone else I stared to play the guitar.

I started to listen to stuff like Barney Kessel’s ‘Our Love Is Here to Stay’. Someone played that tune to me and I thought ‘That’s what I want to do’. I was thirteen, fourteen. Yes, that struck me. As soon as I’d heard that I thought ‘That’s what I want to learn to do’. I started to listen to that sort of music but even at that age I was savvy in respect that I thought ‘I’m not going to make a living playing that, the only way to make a living is to learn to play skiffle and rock and roll…”

EB: You thought about that at that age?
Norman Stracey:
“Yeah. I was beginning to realize I wasn’t going to set the world alight playing football (laughs heartily), even though I capped in the schoolboy county team.  I was a big boy for my age but (laughs) the others gradually caught me up. I was never gonna be brilliant and I’m not academic so I wasn’t gonna be top of the class in that either, so I sort of set my sights on music really”.

3 Johnny Rogers, Dick Teague, Brian Parker

Norman Stracey:
“At that early ag I was playing guitar eight hours a day, till my fingers bled. You can do that when you’re young; you’ve got time on your hands. I used to follow Lonnie Donegan and all the skiffle groups and went on to try and learn that, that was always at the back of my mind. Skiffle was the driving force to learn to play. While I was playing rock and roll for a living, I was playing for my enjoyment if you like. And it continued.
Skiffle pulled Johnny (Rogers) and I together. Johnny and myself were good friends from the day we went to Senior School, we were more or less inseparable. He was mad on football as well and we played a lot of sport together. We spent all our time together, really.  

When skiffle came along some boys got together and we played at some local workingman’s clubs and we gradually got better. And we knew Brian (Parker) who went to the same school, Cheshunt Secondary Modern. He was two years older than us and he was part of the National Youth Orchestra, playing the violin. He had a good foundation in music. He liked all sorts of music as well.  Brian played with Dick Teague’s skiffle group - that was Cliff Richard’s first group. Dick was basically one who loved the blues and I got to know Dick really well. We knew Cliff because he also went to our school. And he was a year older than us - would you believe (laughs!), he doesn’t look it now. He was a good-looking lad, he was the only boy in school who wasn’t chasing the girls, the girls were chasing him!

Brian got a good entry into the guitar music from the skiffle group with Dick. A bloke named Terry Smart played the drums. But it was too much R&R and Dick was into the blues. He also liked Django Reinhardt. Cliff wasn’t satisfied with the skiffle and wanted to do more rock and roll and asked Brian ‘Would you like to come with me?’. And Brian says ‘No, I want to stay with the skiffle where the money is’ ((laughs heartily), so Cliff went off and made his own group. Brian eventually started what was called then The Parker Royal Five and everybody thought the name was a bit naff, so we changed it to The Hunters with John Rogers, myself, Brian Parker and Norman Sheffield. That’s the line-up that backed Cliff at the London Palladium when The Shadows couldn’t do it. So, we started at the top and gradually worked our way down to the bottom” (laugh).

4 The Parker Royal 5

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Line-ups:
 The Parker Royal 5: Norman   Stracey, John Rogers, Brian Parker,   unknown drummer, Buster Meikle.  The Hunters:N orman Stracey, John Rogers, Brian Parker, Norman Sheffield.. 

Norman Stracey:
“Johnny and I started playing together with Brian, and Johnny then thought we needed a bass-player. We had a discussion and John said he’d do the bass, I took the rhythm guitar and Brian did lead. I can’t remember the name of the drummer, another chap who was in our year at school - but it wasn’t Smart. We called ourselves The Parker Royal 5, after Brian [Parker] of course. We all got suits and started getting gigs. There was a young chap in our year, Buster Meikle, a funny guy and a good footballer too, who became our singer. Buster was later in The Daybreakers [with drummer Bob Henrit and singer-guitarist Russ Ballard – EB] and then in Unit 4+2.

Our gigs were further and further apart, we gradually got better and bigger gigs. On 9 November 1959, we played the Hammersmith Palais which used to be a very big place [the poster announcing them as ‘the rocksational Parker – Royal Five with Bobby Meikle’ – EB]. We also backed Cliff a few times. Once he flew back from America because he’d made an agreement with ITV to play the Sunday Night London Palladium. The Shadows for some reason did not want to do it or did not want to come back or whatever, and Cliff used us -The Parker Royal Five. We also backed him at the Poll-winner’s Concert at Wembley.
We used to tour a lot with The Shadows, we got to know each other quite well. A couple of times I used to ask Bruce Welsh about certain things he’d done and once as they were rehearsing ‘Blue Star’ they couldn’t work out the chords. So, they asked me to show them the chords which I duly did. I think they recorded it, I’m not sure, it was all amicable. [‘Blue Star’ is on their self-titled album from 1961 – EB]
But I digress. After the London Palladium we got offers to do Summer Seasons and various gigs all over the place, still as The Royal Five. One of the most memorable Summer Seasons was the one at Bournemouth. On the bill were Cuddly Dudley, Michael Cox who’d had a hit with ‘Angela Jones’ produced by Joe Meek in 1960, Mark Wynter, Marty Wilde… We were at the Pier and Marty Wilde and the Krew Kats at the Pavilion. We got to know them very well, we used to go and see them, play together, so we got to meet Brian Bennett, Brian ‘Licorice’ Locking - a really nice man - and Big Jim Sullivan on guitar, who was a really good musician and had a good ear.

People of our age at the time were not necessarily good at reading music and it was a good thing because we developed our ear.  We would work things out ourselves, we didn’t need anyone show us or read it in a music book. Rock and roll was all new, without tutors or computers to show you how to do anything. We had to learn from real basics how do to things and to copy. Everybody just tried to find out how it worked. I am going back to when I started in 1956-57 at the age of fourteen, fifteen, when we first heard Elvis and a little bit later Lonnie Donegan. It was almost country music with Elvis, Fats Domino, they all come from blues and country music. That was the start for us all, it was a good scene with lots of bands”.

5 Buster Meikle

Norman Stracey:
“We are now in the late fifties, early sixties when I met up with a chap called Buster Meikle. A lovely chap with a good voice, but very unreliable. We did a couple of gigs when Buster didn’t arrive until half way through and we were stuck. I remember we played a big cinema and we went on before the main film, we were on the stage all set up and ready to go, but no Buster. He let us down three or four times like that. He couldn’t keep time, had no appreciation of time. In the end we had to ditch him, which was sad. He went on with a group called The Daybreakers, which included Russ Ballard and Bob Henrit who were a couple of years younger than us. That’s where Bob met John Rogers [who became very attached to a young lady called Pat Henrit, Bob’s sister, and they were on the verge of getting married when John died in a car accident [Rogers was the bass-player of The Roulettes when he died in a car accident on 5 May 1962 – EB].  
Anyway, we had to find someone else to replace Buster. Cliff’s manager had heard of a bloke called Dave Sampson, so we teamed up with Dave Sampson and toured with him for quite some time, a year or maybe 18 months. Cliff’s manager was very crafty, he had us, Cliff, The Shadows and a comic, and he used to put out the whole tour. No, Sampson was not related to Cliff, I believe he had won a contest or so. No, he’s not from Cheshunt, but from Walthamstow, London.
[Dave Sampson & The Hunters also put out a few singles on Columbia in 1960 and 1961, with ‘Sweet Dreams"’ c/w ‘It's Lonesome’ (Columbia DB4449, released May 1960) reaching the no. 29 chart position - EB ]
This lasted until Dave, like Cliff, split from his manager Tito Burns and went with Larry Parnes. Do you remember the tours Larry Parnes type? They weren’t the headliners but they all had a name, so the singers didn’t need us as there was a big band. We were left without a singer, did a couple of gigs without other people singing, did lots of instrumentals, but the work wasn’t there. And it was coming up to the Beatles time. If you weren’t The Beatles of the Stones, life was very difficult, even for the Everly Brothers or Neil Sedaka in America.  Even they couldn’t get work and had to play small clubs. Not so much the Stones, although I like their rawness, they were right on the beat, but more The Beatles. They were all smart, the songs were good, they all did well and they all had good voices”.

6 Stop the Music

Norman Stracey:
“Around that time I’d had enough, I was so disillusioned. When we finished with The Hunters in 1961 or something like that [Their last release was the LP ‘Hits from the Hunters’, 1962 - EB], I decided I really ought to look for another job, because touring is all very well, but you can’t meet anybody, you have no other life. It’s hard, it’s always London, Wales, Scotland, travelling all the time, and I wasn’t coping very well with that because you got no other life.
It’s nice if you like that, but I didn’t. No time for sport and I used to play a lot of tennis. I used to run for an athletic club and touring is just such an unhealthy life. And of course, with The Roulettes playing with Adam Faith - that music is absolutely awful! When I first joined them [Autumn 1962 - EB] there was this talk of the Oceanic tour, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Australia …

Brian Parker was with them before me, and I never will know the truth because Brian didn’t want to talk about it [early August 1962 for the Wolverhampton shows, he left within a week and Peter Thorp returned – EB]. Brian joined The Roulettes very briefly, didn’t he, and Brian, funny chap, h took music seriously as well and he wouldn’t take what Adam Faith said. Faith was an absolute plunker, an absolute idiot with music. He had no idea whatsoever, yet he used to have these funny ideas about what he wanted.
If you didn’t do it, that would be it, that explains the many changes of personnel. I was determined to go on that Oceanic tour (Autumn 1962 – EB). I’d never flown, hardly been out of the country, and when Faith asked me to change my guitar, my lovely Gibson, a Barney Kessler type, because he loves the skiffle sound… Well, none of the music we played had anything to do with skiffle. He wanted me to play that guitar, twice as thick as that, and he said: ‘That’s what I want you to get’. Obviously, that’s what he wanted and I changed guitars. It didn’t suit what I was playing at all, I hated it, absolutely hated it, it’s a different technique, the strings on a big guitar are much further away from the fretboard so you really have to touch them real hard to get the acoustic sound. I got this big guitar and it didn’t really fit. Faith was useless really, but I made the best of it, because I wanted to get on this tour.
Johnny Leyton was on that tour too, because he was having an affair with the promotor, Robert Stigwood. I also had to accompany him and on some of the songs he was playing very fast, extremely fast and if you listen to his hits like ‘Johnny Remember Me’ … (imitates sound, then pauses and sighs)
Well, it was just one of these things. Faith just loved these big guitars. Awful guitar. And I lost all interest. I had no time to practise because I was on tour all the time, from a theatre to a radio station to tv station…”

Q That sounds like you didn’t enjoy the music at all, maybe you shouldn’t have joined The Roulettes  
Norman Stracey:
“It was awful. No, most probably I shouldn’t have been in that band. If Faith had let me be or asked ‘Can you get me a solid body guitar?’, I could have dealt with that better because the strings are closer to the fretboard. It’s just a matter of getting used to the solid guitar, mine was a traditional wooden sound box and now he wanted this damn big guitar and so I lost all interest in music. I was getting fed up with the touring anyway and I couldn’t care less really.
Also, at the back of my mind, there was this song Tony Meehan and I had written for Cliff, which he duly recorded and released [‘Say You’re Mine’, b-side of ‘Don’t Talk to Him’, released November 1963 – EB].  

Tony Meehan, yeah, Johnny (Rogers) and I had become friendly with Tony Meehan, Johnny and Tony used to play together. We had lost contact with Cliff by that time so Tony Meehan was the who was going to say ‘I’ve got this song, Cliff’; people like Tony would place songs and it got me a hell of a lot of money; I got a big deposit on the house. I don’t know if Faith realised what was happening.
That was me finished with the music scene”.

  

THE HUNTERS: 2 LPs on 1CD 

END OF PART ONE of TWO. 

Text is © Eddy Bonte. FIrst published on this site on 2 April 2023. 

As told by Norman Stracey to Eddy Bonte during two interviews at Stracey’s home, on 21 July 2022 and 8 March 2023. Published with the interviewee’s consent. Sincere thanks to Norman for going the extra mile and trusting me with his memorabilia, to his wife Mary for coffee and ‘light’ lunch, and to both for hospitality!