Continued...

  After a month of half-filled halls and dire reviews, Parlophone reverted to re-releasing ‘All Shook Down’, which somehow managed to get us back up the charts again – but not without cost. It reinforced the ‘one-hit-wonder’ label in everybody’s minds, including our own. On the last night of the tour, in some horrible backstage room on the end of a freezing cold pier in Cromer, Jake and Dean told us that was it, they were leaving. They’d had a better offer, to do something more modern and with it.

Johnny sat down and cried, a bottle of brandy stuck to his right hand.

  I soldiered on with him for a while, recruiting a couple of new fellas from bands we had met along the way, but without the other two it was never the same again. Even I started to believe the curse when the next we heard of Jake and Dean was that they had joined this new band, The Tornados, who hit number one in November 1962. With a song about the satellite Telstar, produced by, you guessed it, Joe. It even knocked Elvis off the top spot.

  After that, there was no living with Johnny. I swear that I tried, but his boozing got worse, his temper more volatile, his live performances frankly an embarrassment. We had one argument too many and for my sins, I got up and left him in the middle of a tour, another half-empty washout on the end of another pier, far away from everything we had dreamed of and everything that had once been in our grasp.

  I went back to London and got myself involved with another couple of bands, while Johnny stayed on the circuit with a band of session guys, turning into a cabaret of his former self, even resorting to Gene Vincent covers to bring in the pennies for the record company, who, unlike everyone else, still hadn’t given up on him.

  The Off Beat café had become The New Beat Cellar when I found myself standing at the top of the stairs, looking down, on the evening of 1 October 1966.

  Things had changed an awful lot since the days when we played there. Upstairs had been completely remodelled and repainted, in eye-straining op-art black and white, and the art students these days looked like Mary Quant with their bob haircuts and miniskirts, the boys wearing collarless shirts and bowl cuts on their heads. I didn’t see none of the gangster crowd there, nor the strippers, and Iron Foot Jack was long in his grave. I guess the Soho sinners weren’t welcome here no more. It was a place for young folk and I was feeling old.

  I checked the jukebox before I went down, but all the jazz and rock’n’roll was gone, along with Joe’s space pop ditties. Even he had finally fallen out of favour with the onslaught of the Northern beat sound that had come raging out of Liverpool to conquer the world. I was on my way to see a bunch of guys I had actually met in that city, back in the good times, when The Buccaneers were on a roll. They hadn’t forgotten me and it was only good manners to go and check them out.

  But now I was here, any enthusiasm I tried to muster just evaporated. Maybe it was the way they’d changed this place, maybe it was just the happy, jangly sound the band was making what turned me off. I never made it any further than the top of the stairs, watching their mop-top cuts vibrating to the screams of a new set of students and decided to retreat back upstairs for a cup of java.

  The jukebox had been turned off for the duration of the gig, and the guy behind the bar had the radio on. I drank my coffee slowly, leaning against the counter, lost in a reverie about our time downstairs, not really taking anything in until there came a sudden newsflash:

  ‘Johnny Murphy, the lead singer of The Buccaneers, has been killed in a car crash on the outskirts of Bury in Lancashire. Murphy, who was travelling back from a concert at RAF Waddington that had been cancelled at the last minute, was a passenger in the car that was involved in a head-on collision with another. He was taken by ambulance to Bolton Royal Infirmary where he was pronounced dead on arrival…’

  I heard it but I didn’t hear it. In my head I was back down there, in that cellar, playing my heart out while Johnny shivered, shimmied and shook, the pirate king in all his glory, the world at his feet.

  And then I saw him.

  Standing at the back of the room, in a smartly-cut pale blue suit, so cleanly shaven his skin still had a rosy glow from the razor’s kiss, thick brown hair set into a shiny pompadour that looked as though it had been set in plastic. His bulbous dark blue eyes darted around the cellar, and he pulled on a cigarette fretfully. For a second it seemed that he was too nervous to come across the floor, but then his eyes became still as they settled on what he was searching for. With a sudden sense of purpose, he walked towards Johnny.

  As the radio started playing ‘All Shook Down’ in tribute to my former friend, my mind was filled with a slower, more spooky refrain. It was a girl singing and a curse falling from her red lips, a ghost that echoes down my memory and never, ever lets me forget.

  ‘Johnny, remember me.’

© Cathi Unsworth 2008 All Rights Reserved