By Ian Woolley
Mike Read talks songwriting, sitting next to Prince Charles and the truth about that ‘Frankie’ song…
He’s done it all. Broadcaster, singer, author, presenter and has even dabbled in the odd musical but Mike Read still does what he loves best…songwriting.
Mike Read (photo credit Quiz Britain)
“My big love was always songwriting. I used to think ‘that’s a great tune but the words aren’t right. The words were OK, but they weren’t a marriage. You could destroy a good tune by average words and vice versa”.
“Not many people would probably know that they wrote more than 50 songs for Elvis”.
“Years later I got to meet them when I was writing my book ‘200 years of Songwriting in America’. After talking to Roy Bennett on the phone, he said that, despite the many songs they wrote for Cliff Richard, they never got to meet him”.
“A short time later I was doing a video with Cliff on a song of mine he was recording and he said: ‘I never met those two guys Tapper & Bennett who wrote all those hits’. He just assumed they had died.
“So I flew Roy up to Birmingham to surprise Cliff at one of his shows and walked on to the stage unannounced. When I announced that one of those great songwriters is here today and Roy walked out, Cliff hugged him and then they sang The Young Ones.”
Fellow broadcaster Peter Powell asked him to get a tape into Radio Luxembourg which he never did. He did, however, do a live interview at the station HQ – one of some 2,000 applicants.
Mike recalls: “The very next day they put me on a plane to the Grand Duchy. I was thrown in at the deep end as the desk looked like something out of the flight deck of Concorde!”
Mike Read at Radio One
A year later he got a call from Radio One and met controller Derek Chinnery who gave him the much-coveted job of being one of their presenters.
“I was lucky – being at the right door when it was opened. I knew a lot of really good presenters who never got the opportunity, or came up at the wrong time. You also have to do a good job”.
“You could find yourself sitting next to Prince Charles at some dinner party, or at Buckingham Palace with the Queen, so you have to be an ambassador for Auntie Beeb.”
Mike’s nemesis was Relax by Frankie goes To Hollywood. Dare I ask him?
“I used to repeat the chart on Wednesday morning and Adrian John was in the studio. Having had little time to play all the songs and Frankie being on a 12-inch, we were looking at the record cover and Adrian said ‘have you seen the cover on the back?’ I said, if I drop one it will be that one”.
“Obviously, their manager capitalised on it but the record got banned by the BBC not me – oh, and the video didn’t help. “Some years later, the director of the video told me he was told to make the video really over the top”.
How many know that Mike did a voice-over on Frankie’s first album?
“Trevor Horn, of course, was the mastermind behind their sound,” said Mike. “Two Tribes was my favourite though”.
He has recently written his 40th book called ‘100 Blue Plaques’ (he is also chairman of the British Plaque Trust) and recently erected one for Lonnie Donegan’s 65th anniversary of ‘Rock Island Line’. On top of all this Mike has signed a six-book deal on famous streets associated with music.
The first one published was Denmark Street where, at one time, David Bowie lived in a camper van on the street for six months trying to get a record deal. Paul Simon walked up and down this street trying to get a deal on two songs – Homeward Bound and The Sound of Silence. He was flatly turned down.
“It’s an amazing street that’s just 300 feet long, with so much musical importance,” added Mike. “People working on that street who could hear a hit from a flop, and sometimes on the flip of a coin, took a chance on what would later be heard as some of the most famous songs in the history of pop music, Rock Around The Clock and Heartbreak Hotel being just two”.
“I asked Neil Sedaka once what was his favourite record. He replied ‘They are all my little babies. I send them out into the world and they send me home money. They’re all my babies.”
These days, you can hear Mike on the morning Breakfast show of Downforce Radio and there’s new news coming out that he’ll be presenting a brand new show called The Heritage TV Show. More news of that coming soon.