Clem Cattini: Shakin’ All Over, Telstar and Forty-Three Number Ones
He was not on the list.
I have just heard the news of the death of the great Clem Cattini. I do not use the word, ‘great’ without deep consideration. The man who has played on the most number one hit singles in Britain. Legend has it that he refused to play with such bands as Led Zeppelin and Wings. More about that later.
I caught up with him in Yorkshire during the Spring of 2019 as his memoir was due out. The phone line rang in the North London area in March of 2019. Clem Cattini answered the call from Yorkshire. At the other end was someone there at pretty much every key point of British pop music history since 1960.
Clem Cattini was born Clemente Anselmo Agustino Cattini in Stoke Newington in August 1937. He came from an Italian background and grew up with a sense of industry from his father’s restaurant. Music came from his love of Latin rhythms. As a young boy, he used to play ice hockey and kept getting injured. This led him towards something that would utilise his natural sense of rhythm but not cause any injuries. Eventually Clem found himself in the 2i’s Coffee Bar in Soho. The basement bar on Old Compton Street became the cradle of British Rock n Roll. He started playing with a young singer named Terry Dene. He then moved onto playing with the Larry Parnes circuit playing with Billy Fury and others as part of the touring group known as the Beat Boys.
A nearby pub led him to the record that would make him famous.
“I’d left Larry,” he said. “I went around to his office and I went in the pub in Old Compton Street and somebody said to me, what are you doing? I said, well I just told Larry what to do with his job. And they said, well there’s a guy in Wilsden called Freddy and the nutters who’s looking for a drummer and bass player. Myself and Brian Gregg, we were in the pub. He said, you fancy a job? So he rang up and we went over and auditioned, and that was the formation of the Pirates.”
Freddy Heath had changed his name to Johnny Kidd at this point and the Pirates were put together quickly. They went into EMI Studios – “they actually call it Abbey Road now,” remarked Cattini, and recorded one of the most defining moments in British rock and roll history, ‘Shakin’ All Over’.
“That was my first recording ever,” he said. “My first recording, and it went to number one. Thank you very much.”
The song was written during the night in the Freight Train coffee bar in Soho. It was put together using two guitar riffs, and a lyric that Johnny Kidd had come up with based on something he said whenever he met a pretty girl. The song was intended to be the B-side. The session was produced by Peter Sullivan (a future producer of much of Tom Jones’s greatest work) who was an A&R man at EMI at the time. The group were Kidd on vocals, Alan Caddy on rhythm guitar, Brian Gregg on bass, Joe Moretti on lead guitar, and Cattini on drums.
“The drum solo bit in the middle was a mistake,” Cattini said. “I was supposed to do one bar fill-in to the guitar solo, and I got into this thing I was doing. I couldn’t get out of it, and it was two bars. I apologised to the producer, who happened to be Peter Sullivan. He said, no, we’ll keep it in. And that was left there for posterity. Sometimes out of mistakes you get better things happening.”
He paused. “I got five pounds and fifteen shillings for that recording.”
“Shakin’ All Over” reached number one in August 1960 and stayed in the charts for nineteen weeks. Pete Townshend has said it was a major influence on The Who, who covered it on their landmark live album Live at Leeds. Its power has not diminished.
About two years later, Cattini was at the centre of something even more globally reaching. In Italy Clem had played as a backing group for Colin Hicks, (Tommy Steele’s brother who was very popular at the time) and then returned to London. It was a phone call from Alan Caddy which started things off.
“Alan phoned me up and said he was going to go and audition with this guy in Holloway Road,” Cattini recalled. “Did I fancy going with him to give him a bit of support? So I said, well, all right. The Arsenal were away at that weekend, so I went. He said to Joe, would you mind if my mate plays drums while I play the guitar? Joe said, yeah, go ahead. We did a couple of numbers. At the end, Joe said, does your mate want a job as well? And that was it. That was the start of the Tornados.”
Joe Meek, the eccentric visionary, had created a studio in a
flat above a shop on Holloway Road. Meek was already a cult figure in British
pop music having produced the eerie ‘Johnny Remember Me’ by John Leyton. Meek
was always able to hear sounds which others couldn’t and had devised devices to
record them. Joe used the Tornados as his resident group.
The Telstar satellite was launched from Cape Canaveral in July 1962. This was the first trans-atlantic communication satellite and live images were transmitted across the Atlantic for the first time. Meek was obsessed with the idea. He put together a demo of his idea, singing wordlessly to his backing track as usual and gave it to the band to work out.
“He was just singing over some track that had nothing to do with his voice, nothing to do with the tune,” Cattini said. “We had to sit down and sort of decipher it all and put out the right chords, and then we had to work on the arrangement. I honestly don’t think we got enough credit as a band for what we put into the record.”
As well as delivering the realisation of Meek’s basic demo, the band contributed a lot to ‘Telstar’, notably the driving feel and sense of speed. A large part of that came from Cattini.
“It was my idea to do a sort of galloping rhythm,” he said, “the moving thing. And then we’ll do a key change in the middle, to sort of let it take off again, to give it even more impetus. But we never really got the credit we should have got as a band for what input we had into it. But, you know, that doesn’t matter now, does it?”
The clavioline sound provided by Roger LaVern cut through nicely, and the rocket noises (purportedly a recording of Meek’s toilet flushing played backwards) gave it a dramatic feel, but the driving element of the song came from Cattini’s drums. The galloping beat was designed by Cattini while sat in a flat above a shop in North London.
‘Telstar’ went to number one in Britain and America, making it the first British record by a British group to reach the top of the Billboard Hot 100. It sold five million records and won an Ivor Novello award. However Joe Meek never earned a single penny in royalties as a plagiarism case was brought against him by Jean Ledrut, a French composer claiming the melody was stolen from his score for a 1960 film. This wasn’t sorted until 1967, three weeks after Meek’s death.
After ‘Telstar’, Cattini had no time for the group as he felt it was the wrong decision to choose the next track.
“I always thought it should have been ‘Riding in the Wind’ as the follow-up,” he said. “I didn’t like ‘Globetrotter,’ and I still don’t like it to this day. Joe threw a stool at me because I said I didn’t like it. He got the hump. It was too much like a slow change, for God’s sake. ‘Riding in the Wind’ was one of my favourite tracks, let’s put it that way.”
Eventually, The Tornados became unsustainable due to constant line up changes and changes within British pop. Billy Fury got frustrated and Cattini had enough. He left the group and had no job to go to.
“I went down Denmark Street,” he said. “I used to hang around there, and I used to sit in a cafe and people would come in and say, I’ve got a demo to do, could you come and do it for me, which I did. And then I started getting phone calls from people saying, could you come and do the master? And that’s how my session career started, for want of a better word.”
Denmark Street, also known as Tin Pan Alley, was a short, narrow street just off Charing Cross Road where all British pop music business happened during the sixties. All music publishers, studios, managers and musicians were based there. Although Cattini couldn’t read music, “I didn’t know the difference between a crotchet and a hatchet,” he had a good sense of timing. He was able to adapt to anything quickly and could lay down a track much faster than most bands.
“People don’t understand what the question was,” he said. “It’s not because they weren’t competent, they could do what they could do. Mick Avory was a very fine player. It was just that we were, being specialists, we were a lot quicker. We did, in three sessions — nine hours — our own album’s worth. It used to take them three hours to do one track. So the only reason we were used more was that we were more efficient. That’s all.”
He deputised for Avory on several tracks for The Kinks, including “Till the End of the Day,” one of the band’s best singles from 1965.
“I did a couple of gigs with The Kinks as well,” Cattini added. “I got twenty-seven pounds for the album. Princely sum. Mind you, I got five pounds fifteen shillings for ‘Shakin’ All Over,’ so there we go.”
There was very little recognition of session musicians in those days. You would do the recording and then leave. The singers weren’t typically there. They were sometimes represented by a stand-in who would just be there to meet union requirements.
“You went in, you did the track, and then the singers came in afterwards and put their voice on,” Cattini said. “The union had a rule that the singer had to be in the box singing when you were playing. But it was a ridiculous situation, because all they did was get somebody off the street making out they were singing. They’d take them off and put the proper singer on. It was quicker for us as well, to be honest.”
This was the context in which Cattini played on the Walker Brothers’ “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore” in 1966. The session was one among hundreds and he had no clear memory of it.
“I’ve got to be very honest,” he said, “I don’t know, I haven’t got a clue what I played on half the time. We never even knew what we were playing on half the time. I used to go in, a piece of paper was put in front of you, and most of the time I was looking at it blank, because I couldn’t read it anyway.”
He worked with the Ivy League very extensively. In addition to working with John Carter and Ken Lewis who were themselves accomplished songwriters, Cattini played on many demos by the group. He also played on Let’s Go to San Francisco by the Flowerpot Men and a variety of other recordings.
In what has caused the most controversy and confusion in British pop history, one of the most fascinating recordings was created. In early 1968, Donovan recorded “Hurdy Gurdy Man.” It was a heavy, ominous piece of music that foreshadowed the powerful rock music that was about to come. John Paul Jones arranged and played bass while Alan Parker played guitar and Clem Cattini played drums on the track.
There was a myth that grew up over the years that Jimmy Page played guitar and John Bonham played drums. This meant that three quarters of the soon to be Led Zeppelin band played on the session. However, the romantic story was too good to ignore.
“There was a story going around that it was Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones and John Bonham,” Cattini said. “But it wasn’t. It was John Paul Jones and myself and a guy called Alan Parker on guitar. But it took me about a year to prove I was on it, because John Paul Jones sent me a letter saying no, no, it was you on drums. That was before Zeppelin was even thought of. So I don’t know where people got that idea from.”
John Paul Jones has confirmed the lineup repeatedly and unambiguously. “No it wasn’t Jimmy,” he said in 2002. “It was me, Alan Parker on guitar, and Clem Cattini on drums. Donovan played acoustic guitar. I booked the session.” He later added, for clarity: “I would like to confirm that the musicians on the record were as follows: Donovan, acoustic guitar; John Paul Jones, arrangement and bass; Alan Parker, lead guitar; Clem Cattini, drums. No other musicians were involved in this session.”
There was confusion. Donovan gave different interview and sleeve note answers and Cattini wasn’t even able to get a letter from Jones to prove he was there.
He had known Jimmy Page since almost a decade earlier. “When I was with Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, Jim was in the support band when we used to do gigs,” he said. “So I knew Jim from the early days when he was about fourteen, fifteen years old. He was good then, by the way.”
He had also been on Peter Grant’s shortlist when the group that would later become Led Zeppelin was being assembled. The approach never quite materialised. “I was very busy doing sessions,” he recalled. “I had been on the road for nine years, and suddenly I was at home, getting into my own bed at night.” The call never came.
Cattini became a part of the inner circle of the British music industry thanks to his work with John Paul Jones and Lulu’s backing band. “I got very friendly with Maurice,” Cattini said. “Maurice used to use me on broadcasts and records. I remember getting a phone call at three o’clock in the morning from Maurice saying she’s left me. We were working at a club in Southend.”
He played on Bee Gees recordings, including material that appeared on the 1972 album To Whom It May Concern, which contained the ballad “Run to Me.”
“I was on the first albums I did with them,” he confirmed. “That’s right, good, I’m glad you remembered.”
Paul McCartney came calling for a project that, at the time, went unreleased. It was eventually known as Thrillington, the alias McCartney used for an orchestral version of his Ram album, recorded in 1971 but held back from release until 1977.
“That was quite interesting,” he said. “It was never released. I think he just did it as a whatever you wanted to do, you know, just when you’ve got that sort of money, just do what you like.”
He had known McCartney since the early Sixties, through encounters with the Beatles during the Billy Fury days, when the Silver Beatles had come around wanting introductions to Fury. McCartney offered him a place in his post-Beatles group. “I got offered the job with Wings at one stage, which I turned down. Obviously, because I didn’t want to go. I’d done enough work on the road.”
He had also played on Lou Reed’s self-titled debut solo album, recorded in London in late 1971. Reed mentioned him by name during the session.
“Yeah, one of the tracks I remember him saying to me: hey Clem, you really got into that, man,” he said. “I could see you getting on the other side of the wall. I was doing this thing and it was like late in the afternoon and I was getting tired and all I wanted to do was get it down and go have my dinner.”
The track was “The Ocean.”
In the mid-1970s, a guitar riff was developed by Terry Britten that had the mysterious, coiled tension of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” and a lyric was written to it by Christine Holmes/Authors about a crystal-ball reader and a stray black cat. The song was placed with Cliff Richard, who was initially reluctant. His producer, Bruce Welch, persisted. The recording was recorded at Abbey Road in September 1975, with Britten on guitar and Cattini on drums.
“Terry Britten and Christine Sparkle wrote the song, rang me up and said could I come and do a demo for them,” Cattini said. “And I did the demo. And then Bruce, who I knew anyway he used to come to my house quite a bit when we were at the 2i’s, he rang me up and said, you did the demo for ‘Devil Woman.’ I said yes. He said, could you come and do the master? So I went and did the master at EMI. And the rest is history. I’m surprised it never got to number one, actually. It’s a good record and good song.”
“Devil Woman” reached number nine in Britain and number six in the United States, Richard’s highest-ever American chart position, in the summer of 1976. The co-writer Cattini called Christine Sparkle is the same person as Christine Holmes, one of several names she used professionally over the years; the multiple identities caused decades of confusion over the writing credits.
Hot Chocolate’s “So You Win Again” from 1977 was another
session Cattini confirmed, his memory jogged by Errol Brown, who had told him
which tracks he had played on. Herbie Flowers was on bass.
But the Wombles were more of a challenge. Mike Batt, who wrote all the material, was not content to write novelty pop songs. There was jazz and country and big band and orchestral music to be written and all this had to be covered by the musicians involved.
“Some of the music he wrote was great,” Cattini said. “One of my favourite tracks of the Wombles thing, ‘The King Could White Time Tales,’ it’s a big band thing that was really interesting to play. He wrote some good stuff, Mike, in fairness. The whole album is all different. You’ve got the country, you’ve got the jazz, you’ve got the pop, you’ve got the sort of like orchestral. He was very versatile in that respect, fairness to him.”
Chris Spedding was on guitar. Les Hurdle was on bass. Cattini appeared on Top of the Pops once in a Wombles costume, which he mentioned without much ceremony.
A thread connecting a number of these engagements was Bernard Jewry, know as Shane Fenton and later reborn in the early 1970s as Alvin Stardust. Cattini had known Jewry since the Tornados days, when Shane Fenton and the Fentones were on the same bill.
“When I was with the Tornados, we used to tour with Shane Fenton and the Fentons,” he said. “And it was through the Fentons that we recorded ‘Telstar,’ because we’d recorded ‘The Breeze and I,’ and we found out the Fentons were recording and putting it out. I told Joe Meek, and he said, come back to London. We were on summer season in Yarmouth. He said, well, I’ve got this thing I’ve written called Telstar. So we went back to London and recorded ‘Telstar.’ So if Shane Fenton and the Fentons hadn’t recorded ‘The Breeze and I’ and put that out instead, we’d have had something else instead of ‘Telstar.’ Just a bit of luck, really.”
In his Alvin Stardust incarnation, Jewry had a number of hits in the early-to-mid seventies, including “Jealous Mind” and fronting “My Coo Ca Choo,” (which was sung by writer Peter Shelley). Cattini played on those too. “He was great,” Cattini said. “He was a real nice lad.”
The work dried up in the 1980s, as drum machines and sequencers came in.
“All sorts of things started to change. You got all what I call the mechanical music coming in, didn’t it,” he said. “All the drum machines and things. And with any business, you know, you’re the flavour of the month, and suddenly you’re not the flavour of the month anymore. People want other people. And I started to — my work as a session man started to go down. So I reformed the Tornados, you know, and went back on the road for a while.”
The thing he didn’t know was that there would be younger artists coming to work with him. Paul Weller tracked him down for his 2010 album Wake Up the Nation. Weller wanted Cattini for the track “No Tears to Cry,” a lush, string-laden ballad with the feel of a Walker Brothers record. The phone range, and Cattini had no idea who was calling.
“I’ve got to be honest,” he said. “I didn’t know who Paul Weller was at that time. I was talking to a friend of mine, and I said, oh, I’ve got this guy rang me up, I said Paul Weller, he wants me to do a track. And my friend fell on the floor. I said, what’s that all about? He said, do you know who it is? I said, no, I haven’t got a clue. And he went, oh, he’s the man. You know, he’s the king. I went, oh. Which I wish he hadn’t told me, because it made me nervous.”
He went to Weller’s studio. “He was absolutely ace. He was really nice, nice fella. Made me a cup of tea, gave me a donut, and we recorded the track. And he paid me a nice cheque. So I was very pleased.”
Clem Cattini called himself “a musical navvie”. It was a humble description, but the records he played on say otherwise. Forty-three of them reached number one in Britain. He drummed on “Telstar” and “Shakin’ All Over” two of the most important rock and roll records this country has produced. On the latter he made a mistake during the session that the producer chose to keep.
“Sometimes out of mistakes,” he said, “you get better things happening.”
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