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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