Free Seize the Day by Mike Read

rather abashed, ‘I’m afraid that was my fault. I was wafting the smoke away and all the children thought I was keeping time and followed me rather than the band.’
    As well as Cliff, there was a liberal helping of rock royalty in my own corner of Surrey. I’d grown up in Walton-on-Thames and Weybridge so it was home territory and I bought a house there. An increasing number of rock stars and the like began to move into the area. I’d known Kenwood, John Lennon’s house in Weybridge, through my early teenage years as there were often parties there before it became the home of a Beatle. The big mock-Tudor mansion had been owned by Ken Wood, the founder of the eponymous food mixer company, and his kids had parties there. With Lennon in residence it seemed ideal to try for an article for our Brooklands College rag magazine, the establishment where I’d attempted to balance studying English Literature, Art and British Constitution with guitar, girlfriends, parties and tennis. The crest on the door read
Lennon Hibernia
, which appeared friendly enough, but he had a rather tetchy Welsh chauffeur who was pretty scary and very security conscious. John very kindly gave me a large Chelsea boot which had been sitting in his garden. Very decent, I thought, although it was probably a major obstacle for anyone mowing the lawn. The 7-foot-high boot had been used as a prop in
A Hard Day’s Night
, in the scene where Paul McCartney shrank, to make him look small. We hired a lorry and towed it around the town a few times before it came to rest near the old wall of death at Brooklands race track and eventually fell apart. Nobody seemed too bothered, but these days we’d have been looking at selling it to a Japanese collector for £100,000. I still have a photograph of it.
    Lennon eventually sold the house to a local car dealer, Billy Atkins. When we were kids Billy could be seen on his second-hand car lot complete with camel-hair coat, flogging old motors. How he came to buy Kenwood and several other houses in St George’s Hill, heaven knows, best not to ask, but he was more than generous in throwing open his doors to the regulars of the Flint Gate pub and letting the locals hang out at the house where many classic Beatle hits had been written. ‘Bring your guitar,’ he’d say to me, ‘and go and sit in the Blue Room, you’ll get some inspiration there for your songwriting.’
    The room had no furniture, so I had to sit on the floor, and it was empty except for a pair of old leather sandals that had escaped the famous division of property between John and Cynthia. Maybe I tried too hard, maybe I was expecting too much, but I only wrote one complete song there. All the same, while it might not have been as good as Lennon’s songs that came out of that room, I still have the demo I made of ‘London Town’ and it stands up pretty well. I also worked there on a song called ‘Cinema Saint’, which I felt was perfect for David Bowie. Of course he never heard it, but I was writing highly diverse material with very out-of-the-ordinary lyrics. No trite ‘I love her, she loves me’ lines from this lad. The demo is probably where it belongs, on an old cassette in a box somewhere, and I think I can say without fear of contradiction that ‘London Town’ was the least successful song to escape from that room.
    Billy was a bit of a villain, there was no doubt of that. There was something of the underworld about him. Everybody knew him around Weybridge, where he’d commandeer a desk in somebody’s office or shop, use the phone and order tea, and nobody would dare ask him to leave. He was rather Fagin-esque, sending boys to the shops on petty pilfering raids. He was probably the love-child of Fagin and Walter Mitty. He could be hellishly embarrassing. If you were in a restaurant with friends and Billy came in he’d shout ‘Don’t pretend that you don’t know me’ in a loud voice that silenced the place. The premise locally was