Is there anywhere online I could listen to the 'Grannie' album?  Ive tried Youtube as almost everything these days surfaces on there but alas no luck.

Phil Newton and Grannie.

I don’t really do the past, but a friend of mine saw that the Grannie album was being released by Wooden Hill and he asked me if I was singing on it. (I’m not. That’s Fred). He directed me to this site and I thought oh well…

I finished school in 1971 determined to leave Cornwall, where I had grown up, and come to London to join a band. There was an ad in Melody Maker that said, ‘Signed band seeks singer’, so I rang the number and it was Jan from Grannie saying there was an audition the following Saturday in Ilford.

I turned up at the audition in a small rehearsal room at the back of Sainsbury’s  and was met by Jan, Dave Holland (‘H’), John the drummer and Phil.

For the next eight months I worked at Kentons furniture store in Stoke Newington, (thanks to Phil who had a job as assistant window dresser for the Kentons chain), slept on Phil’s sofa and was the lead singer with Grannie,

The album was already pressed at this point but Fred had left.

Jan and Phil and ‘H’ were all really warm towards me and introduced me to the delights of cockney speech (Me trousers ‘ave broke) and the general ‘living in East London’ experience.

Not long after I joined we went to a studio in Denmark Street which I remember being a couple of doors down from where Rose Morris is now and I recorded some tracks. This may be the same studio that Fred talks about.

It was my first recording session.

John the drummer had left the band so we found someone named Graham who was from Zimbabwe which was still Rhodesia at that time (Interestingly, he knew Ricky Fataar and Blondie Chaplin, also from Zimbabwe/Rhodesia, who were working with the Beach Boys touring the ‘Holland’ and ‘Carl and the Passions’ albums).

We played various places and eventually landed some gigs at the Speakeasy.

At one of them Bowie/Ziggy and Pete Townshend were in the club as well as Ed Goodgold, who was the manager of Sha Na Na. He came up to Phil and said how great we were and gave him Tony Stratton Smith’s number (Charisma records) and said he would tell him to come and see us.

Following that, I think the same night, the manager of the Speakeasy, introduced himself and said he would manage the band and we could rehearse at the Speakeasy on Sundays when it was closed.

Around this time Graham left the band for some reason and on the second rehearsal I arrived at the Speak and met Ginger Johnson who was an Australian drummer Phil was very excited about.

We rehearsed with him that day and as we were packing the gear we were talking about needing a van.  The Speak manager said to us ‘Oh do you need a van? I’ve got one.’

Then he suggested we pack all the group gear in the van and he would look after it until the following week at a place he had in the Mile End Road. We did that for a couple of weeks.

Then on the next Sunday I was walking up north Regent Street toward Margaret Street where the Speak was situated when I saw the manager coming towards me. As I got within earshot he stretched his arms out wide in a helpless gesture and said ‘All the gear’s been nicked’

As the singer I didn’t have any gear but Jan and Phil lost everything including the Mellotron and Phil’s Les Paul. H had taken his bass home but he lost his rig. Everything was on hire purchase and uninsured.

(To this day, whenever I hear people romanticising the 1960’s East End criminal fraternity, I always remember that it was East End working people who had their gear stolen somewhere on the Mile End Road.)

We talked about carrying on but I confess it seemed to me like a huge mountain to climb and by that time I wanted to start a band of my own.

So I left and went back to Cornwall.

I came back to London a year later with my band and one night I met ‘H’ at the Fulham Palace Greyhound where we were playing. I forget what we talked about except that he was very impressed with our PA.

Nothing much happened for that band and we split. I drifted for a while,

trying to re invent myself ,as you do, then Punk and New  Wave happened and I got signed. After that I worked pretty consistently through the 80s and 90s on my own stuff and doing session and production work.

Like a lot of people in the industry I didn’t get super rich or famous, but I did okay through publishing because I wrote songs.

And song writing was the main thing I took away from my time working with Phil.

I had written songs before I joined Grannie but being a keyboard player as well as a singer everything I wrote felt too chordy.

I learned from Phil how melody could dictate the chords in a song not the other way around. He would sing the melody and sit the chords underneath with these nice little guitar licks that drifted in and out of the vocal part and he would also let the vocal change the tempo and mood of the music.

Songs like ‘Leaving’ really show this but there were others that aren’t on the album like ‘Wait in Line’. I can still remember the guitar lick and sing it to this day. Catchy as hell.

And of course Phil could play the blues. He was a big Clapton fan in 1971 and we would all stay up until 4 in the morning, usually listening to the ‘Layla’ Album and talking while he doodled and wrote on the guitar.

I also remember when he played live he would tap his foot sideways instead of up and down. I asked him about it once and he said he copied it off Paul McCartney because he thought it looked cool.

These days I teach music and occasionally I drive out east on the A13 and turn south on the A117.  The sign pointing north says Manor Park, where Phil lived at that time, and I always think back.

I was so sorry to hear that Phil had passed away. I never saw him again after 1971 but working with him was a really formative experience for me.

He introduced me to proper song writing.

SB

Well! What a lot of momories reading this forum have evoked for me.

My part in the Grannie story goes back to 1956 when I was pupil at Napier Road infants school in East Ham London. Among the other kids in the class was Phil Newton. We were not by any means best mates or enemies but went through infant, junior and secodary schools in the same year and mostly in the same class. We laft school in the mid 60’s and that was that, until 69/70 when I bumped into Phil at a local music venue. He told me of the bands and music he played and I told him I was now an electrician. One thing led to another and I became Grannies roadie. Humping gear in and out of gigs and rehearsal rooms etc. The worst thing was that Phil lived in a first floor flat with a narrow staircase, and that was where the gear was stored.

          The gigs they did at the Speakeasy were brilliant. Grannie were a really good live band, the interplay of Phils guitar and Daves bass was what really impressed me. Among the covers that  always went down well at gigs were thier renditions of ‘Ohio’ by Crosby, Stills & Nash, ‘Black hearted woman’ by The Allman Bros and Claptons ‘ Have you ever loved a woman’.

          I was at the recording sessions in Denmark Street, some good stuff was put down that day including ‘Black hearted woman’. I wonder what happened to those recordings.

          Another gig that sticks in my mind was  a 21^st birthday party in a big posh house somewhere in Kensington. The band got there and set up for the gig and then the guests sat down for a meal and the band were ushered into a romm for an hour or so until they were to play. The caterers said they would bring us some drinks, they did. A case of 12 bottles of champagne! The rest of that evening is somthing of a blur for some reason. I know that the next morning I woke up on the floor of Graham, the Rodhesian drummer’s, flat in Chalk Farm with a steaming hangover!

          As for the bands gear being stolen. Well all I can say is that it was all very fishy. A big shame. Grannie were certainly good enough to have gone on to enjoy the success and recognition that they deserved.

          Many years later with the advent of the internet I tried to trace Phils wherabouts and found a site about a tribute evening for Phil Newton who had died a year earlier with an email contact. I wrote to find out if it was the same Phil as I had known and it was so I went from Somerset where I now live to the gig and met a lot of people who had known and played with him in the latter part of his life.

          And as for the Famous Grannie LP, Yes I have a copy. Cheers Phil

R.I.P. Phil Newton

          Pete