THIS ISLAND LIFE
I SPENT the summer of 1966 playing cricket for Ryde CC. It was the one and only season I spent away from Havenstreet — and there was an interesting development in my absence.
That autumn, my friend Roy Winter said: "You ought to come back next season mate. We’ve got a new bloke playing for us. He came to the village from London a few months ago and he’s a bit of a lad."
This was my introduction to the existence of one Malcolm Lawrence — and Roy was spot on. Nobody, either socially or professionally, has ever made me laugh as much as Malc.
When you’ve been friends for more than 40 years, things are said and events happen which, over time, crystallise into priceless anecdotes.
Now, as enthusiastic laddies who lunch, we relive them with great exuberance. If it’s a quiet meal in a village pub you’re after, don’t sit near us.
But it occurred to me the other day that though plenty of people know of Malc — his stint as resident DJ at the La Babalu in the Sixties and Seventies made sure of that — not many really know much about him.
For a start, how come someone so instinctively witty and amusing did not make a career for himself in the entertainment industry?
The answer is simple. He was never at home with scripts or pre-planned routines. He responds best to people, implements and situations and still does.
What you or I may see as a menu-stand on a restaurant table in his hands suddenly becomes an indispensable aid in his impersonation of Bobby Ball.
A few months ago he embarked upon an improvised soliloquy of a vicar lamenting the absence of toilets in his church, which reduced my wife to such a state of giggling helplessness I didn’t think she’d ever recover.
Indeed, there’s something about the church which appeals to Malc. A few years ago, during post-match jollities at the White Hart, he began to flick the top of his lager around as if it were holy water.
This was accompanied by some cod Latin liturgy and the whole performance caught the eye of a chap sitting quietly in the corner.
He wandered over to talk with Malc and they left the pub. The man happened to be a lay preacher and he had some vestments in his car.
Five minutes later, Malc came back in wearing a cassock and the performance resumed with Lawrence enthusiastically quaffing his Guinness because 'this Poping lark is hard work’.
It was classic Lawrence and the lay preacher, who that day did more to further the cause of his religion than any sermon will ever do, laughed loudest of all.
Malc was born in Hayes, Middlesex, and his earliest claim to fame was playing the drums in a group (we never called them bands in those days, unless Billy Cotton was standing in front of them) called Lee Allen and the Sceptres.
Malc and his mates had one chance of fame when they won a competition to be auditioned by Joe Meek, the rather odd bloke from a Gloucestershire village whose fame as a record producer flared briefly and brightly in the early Sixties.
He was a man who tinkered with noise rather than simply produced pop records, and his greatest hit was Telstar by The Tornadoes, which topped the charts on both sides of the Atlantic.
Malc and his mates, having won a local competition, trooped off to Meek’s strange studio, which he had constructed in a three-floor flat above a leather goods shop in Islington.
He remembers the legendary producer’s verdict on the group: "You’re okay but nothing special. Mind you, the drummer made the most of a poor kit."
During this time, Malc met Ann Lantry, who went on to achieve fame as the drummer in The Honeycombs (another Meek creation) who had a worldwide hit with Have I the Right? in 1964. Her mother and Malc’s worked at EMI together.
Lee Allen and the Sceptres must have impressed at an audition at the Hammersmith Odeon, because they got signed up by a local agency and soon began to get regular bookings (gigs to those born after 1980).
They were even contracted to go on tour with Mike Sarne, who had managed to compile an entire career out of his one hit, Come Outside. But he was taken ill and the tour was cancelled.
There was plenty of local work, however, and Malc recalls regularly appearing at the ABC Club,
which was in a cellar under a bakery on Ealing Broadway.
He said: "There were three groups who took turns to provide the entertainment for the night. Mann Hugg Mann Blues, who went on to become Manfred Mann, and a bunch of lads who called themselves The Rolling Stones.
"We used to drink with three blokes called Keith Richard, Mick Jagger and Charlie Watts regularly. But they suddenly disappeared. I have no idea what became of them …"
Drumming up a wedding storm
Malc’s own drumming career reached a predictably chaotic conclusion. He got drunk on neat rum during a lunchtime wedding gig, turned up for the evening booking, went to play his first note and promptly fell head-first through the entire drum kit, destroying most of it.
Lee Allen and the other Sceptres felt they could prosper without their drummer (they didn’t, of course) and a couple of years later he turned up on the Island with his parents, after they bought a home in Havenstreet.
From Joe Meek to Fred Price was something of a culture shock but it was the Sixties after all.
It also meant the start of Malc’s career as resident DJ at the La Babalu Club, where his reputation as an entertainer really began.
But I’ll tell you all about that next week.