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It was in September 1966 that the Shadows first met seventeen-yearold Olivia Newton John at a gig in Bournemouth and for Bruce it was love at first sight.
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I desperately wanted Olivia to audition for our third pantomine Cinderella which lined up at the Palladium at Christmas but she declined and flew back to Australia and her steady boyfriend in November. They were troubled times for me, my wife Anne had found out about Olivia, Olivia had gone back to her boyfriend, and there was a lot of squabbling going on within the group!
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At the tail end of the Cinderella show at the Palladium, Bruce bumped into the Seekers’ road manager who told him, ‘A friend of yours is in town and would like to see you.’ Bruce made it to the phone faster than you could say ‘Kip Keino’. Olivia was back!
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I called her straight away, and we started seeing each other. Dwayne, my son, was six then so it wasn’t an easy decision to make, but Anne and I eventually parted, and Olivia and I moved into a rented flat overlooking Lord’s Cricket Ground in St John’s Wood. We were up on the ninth floor, so there was a grandstand view for test matches, in fact some of our neighbours used to rent their balconies out!
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However much in love Bruce and Olivia were, it did nothing to improve her cooking, as Shadows recording engineer Peter Vince discovered when he and his wife were invited round one night.
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Olivia duly brought out something to drink and a couple of dishes of those little cheese footballs. All set for a good evening, I thought, but about an hour later there appeared to be no aroma of food in the air, and I'd seen more footballs than an out-of-form goalkeeper. ;
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Despite a few hints and some well-timed coughs we were still wading through the spherical dairy produce after the second hour, and when Bruce and Olivia spent the third hour totally engrossed in each other on a mattress in the corner of the room, I felt it was time to go! We never did get the meal, and I wondered how Bruce didn’t waste away with all that exercise and no food except cheese footballs!
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It was a number I'd written called Alentejo, but in between doing sessions for that album and some things with Cliff, Bruce had started to work with Olivia in the studio, working with her both as a solo singer and on occasion backing vocals for the Shadows — she’s even on the Shads’ version of The Day I Met Marie. She had such long hair that it often hid her headphones, and I wrongly assumed this one particular day that she didn’t have any on. Bruce had a habit of always clasping his hands over his crutch while he was working, so as he, Hank and John were adding some vocal backing, I pressed the intercom and said, ‘For God’s sake leave it alone, Bruce!’ I couldn’t understand why Bruce started glaring at me until Olivia turned round and I could see she was wearing headphones and obviously heard every word! Oops!
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For one particular week’s residency in Darwen in Lancashire we were lucky enough to secure the services of two excellent lighting engineers, who were not only good at their job but also very decorative! A pleasant change from working with three blokes all the time! I think it was their first and last time as spotlight operators, but Olivia and my Carole obviously enjoyed their
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I'd been browsing through some books at the airport and I picked up Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. I suppose my conservation consciousness was becoming more acute and I felt strongly about damaging pesticides being sprayed indiscriminately over the countryside, killing not just the harmful insects but creatures like bees and butterflies and others, essential to the world’s natural balance. So I wrote this song Silvery Rain about my feelings on the subject (a number that Olivia was to record on her album Physical fifteen years later).
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Bruce and his wife Anne were finally divorced, and he became engaged to the girl who was named as ‘the other woman’, Olivia Newton John.
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Hank would always arrive second, and Brian and myself would turn up next, when all the instruments were in tune. The night we played at the Talk of the North we were staying at the Piccadilly Hotel in Manchester, and had changed into our tuxedos there, arriving at 11.15 virtually ready to be on stage by 11.30. John was alone in the dressing room, and his face, as it had increasingly been over that year, was black. He was fuming when he demanded to know where Hank was. Brian, Olivia and I hadn't seen him for hours, and had imagined he'd already be there. He turned up with five minutes to go, breezed in with a‘ Hi fellas’, picked up his guitar and said, ‘Give us a “D”, John.’
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I just broke down. Bruce was about to run out on us, John had got it in for me and my fuse just went. I ran out of the building and gulped in a mouthful of cold Lancashire air. I went back ten minutes later having regained my composure a bit, to find that Olivia had persuaded Bruce not to go home, as we'd got a job to do and a contract to fulfil.
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For Bruce it was a comparatively non-musical year mainly spent decorating and organising the house at Hadley Common he'd bought with Olivia.
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I'd been working solidly since 1958 so I thought I deserved a break, although I was spending a certain amount of time in our ‘Shadows Music’ office at 17 Savile Row listening to new songs. I got very domesticated and bought Olivia a red setter which we called Geordie, and later a companion for him who got saddled with Murphy. The first part of the year was really spent around the house or in the office, but later on in the autumn Olivia and I got away up to Edinburgh for a while, and I was delighted to be able to show her a glimpse of Newcastle through the window as our train pulled into Central Station on the return journey. With the two setters locked firmly in the guards van, Im eagerly recounting a potted history of my hfe on Tyneside when two brown hairy things with long ears hurtle past the window! I leapt up, flew out of the door and accosted the nearest porter.
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Well, I thought as I pressed myself flat against the edge of the bridge, I've had lots of good times, things are obviously being balanced out now! No dogs, hardly any clothes, freezing cold, out of breath, my train moving off with Olivia on it, and no money — things couldn’t get worse! Could they?
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As the train rattled past me I looked up and saw Olivia, not even looking out of the window for me or showing the slightest concern, and worst of all she was patting Geordie and Murphy!
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After a lot of grovelling to the station master I caught a slow train to Kings Cross which crawled in hours later. Needless to say I didn’t exactly walk through the door, kiss Olivia on the cheek and enquire about her health!
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My mind wasn’t just full of nurses and clinics, I was getting restless, and started writing again. I chatted to Hank about doing something without actually using the name ‘the Shadows’ or just bashing out instrumentals the whole time. As we talked and kicked various ideas around — whether to perform as a duo or add a new voice — John Farrar’s name cropped up. We’d met him in Australia while he’d been playing with a group called the Strangers, and had been very impressed by both his guitar playing and his singing, as he had an amazing falsetto. Olivia knew him from Melbourne, as he went out with her ex-singing partner Pat Carroll, so we rang him and asked him if he wanted to come to England. He arrived during August so the three of us took off to Portugal for a working holiday. Hank and myself had already written ten songs and finished a couple more which we wrote with John, My Home Town and Faithful. While arranging and routining, we found that in John we had new influences and dimensions — it was a real three-way thing as he was much more a musician than me and on a par with Hank. John had a tremendous talent for arranging vocal harmonies so we did a lot of West Coast harmonies stuff, along the lines of Crosby, Stills and Nash, with John organising who sang what.
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We learned a lot from him. John and I were kindred spirits, because we both had real dedication and absolute determination to get things right. Although he was pretty quiet, he said what he wanted to say through his music. As I was getting increasingly involved with Hank and John, Olivia had spent most of the year with a group called Toomorrow, which was put together with the intention of being a Monkees-type thing, you know — the instant formula for success! The good-looking guy who fronted the group was Ben Thomas. The other two members of the group, Chris Slade and Vic Cooper, had both been members of Tom Jones’ backing group, the Squires, an outfit whose ranks ex-Shadow John Rostill also passed through. Despite Olivia having to spend quite a bit of time in the States during the year, she was back in England for the first night of the group’s film, simply called Toomorrow, at the London Pavillion in August, but it didn’t set the celluloid circuit on fire, which must have pleased Susan George as Olivia
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Also that year, Cliff was going to make a film called Xanadu (coincidentally Olivia was to make a film called Xanadu nine years later!), a picture about young people oppressed by society, with the script by Alan Plater, and I was invited to write the music.
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breakfast that followed were attended only by the happy couple along with Bruce and Olivia.
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In keeping with the majority of show business honeymoons the celebrations were cut short due to work commitments — in this particular instance a rehearsal at Bruce’s house at Hadley Wood, a mere hour and a half after Hank and Carole tied the knot. Bruce and John Farrar had started producing Olivia's records which resulted in an immediate hit for her with her debut single /f Not For You, which made the Top 10 in the spring of 1971. Six months later her single Banks of The Ohio also went into the Top 10 and stayed in the charts for seventeen weeks. Bruce admits that at the time Olivia didn’t have the most powerful voice in the world, although she had a great ear for music, which combined with his constant striving for absolute perfection became a recipe for success. In December 1971 the whole ‘family’ toured the United Kingdom: Marvin, Welch and Farrar, along with Brian Bennett, Cliff and Olivia. 1971 had been a good year for the girl who had previously been known to the British public as ‘the one who’s on Cliffs TV series’ — she'd had two Top 10 hits and had established herself firmly. The previous twelve months had also been good for Cliff with four hits, Sunny Honey Girl, Silvery Rain, Flying Machine and Sing a Song of Freedom, but record buyers hadn’t dipped so deeply in their pockets for the offerings of Marvin, Welch and Farrar. Neither of their singles Faithful or Marmaduke nor their second LP Second Opinion made the charts. However the debut album did enter at Number 30 only for the record company to be taken by surprise and have no stock of records to meet the demand, thereby losing out on a potentially big album. Exactly a year after her first single Olivia’s third hit What Js Life crashed into the best sellers and really put her on the map as a major artist. Two weeks later, at the end of March 1972, after a five year love affair, Olivia broke off her engagement to Bruce Welch. Bruce was shattered.
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In September, Marvin and Farrar toured the Far East with Cliff and Olivia, taking John Rostill and Brian Bennett; Brian recalls:
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We had a lot of fun on that trip. I remember Olivia insisted on authentic Japanese suites in the hotels — and she always got them! She was a fun person to be with. We all played cards a lot, and charades, and we drank a lot of that lovely hot Japanese saki. We didn’t realise how potent it was, and one night sat there drinking for hours. It was only when Cliff got up to walk out and fell flat on his back that we knew it was powerful stuff!
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Still interested in finding out more from the Bible, but not yet really committed, in 1971 we moved to a small farm we had bought in South East Devon. It lay in a beautiful unspoilt valley with not a pylon in sight. Even the poles that carried the electricity and telephone lines stood unnoticed in the borders of the thick woods that covered part of the land. The woods also concealed badgers and wild deer and although we occasionally thrilled to see anything up to seven deer at a time cautiously crossing our fields, we never once saw a badger, only the signs that they were there. One afternoon when Bruce and Olivia were staying with us, I proudly took Olivia, who loves animals, to see the badgers’ sett, leading the way boldly through the thick under growth. ; arrived at the sett a few yards ahead of her and pr omptly broke wind. ‘Look Livvy, this is where the badgers live,’ I said div ertingly, hoping she wouldn't notice a smell that would have peeled the bark off a tree. She gasped for air. ‘Is that how badgers smell? It’s awful.’ Not wishing to malign Mr Badger and his family, I sheepishly owned up, at which point we both collapsed with helpless laughter.
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The musical director of the Brian Bennett Orchestra with Olivia and Cliff
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One facet of our worship of Jehovah is to share in telling others of his purpose to restore this earth to a peaceful paradise through the means of Christ's Kingdom. Jesus set the pattern for this in his ministry and of course told Christians to pray for it in the model prayer usually known as the ‘Lord’s Prayer’ or ‘Our Father’. Our places of worship are called ‘Kingdom Halls’, where we have five meetings a week. Everyone is welcome, of course, and the emphasis is on learning scriptural principles and applying them in our lives. The ‘Kingdom Halls’ are also, from time to time, used for funeral services and weddings, which reminds me of the day Carole and I got married. We had obtained a special licence in order to avoid publicity and with Bruce acting as chauffeur and get-me-there-on-time best man, and he and Olivia as witnesses, we got married at nine o’clock in the morning. The lady registrar was delightful, every line was spoken in a soft romantic tone of voice and Carole, overcome with emotion, started having difficulty repeating her vows. The registrar encouraged her sweetly, while Bruce kept looking pointedly at his watch, because we were rehearsing at ten o'clock. Afterwards we went back to Bruce’s house, which was being redecorated, and amazed the painters by drinking champagne at twenty to ten in the morning. Since then we have been blessed with two beautiful children, Tahlia, who is ten, and Ben, seven. When our little girl was only four months old in April 1973, Carole and I were baptised and as Tahlia has grown physically, so we have grown in knowledge of Bible truth and the application of it in our lives.
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I'd stopped drinking brandy completely by then which made me feel a whole lot better in myself, and my love-life seemed as though it was taking a turn for the better, when Olivia moved back in with me in all One year after we'd parted, we tried to make a go of it and really w orked hard at a reconciliation, but it didn’t work out. In June 1973 Olivia and I parted for good. Working with the Shadows again got me off my backside and gave me something to be part of, and apart from that I’d always been and still am, nmmmiensely proud of the Shadows. I started writing songs with John Rostill which we often used to demo in the studio at his house. He was knocking out some very good songs around that time, including Let Me Be There and If You Love Me Let Me Know, which we took down on a Revox tape recorder and I took them to Peter Gormley’s old house on the Thames at Sunbury. Peter liked them, which resulted in Olivia releasing Let Me Be There, but it failed miserably in this country, only selling about eight thousand copies. One of the songs I wrote with John was Please Mister Please which was inspired by the breakup of my relationship with Livvy. We expected great things of the song and thought it stood an excellent chance. John had been in the States playing with Tom Jones until the summer, so maybe he’d absorbed the type of music that was right for America, because events were soon to take a strange turn — but it was too late for John.
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The events that followed seemed unreal. The coroner came and pronounced that John had been dead for five or six hours. The tragedy was compounded by the fact that he never lived to see the success of his songs Let Me Be There and If You Love Me Let Me Know, both of which became million-selling hits for Olivia in the States. Not being able to do any wrong in America with songs that were unsuccessful in Britain, Olivia had yet another million seller with Please Mister Please, so although the Shadows as such have never broken on the other side of the Atlantic, our songs couldn't have been more successful. It was such a pity that John wasn’t able to reap the benefits of his talent.
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Back in 1973, Cliff and Shadows’ promoter, Eddie Jarrett, had asked a guy called Brian Goode to put together a band to back one of the artists, Labi Siffre, who’d had three Top 30 hits during ’71 and ’72. He was going to be guesting on an Olivia Newton John show from Manchester. It was through Labi that Brian met Cliffs manager Peter Gormley, who'd also been looking after the Shadows, but with less and less to do in that direction had been devoting more of his time to Cliff and Olivia. It was through this meeting that came the work out at the house at Upper Harley Street, the base for Peter and Norrie Paramor, but it wasn’t until 1975 that Brian was going to become an integral part of the Shadows story.
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in 1975 John Farrar moved to America as Olivia Newton John’s producer and Bruce started working with Cliff, which came rather out of the blue.
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previous time I'd been there it had been in Santa Monica for the whole month of August with good friends like John Farrar and Olivia, but this time it was New York, we got caught in a violent blizzard, became hopelessly lost in the not-too-healthy district of Harlem and ended up having our hotel suite burgled. Apart from that things were great!
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After a brief spell in the printers’ trade Alan Jones started playing bass with assorted Mecca groups and stood himself in good stead for the future by learning to read music, and getting involved in session work. I took over the bass guitar for Tom Jones’ Squires, when John Rostill left, and I spent three and a half years with Tom before vetting back into sessions. I've played with stacks of different artists: George Harrison, Lulu, B.A. Robertson, Elvis Presley, Olivia Newton John, Gilbert O’Sullivan and Tom Jones, to name but a few. During the early part of 1977 Brian Bennett called me to ask if I’d like to do the ‘20 Golden Dates’ tour with the Shadows, and as I’d previously worked with Hank and Brian, and with Bruce on Olivia’s sessions, it seemed the right thing to do.
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16 SHADOWS (plus 28 weeks backing Cliff Richard) T REX JOHN TRAVOLTA & OLIVIA NEWTON-JOHN (Olivia Newton-John 2 more with Electric Light Orchestra)
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