The Krewcats

The Krewcats were formed after Marty decided he was going to be a film star. He was in fact going to Australia to take part in film about Ned Kelly. I think it was Ned Kelly, anyway we decided to stay together and make an instrumental. I played a lot of Chet Atkins numbers in those days, so I put the idea of 'Trambone' to the rest of the guys. They thought it was a good idea and we booked the Studio. I also had written a couple of original instrumentals myself and we decided that 'Peak Hour' would be the 2nd instrumental we would record. We booked the small studio upstairs at Portland Place I.B.C studios. We had Terry Johnson for our sound engineer and Glynn Johns as our tape jock. It was Glynns job to change tapes and make the the tea and so on. I think he must have been about 16 at the time. We recorded the 2 tracks in about 2 hours and that was that as far as the recording went. We then went to our, so called, manager, Eddie Rogers, and he went on the rampage through the record business looking for a record label that would release our little musical renderings. We struck it lucky, Norrie Paramor of Cliff and the Shadows fame, said he would take the recordings and release them on Columbia E.M.I records. To our delight it was released and it made number 31 in the charts. The only problem was the fact that Norrie had soaked the track with echo. Still 31 was pretty good and it left us with a little niche in rock history. We performed one night stands for a while but we weren't earning enough money for Brian, who was married, to live on. I was doing a few sessions and was ok but Tony and Lic were a bit Broke as well. Brian and Lic were then offered a job in the orchestra at Yarmouth in the Frankie Howerd show. They, of course, were delighted and packed immediately. Tony and I were the last of the Krewcats and we had to go our separate ways. Tony and I did make one trip to Yarmouth to try and get the band together again but to no avail. Brian had been offered the job with the Shadows and had accepted the offer. Its was a short while later the Lic joined the Shads with Brian. Alas Tony didn't carry on in the business. I went on with career and never looked back. This was the brief life of the Krewcats. It was good at the time and we all learned a lot from being with the band.

I leaned about the business and managers very quickly. I remember going to our manager to ask for a loan of £30 to pay some bills. The manager asked me if I had any collateral. Collateral? what the hell was that. He then reminded me that we had a semi hit record and I had written the B side, which should bring in quite a substantial amount of money for the composer, ME. He made me sign over the rights to the song over to him. To this day I have never received any royalties from 'Peak Hour'. I should imagine that the title must have grossed £10,000 in this last 37 years. Not bad return for £30 ay! The Krewcats did get together once a few years ago when Marty appeared on 'This is your life'. We came out at the end of the show and Marty was completely taken back. I also appeared with Marty at the Albert Hall for a 30 year reunion. It was great, we played 'Teenager in Love' and 'Bad Boy' we both enjoyed the experience and it brought back a lot of memories.