In 1983, The Sex Pistols’ manager, Malcolm McLaren, brought Pippa Gee (20) to Stuart. “She was promoted like a hip hop cowgirl but Malcolm was so patriarchal and demonic that it was never going to work. We remade the Louise Cordet song, ‘I’m Just A Baby’, which was a beautiful song that I’d always loved. We made it contemporary and added another minute to it and darn, if it wasn’t a hit in Japan.”
One of Stuart’s more unlikely commissions came in 1984 with a teenybop star from France, 11-year-old Billy (21). “We did the backing tracks Shaky-style in London including ‘My Boy Lollipop’. Pete Wingfield was on it and he told me that his neighbour played drums on the hit version by Millie. Polydor took the tapes to France and they added backing vocalists. The overdubbing was so bad that it was like sticking a stamp on a stamp: you could see the joins.” And what happened to Billy? “He grew up!”
By 1984, Alvin Stardust (22) was widening the scope of his singles, but having once been Shane Fenton, he had never completely left his rock’n’roll roots. “Alvin and Lisa Goddard lived very close to me and we would have dinner together and that paid dividends. I brought him a story song, ‘I Won’t Run Away’, from John David. It was about a guy making a girl pregnant and promising that he would stick with her. It was heavy going for its time but it rang true with young ears. He sang it beautifully and it was a Top 10 single. The next three records were written by Mike Leeson and Peter Vale including ‘So Near To Christmas’. They were successful writers at the time – Mike had written For Your Eyes Only for a Bond movie – and they would do the backing vocals as well.”
As you will have gathered, John David is emerging as one of Stu’s regular and favourite songwriters. “Very much so. He’s from Wales and a very good writer. We used to have the same manager, which is one of the reasons why we worked together so much. He has also written for Status Quo, The Searchers and Samantha Fox. He’s still writing for Shaky and is involved in his new album.”
There were some differences between recording with Alvin and Shaky. “I like well-rehearsed ad-libs and I would say to Shaky, ‘I want you to yell out ‘Take it’ or something like that here’ and he’d do it right because the great ad-libs in rock’n’roll are on the beat, ideally the off-beat. I asked Alvin to do that and he tried but he was so out of time that I never used his attempts. That was the only downside with Alvin. He could do it in a concert because it came naturally but it wasn’t his bag to plan it. I learnt a lesson there. You can’t give everything the same coat of paint.”
As well as working with Cliff Richard, Stuart produced The Shadows (23). “They had left EMI with sore feelings as EMI wasn’t promoting them as they should have done. Polydor opened a new era for them with them recording big screen instrumentals for TV-promoted albums. I brought them some new material and in particular, another John David song, ‘On A Night Like This’, which was like The Shadows meeting Jimmy Buffett. I imagined it as the scene from 10 where Dudley Moore chases Bo Derek down the beach. It was exotic and it almost charted. I like The Shadows’ singing very much: their vocals have always been very underrated. I’d love to have done more with them, but I was very busy and they had a deadline for their album. However, Hank did play on the Comic Relief single.”
That Cliff Richard lookalike, Radio 1 DJ Mike Read (24) made some singles with Stuart. “He would do Top Of The Pops on a Thursday night and he would say, ‘I’ll be over as soon as it finishes.’ He would turn up four hours late because he had been chatting in the bar. I had to tell him that I couldn’t make records like this, and I did get some records out of him. He did ‘Dizzy’, some six years before Vic Reeves, as part of The Rockolas (25) and he rewrote ‘The Promised Land’, going down the A30 to Cornwall instead of travelling across America.”
“A ramshackle girl punk rockabilly quartet” (Stuart’s words) called The Shillelagh Sisters (26) recorded for CBS in 1984. “That was very disappointing as they asked Pete Waterman to remix the A-side and he turned it into a train wreck. Their girl singer, Jacquie O’Sullivan, later joined Bananarama.” Around the same time, Stu remixed ‘Devil In The New Man’ by The Revillos (27) for a single.
In 1985, Ricky Stone (28) recorded ‘Something’s Cookin’’, which was used over the credits of the ITV programme, Krazy Kitchen. Stu produced the single, which was released on Magnet. Memphis (29) was a Pet Shop Boys-styled duo, who came from the hit-making Orange Juice. Stu produced their single for Swamplands Records, ‘You Supply The Roses’, which was written by band member, James Kirk. Stu produced Claire Hamill (30) on ‘If You’d Only Talk To Me’. “That was a lovely record and another John David song.” In 1986, Stuart pursued a rare excursion into politics when he cut a single for RCA with a Liverpool duo, The Reverb Brothers (31), entitled ‘(Someone’s) Selling Off The Country.’
Stu made an album with the London eccentric, Hank Wangford (32), who praises and parodies country music at the same time. “The album was called Rodeo Radio and it was a good fun project. Hank is an old hippie and he would pat a band member on the head if he did well and hand out jazz Woodbines. I don’t go near the stuff and I told them that it had to be smoked outside. Old hippies never die – they just get put out to grass.”
In 1986 Stuart was asked to produce the Comic Relief single: “The Young Ones (33) were very hot at the time as were the writers Richard Curtis and Ben Elton. I remember the first day that we discussed the possibility with them of doing the record and we spent a couple of hours laughing our heads off. By then, I had my own studio, Master Rock in Kilburn and ‘Living Doll’ was the first record made in there and it went to No.l, which was amazing. The Young Ones were all in costume as we were shooting a video and so they looked thuggish and weird. Everyone was thinking, ‘What is Cliff going to say when he comes in?’, but he said, ‘Hello, chaps’ and they all went, ‘Ooh, it’s Cliff’ and that demolished everything and was so funny.”
When they came to cut the record, Stuart noticed a problem. “Cliff said, ‘Ready when you are, Stuart’, and he clicked his fingers and went, ‘I got myself a crying, talking…’ and I said, ‘Stop right there. ‘I got myself…’ is end of the pier’, and he said, ‘I’ve been singing like that for years.’ I said, ‘You should come in on ‘Got myself…’ with the word ‘Got’ on the downbeat. You listen to your original record.’ He realised that it did sound better and he went back to it immediately, but for every suggestion I made, he had three of his own.”
The single still sounds funny. “The danger is that a comedy record is not going to remain funny after more than one play, so you have got to put things in there that will make you laugh time and again as they do on the Peter Sellers and Stan Freberg records. How do you do that? It’s the way it’s executed. If a line is executed well, you hang onto that funny line as you would a great vocal from Elvis or John Lennon. People were going into pubs when ‘Living Doll’ was a hit and were imitating the jokes on that.”
A few months later, Stuart took another comedy record into the charts, ‘Je T’Aime’ from the ’Allo ’Allo! cast, René (Gordon Kaye) and Yvette (Vicki Michelle) (34) on the Sedition label. “We cut that in Liverpool when ’Allo ’Allo! was touring and I mixed it in London. René was the harassed bartender being chased by a glamorous barmaid, and it was very funny. It was on an independent label but it deserved to be on a major. I am proud of the B-side which was called ‘René DMC’, which stood for Devastating Macho Charisma, and it was a hip hop record about the cellar hiding the spies. René fell through and there is a cry and a shout, and it is so funny. Jeremy Lloyd, who wrote the TV series with David Croft, asked me what hip hop was. I said, ‘It’s just poems that rhyme’ and he rattled off 10 lines just like that. I was laughing and he was picking up on my reaction.”
The oddest group name to be associated with Stuart Colman is surely Vindaloo Summer Special (35). “That was ‘Rockin’ With Rita’, a mad comedic punk record. They were very cultish at the time, and it’s a bit like the Bonzo Dogs doing punk.”
In 1986 Stuart produced his ultimate hero, Little Richard (36) and the album, Lifetime Friend, was made in London. Stu encountered, much as he anticipated, a character considerably larger than life. “Little Richard comes from an incredibly complicated, deeply religious background but he also loves the show business life of Los Angeles, so he is a mixture of the religious and the glossy. I had to find abstract, almost oblique songs so that the listener can make up his own mind whether he is singing about God or his baby. He liked several of them and he wrote some of his own and so did Billy Preston. I brought over Travis Wammack, a great guitarist from Muscle Shoals, and I will never record a finer black voice than Little Richard’s. To see him work in the studio was spine-tingling. He psyches himself into singing and it’s rather like watching a wrestler or a weightlifter. Before they pull up the barbells, they are hollering and beating their chests and getting the adrenalin pumping. Richard is like that and he’ll suddenly say, ‘I’m ready now’.”
Little Richard was fine, when he was there. “We were in at the deep end immediately as he flew back to LA to go to Rock Hudson’s funeral. I got the news on Monday morning that Richard had been smashed up in a car in LA. I said, ‘No, no, he’s in a hotel down the road.’ Oh no, he wasn’t. I learnt how to scold him gently. In the end, he liked to be told what to do. I wish I’d had the opportunity to do the same for Elvis as I think I could have made a good record with him.”
In 1987 Stuart recorded another London pub band, The Chevalier Brothers (37) for Magnet. “Ray Gelato ran the band and he is very highly rated as a jazz sax player now. We did ‘Buona Sera’ in the Louis Prima tradition with vibes in my own studio. They were an act without real representation, which you need if you’re going to get anywhere. You can make the best record in the world but you’ve got to have people who are powerful enough to drive it home.”
Recorded in 1987, Buddy Curtess and the Grasshoppers (38) was a very energetic, nine piece pub rock band. “They’d been signed to Phonogram by John Stainze who’d previously snagged Mark Knopfler and it was Darts meets Jackie Wilson, ’cause the singer was black and could sing just like Jackie Wilson. I struggled with some of the players as they weren’t used to recording studios. The drummer had a roadie who was Zak Starkey, and he should have been playing with them. We did four tracks and the intended A-side was ‘Whenever It Rains’. Unfortunately, it became very political and after the A&R department demanded a fourth remix, I backed off and the damned thing never came out.”
And now we come to Stuart’s rarest record, that is unless you live in Harrogate. It’s by his father, Walter Colman (39): “My father was a fabulous piano player who had a dance band in the 1930s and kept it until the early 60s and then he taught piano for the next 30 years. He would play in a stride piano style and for his eightieth birthday, I took him into a studio in Guildford and asked him to play his best tunes. He had never been in a studio before and I recorded ‘Roll Out The Barrel’ and those kind of things, and he had fun doing it. Unbeknown to him, I put some players behind him and made an album out of it. I had 500 copies of The Walter Colman Collection pressed for him to sell at church, and all 500 copies were sold.”
In 1987, Central Television commissioned Stuart Colman to produce the music for a special, Love Me Tender, commemorating the tenth anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death. “It was a massive show with a good budget and I was at Central Television for months. I worked with the likes of Elkie Brooks (40), Dr Robert (41) and Kim Wilde (42) and we brought over some American musicians – Plas Johnson, Jim Horn, James Burton and Ronnie Tutt. Roger Daltrey (43) did ‘Lawdy Miss Clawdy’ and he was in heaven with those musicians, and I got Ben E King (44) to do ‘Money Honey’ because of his link with The Drifters. Meat Loaf (45) sang ‘American Trilogy’ very well but he had a Yoko Ono of a wife telling me and him what to do. Boy George (46) did ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight’ and he was with his auntie. She brought a scarf for him and a flask of hot soup and was treating him like a little boy, which was so funny. I’ve been in the studio with Duane Eddy (47) but it is this television show which sticks out. He did ‘Love Me Tender’ with a superb string arrangement from Ivor Raymonde. I matched the songs with the artists and I produced all the tracks and it drained every last drop of energy from me. It was the biggest project I had ever done and it went down fine. The Pet Shop Boys (48) went to Number 1 with ‘Always On My Mind’ but I can’t take full credit. I did the basic work and they did most of it themselves.”
Because of ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ and his friendship with Presley, Carl Perkins (49) was a ‘must have’ for the TV special, but Stuart wishes they had done more. “I wish that I had made an album with him. In 1981, I met with Carl Perkins and Marshall Grant, who was managing him, to discuss working together. However, when it came down to organising a gameplan, I couldn’t match Carl’s schedule, and the project fizzled out. We did work together at Central Television and I did play bass for him several times, but I never made that album.”
In 1987 Stu produced four tracks for an Icelandic prog rock band, Studmenn (50). “They flew me to Reykjavik where I was wined and dined at great expense. They threw a party in my honour and introduced me to a very pretty young girl. She offered to spend the night with me and I didn’t realise that she was a Miss Iceland. As I was a married man at the time and I was catching an early flight back to the UK, I regretfully declined.”
Maybe Gary Glitter (51) is not the best name to have on your CV, but in 1987, Stuart produced a TV-advertised album for Telstar, C’mon, C’mon … It’s The Gary Glitter Party Album. “No problem. Oddly enough, I remember him chasing the backing vocalists, P P Arnold and Vicki Brown around like a hot-blooded male, so his arrest came as a huge surprise to me. We did standards like ‘New Orleans’ and ‘Dancing In The Street’, and a few originals, and his manager said, ‘If he likes the record, he’ll show you in no uncertain terms. He’ll take his wig off.” And he did. It was a good record, but if anyone is synonymous with a sound, it is Gary Glitter and I had to capture that. You put plenty of slapback on the drums to make them crack and a fairly heavy reverb on his vocal.”
Because of other commitments, Stuart has turned down several significant acts over the years including The Damned, Roman Holiday, Leslie Ash and Bros. He recalls, “I was offered Mud (52) and Showaddywaddy (53) at about the same time and their hits had come and gone. I was reticent about them but it was great money so I took it, frankly. They were recorded at my own studio and Mud was difficult. I had to bring in session players and the singer Les Gray wasn’t that hot, but we did ‘Hi Ho Silver Lining’ and a couple of other oldies, which never came out. I had two fabulous songs for Showaddywaddy and one of them, ‘Nobody Is’, came out at the time and the other has just been released as a bonus track on a CD. It is a fantastic song by Terry Britten called ‘Old Habits Die Hard’, and Dave Bartram sings the heck out of it.”
The success of the Comic Relief single led to another comedy hit in 1987, ‘Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree’ with Mel Smith (54) and Kim Wilde, and Mel’s comedy partner, Griff Rhys Jones, joins him for the intro and the outro. “That single was Richard Curtis’ idea and a very good one. I would stop them in the middle of a funny line and say, ‘No, can you say it like this? It will be slightly funnier.’ Griff and Mel’s manager said, ‘You can’t tell them how to do comedy. They know full well how to do it.’ I told him I was making a record and I knew how it would sound on radio, so ‘Please don’t do that.’ Mel and Griff were embarrassed because they knew he shouldn’t have said that. I wasn’t putting them down, and what else was I there for? To serve the tea? I must give credit to Pete Thomas who replaced the tenor sax solo on Brenda Lee’s original with an alto a la Laurel and Hardy, which allowed the repartee to shine. It sounds like the opening of Christmas crackers with the jokes coming through. Kim Wilde was delightful and I’d like to have done more with her but she was being produced very successfully by her brother.”
Jane Harrison (55) was a classical vocalist who won Bob’s Opportunity Knocks in 1988. Stuart produced her chart album, New Day. “This was a huge undertaking with some of the country’s top long hair musicians. However, one of the violin players was clearly inebriated on the session and very diplomatically I had to ask the arranger, David Bedford, to dispense with his services.”
In April 1986, Stuart produced a Comic Relief album, based on a show at the Shaftsbury Theatre. Kate Bush (56) sang ‘Wuthering Heights’ and also did a sketch about the mile high club. Rowan Atkinson (57) is a headmaster who has to tell Angus Deayton that his son has been killed for not returning his library book. “I loved doing comedy records and I am a huge fan of what George Martin did with Peter Sellers and without doubt, the Stan Freberg records which influenced the way those Peter Sellers records were made. Both of them had wonderful comic sound effects, and I adore being asked to do comedy records.”
After the Elvis programme was so successful, Central Television asked Stuart to make a series of programmes called Album and each one was devoted to an artist. There was Natalie Cole (58), Nona Hendryx (59), T’Pau (60), Jaki Graham (61) and Ruby Turner (62). “We did about 8 to 10 songs with each of those acts and we were given carte blanche – they weren’t ‘greatest hits’ concerts. Nona Hendryx was wonderful to work with. She wore the skimpiest of outfits and had everybody drooling. Natalie Cole had a difficult manager, who said that I had to speak to her through him, and you almost have to laugh in someone’s face who says that. It is Spinal Tap. You hear it so often in the business – ‘The artist’s great, shame about the manager.’”
In 1989, Stuart produced an album for the rock guitarist, Pierre LeRue (63), but it was never released as LeRue’s manager died of a heart attack. The tracks included Dr. John’s ‘Keep That Music Simple’ and a cajun treatment of ‘Sixteen Tons.’ A Welsh rockabilly outfit led by Ray Thompson called The Ray-Vons (64), recorded a single, ‘I’d Rather Bop Than Hip-Hop’ on Tribute Records in 1989.