Stardust Ray Connolly by Ray Connolly

Author:Ray Connolly
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 1974-06-27T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

If 1963 had been the year of the Beatles in Britain, then 1965 was the year of the Stray Cats-or to be more precise the year of Jim Maclaine. With more hindsight than good judgement Colin Day managed to garnish a considerable degree of the acclaim for his part in putting the group on the ladder to success, and before many more months were up they had been heavily featured on the cover of the Observer, had numerous intellectual articles devoted to the music of Jim and Stevie, while the Jim Maclaine Fan Club had branches in every major city and some inordinately minor places in the United Kingdom. At first Day had toyed with the idea of going, to America, where their first record had broken big and won a gold within a month of release, but his natural cautiousness in his investment bade him to consolidate in Britain first and to keep America waiting. Colonel Tom Parker had made the British fans wait for Elvis, and he was bigger in Britain than anywhere else in the world. Maybe, just’ maybe, scarcity value would increase the American fascination with the Stray Cats. And as it happens, he was quite right. While little girls wrote long, loving letters to Jim from Divide, Colorado and Fairmont, Indiana, Colin Day merely fed them with hit after hit, and odd glimpses of television film. Meanwhile Britain became Maclaine’s to do with as he wanted. The Daily Express ran competitions offering nights out with the Stray Cats (all carefully chaperoned by the Express’s publicity department who had heard the reputation that the Stray Cats were getting), while television pundits and interviewers fell out with each other about who should interview Maclaine, and what his effect was on the lives of the young. And all the time everybody was making a fortune. That is, everybody except Johnny Cameron, who, after his drink with Mike, was suddenly replaced by a youthful boy called Kevin Doncaster, who had the double attraction of being as meek as a lamb while incredibly skilful on guitar. Of course Johnny did get one moment of revenge when he sold his inside story to one of the Sunday trashy papers but the thousand pounds he picked up for that hardly compensated for the knowledge that somehow or other Mike had tricked him out of his heritage. He might have been the one that had started the Stray Cats but none of the lawyers he hired was able to prove that he couldn’t be sacked by the others, and none of the others cared two hoots what happened to Johnny so long as life remained good for them. People in pop are greedy like that.

And so the whole bandwagon of money and work rolled through the year. Gigs were played, film parts were offered and turned down, television shows were done, a tour of Europe was a sell-out in Germany, Holland and Denmark, and even the French managed to get a little more excited about the Stray Cats than they had been by the Beatles’ initial trip there.

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