We worked on ‘Kites’ with Geoff Emerick, Alan Parsons, and Dave Paramor, who produced it. We changed the arrangement and injected the song with the psychedelic flair we loved in Beatles songs like ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ and ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds.’ We put some swirly effects on the guitar, added xylophone, wood blocks, and some sound effects, and recorded the whole thing a few days later in a three-hour session. We all worked hard to make it the best we could and create something that was better than what was originally handed to us, but when we were done, we weren’t exactly sure what we had created.
Phil used to tell the press that we didn’t like the song and were just fucking around with it. That wasn’t true. We thought it had promise, and we tried to put our stamp on it. It was my idea to have a middle-eight that featured someone speaking. I thought of doing that because Traffic had a song called ‘Hole In The Ground’ that included a part with a little girl speaking. I felt like the same approach would work with ‘Kites.’ Only, I thought we should get a middle-aged woman who spoke Chinese, since there was a gong at the beginning, and some parts of the song had an Eastern feel.
John King said having a fairly well-known guest performer would make people pay more attention to the song, so he suggested Jacqui Chan, with whom he had a loose connection. She was a sexy Chinese Trinidadian actress, dancer, and singer, and John thought her involvement would attract the tabloids and gossip hounds. She agreed to be involved, and someone asked her to say something poetic in Chinese. What she cooed translated to ‘I love you I love you. My love is very strong. It flies high like a kite before the wind. Please do not let go of the string.’
Right after we finished, we recorded the B-side, ‘Like The Sun, Like The Fire,’ which, as was our custom, was by Paul and Evelyn. Then we went home and figured that, at the very least, doing such a strange, psychedelic pop song would get some people talking.
A few days after we recorded the track, David Paramor called me at the venue we were scheduled to play that night.
‘Derek, I’m glad I got you,’ he said.
‘Is everyone okay?’ I asked.
‘We’ve got a bit of a problem. The vocals don’t sound right. We need you to come back to the studio after the show and record another take so we can double them.’
‘Okay, do I have to do it tonight? We’ve got another show tomorrow night.’
‘Yeah, I’m sorry, but “Kites” is going to radio in two weeks. We have to get them copies.’
I was a little frazzled by the news, but it didn’t affect my performance that night. Afterward, we hopped back in the van and drove 285 miles from Newcastle to London. The next morning, I went back to EMI Studios and spent fifteen minutes in the studio doubling the vocals. Then I met the rest of the guys and we headed back on the road to play more shows up north. In less than a week, we were scheduled to take a ferry to Gothenburg, Sweden, to play some concerts in Europe, and I hoped nothing else would go wrong before then.
We were taking a ferry to our first major shows in Scandinavia, so we were excited when we stepped onto the boat, even though the ride was thirty-six hours long. We hoped to get comfortable and relax, maybe kill some time by having some lunch and getting some sleep. The weather was cold and rainy, and we were sailing on the North Sea, which is notoriously rocky, even on a sunny day. It felt like we were driving a car with no shock absorbers through a highway filled with potholes. Shortly into the journey, my stomach was lurching with every wave that crashed against the hull. In no time, we were all violently throwing up. So much for lunch and sleep.
When the boat finally arrived in Sweden, I was shaking and exhausted. I had nothing left in my stomach, and I had stopped dry heaving a few hours earlier, but I still felt like I had Bubonic plague. We had to do press shortly after we arrived, so we bucked up, pried our eyes open, and plastered smiles on our faces. No one vomited during the interviews, and somehow none of the journalists commented in their articles about how green our complexions were. Maybe they figured that’s just the natural pallor of the English. The Swedes loved us and danced throughout our sets.
A week later, the tour was done, and we had to take the boat back to England, which none of us were looking forward to. Thank God it was a beautiful day, and while the ferry rocked back and forth during the journey, our stomachs remained settled as long as the motor was running and we were moving.
About six hours into the trip, a man with a hat, glasses, and a white beard came up to me.
‘Are you Derek Shulman?’ he asked.
He didn’t look like a fan, and he sure didn’t look like someone from EMI. ‘I’m the captain, and you’ve got an urgent message. Follow me.’
Suddenly, I felt seasick again.
The captain led me to what looked like a first-class cabin and pointed to a phone. ‘You’ve got a call,’ he said.
I warily picked up the phone imagining the worst: a death in the family, news that our house had been burglarized, a report that ‘Kites’ flopped and the label was dropping us.
‘Hello, this is Derek,’ I said.
It was a publicist at EMI. ‘Derek, I hope I didn’t worry you, love, but I had to call and congratulate you!’
‘Uh, okay. Why?’
‘Didn’t you hear? “Kites” is a huge hit. You’re in the Top 20 on the national charts.’
I’ll never forget the sound of her voice or those magical words. The enthusiasm, the joy of telling me we had made it. It’s one of those few memories in life that gets frozen in time and can be accessed anytime, as if by the click of a switch. I felt elated, vindicated, as whimsical as a kite in the wind. This was a milestone. This was what I had worked for and dreamed of from the moment I heard the Beatles on the radio. And now I was a rock star. As validation of that, Simon Dupree & Big Sound were booked to perform on the biggest national music TV show, Top Of The Pops, the next week.
Despite my excitement, I was suddenly calm, completely at ease, and sure I was exactly where I was supposed to be. Getting booked for Top Of The Pops was as big as being on The Ed Sullivan Show, but it was only for music. Millions of people tuned in every week to watch the top-charting bands play their latest hits. Being on the show was on every group’s bucket list, and playing it was unfathomable for a young group from Portsmouth who hadn’t even recorded a full album. We were scheduled to perform on the show the same week Status Quo played ‘Pictures Of Matchstick Men’ and The Move did ‘See The Grass Grow,’ so we were in great company.
We had less than a week to decompress from our tour of Sweden and play the TV show. On the day of filming, we made sure we had all of our gear and then rushed to the studio. We set everything up and placed the xylophone on the stage, but we couldn’t find the mallets. We looked everywhere. Finally, we had to give up and borrow some little sticks with fuzzy heads on them. We played them as though they were mallets. It’s a good thing Top Of The Pops used only live vocals. The rest of the music came from the original recordings, and everyone in the band would only pretend to hear what they were playing, so even though the fuzzy sticks sounded way different than mallets, no one knew the difference. The crowd loved us and cheered like we were rock stars.
Our appearance on Top Of The Pops boosted both our public profile and our market value. Before ‘Kites,’ we’d had minor hits with ‘I See The Light,’ ‘Reservations,’ and ‘Daytime Nighttime.’ That Thursday evening, we were already a pretty well-known pop band to lots of young people. By the same time on Friday, after we’d played ‘Kites’ for millions, we were recognized by everyone’s moms, dads, and grandparents as well.
We didn’t write the song, only arranged it, so we didn’t see any of the publishing revenue, but the performance royalties were solid and our tour fees jumped considerably overnight. Viewers went out and bought the single in droves, and the song entered the Top 10. I visited the high school I had just graduated from, where students lined up for my autograph. They weren’t the only ones. Some of the kids I’d graduated with, who had laughed at me years earlier when I stated unequivocally that I was going to be a pop star—and the teacher who told me with great glee and sarcasm that it would never happen—waited for me to sign their copies of ‘Kites.’ Some of other my teachers who surely would have joined in the ridicule, had they been in the same room when I declared my future occupation, saw me on TV and were excited to meet hometown hero Simon Dupree.