As a matter of fact, we were. We hadn’t eaten before the show, there was no food spread or catering backstage, and all the pubs in the area had stopped serving food. With all the local restaurants closed as well, we’d be lucky if we could find a fast-food joint that served greasy fish and chips.
‘So, what kind of food do you like?’ Wilf continued.
‘Uh, Indian,’ I said. ‘But everything’s closed.’
‘Don’t you worry about that,’ Wilf said. ‘Come with me.’ We got into his car and his driver took us to a great nearby Indian restaurant. As I feared, it was closed. Wilf got out of the car, walked up to the front door of the restaurant, and pounded on it.
‘Hey! Open up!’ he shouted. ‘It’s me.’
After a few moments, the door opened. Wilf talked to the restaurant owner and explained that he would consider it a personal favor if they opened up the kitchen and cooked some food for everyone in the band. The owner nodded, turned to one of his employees, and told him to fire up the ovens and cook some appetizers and curries. A few minutes later, we were sitting at the table with Wilf, Mick, and The Canadian, and the wonderful smell of cooked meat and spices wafting from the kitchen. Thanks to the sway Wilf and his thugs had over the community, we enjoyed an amazing meal that night, secure in the knowledge that all of our equipment would be safely under supervision at the venue until we came back for it.
Being loved by the Isle Of Wight Mob was sometimes a double-edged sword. There were times when the police would get too close to whatever Wilf, Mick, and The Canadian were involved in, and they had to bolt out of town until the heat died down. On more than one occasion, they stopped off at Phil’s house in Portsmouth and had him stash jewelry until they came back for it. It was an odd relationship, but one that certainly benefited us—and Phil.
Once, Wilf showed up at Phil’s in a Rolls-Royce. ‘I gotta go out of town on business,’ he told Phil. ‘Would you mind watching my car until I get back? It’s all right if you drive it around. Have a good time,’ he said, and he left before Phil could respond.
A minor historic moment in the career of Simon Dupree & The Big Sound happened in July 1967. Right before we toured Scotland, keyboardist Eric Hine came down with glandular fever, so his doctor grounded him from touring. We needed a replacement right away. Elton John was just starting out—only at the time, he was still going by his birth name, Reg Dwight. He was managed by a guy named Dick James, who had him working under a retainer of £10 per week.
Ray and I went to London to meet Reg, and he was incredibly nice and very humble. Of course, it’s hard not to be humble when you’re making less than £2 a day—something we had no way of knowing at the time.
We asked him if he would play something for us, and, without a pause, he launched into a litany of piano music: blues, American standards, British pop. It was like someone had tossed a nickel into a player piano.
‘Can you play organ and Mellotron?’ I asked.
‘Sure, if it’s got keys, I can play it.’
‘How about weird, psychedelic stuff?’
‘Yeah, mate,’ he said. ‘No problem.’
It was clear he’d be able to play anything we threw at him, so we asked him to fill in for Eric on tour. ‘Hey Reg, what we can offer you is £25–30 a week,’ I said, hoping he wouldn’t ask for more.
‘Holy shit!’ he shouted. ‘Really? I’ve never seen that kind of money.’
We would never have guessed that this was almost three times what he was making, but we were happy to pay it. He was a fine keyboardist, and he was saving our asses. After we met Reg, we went home, then he came down to Portsmouth to rehearse with us for a few days before the tour.
Reg was chatty and open with us, and we grew close in no time. He wasn’t out of the closet yet, and it wasn’t long before he unloaded some personal shit on us. He had a girlfriend who wanted to marry him, and he didn’t know if he loved her as a friend or as more.
‘I dunno what to do,’ he confided in us. ‘I don’t really want to get married. Should I get married, should I not get married?’
We liked Reg but we barely knew him. How could we possibly give him advice on something so serious?
‘You know, Reg, I’m sure you’ll do what you have to do,’ I said. I knew it was hardly constructive advice, but it was the best I had.
‘Yeah, fuck it,’ he said. That was the last we heard about the subject.
Reg knew a lot about pop music and loved talking about his favorite groups. He wasn’t just knowledgeable about English music. He knew just as much about what was happening in the States, though neither of us had been there yet. We bonded on the black blues we all listened to on the American Air Force Radio.
Some of the shows on the Scottish tour were in nearby towns. Others were a hundred miles or more apart, which required long drives in the van. Every few hours, we’d stop at a café to take a short break, have a coffee, and maybe take a piss. And then we get back into the van and head back out. That’s when we learned another quirk about Reg.
‘Hey guys, look what I’ve got,’ he said one day, shaking a snow globe that probably cost about £5.
‘Reg, why do you want that? Isn’t it a little pricey?’ I said.
‘Maybe. I dunno. I just wanted it.’
So it went every time we stopped. Reg always picked up something odd: commemorative spoons, a yo-yo, a candlestick. And he never worried about the price. Once, he picked up a watch that looked expensive. I figured maybe I should talk with him before he spent his entire per-diem for the week.
‘Do you think you should think about whether you really need something before you buy it?’ I asked. ‘I mean, especially if something costs a lot and you don’t need it on tour.’
‘I like to collect stuff,’ he replied, nonplussed. ‘It’ll remind me of being on tour when I get back home and look at the stuff. Why, do you want any of it?’
‘No,’ I said, and I laughed.
I kind of felt sorry for Reg. He seemed unable to stop himself from buying useless things. Pretty soon it wouldn’t matter, and he’d be able to buy anything he wanted.
We stayed friends with Reg after Eric returned to the group, and we frequently talked about working together in the future. Meanwhile, we swam forward with Simon Dupree, but at times it was more like treading water. We started to talk more to John and everyone at EMI about heading in a different musical direction. Understandably, they weren’t too keen on the idea.
In an effort to appease us, my brother-in-law booked us a session at Abbey Road in mid-’68 to record something more experimental than anything we had done and release it under another name. Ray, Phil, and I wrote a weird song called ‘We Are The Moles,’ which we structured in the style of The Beatles at their trippiest. We played droning, spacy riffs and phased the instruments in and out of the mix. We layered chiming keyboards on top and added freaky studio sound effects to the vocals, which included lines like ‘We are the moles and we stay in our holes / Hiding our faces, revealing our souls.’ We didn’t take it seriously at all. We just had fun, and there was a fast vocal part that was a little like ‘I Am The Walrus,’ which we all thought was great.
It was easy to do, and we did it quickly so we would sound spontaneous. We had a good time tapping into this strange, surreal side of ourselves. When we’d finished it, we recorded a B-Side, ‘We Are The Moles Part II,’ which started with marching sound effects and then turned into this ethereal, nonsensical ditty with the three of us harmonizing the only line in the song, ‘We are the moles,’ in various ways. It ended with madcap clapping and calls for ‘More!’ which Ray and I found hysterical. We wrote the whole thing in the studio in five minutes and recorded it in ten.
Parlophone released ‘We Are The Moles’ in 1968, and, to our surprise, it started getting airplay. The press was chattering. Everyone was trying to figure out who was in this mysterious band with no credited members. The song hit the Top 100, and when people started wondering if The Moles were The Beatles in disguise, it reached #75 and started going up the charts. We thought this might be the beginning of an anonymous side project that would be fun to do and imagined going back into the studio to record a whole album of silly, psychedelic songs.