‘How about you, Derek?’ the teacher asked when he reached me. ‘What do you want to do?’
‘I’m going to write music and be a pop star.’
I don’t know what I was expecting. Maybe some support or validation that my aspiration was valid—noble even. That’s not what I got. My classmates erupted in laughter.
‘No, Derek,’ said the teacher. ‘That will never happen. Choose something else you’re good at.’
I stuck to my guns. ‘I’m in a band with my brother now, and I want to keep writing music and be famous,’ I continued.
‘You’ll never be a pop star. For everyone that makes it in music, there are ten thousand who wind up working in factories—especially here in Portsmouth. Is that what you want?’
‘I’m not going to work in a factory. I’m going to make music and record albums and tour. You’ll see.’
Two years later, my band, Simon Dupree & The Big Sound, were signed to Parlophone Records, the same label as The Beatles, and a year after that we had a hit single and performed on the legendary TV show Top Of The Pops. Many of the kids that had laughed at me and even Mr. Rogers watched along with a million other viewers as we jammed on our biggest hit, ‘Kites.’ Strange how life works sometimes.
CHAPTER
TWO
THE BIG
BREAK
The Beatles released ‘Love Me Do’ in 1962, and the Stones honed their early sound at their first gigs. It was the beginning of the British beat era, and the air was charged with a new youth movement.
‘Man, we need to be a part of this,’ I said to my closest school friend, Eric Hine. So, we pulled kids people from our peer group together and convinced them to get whatever instruments they needed and join us. Ray was already on board, and since he was one of the only great violinists playing pop music, he stood out. We were on our way. I realized we needed two guitarists, so I went up to another friend, Ray Feast.
‘Why don’t you come and join the band my brother and I are making?’ I asked Ray. He was my brother’s age, and he could play basic chords. Better still, he had a Fender Stratocaster way before anyone else had one. At the time, Fender was facing a trade embargo and was unable to send guitars to England. (It wasn’t until Eric Clapton got hold of a bunch of Stratocasters and brought them back to England to sell to his friends—including Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, and David Gilmour—that British bands started playing Fender guitars.)
I was pretty good at playing simple, melodic solos, so I was the lead guitarist and the singer. I even learned how to play those pain-inducing barre chords, pressing the strings until they cut into my fingers, and persisting until I could wrangle ringing chords out of them. They were much easier to master on an electric than an acoustic. Eric wanted to play guitar as well, but there was no room for three guitarists in an R&B pop band. What we needed was a keyboardist. I convinced Eric to buy a keyboard, and for someone who wasn’t a natural musician, he wasn’t half bad. He stayed with us right through to the end of Simon Dupree & The Big Sound.
Our first drummer was Andy Meade. He didn’t have a set of drums, and he wouldn’t buy one, so we had him bang on pots and pans. That was bad enough. He also couldn’t keep time, but neither could some of the other guys we’d brought on board. My brother and I were naturally better musicians than our friends. We would start to play music and they would struggle to keep up. They were good friends, but they weren’t good bandmates. It was okay when we had just started out and we were all struggling and making an awful row—trying to play in the same key with the same timing—but once we started to become musical, we had to make some tough decisions.
Andy was the first to go. We needed someone who had drums. Ray Feast didn’t make the cut either. The one good thing that came out of that was that, when he left, he decided he was done playing guitar and agreed to sell us his Fender. That was great, but after he left we were no longer friends, which was upsetting but a necessary misfortune. If we wanted to get better and play in front of a lot of people, we had to get our act together. We needed the right players, the right songs, and the right name.
The first name we came up with was The Howling Wolves, after the Chicago electric blues guitarist Howlin’ Wolf. That didn’t stick for long. Soon we’d changed to The Roadrunners, because of the 1960 Bo Diddley song, ‘Roadrunner Blues.’ No one loved the name, but we all agreed it would work.
It was around this time that my brother Phil joined us. There were two reasons I wanted Phil in the band. First, he was gainfully employed as a schoolteacher, which meant he had some money to spend on the gear. More importantly, I was able to convince him to play saxophone. He was a trumpeter like our dad and had never played sax in his life, but I thought it would be good for us because everyone was trying to emulate the music on the American soul label Stax, and all those groups had sax players. ‘C’mon Phil,’ I said. ‘You already play trumpet. How different could it be?’
I added that if he joined the group, he would have to supply a van, since none of us had money to transport our gear. Phil had grown tired of teaching and wanted to be a star musician as well, so he agreed. I hoped he would be the star saxophonist I thought we needed, and he really tried, but he wasn’t as good as we thought he would be—not good enough to hang with the more talented sax players in the scene. We realized he should probably stick to the trumpet and only play a little sax.
A few moments of introspection later, I realized I was no John Lennon. I could only sing and play guitar to the simplest progressions. Beyond that, I couldn’t coordinate my hands to work with my mouth, and my guitar skills only went so far. So, Ray picked up my guitar, and in no time he’d learned all the open chords. Soon after, he was figuring out how to play leads. He was a natural. Just like my father, he could pick up any instrument and learn to play it within two hours.
Once he was in the band for real, Phil made it clear he didn’t like the name The Roadrunners. He wasn’t the only one. Some friends of ours and a guy who was working as our agent agreed, and, as we found out, there were other bands named Roadrunners. Back then it wasn’t like today, where every name is taken and trademarked by somebody so you have to pick something obscure, often by combining two unrelated words—like ‘Elemental Gourds’ or something equally ridiculous. But Roadrunners …yeah, I guess we should have figured there were probably another dozen of them out there. We told our agent we were changing our name.
‘Okay, what you got?’ he said. It was more of a command than a question.
‘Uhh …Simon Dupree!’
‘I can’t remember who blurted it out, but we all liked it. Simon Dupree was the first Lord Mayor of Portsmouth, so we were paying homage to our roots. Only, it wasn’t quite enough. In a review of one of our early shows, a journalist wrote that we had a ‘very big sound.’ We liked that, so we threw it on at the end: Simon Dupree & The Big Sound. The name was long, but it floated off the tongue and made a statement.
Calling ourselves Simon Dupree & The Big Sound was an epiphany for me because it gave me a role to play. I’ve always been opinionated, but I’ve never been naturally extroverted. My brother-in-law, John King, was our manager by then, and he wanted me to be the charismatic presence and pretty face in the front of the band. I never considered myself a looker or a natural leader, but with our new name, I didn’t have to be Derek Shulman, working-class kid from Portsmouth. I was Simon Dupree, which enabled me to put together a suave, sexy alter ego that took me away from my humble roots and allowed me to become a rock star and put on a dramatic, entertaining show. We were a sweaty, bluesy R&B band, and I loved interacting with the crowd, banging on the stage to encourage them to come closer, reaching out to shake hands with the guys, and touching the arms or tousle the hair of the girls.