The Songaminute Man: How music brought my father home again

It was Ted.

The band often had people coming up and asking to sing, and it mostly didn’t work as it was impossible to get a stranger to hit the right notes with no rehearsal. But there was something about Ted they thought was worth a go as he seemed to know his stuff.

‘Do you know “Mack the Knife” in C?’ he asked.

The band played the intro and Ted started the song flawlessly. The guys were stunned by the quality of his voice and his phrasing. By the time he had finished the whole audience was standing up and applauding – something that hadn’t ever happened to them before.

Ben turned to Ted: ‘You wanna job, mate?’ ‘Ar, go on. I’ll ’av a go,’ Ted replied.

‘That was the night our lives changed for ever,’ says Ben.

The following week or so, Ben booked a room in a pub to go through some songs with Ted, as well as buying a new portable organ to complete the band’s sound. ‘We only needed one crack at any song. He just got them – he always knew the words straight away, so things didn’t take much practising, it was unreal,’ says Ben.

After a couple of weeks of polishing their act, the band applied for a spot at the local Entertainers Club. It went down a storm. But there was one drawback – Ben felt Geoff the drummer was letting the band down, so he rang up Ronnie Cox, another drummer he knew, and he joined the band right away. It turned out that Ted and Ronnie knew each other – they’d grown up living a few streets apart, were the same age and had spent some of their earlier years getting into various scrapes and scuffles – and they got on like a house on fire. Ron was a real comic and Ted was constantly in hysterics at some of his jokes. It was strangely freeing for Ted, having someone else take the lead when it came to cracking jokes and keeping the mood up: it meant he could sing some of his best notes and not have to put on such a front. The chemistry worked perfectly and no one doubted that Ted was having fun. Ronnie would just have to make a passing comment to Ted onstage and then the next thing he’d be falling about laughing hysterically.

For the next few months, the band kept the regular gig at the Friar Park Labour Club to polish their performances and to try out new songs. But they wanted bigger crowds, a higher bar, to challenge themselves with an audience that wasn’t made up of locals who already knew and loved them. Finally, after perfecting their act, they were ready to up their game. Everything was now in sync for The Starliners to move on to bigger things. So they began to spread the net wider, and auditioned at different clubs in the area.

In the mid-1960s all the other bands were trying to copy The Beatles or The Shadows and were made up of kids ten years younger than Ted and the rest of the guys, who were all in their late twenties or early thirties. Sometimes the crowd didn’t always appreciate the different style of music that The Starliners, with their broader musical influences, brought to the stage. But the rest of the time, their refusal to conform was their best asset, something that became gratifyingly obvious during one particular open audition night at Rugeley Miners Club. This audition night was the one time every month that the Midland’s Entertainment Association – a group of social secretaries who were responsible for booking acts to play the pubs and clubs in the various local areas – were all in the same room and, once business had been taken care of, the night became the perfect shop window for them to witness potential talent first-hand. Bands would be queuing up to perform in front of the decision-makers in the hope of leaving an impression.

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