Procol Harum

Beyond
the Pale

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B J Wilson

How Am I Going To Get Home, Then?


Barrie Wilson in 1964


Barrie James Wilson
18th March 1947 – 8th October 1990

We decided to launch the 'Beyond the Pale' website on 8th October 1997 in respectful commemoration of the life and talents of BJ Wilson. 

This 1964 photograph, like others in the following article, was kindly sent to us by Kenny White, a close friend of BJ's from schooldays onwards.

Kenny's moving tribute to Barrie, entitled Missing the Man, Remembering the Boy, was published in the Redhill Glossy Souvenir from Shine On

Meanwhile we hope fans will be touched and perhaps heartened by Kenny's further reminiscences here, condensed from recent telephone conversations with Roland Clare.

 


RC: Can you remember where you first met BJ Wilson?
KW: Yeah, at school. We both went to Latymer Grammar School in Edmonton, North London. It must have been in 1959 or 1960. We all wanted to be like Cliff & the Drifters (the Shadows) and were looking for a drummer: Barrie's name came up. I found out that he lived in Derby Road, Ponders End, five minutes' walk from where I lived on the Great Cambridge Road. Barrie – that's what we always called him – was born in Haslebury Road, in Edmonton, as far as I'm aware. He never knew his father, of course: he lived in Canada. His mother, Peggy, remarried: she married Ron Betty ... and she was always known as Mrs Betty.

She was lovely woman, Mrs Betty; she only died in November, and Ron shortly afterwards. I got to know them really well, and Pam and Richard Betty, Barrie's younger sister and brother. They were very like their mother, and consequently very like Barrie. They were both at Redhill, you know; it was very emotional. They hadn't heard from the band in years.

Was it a musical family?
Not as far as I know. Barrie just blagged his Mum into buying a drumkit for him. He may have said he'd pay her back, and she may have moaned at him, but she ended up paying the monthly or weekly statements herself. The drums came from Berry's Pianos at Edmonton: it was a well-known firm in the London area. They'd been piano-makers until the electric guitar boom came, when they went into music shops. I worked for them for a while when I left school.

As far as I know Barrie probably bought an Olympic kit, the cheapest reasonable kit you could get, but probably with it he got a Premier snare. Later he played Premier exclusively, but his great thing was his Ludwig kits: he had a black one, and a blue one ... lots of kits. I remember visiting his house in Norfolk, years later, and seeing three different kits all set up at once!

What was he like at school?
He hated it! In fact we were four years apart, but I ended up playing with him because we needed a drummer. I was a guitarist, of sorts. Alan Cartwright was in the year below me and Barrie was in the Fourth form I think. I did a year in the Sixth form, English Literature, Chemistry and History, I think; but I left to tour Sweden with a band. By the time I got back, Barrie had left school. He was just sixteen.

I don't think he finished the fifth year. He was far from stupid of course, in any way; but he had nothing academic going for him: he had no interest in school in any way. When he first left he was an office messenger, then he was in some printing firm: he probably got kicked out of all of that, 'cos he wasn't any good. Not lazy, but not interested. My mother got him a job in John Temple's suit factory, which was a bit like Burton's. We worked together but he hated it.

What sort of musical education had he had?
Well he'd learnt snare drum with the Boys' Brigade, and he taught himself guitar, and the mandolin, as you know from the credit on Grand Hotel. He may have taken up mandolin because his great hero Levon Helm played mandolin as well. They were good friends. I know Procol had met The Band, and Barrie and Levon got on well. In about 1968, for my birthday, a whole bunch of us went to hear The Band play the Albert Hall; Barrie nipped out to see Levon in the interval and lots of our party went back to his hotel afterwards. Levon kissed the ladies' hands like a real Southern gentleman.

Barrie persevered with the mandolin, though he had these big, drummer's hands. I've got a lovely picture of him playing mandolin at the Hollywood Bowl, with Mick and Alan on guitars, and Messrs Brooker and Copping on banjos. White suits and Hawaiian shirts. It's Souvenir of London they're playing. It may be Barrie playing spoons on that track on the album, but you've got to remember that it could be Gary: he turns his hand to a lot of instruments, and he's a Londoner from way back too.

You'd be surprised the things Barrie liked: Mother-in-Law by Aaron Neville of the Neville brothers: as far as I know there is a recording of him singing that. And I took him up to see my sitar-teacher, up in Hornsey, and Barrie bought these tabla from him, and had a go at those. As far as classical music goes he liked the same stuff we all did, the run-of-the-mill Tchaikovsky and Beethoven, but he could get into Mahler as well. Albinoni was one of his favourites. I don't particularly think it was his influence that brought that Adagio into the band's repertoire, though. I had a shop in Oxford Street selling hi-fi and I had a good buddy who was the manager of One Stop Records in South Moulton Street; and he gave me this stunning version on the Erato label, the most superb version of it. I played it to Barrie and Alan – it was a regular thing for us to sit night after night, listening to all kinds of music and getting wrecked. I think it was in a movie at the time ... you know, Klaus Kinski as Aguirre, Wrath of God ... or maybe it was another movie. [Perhaps The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, also by Werner Herzog? RC] He had a really good taste in music, Barrie: he'd even play me Fred Astaire.

Can we go back to the time he turned professional?
Well he wasn't even applying for bands when he left school. On reflection he always needed more 'let's get up and go and do it'. But then he just simply saw an advert and it was probably the first one he went for, probably in Melody Maker. We went along together, but I don't remember exactly where it was: once you left Edmonton and Tottenham you were in unknown territory! He took his own sticks and snare, to get the sound he wanted. In any case you always took your own snare because it was the one drum-head you were likely to break.

I went in with him, and I'd been playing in bands myself (Jimmy Powell and the Five Dimensions, Barrie played in that for a while too) but straight off I was thinking, 'Wow, these guys know what they're doing!' There was Trower with dyed blond hair, and Diz Derrick, and they were ... they were like the way they always were: Brooker was like the way he always is: 'Hello, sit down then.'

Barrie was just this skinny, snotty little kid, spotty and gangly. He smoked the most atrocious hand-rolled cigarettes, something like Boar's Head, the strongest sort of tobacco. Even when he was a kid at school he did the same, and I used to ask him, 'For Christ's sake, does your Mum know you smoke like that?' He had nicotine-stains all over his fingers and it was ghastly. But he got the job and we were both gobsmacked when they wanted him to go and live down in Southend, at the Shades or wherever it was.

I've got a lot of Standard-8 movie footage of Barrie and myself, it's personal stuff, clowning around, shot in the van, on the road together in the Paramounts days. There's a little bit of Procol stuff on there too, bits of Parliament Hill Fields I think, and there's some hope of tidying it up for another Procol-type film. Then when I was in The Score, that was the third generation of Dimensions after we'd split from Jimmy Powell, the Paramounts would come up to our flat in Manchester and it would be a great party. Great times. And of course I used to go down to Southend on odd occasions but I never saw the Paramounts play at The Shades or anything like that.

I wonder if Keith Reid wrote A Whiter Shade of Pale with the Shades in mind?
I doubt it, personally. I think Keith Reid knew nothing much about the Paramounts. But I don't remember ... my brain is as addled as anybody's ... certainly I only ever met Guy Stevens once, in 1966 when I did a session for Brooker and Reid. They'd just got into writing: there wasn't a Procol Harum then. Barrie had just 'phoned me up and said, 'Gary wants to do some demos: he's writing songs with this guy.' I assumed he was doing an Elton John / Bernie Taupin type thing. So we went down to Marquee, and I think we did Something Following Me, Lime Street Blues, maybe In the Wee Small Hours of Sixpence, maybe Alpha? But I paid no attention at all. They were just chord sequences over lyrics and we bodged our way through them: piano, drums, guitar and bass. I thought it was Alan Cartwright on the bass, but he says no. I spoke to Gary at Redhill about it and he doesn't remember anything about it at all. We just did it for a favour, and I hope the sessions haven't survived: I played terribly.

Were you ever in line to join the new band yourself?
Never, no, but I wouldn't have thought of joining them anyway: I thought the songs were so weird at the time! They weren't just Dylanish, they were beyond that: there was no shape or content or body to them, no real melodies at that time. Some of the tunes were probably weak at that time, or I was just not paying attention. I don't think Barrie thought anything of them either. But he became a great admirer of Gary's stuff, always thought it was wonderful.

Were the Paramounts somehow turning into Procol Harum, via experiments like Freedom?
No, no, Freedom was just a Brooker thing, his choice, though they all liked Charlie Mingus at the time. That's not why the Paramounts split up. I don't know why that was, but lots of bands did around that time. No, with Procol you did have three guys who had played together for years, but they were suddenly playing a totally different kind of music. I don't know if they felt like a continuation of the Paramounts: but there was still that obvious tightness.

Barrie's thrashing-about style developed and developed as soon as he got into Procol. There's a classic difference between being a drummer and being a rock and roll drummer. A rock and roll drummer needs to keep a solid beat, rock-steady on snare work and high hat, his bass drum tight, not smashing about on his cymbals. It takes years of playing very simple music in clubs to be able to do that and Barrie was very good at it. But in Procol Barrie was given his head, as far as I can see.

Gary may have had it sewn up in terms of the songwriting – Barrie didn't contribute to that any more than the others did, because Brooker brought in finished songs as far as I know – who knows? I assume Barrie had all the latitude he wanted in the context of the arrangement. So you get these fabulous drum-rolls, very laid-back: you don't think it's going to come and then the drums roll in. The only drummer similar is Ringo Starr, though I wouldn't say Barrie copied his style – he just appreciated the way Ringo played. Nobody could beat those two for feel, where one thing rolls so smoothly into another. And the band at that time was something very new, the basis of a rock and roll band with a guitarist who was so steeped in the blues at that point, and this totally classic-sounding organ player who obviously knew what he was doing.

 

Barrie at Parliament Hill Fields

Was there a spirit of rivalry then, in terms of playing their instruments?
Well, Matthew was such a good player ... I would have thought he changed Gary's style of playing very much. I don't know if Gary had ever been classically trained or even had piano lessons – he could have been self-taught for all I know. In the Paramounts I remember he did some great Jerry Lee Lewis and Ray Charles. But I guess Matthew woke something up in Gary: some wonderful bits of classical piano come out at that period.

Playing the drums really lightened Barrie up, and like every musician he got pleasure out of being able to do what other people couldn't do. He was not a shy person but he was never sure of himself. Certain things he would do ... he knew he was good ... but he hadn't got enough self-confidence as a person. And however big it got, he never would have regarded himself as being anything other than a drummer in a group, not in any way a star, just an ordinary person.

I was there at the recording of the first album: it may have been at Olympic ... I can remember the studio and how it was set up: Denny Cordell and Tony Secunda were in the control room, but I spent very little time there. I was down with the band, there were lots of friends in there as they played and they did the numbers in two all-night sessions: I was very stoned, as I recall, completely out of my brains with my head up against Robin Trower's little Gibson amplifier, while they laid down Cerdes and Repent Walpurgis. Amazingly few takes, you know: they'd gone in with the music rehearsed. Maybe Gary did a few vocals again, but fundamentally the songs were all done live. I'm not clear about that. But what you hear is what happened, on that album.

I think there was the odd song or two that didn't come out on that album, but in those days we weren't in the business of cataloguing what went on: another day came along. It was just a bunch of guys playing to a set of friends, people from Southend, other friends. You can hear us all on Mabel whistling, banging things, smashing bottles or whatever was hanging around in there. Lots of us: I would think Franky Braun was there ... she might have been Mrs Brooker by then but we always called her Franky Braun anyway ... and maybe Doe, my wife-to-be.

Doe gave Barrie the bollocking of his life! She happened to have a set of [drummer's] skulls which she lent him to record with, and though he promised to give them back he never returned them. He recorded with them: you can hear them on Mabel. But we never saw them again.

In fact Barrie was quite tense and serious at those sessions. The band in general were pretty relaxed, they knew they were doing something important but they were ... know what I mean ... they were relaxed! I think you find when you see Barrie play a lot, he's looking at Gary all the time. I mean there you see it, he's never that confident. He's not looking at him – this is how I see it – he's not just looking at him as a musician, 'Where are we in the song?' sort of thing; it's more as if it's, 'Am I doing it right?'

He responded well to Gary's straightforward band-leading style, then?
Very much so. You see behind some of his darker moments, early on in his life .. and we never pursued this because why would you want to talk about miserable things? ...there was this thing of where was his Dad, why did his Dad leave him? So that reassurance, that must have been very important to him. I think he took notice of Gary in the same way he listened to me. Gary and I share the same birthday, both Geminis: so if you believe in the stars, I guess Gary and I must have something in common – maybe Barrie saw it – I don't know.

He always got on so well with the others in the band. He admired Robin, thought he was a fantastic player, and I know he was very friendly with Mick Grabham. Alan too, of course. I don't think he spent time with Keith. I can't imagine him on the road with Keith, I mean, what would they do? But in fact he admired Keith's words immensely, thought they were very clever. I don't say he knew what they meant – what does half of it mean anyway? – but he'd be back from working on a track at the studio, 'Here Kenny, listen to this,' and he'd sing or narrate the whole thing through to me from memory. He loved the material and he loved the people.

Kellogs was pulled in quite early on, he'd been the Paramounts' roadie. They shared a mews flat somewhere at the back of Paddington, him and Barrie and Stevie Gershinson, another Southend lad. And everybody just used to go round there all the time, Secunda, Cordell too, lots of funny times, hilarious times.

Did you and BJ discuss favourite pieces from the Procol Harum repertoire?
He always liked the complete suite of In Held 'Twas in I. But he was intensely proud of everything they did. At that time they would bring back the acetates to audition at my house, because I was in the hi-fi business and I had the best hi-fi that they knew. Other people I supplied were Brian Davison of The Nice, Kim Gardner of Ashton, Gardner and Dyke. Kim was a good friend from his days in the English Birds. When Brian Davison was looking for a bass-player I introduced him to Alan Cartwright, and that led to Every Which Way. I still see Brian, as he lives down this way: we were playing together in a band about three years ago.

The first album was certainly auditioned at my house, probably the first four in fact: certainly Home was brought there and I remember listening to Whaling Stories and thinking how tremendous that was. It was like a shortened form of In Held 'Twas in I in a way, you got a little bit of classical and a lot of discords. That's a favourite of mine, but when you think about it my favourites are Magdalene and that whole side, the Shine On Brightly song, and My Old Man's a Silly Old Sod ... don't ask me why, I just love it.

Barrie loved his cowbell, you know. I think he made it his own. Live, he used it a lot, not just on Whisky Train. And he liked The Devil Came from Kansas, Homburg. He liked touring and he loved the orchestral things, but the beginning was the best time, when they were doing something so exciting and new. To tell you the truth, the greatest thing they ever did was Homburg: it was so much better than A Whiter Shade of Pale and it just didn't get the recognition it deserved. It's just a great song, a tremendous song: it's got great moments. But A Whiter Shade of Pale at Redhill was tremendous, I admit. It was worth it to hear the complete piece at Redhill.

I'm afraid I didn't take much notice of [Graham Broad] at Redhill: I appreciated his playing and thanked him backstage after the gig. But I found the Redhill thing very upsetting, specially after the video of Barrie playing; my wife was the same. The first week after it we were a bit stunned coming to terms with things again, things we thought we'd put behind us. I've got so many souvenirs, you see. Barrie gave me all sorts of things the band had done that he was proud of: five copies of this, six copies of that.

Was he proud of the Liquorice John Death session?
In fact I haven't heard that as far as I'm aware. But I'd sold Gary a little Akai stereo tape machine and I have hours of stereo tapes of 'the four-man band' rehearsing, probably in Surrey, maybe that house they rented which you see in the Copping brothers' video. You've got Robin in there on slide guitar, an hour or so at a time, having fun, playing Paramounts stuff. They still loved to play all that. It's basically a Paramounts line-up, although Copping never played with Barrie in that band. This could be the same stuff as the Liquorice John tapes: they do I Just Wanna Make Love to You and My Babe, Willie Dixon tunes, a twenty-minute version of Spoonful, and Boom Boom and I'm going upstairs by John Lee Hooker. But there's no sax, no Jack Lancaster, no Leon Redbone, though Leon was a friend of theirs. I remember Barrie playing me a Leon Redbone album in fact. And I've got rehearsal tapes from the Grabham version of Procol, later on.

Somewhere I've got a really early EP acetate of cover versions, I always call it 'The Forgotten EP': I think at one point it was going to come out under some jokey name. It might have been a Liquorice John Death sort of thing. But I don't know of anything that they actually did put out under an assumed name. There are four tracks, each member except Barrie singing a vocal solo: one from Gary, one from Matthew, one from Robin. Dave Knights, as far as I remember, sings I Gotta Get a Message to You!

Was BJ brought down by the band's lack of commercial recognition?
I don't think there's any doubt that he regretted not ever achieving the success of A Whiter Shade of Pale again. He would have liked to be a wealthy man; I don't think there's any doubt that anybody with any sense would have liked to have got the recognition that they deserved.

They never did what lesser groups did, like The Moody Blues or Barclay James Harvest, get a really good light show or a quadraphonic sound system or whatever. I mean Pink Floyd had one. They built their early reputation on a great light-show and playing one chord for twenty minutes with bits of guitar floating in or whatever. They got it sussed that great music wasn't everything, but the show was! I don't mean that Procol had to be like the Floyd – but I always thought there was just something missing from the live performances. Don't get me wrong – Procol were good, but somewhere along the way they got left behind. Didn't compromise, I suppose. They played the music they wanted to play, nothing wrong in that. I would say all this to Barrie: but I don't somehow think he ever suggested it back to the rest of the band. Not that assertive, you see.

There were people in the industry who admired him, drummers, of course, as well as fans. Brian Davison really liked his playing, although I think bands like Procol weren't his style. And Barrie had great regard for Brian: they got on well. Surprisingly enough Brian and I were talking quite recently and maybe Procol or Barrie gets mentioned and all of a sudden he's telling me about In Held 'Twas in I – he didn't call it that, just 'the long track' – and how he always liked it from the first time he'd heard the original track in the Enfield house. Strange that that should stay in his memory.

Yet after the first great phase the band weren't highly regarded except for being good at what they did; you see it wasn't a kind of music ... how can I put this ... you get occasional tracks with no obvious tune or melody line, they just seem to meander about. Do you know what I mean, no instant hook, nothing to grab hold of. Imagine people putting on Dead Man's Dream if they don't know what to expect, or Barnyard Story ... bloody fantastic ... but they're saying, where's that nice organ melody gone?

People are always saying it's bad that 'he turned down Led Zeppelin'. Well, bloody good job! He wouldn't have lasted long with Zeppelin: not as a player, I mean physically. I don't think Barrie could have kept up with their lifestyle. He did drink, all groups drank, though I never heard of him being unfit to play in that way. He'd drink a bit of brandy with me at home in Enfield but I would say that Procol Harum were one of the least excessive groups around.

These stories about Barrie's death, you know, it's all crap. I had a guy came up to me at Redhill waffling on about Barrie having had a brain tumour because he'd seen him with the little bald patch on his head. It was alopecia, that's all. Sue was having their first baby and as soon as she was born it just cleared up again. I mean, there's some sick people out there, you know. Why don't they just leave him alone? It's all crap – take it from me.

Basically Procol just screwed up all along the way. They made the classic management blunders. I'd say to him, 'For Christ's sake Barrie ...' but he'd cut in and say, 'These guys this time are good guys,' and I'd say 'Yes, so were Tony Secunda and Denny Cordell, but they robbed you blind, smoked your dope and took your money.' And then the same thing happened with Procol's Ninth: not that Leiber and Stoller ripped them off, but the rules were set out for them.

But they can't have been the only band that suffered this way?
Christ no, it wasn't just Procol. Even bands like The Who didn't start to make money until the late seventies. It's quite frightening that grown men could get into such trouble and not realize it. Not realize that every time your agent flew to America and put this and that, plus the odd hooker, on the hotel bill, he was spending your money, not his own. Luckily I was not in the pop business at that time, so I could see it happening to several different bands at the time, and think to myself, why can't they see what's happening?

But it wasn't Barrie's way ... you see, every album they made he was happy with: he'd bring me a dub of something and say 'Listen to this!' even Eight Days a Week, he'd say 'Listen, Gary sings this great'. Until we got to the last album.

So he didn't bring Something Magic round for you to hear?
By that time I'd decided to make my move, get out of London. Here in Cornwall I've got my business now, a bit of records, a bit of memorabilia. So I didn't see so much of him. He sent me that record, and the note he sent with it implied that he didn't think The Worm and the Tree was very good. But the whole band was nose-diving at that point anyway.

There were odd times when Barrie and Alan would drive down from London to Cornwall, get here at eight, party through the night and drive straight back: and in those days there wasn't motorway all the way.
All the schoolfriends basically stayed in touch, even though we'd moved out of London in different directions. So I'd go up to visit him in Norfolk, near Diss, where he moved when he and Sue were married, 1968, 1970, whenever it was.

 

Barrie and Sue

He'd been able to buy a nice biggish house up there more cheaply than he ever could in Surrey or any of those places. He used to buy the odd antiquey thing but it was just bits, really: a nice table for the house, that kind of thing. But you got to remember that only two people ever made any money out of Procol Harum, the songwriters. That's the way in any band.

How did he end up living in the States, then?
American wife, you know. He got a bit of land off some part of Sue's family and they built a house in Oregon. Christ knows really. I've got a whole bunch of letters from Barrie but I'd have to dig them out to give you precise dates when he left. Another friend of ours could tell you: he was in the removal business, and he went right the way from Cornwall up to Norfolk to move them.

You know Barrie did sessions in the States, including one of the well-known heavy metal bands, believe it or not. He hated it. But Joe Cocker was the big thing then, even though Barrie only played in his stage band. As far as I understood from Barrie, he'd been to Joe and said he wanted to play on the albums as well; for one thing he needed the session money. It was years before that he'd played on A Little Help from my Friends of course.

But Cocker was committed to using session men in the studio. Barrie seems to have called Joe's bluff here. He got annoyed that Joe seemed to have thought he was good enough to play on stage, but not on the records. I don't know what his playing was like then, but he played good enough on all the Frankie Miller records that he did. Barrie more or less told me himself that he blew the whole thing out, walked out on Joe, and assumed that he would be asked back into the working band. And he may have thought Joe would relent.

BJ never had any plans to put his own band together?
No I don't think so. He would be waiting for a 'phone call, waiting to be asked. But he loved to pick a guitar up and just tinker. His classic thing was to pick up a guitar and just do I Heard the Lonesome Whistle Blow: he would sit and bang away on the guitar, doing very awkward changes: he just loved it. Hank Williams was one of his favourites ... miserable, I suppose, and a classic pop-star in that he did himself to death, wrote so prolifically and all about lonesome trains and things like that. Barrie loved all that, the blues feel of it, and he loved country music, as well as the folksy bands. I played him Eric Anderson, a Canadian typical guy who came along just after Dylan: and Barrie thought it was fantastic. That was plaintive, low-key country folk music too. He did a great album called Blue River. We both really liked it. It's one of my all-time favourites, I think Barrie's too. I play it and I think about him. It's that sort of record, you see. There are songs on it I relate to Barrie. It's hard to explain: you'd have to hear it.

Gary got Barrie over specially to play on Echoes in the Night: I assume the session fee included the flight, and I assume he brought his drums over with him. As I recall it the songs had been recorded and Gary was re-doing certain drum tracks. Or maybe Barrie did the whole lot and some of his drumming wasn't up to it and the reverse happened? I don't know.

He came down here to stay for three days during the Echoes sessions. It was the last time I ever saw him. We were so pleased to see each other, and ... I should have held on to him when he went to go, stopped him going really. It was a very tearful thing, that's the way I felt. I didn't have any idea that I wouldn't see him again, I just hadn't seen him for so long. His marriage to Sue had ended, and he was coming back home, and I said, 'Barrie, you can come and live with me for as long as it takes you to get things sorted out.' Because that was the whole plan, he was coming back, there was no doubt about it. I've got a whole area he could have lived in down here, but nobody ever knew what would happen. This was two or three days before it all fell apart for him.

I don't have any contact with Sue any more. I don't know what his daughters are doing, or whether they're musical or not. Probably not. It's not a good business to be in. You can't make your fortune!

 

Did his friends expect some sort of tribute from Procol Harum, like Nothing That I Didn't Know or Liquorice John?
I felt that when he was gone finally the band might have played a concert, something for his parents maybe: but it was too long after they'd split, gone all their different ways. There's one on Prodigal Stranger ... one that makes me think of him sometimes ... but it's not (You Can't) Turn Back the Page ...

Thanks, Kenny: I hope this hasn't been too painful for you.
What can I say? It's worth it for the boy. We were great friends. He was very genuine and you couldn't meet anybody more down-to-earth. He was never full of bullshit – this is really important to me – I can't think that I ever had to say to him, 'Barrie, don't be a star with me'. There was never a time when he was laying it on heavy.There's this story, well it's not a story, it's true: one night at Liverpool Street Station, Kellogs and Stevie and Barrie are all on their way home after Barrie has just joined Procol Harum. Kellogs is a bit in awe of the world-famous group thing, and he says something to him like, 'Barrie, you know what this means: you'll never travel on the 'bus or the train again.' And Barrie just looks round at him and asks, 'No? How am I going to get home, then?'

 


More pictures from Kenny White here 

Barrie Wilson's page at BtP

Barrie's sister's Paramounts scrapbook

 


 

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