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Richard Amey: The Consecration of the House

Successful autograph hunters inevitably become devious people.

I was one back in the early 1960s when all the main rock bands and many emerging ones visited my home town. The hunt for one’s quarry develops in one a fearless sense of adventure in the eternal running battle with Jobsworth who can never let you through his door, for inconvenient but entirely laudable reasons of security.

Getting to the venue early is the secret of success. You can work independently. You’re not with a crowd of other less adroit hunters who give the game away, so you can slide through doors before Jobsworth goes on duty, explore dark corridors in the labyrinths of backstage, stumble upon the very star you’re after, sidle up to them crab-wise and ask if they wouldn’t mind just writing something on this album cover if they’ve got a moment to spare.

At that stage of proceedings they’ve often got more than a moment.

I no longer hanker after autographs. And one reason may be Procol Harum. Having worked my long-honed skills to fulfil my calling and get my gig programme fully signed at the Wimbledon Theatre sometime in the 1970s, I suddenly felt it was time to retire from the profession.

That Night Of The On-stage Piano Tuner is a tale that can wait for another time. But having chatted to BJ and Gary backstage before and after that gig, and gratefully accepted (as one does in one’s middle 20s) that one’s heroes were, after all, just ordinary honest blokes like you and me, with a strong talent in a field merely different from mine, the Autograph Hunter in me was laid redundant. The obsession was gone, the need no longer consuming.

But all the same I’m grateful because the boldness bred in me by those teenage days brought me an experience to share with those of you, the vast majority, who have not cultivated the audacity to tread where it’s the decent thing not to.

Martin Lambeth and I opened the car doors and headed, spring-heeled in feverish anticipation, across the top level of the Harlequin Theatre car park. This was the Day of the Year we’d waited so long for; this was the afternoon, soon would be the hour.

But where the deuce is the way in? It’s all bricks and designer masonry.

Aha. A double door. A route in for the big theatre scenery? Opening straight out to an unloading area? Today, could it be the way in for the band’s gear?

Shouldn’t we go down a few car park levels? This can’t be the Harlequin as well, right up here, can it? It’s probably a supermarket ...

Curiosity never killed this cat. It only got scoops in the world of journalism or autograph hunting.

The overriding impulse to do the unorthodox overcame me and Martin had no choice but to follow. Bouncers superseded Jobsworth in the 1980s after autograph hunters discovered human rights. We hoped they’d be lenient.

A push, a shove, a creak. The door pushed to, behind us, and five paces later we were in gloom. A minute or so of nose-poking in this direction, then that, to try to establish bearings and we were soon disorientated.

Were we high up? Or low down? Where was the box office? Where was the cloakroom? The restaurant? Where was the auditorium? (Where were the toilets?) Where was anything?

We might have been potholers in a subterranean dither.

Then a sound.

An organ.

A Hammond organ.

But playing entirely by itself.

No one else.

A single track isolated by the engineer for scrutiny in a recording studio? Heads listening? Intent? Rapt? Critical?

Unmistakable, unfolding majesty: the organ part from In the Autumn Of My Madness, starting from the first bars of that querulous, mountingly hysterical section that searches rewardlessly through the keys.

The Phantom of the Harlequin? A cowl over his head, playing manically by himself, as though alone at three in the morning?

No, stupid! Just a Procol, playing through, reminding himself how to do it after all these years.

Ah. But who?

Matthew, the theme’s father? Downward-looking, detachedly intent, revising for his big exam?

Or Chris, the theme’s inheritor? Dimpled chin, shoulders grooving, checking below his foot-pedal positioning?

The sound was being relayed to dressing rooms very near us in that corridor, through speakers on the wall, from on-stage. Was the stage at this level, too? If we go this way, will we find ourselves walking out onto the stage itself?

The music stopped.

We waited, but it did not resume. The organ bench was empty, the keyboard abandoned. Slightly crestfallen, we had to accept that was so.

The spell broke. The juvenile need to seek and find was no longer extant. We could simply turn on our heels, save our 40-something bodies a bearingless and possibly fruitless amble around the Harlequin without a map, and jolly well find the proper way in, that decent folk find and use.

So we did. And, do you know, the burning question of identity of the phantom organ player receded as the conviviality and sheer uniqueness of the afternoon enveloped us, down in the reception foyer. As 40-somethings we’d get far more satisfaction just simply biding our time to find out when the time came.

Well, mate. At least we know one number they’ll probably play apart from You Know What, on its 30th birthday.

And yet, what a moment that had been.

Firstly, the Harlequin Theatre had undergone something very special indeed: something it had never experienced. It had been quietly consecrated by the music of Procol Harum.

And secondly, what an uncanny, veiled presaging of what was to be, before of our eyes later: one of the Great Moments in Procol Performing History. A hint we never perceived because we did not know who the organ player had been.

But had we gone deeper into the caverns, and happened on that apparently highly private, personal rehearsal, would we, even then, have put two and two together and made the four of anticipating that Professor Fisher would, instead, be playing guitar and singing?

In our happy, duller-witted 40s, I doubt it.

We’re no longer that clever!

Back to Back to Shine On-Line May 1998