upfront
Q&A
Bobby Elliott of Manchester pop pioneers The Hollies on 60 years not out
Rhonda Lee Reali talks to a guy who was there at the start of the British pop boom, and whose drumming powered some of the jauntiest hits to have emerged from the 1960s golden age. And they’re still touring like troopers!
So this is The Hollies’ 60th anniversary tour… It’s quite a big tour. Obviously these two years have been in lockdown and away from it all for the first time in what, how many years since we started? Certainly, since The Hollies started making records in 1963. We’ve worked every single year since then up to the time we all hit the buffers for two years. The main thing is having fun. Our show is ‘An evening with’. We do an hour, we have an intermission and then we do another hour, so you get all hits and more, as we say.
I understand you’re self-taught and jazz was your first love. So why did you make the move from jazz to rock? Was it because rock was something new?
Rock was always there – rock was blues. Going onto the early American records that everybody was influenced by, like Little Richard and Eddie Cochran. When I was at school, I was keen on modern jazz – Gerry Mulligan, Chet Baker, people like that – and that’s what I started playing. My mother had a grocer’s shop, and I used to drum on the biscuit and Cadbury’s Roses tins. There were tins in those days, next to the radiogram, and it developed from there.
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The Hollies recorded their albums that included dozens of hits almost exclusively at the famous Abbey Road studios. I was down at Abbey Road last year with Tony, Elton John and Ringo. There’s a documentary that Mary McCartney is making called If These Walls Could Sing. Mary and the production team had me in there in the Number Three studio, and she was filming me going round up and down the stairs, as we did in those early days when we were excited – exploring the effects cupboards and the echo room that is still there. It’s just a concrete room with some upstanding sewer pipes for the echo. You have a microphone at one end and a speaker at the other, and they still use that. So, Mary had me retracing my steps and hopefully, it’s going to come out sometime this year. I hope I don’t end up on the cutting room floor!
A favourite Hollies song of mine is one that you’ve written, Then, Now, Always (Dolphin Days). You like Dolphin Days?
Yes, I do. I love it. Oh, that is sweet. Thank you so much for that. I thought everybody had forgotten about it! That tells the story of [Hollies singer/guitarist] Tony Hicks and I coming
down from the North here and making it in the Big Smoke. I’ve written quite a few things. In fact, I’ve had a book published. It’s called, It Ain’t Heavy, It’s My Story: My Life In The Hollies, and it’s in its second run now. I’m quite proud of that. It’s not a blockbuster – it wasn’t intended to be – but I’ve crammed a heck of a lot of stuff in there, and it weighs a ton. [Laughs] That came out right at the start of lockdown, so I really couldn’t do much to promote it.
The 1960s – coming down to London, all your hits, touring. Fabulous times… Yeah, with hindsight, we took it for granted at the time. In those early days in the 60s, and then the 70s, we were churning hits out like a machine in those Abbey Road studios. We liked the social life as well, going to all the clubs. We did the very first Top Of The Pops in 1964 from up here in Manchester, and Ready Steady Go!. Hanging out with the guys and everybody. It was just a way of life, but looking back, I tried to squeeze quite a lot of it into my book. Yes, it’s been a privilege.
St David’s Hall, Cardiff, Thurs 2 June. Tickets: £34-£49. Info:
stdavidshallcardiff.co.uk
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