"On Prescot Road, just before it descends towards town and becomes London Road, there used to be a recording studio called, Phillips. When we were kids we used to pass it on the bus and assuming it to be named after the Phillips record label we wondered how come such a famous company had a recording studio in the front room of a terraced house in Kensington, Liverpool!
Later, having formed a beat group, we telephoned to book a session there. Mr Phillips told us it would cost fifteen shillings an hour! We threw caution to the wind,
said screw the expense and booked two full hours (we were, after all, planning to record the entire fourteen tracks of our first album!).
Just about everyone who was ever in a Liverpool group has got their first Phillips record tucked away in an attic somewhere. Paul McCartney still has the Phillips record of the first tracks ever recorded by The Beatles. Although I haven't been up to the attic for years, I know that mine is up there somewhere, the single that is.
We never quite finished the album! Shortly after this committal to vinyl, the group broke up, an early victim no doubt of the pressures of the recording studio!
Lack of reliable stage equipment was undoubtedly another contributing factor in the demise of The Movers. The last gig we ever played was Kirkby Labour Club. Apart from the guitars and the drums, every other piece of equipment was either borrowed or home made; the microphones kept falling apart, the p.a. equipment kept picking up the local police and taxi cars and halfway
through our second number, my homemade amplifier burst into flames. They didn't like flames on stage at Kirkby Labour Club.
Years later when making fires on stage became rather fashionable, I noticed that neither Jimi Hendrix or The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown ever got booked to play Kirkby Labour Club.
As we stood in the car park that night minus most of our equipment, and all of our fee, I tried to persuade the rest of the group that we should go into folk music. It wasn't that I was that hot on folk music back then but from what I'd seen of it, you could do folk music without amplifiers or even microphones.
Brian and Albert said that folk music was crap and we had a big row, the result of which was that Brian and Albert went home on one bus while Dave and me got on another.
Just over the road from where Phillips Recording Studio used to be, there's now a scuffed piece of grassy ground where Gregson's Well used to be. Someone had told us they had folk music in a room upstairs and Dave and Mel and Pirate John and me went to see what it was all about. There was a little American guy playing on the stage and, just like I'd said, he had no microphone, no amplifier, no p.a., just an acoustic guitar, a set of songs and a little bit of talk in between. Dave, Mel, Pirate John and Dave and me thought the little American guy was okay.
Two years later when Sound Of Silence was a worldwide number one, me and Pirate John and Dave and the others used to strut around Knowlsey estate saying, "Yeah, we always said he was okay, that Paul Simon".
I kept going back to Gregson's Well.
The night before I got married I shouldn’t have been there at all. I’d been booked to play a gig myself up in Blackpool. But that afternoon a snow storm had set in and I never got to Blackpool.
My brother-in-law who did get to play the Blackpool gig said it was one to remember. But I’ve never regretted missing it because, instead, I got to go to Gregson’s Well and for the first time in my life I heard Barbara Dickson sing. Along with everyone else in the place I had never heard of Barbara Dickson. She was appearing as just another floor singer, someone who was getting up to do a couple of songs for free in the hope that subsequently she might get a booking at the club."
