It all started with a challenge from John Lennon.
As his epic TV history of pop music is reissued
on DVD, Tony Palmer recalls dodging bullets,
facing a furious Aretha Franklin, and surviving
Russian roulette with Phil Spector

It all started with a chance encounter with John
Lennon in New York in the early Seventies. “Doing
anything useful?” he said with his customary
directness. Over a “delicious” lunch of brown
rice, the plot was hatched. “There will be no
escape,” he warned me, as we mapped out one of
the most foolhardy ideas devised by man ­ nothing
less than the entire history and development of
popular music. “It’s what’s needed,” he kept
telling me. “Something that pieces together all
the various elements that have gone into making
rock’n’roll: country, jazz, blues, ragtime, music hall, soul ­ it’s easy!”

Lennon had been my mentor once before. I first
met him in Cambridge in November 1963, and some
years later, after I had joined the BBC, he
complained to me frequently that many of the
great musicians he admired simply could find no
place on a BBC dominated by Top of the Pops, Juke
Box Jury and gyrating nubiles, musicians such as
Jimi Hendrix, Eric Burdon, The Who, Frank Zappa,
Pink Floyd and Cream, none of whom had at that
time been seen on TV. “I had a duty,” Lennon had
told me then, “to find a way to get them there by fair means or foul.”

He made the introductions and gave me the title:
All My Loving. The BBC hated it. David
Attenborough, then the director of television and
since a good friend, wrote a memo saying that
“over [his] dead body would the film ever be
shown”. After six months on the shelf it was
rescued, if that’s the word, by John Culshaw, the
BBC’s new head of music programmes and a friend
of Benjamin Britten and mine. It was eventually
shown, after the Epilogue, in 1968, after Paul
Fox, the controller of BBC One, had suggested a
compromise: “I’ll trade you two f***s for three pisses,” he said.

Mary Whitehouse hated it. Paul McCartney sent me
a telegram of congratulations. Lennon considered
me “an ally for the cause”. As he wrote to me,
“we have smashed down the door of the BBC and
rock’n’roll on TV will never be the same again”.

In that at least he was right. More or less every
sequence of it has been stolen and used in other
films, usually without attribution, and even on
its fifth screening two years ago on BBC Four it provoked a row.

So here am I in New York, four years after All My
Loving, thinking the unthinkable. I realised that
my ignorance of the subject was matched only by
my stupidity in attempting such a task. Lennon
again came to the rescue: “Get some clever people
to write down why such-and-such a subject is
important to them. Use that as a starter. Oh, and
if you need a good title, how about All You Need
is Love? That’s what it’s all about anyway, or
the lack of it. Cheerio . . . and have fun!” What
we needed first was money, since something on
this scale was not going to be cheap.

Enter Paul Fox again, by then the boss of
Yorkshire Television. He brought in Cyril
Bennett, his equivalent at London Weekend
Television, whose new controller of entertainment
was one Michael Grade. Tell us what you have in
mind, said the three wise men. I mapped out
individual episodes on the blues, jazz, the
musical, ragtime, country, the Beatles, glitter
rock . . . in all, I said, about 16 episodes.
Their eyes glazed over. I could see them thinking: “Man’s an idiot.”

“Are you seriously asking for 16 hours of
primetime television?” one said. “Yes, why not?” I replied.

Grade thought that his uncle, Lord Delfont, might
be willing to fund it. Bernie Delfont, the
tap-dancing impresario who ran every end-of-the
pier show in the country as well as EMI, was. “My
boy,” he said between cigar puffs, “it will be a pleasure.”

Had Lennon and McCartney, EMI’s No 1 artists, let
it be known that the series had their approval? I
never found out, although George Martin told me
years later that he had been told by the
management to give me whatever I needed.

And so I wrote to “those clever people” asking
them for 2,000 words on what their particular
subject meant to them ­ George Melly on the
blues; Leonard Feather, the great jazz historian;
Paul Oliver, the expert on American traditional
music; Jack Good, the producer of Six-Five
Special, the first British rock’n’roll TV show;
Humphrey Lyttelton; Derek Taylor, the Beatles’
press officer; Stephen Sondheim; the journalists
Nik Cohn and Charlie Gillett; Rudi Blesh on ragtime . . .

These were not to be “scripts” for the films, I
explained, but a reference point from which I
could begin my journey. Together with a brilliant
sergeant major, Paul Medlicott, we set about
making lists ­ every artist we could think of who
should be included if humanly possible. For the
episode on swing, for instance, we thought we
must include Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Cab
Calloway, Ella Fitzgerald, Woody Herman, Frank
Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Lionel Hampton . . . well,
that would do for a start. Eventually we had a
list of nearly 500 artists. The astonishing thing
is that, thanks to Medlicott’s organisational
genius, we filmed nearly all of them.

We crisscrossed the United States, north, south,
east and west; travelled to West Africa and up
into the Sahara; to the lakes around Salzburg for
the origins of operetta; to Coventry Cathedral
and Mike Oldfield’s hideaway on the Welsh
borders; to Liverpool and Northern Ireland where,
surrounded by men with Armalite rifles, we filmed
IRA and Provo songs while the Troubles raged. We
drove into the Navajo desert to film Bo Diddley,
who threatened to shoot anyone white. We played
Russian roulette with Phil Spector, and sat while
Brian Epstein’s mother spoke publicly for the
first and only time, in tears, about her beloved
son. We toured Harlem with John Hammond, who had discovered Billie Holiday.

At his insistence, and in spite of his
tracheotomy, we interviewed Richard Rodgers about
his fantastic partnerships with Oscar Hammerstein
and Lorenz Hart; heard the jazz pianist Earl
“Fatha” Hines patiently explaining that he was “a
tool” of Al Capone. There was Eric Clapton
playing a heartrending version of Layla; Lonnie
Donegan delivering “the performance of a
lifetime” (he told me) of Rock Island Line. We
had Roy Rogers, the TV cowboy; Bill Wyman, in
tears while describing the funeral of Brian
Jones; a furious Aretha Franklin; the folk singer
Pete Seeger describing what it was like to be
spat at for his “communist sympathies”;
McCartney, accompanying himself on guitar,
singing Yesterday for the first time in public.
“I wanted to do something special for you,” he told me.

What a great musician (my notorious comparison
between him and Schubert, mocked at the time ­
1968 ­ has long since proved to be correct). I
hope I have been able to repay in small measure
the colossal debt we owe him and Lennon.

Looking back more than 30 years later, I can see
there is much I omitted or didn’t understand
fully. I think that was inevitable, especially as
I had less than £1 million in the budget and only
five months in which to film. The entire series
of (eventually) 17 films was completed in less than a year.

My biggest omission came towards the end when,
having finished filming but not finished editing,
punk rock burst upon the scene. I begged for more
money and more time, but these were refused. The
series was already scheduled on television around
the world, and I don’t think Bernie Delfont cared
much for Sid Vicious. You can see why.

But what strikes me is how lucky we were to get
to so many people (and places) that were gone
shortly afterwards. The 96-year-old ragtime
pianist Eubie Blake remembering talking to Scott
Joplin; the 94-year-old Irving Caesar, who wrote
the words to Tea for Two; the 100-year-old Irving
Berlin. Yip Harburg (the lyricist of the Great
Depression song Brother, Can You Spare a Dime)
and Hoagy Carmichael (Stardust) reliving the
Thirties; the blues pianist Roosevelt
“Honeydripper” Sykes on his slave parents; Liberace on Elvis . . .

They are all gone now, as are many of the places
that have such a resonance in the story. Sam
Phillips’s studio is a parking lot. New Orleans
and its seedy clubs vanished after the floods.
Historic Memphis and Beale Street, so crucial in
the story of ragtime and the blues, bulldozed.
The Cavern, gone. The Grand Ole Opry, now a theme park.

Even while filming I had the occasional glimpse
that what we were doing might have lasting
significance. I obviously knew who Muddy Waters
was, for instance, if only because Mick Jagger
constantly mentioned his name, but we couldn’t
find him. And then, while filming in Chicago, I
noticed that he was playing in a club on the West
Side. Somehow, my assistant, the indefatigable
Annunziata Asquith, managed to find a phone
number and we spoke. “Sure,” he said, “come on
over.” Fearing that the club would be packed, we
arrived very early to set up our equipment (if
only I had had today’s compact digital equipment!
This was slow colour film that needed mountains of lights).

It would not be true to say that there were more
people in my crew than in the audience, but that
is what it felt like. Here was an iconic figure,
more or less forgotten at the time (1975). The
same went for B.B. King, who couldn’t stop
thanking me for having taken the trouble to seek
him out. Likewise Dizzy Gillespie and, most
astonishing of all, Jerry Lee Lewis, who we found
playing in a Holiday Inn on a side stage as guests were checking in.

I think now that what persuaded so many great
artists to take part was simply this: we were
treating them with the respect they deserved, not
only as artists but as human beings. It had
nothing to do with money ­ we paid them a
pittance, and all the same amount, regardless of
their “status” (Lennon’s idea again). Partly this
was a consequence of us going to them, and not
summoning them to a studio, and partly because
they trusted me not to kowtow to focus groups or
illiterate television commissioning editors, or
reduce what they had to say to soundbites.

What they had to say, then and now, is important.
Their story is a crucial part of the social
history of the 20th century in the United States
and Europe. Aaron Copland, the great composer,
once said to me: “In a hundred years, when people
want to know what it was like to be living in the
1960s in the United States, they won’t be
listening to my music. They will be listening to
the Beatles.” Not entirely true, perhaps, but he has a point.

Perhaps the real contribution that the series
made was to demonstrate that it was possible to
make extended studies of “popular music” without
frightening the horses ­ and television
executives. When I brought the finished films
back to the three wise men there was some
discussion about the best time to schedule them.
“Saturday at 10.30pm,” Cyril Bennett pronounced.

My heart sank. “But that’s right opposite Match
of the Day,” I protested. “Precisely,” said
Bennett. “We intend to blast them off the
screen.” Madness, I thought, but at least I
should be grateful for 17 hours of ITV.

After week six ­ and before we had got to the
juicier episodes with the Beatles, the Stones and
so on ­ a jeroboam of Bollinger arrived at my
house with a note from Bennett: “We did it. We buried them!”

Palmer’s close encounters of the strange kind

PHIL SPECTOR

“Turn up at 7pm sharp,” said the voice ominously.
Having nervously passed through a chained fence
(electrified?), past snarling guard dogs and
gun-toting security (and this is Hollywood?), we
were frisked and allowed to enter the vast
mansion of Phillip Spector. He kept us waiting
for five hours, but was polite, even charming,
wearing an absurd frizzy wig and somehow dazzled
by the lights we had put up to interview him. It
was disconcerting to be told: “You know, my
father blew his brains out in front of me when I
was a child. Don’t you think that would have affected my music?”

SAM PHILLIPS

Standing in the tiny Memphis studio where, 20
years earlier, he had recorded Elvis performing a
song for his mama’s birthday, the reclusive Sam
still seemed unaware of the historical
significance of that moment. Equally, as Elvis
himself remembered, Sam remained unaware of what
he had contributed to that moment. Normally,
Phillips recorded gospel, the blues, hillbilly
country music, “always with a beat”, he told me.
Into that brew he added a voice of genius, and
popular music was never the same again. There is
still a Sam Phillips/Sun Records Studio in
Memphis. But it’s not the original. Last time I
was there the original was a parking lot.

LEONARD COHEN

We were in a squalid little café in East Berlin.
Two Stasi heavies stood right by the camera.
Cohen suddenly grabbed a black girl student, also
in the café, told me to start filming, and began
reading a poem about “the killers in countries
such as this”. Mercifully the Stasi men’s grasp
of English was somewhat limited. But the angry
look in Cohen’s eyes was unmistakable. It was a
courageous act of defiance, reinforcing Cohen’s
view that popular music had a duty to be the
social conscience of a generation otherwise cowed
into silence by political hypocrisy.

All You Need is Love is on at the BFI South Bank,
London SE1 (020-7928 3232) on May 3, 4.
Buy it from www.allyouneedislovedvd.com

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article3765982