Advertisement

Alan Blaikley, co-writer of a string of Sixties and Seventies pop hits who went on to become a psychotherapist – obituary

Alan Blaikley in 1976 - UPPA/Photoshot
Alan Blaikley in 1976 - UPPA/Photoshot

Alan Blaikley, who has died aged 82, formed, with his lifelong friend Ken Howard, one of the most successful songwriting partnerships of the 1960s, breaking through with Have I the Right?, a chart-topper for the Honeycombs in 1964, and becoming the first British pop composers to write for Elvis Presley.

The pair went on to discover the “Mod” group they renamed Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich and wrote 13 consecutive hits for them, beginning with Hold Tight, Hideaway and the controversially-suggestive Bend It. Both writers specialised in creating short musical “dramas” for them, notably the whipcracking The Legend of Xanadu and Last Night in Soho. Later still, the pair ventured less successfully into stage musicals.

With its pounding beat furnished by the Honeycombs’ drummer Anne “Honey” Lantree, Blaikley and Howard’s Have I the Right? shot to No 1 in July 1964. Recorded by the maverick independent producer Joe Meek in his tiny makeshift studio in north London, the drum beat was augmented by the Honeycombs themselves stomping their feet on the wooden stairs, to the irritation of the cleaning lady, who told them to hurry up.

Blaikley and Howard had stumbled across them when the group, then called the Sheratons, were performing at a pub in the Balls Pond Road and offered them some of their songs.

When the band said they were desperate for original material for an imminent audition with Joe Meek, Blaikley and Howard quickly taught them the numbers, including Have I the Right? With Martin Murray and Alan Ward on guitars, John Lantree on bass and his sister Anne on drums, the group underwent a hurried rebranding.

The title of the Honeycombs' No 1 was reputedly inspired by a line in Radclyffe Hall's classic lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness
The title of the Honeycombs' No 1 was reputedly inspired by a line in Radclyffe Hall's classic lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness

As Anne’s nickname was “Honey”, and she and Murray were hairdressers (combers), they became the Honeycombs. Joe Meek threw a tantrum when they arrived late because of the traffic, but Blaikley and Howard talked him round and Have I the Right? was recorded in three parts, backing musicians, vocals and finally the stomping on the stairs.

The BBC took a dim view of two of their employees writing a No 1 pop record, which became an international hit, selling more than two million copies.

Blaikley had read Classics at Oxford (Howard had studied Social Anthropology at Edinburgh), and for denizens of Tin Pan Alley, both were unusually well-read. The title of their first hit was reputedly inspired by the last paragraph of Radclyffe Hall’s classic 1928 lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness: “Acknowledge us, oh God, before the whole world. Give us also the right to our existence!”

Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich - David Redfern/Redferns
Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich - David Redfern/Redferns

The song oozed teenage angst and, as Howard recalled, “reflected our own ambivalence”. It was promoted by the disc jockey Tony Blackburn on the pirate station Radio Caroline, but only when it entered the Top 20 did the BBC give it airplay.

Then 23, Blaikley would never forget the thrill of walking down Old Compton Street when Have I the Right reached No 1, “and hearing it blasting from every jukebox”.

He and Howard took over as the group’s managers, and at a Honeycombs gig in Swindon, Blaikley discovered Dave Dee and the Bostons, recently returned from a summer season at Butlin’s in Clacton, and was struck by their choreographed stagecraft. “They employed a lot of humour,” he recalled, “and there was something of the British music hall tradition about them.”

Blaikley and Howard also took over their management and renamed the group, using their nicknames, Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich.

Blaikley and Howard also wrote hits for Lulu, the Herd, Marmalade, Sacha Distel, Petula Clark, Eartha Kitt and Engelbert Humperdinck, among others.

When their run of successes dried up in the late 1970s, Blaikley trained as a psychotherapist, and between 1981 and 2003 ran a private practice in Hampstead, north London.

Blaikley and Howard wrote more than a dozen hits for Dave Dee and his bandmates
Blaikley and Howard wrote more than a dozen hits for Dave Dee and his bandmates

Both he and Howard collaborated with the eccentric psychiatrist RD Laing, which led to the album Life Before Death.

Alan Tudor Blaikley was born on March 23 1940 in Hampstead Garden Suburb, the eldest son of Ernest Blaikley, an official First World War artist and later a distinguished graphic artist and Keeper of Art at the Imperial War Museum.

From University College School, Hampstead, Alan read Classics at Wadham College, Oxford, and worked as reviews editor of the university newspaper Cherwell. On graduating, he collaborated with two school friends, Ken Howard and Paul Overy, running and editing four issues of a magazine called Axle Quarterly (1962-63) and publishing early work by, among others, Melvyn Bragg (his contemporary at Oxford), Ray Gosling, Alexis Lykiard, Gillian Freeman and Simon Raven.

Blaikley, left, with Ken Howard and Joe Meek outside the High Court in 1965 during a copyright case over the authorship of Have I the Right? The songwriting duo were adjudged to have written the Honeycombs hit - Len Cassingham/ANL/Shutterstock
Blaikley, left, with Ken Howard and Joe Meek outside the High Court in 1965 during a copyright case over the authorship of Have I the Right? The songwriting duo were adjudged to have written the Honeycombs hit - Len Cassingham/ANL/Shutterstock

Under the pseudonym Anthony Rowley, Blaikley also wrote a booklet called Another Kind of Loving, about homosexuality in the years when it was still a criminal offence in Britain. As a freelance, he wrote and narrated several BBC radio programmes, including Writing for Children, in which he interviewed CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien and Enid Blyton.

Between 1963 and 1964 Blaikley was a trainee producer with BBC Television’s talks department and worked on the nightly current affairs programme Tonight.

As a choirboy at St-Mary-at-Finchley, Blaikley had picked up a rudimentary musical education which he applied to his early efforts at writing songs. Ken Howard’s mother had been a concert pianist, and his father had an office Dictaphone on which they recorded their first tentative effort in 1954, a rumba-inflected number entitled The Yellow Dance.

Anonymously, they also wrote songs for the critically acclaimed concept album Ark 2 with a storyline tracking the last spaceship to leave a post-Armageddon Earth. Recorded by a new band called Flaming Youth, it featured a fresh-faced pre-Genesis Phil Collins on drums and vocals.

Although the album failed to give the group lift-off, the pop critic Derek Jewell noted that Blaikley and Howard “have a wit, gaiety, dignity and melodic flair reminiscent of Leonard Bernstein… which suggest that pop is becoming the serious music – in the proper sense – of the age”.

Under the joint pseudonym Steve Barlby the pair contributed a handful of tracks to the first Matthews Southern Comfort album, including I’ve Lost You, a little-known story song of a failing marriage. Freddy Bienstock of Carlin Music, who had acquired some of Howard and Blaikley’s back catalogue, was also the recording manager for Elvis Presley. In 1970 Presley recorded it and included it in his film That’s the Way it is.

Blaikley and Howard wrote Love Can Fly for Engelbert Humperdinck - Popperfoto
Blaikley and Howard wrote Love Can Fly for Engelbert Humperdinck - Popperfoto

Less successful were their two stage musicals. The first, Mardi Gras (Prince of Wales, 1976) – “noisy, colourful and abysmally empty... no more than a gaudy mish-mash” (Daily Telegraph) – was a celebration of carnival time in New Orleans set in 1917, with a book by Melvyn Bragg.

Nor was this newspaper much kinder to their second, an ill-fated adaptation of Sue Townsend’s The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾ (Wyndham’s, 1984), which featured what the reviewer considered “the humdrum songs of Ken Howard and Alan Blaikley, all as trite as Grandma’s ditty Your Dead Granddad”.

With a long-term interest in analytical psychology, and at the instigation of his analyst, mentor and friend, Dr William Kraemer, Blaikley trained as a psychotherapist at the Westminster Pastoral Foundation (The Foundation for Psychotherapy and Counselling).

Petula Clark sang Have I the Right? on her 1965 album Petula Clark Sings the International Hits - Popperfoto
Petula Clark sang Have I the Right? on her 1965 album Petula Clark Sings the International Hits - Popperfoto

In a letter to The Times in 2009 following Dave Dee’s death, Blaikley recalled having to produce a sanitised version of Bend It for the American market. He also recorded an outrageously ribald version that he left on the desk of Fontana’s rather straight-laced A&R manager, Jack Baverstock.

“We started songwriting as a joke,” Blaikley and Howard told Jonathan Aitken for his book The Young Meteors (1967), “but suddenly we were forced to take it seriously. Now we are well enough off to have to think of tax fiddles.”

Among their television themes, Blaikley and Howard created award-winning scores for the BBC drama series Miss Marple and By the Sword Divided and, for Thames Television, The Flame Trees of Thika.

Alan Blaikley’s partner for nearly 40 years from 1978 was the translator David Harris, with whom he entered into a civil partnership in 2007. Harris predeceased him in 2015.

Alan Blaikley, born March 23 1940, died July 4 2022