Our Johnny is the Only One Dancing in Time: Chapter 26
An occasional series of possibly true scenes from a perfectly normal life. Let's call it faction.
Chapter 26: A Modern Day Folk Hero
(If you’re new to the book, you might want want to read the other chapters first. Links to each chapter are at the bottom)
Max Clifford is on the phone and he wants to get this sorted out.
The band management and record company side of things has been keeping me busy during the evenings and nights, but by day I was living an almost schizophrenic existence as the CEO of a music charity.
Over the course of ten years, Rhythmix had established a name for itself as a music charity at the cutting edge of community practice. I had encountered hundreds of musicians doing coal face work in this field who had the ability to deliver truly groundbreaking projects in all sorts of places where music could really make a difference. Whether it was a Pupil Referral Unit or a Nursing Home, putting music into it had a dramatic impact. What had started as a deliberate policy by me to take some money and just try to disrupt a small piece of music education with it had turned into a wide ranging project working in literally hundreds of locations with thousands of, mainly young, people.
While I struggled to understand some of the concepts and methods the artists involved were taking in their work, I had a particular life experience which most people running charities of this size, and frankly importance, didn’t have. As someone who had initially thought of music as a route to fame and riches, I didn’t feel a particular affinity for musicians whose main focus was the social impact of creating a new drum beat or writing a lyric. But I did have the advantage of knowing exactly how the kids they were working with felt.
My own brush with formal music education, at a school full of very damaged individuals who had been co-opted into being teachers because no one knew what else to do with them, consisted entirely of having the names of dead composers shouted at me. The intent of this exchange was that I should be able to reply to the demand “Mozart Boy?!” with the swift response “1756 to 1791 Sir!”, thereby confirming that I had learnt all the necessary and the essential facts about the famously bawdy and undisciplined philanderer; both the year he was born and the year he died. Whole terms of statutory music lessons would pass in one of the cobwebbed, decaying towers of ‘the old school’ without sign of a single instrument or, indeed, a note of any music to consider the musical prowess of these no doubt worthy individuals. A classical education you see; the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Something as emotive and human as music, at least the type of music that makes the hairs on my arms stand up, isn’t taught by drilling people to read dots on paper or how to stand while you hold a trombone. It’s taught by giving someone an electric guitar, a lead and an amp and inviting them to hit it. Just to see what happens. What had happened with the musicians delivering the Rhythmix work who I had encouraged to take this approach was that smiles appeared on otherwise glum and solemn faces, and conversations became possible that otherwise wouldn’t have happened.
Most of this book can be quite flippant and deliberately dismissive of the type of things I’ve accidentally been involved in, or even been responsible for creating. The charity work with music is not that. It genuinely changed people’s lives in ways that were unpredictable but totally life affirming. The things I saw achieved through this work possibly shaped who I became and what I believe in as much as any guitar solo or moment of crowd surfing. There was the long term truant who made an agreement to attend provided drums would be available and then turned their life around. The family in the Palliative Care Home who got the chance to hear the song recorded by the child they were losing; they didn’t know how to say goodbye but they knew how to sing it. The hospitalised young person who the doctors described as a medical miracle for reducing their medication and replacing it with the DJ skills that made them feel like a person again. Forget the sub-title of this book because this part isn’t faction or my badly recalled memories of distant events. These things all happened. A big part of my work was to read the reports on the work, the assessment of what was happening on the ground while I sat in my office trying to think how to keep it going. Those reports convinced me to say something publicly and loudly that I’d secretly known for many years: Music had saved my life. The power of it, the community of, the feeling of being there when it happens. Music had thrown a rope down and pulled me out of the holes I’d been thrown in and provided the ladders that got me over the walls people had put in front of me.
My principle role as the CEO of this charity was to find the money to make all this incredible work possible, then to make the decisions of who to give it to so they would make it happen. With a background in opening venues in toilets with no budget, failing to sign record contracts, and flouncing about in movie studios trying to sell esoteric music, you might think that would be a bit of stretch, but I had discovered an otherwise untapped entrepreneurial trait and was, trust me, really very good at it. I was really good at it because I was super motivated by what we were doing, and could explain it with a genuine note of authenticity that surprised people used to hearing quite dry presentations about outcomes and outputs. Some people talk about a calling to a profession, or have dreams as a child to be this or that thing. I’d never felt any of that. But between 1999 and 2019 I found something I really believed in, took everything I had learned by doing all daft things you’ve read about, phoned everyone I’d ever met who might possibly feel the same way I did and raised something just short of £20 million to make Rhythmix happen.
It wasn’t all me, of course. Somewhere between the initial process of telling four music services exactly what they could do with their money and running a charity raising phenomenal piles of money every year I’d had another Road to Damascus moment of self realisation. I’d worked out not only what I was good at, but also what I really was not. If you’ve ever thought that I seem like a rounded individual with a grounding in the achievable and logical, then you have The One to thank for that. I was a massively under achieving attention deficit disorder hyped up maniac equally likely to throw myself off a clifftop to see if it hurt or accidentally become the president of the United States. Then she came along and seemed to think that was all okay but maybe if I focused on what I was good at I could actually do some things I might think were actually worth doing. Someone telling you that by their actions and the way they treat you is my definition of actual love and more likely to reduce me to a blubbering grateful mess than a random day of the year on which we are all supposed to suddenly be romantic.
Learning what I was good at and what I wasn’t enabled me to rethink how I was doing things, which led me to build a close knit team of people around me who had skills I didn’t have or liked doing things I wouldn’t do. First among this merry throng was the Lanky Fop.
If you’ve read this far through this tale, you will by now have noticed a recurring cast of characters who pop up in one unlikely tale and then reappear much later on as the answer to another quirky and unusual spot I’ve landed myself in. The Lanky Fop is one such of this ensemble. Many, many moons ago we had bumped reputations as the two local chancers most likely to end up with a record deal. After both of us singularly failed to deliver on this promise, he had wandered off to run a musical equipment distribution warehouse, I had wiggled my way through the chapters in this book. In the interim years he had learned how to know exactly where everything is and what it is doing there, and I had learned how to keep putting things in odd places and forgetting why. It was the perfect duo, like the discovery of a kindly and benevolent uncle in a Oscar Wilde play. He took on managing all the contracting and finances, leaving me the space to shout at someone until they gave us the money.
Two legs is not a solid foundation on which to build something which might function as a stable seat, for that you need at least three. The third leg of our stool, the person who practically understood and could actually explain the work to other people in the sector who obviously regarded me as an oddball, was The Human Font of Zen Like Calm. I had found this remarkable example of human capabilities working in a somewhat chaotic and virtually unmanageable drum thumping street orchestra. She didn’t bang anything, but she made sure there were things to bang, told people where to be so they could bang the things, and made sure that the people doing the banging were backed up by an invoicing procedure that might actually result in some fiscal benefits for all the banging. She could also unravel the word salad of the most illiterate bid writer, turning phrases like ‘we want to bang things’ into a logical and thought provoking paragraph about the impact that the sonic noise created by banging things might have on social cohesion and connectivity.
These two between them created a functioning machine that turned my authentic experience of music saving my life into something that people at every level of the public funding structure could understand. Essentially, this process ran along these lines: I would go and throw a firecracker into a room full of people with degrees and letters after their names. The Human Font of Zen Like Calm would patiently explain what the flaming object was doing there and why it was a good thing. We would jointly douse down the flames with a bit of flim flam and the sort of reasoned explanation that people with money like to hear about, arriving at a project that sounded like it would have the dual benefits of my authentic approach and her practical world skills. Then the Lanky Fop would finalise the deal by issuing them all an invoice as he politely showed them to the exit. If that sounds like an incomprehensibly stupid way to do things, please suggest a more efficient way to extract £20 million quid out of government agencies to let someone record a rap about how much they want to burn parliament to the ground.
This was the team whose phones started melting with messages and calls at about 8pm on a Saturday night in September 2011.
Full disclosure: I have never seen a whole episode of the ITV show The X Factor. It doesn’t seem like the sort of thing that is likely to hold my attention, as I like music. That was your first pithy throw away put down, prepare yourself because there are probably going to be a few more. To my understanding, this show is based on the premise that random people turn up to an audition in front of some people who are loosely associated with that part of the music industry that is best described as light entertainment. In the 1970s, when I was stuck in hospital, the nurses all insisted on tuning the single TV in the ward to New Faces on a Saturday evening, so they could boo and jeer every time the face of a plainly bored Tony Hatch would appear on the screen expressing his distaste and antipathy towards whichever musical act had just murdered a current hit. The X Factor appeared to have condensed this concept into four Tony Hatches, each one more bored and angry than the last.
The chief bully, the uber Tony Hatch, was a remarkable looking fellow by the name of Simon Cowell. Cowell had an interesting career in the music industry, having basically signed nothing but appalling crap to his imprint label S, housed within BMG who were too embarrassed to put the BMG name to any of it, all of which went on to make remarkable amounts of money for very little investment. This man’s credentials for tat were astonishing, having not only brought the nation Sinitta, but also Robson and Jerome. The sort of acts that Black Lace look at and think ‘that’s a bit much’. His reign of terror produced not just Westlife and Five, but also the Teletubbies and Zig and Zag. Forgive me, but I think it’s not only unlikely you’re going to find him propping up the bar at The Windmill in Brixton checking out the latest talent, I suspect he actually hates music. He’s certainly committed numerous crimes against it which, in any sane society, would be called into the Hague as potential breaches of the UN code on war atrocities.
This chap Cowell had cleverly persuaded ITV that if people would actually buy this sort of dreadful nonsense from him then maybe there was a TV show in creating the musical artists that would perform it. He’d then sealed a prime time event every Saturday night while creating a contract in the background that whoever won this carnival of crap would be exclusively signed to his label. He followed this up by getting everyone to pay him a staggering amount of money for it and spent most of it on trousers that didn’t fit him , hair transplants that came direct from a toilet brush, and facelifts that set his face against the concept of human expression. Look, I don’t mind if you like this sort of thing, it’s just not for me and I hadn’t ever had any reason to engage with it or pay attention to it. Apparently they were already on season eight of this show before I even knew it existed. I was about to become incredibly aware of its existence for all the wrong reasons.
The first message pinged to my phone was the relatively obscure and oblique ‘Oh, smart move! How much did you get?’ This was followed in quick succession by about twenty more messages with variations on this theme including the more succinct ‘oh you sell out’ and the thought provoking ‘I don’t know what the kids are going to say about this on Monday’. Eventually I select one of these messengers and call them to ask what the heck they are on about.
“Turn on your TV, ITV right now. The X Factor”. I respond that I can’t think of a single reason on God’s dear earth that would compel me to do such a thing. “Oh, you will” is the reply. I reluctantly pause the DVD. probably of The Wire or some other incredibly niche programme that viewers of the X Factor would regard as poncey intellectual rubbish, and turn on the channel as requested. The show is heading towards its finale, the end of the auditions and selection of talent they will be taking to the next stage. The camera zooms about a bit madly, then settles on four young women who are crying and hugging each other.
“You’re all going through together” announces the hugely trousered Tony Hatch impersonator. “As Rhythmix!”
I turn to The One.
“Wait, he didn’t just say….. Did he?”
We both stare at the gogglebox. There it is, scrolling across twenty foot high LED screens behind them. R H Y T H M I X. In case we missed it, the gravelly voiced narrator says it a couple of more times like he’s announcing the name of a new wrestling superstar. “Rhythmix! Rhythmix!”
I don’t know if you’ve ever created a children’s music charity and then spent 12 years building up its reputation as a respected purveyor of important social and cultural experiences only to turn on your TV channel one night and find that the nation’s leading music hating Easter Island statue has formed a girl band and given the name of that charity to it, but it is quite the adventure. Weird and bizarre things started happening almost straight away.
I phone ITV the next morning. I seem to be talking to someone who might be the head of programming or could be the cleaner. There’s no one in who can help me, and in any case, they don’t make the programme. Cowell’s production company makes it, it’s an entirely owned subsidiary of his label, by now titled the rather revealing epithet SyCo. I mean… he’s hiding in plain sight isn’t he? How many clues do you people need?
I try to get psycho, sorry, SyCo, on the phone on Monday, but the receptionist insists I must be joking. “That’s not the sort of thing we would do, is it.” she says emphatically, in a tone that suggests I am calling from a nearby mental health support facility. “Well, it plainly is, because you have done it.”
I try email. No one responds. This goes on for several days, with the name of the band, a name which we have trademarked specifically for use in the music field and which we have been using for 12 years, filling the pages of newspapers, radio and TV items. Nobody from SyCo ever answers or returns any calls, but eventually someone from the Daily Mirror picks it up from a Facebook post, manages to get their press department on the phone, and gets a statement from them saying that they’ don’t think it’s an issue’ and they have ‘spoken with us and we are fine with it’. I inform the journalist we are not fine with it and we haven’t spoken to them. He invites me to describe Simon Cowell as a thieving bastard. I decline, but point out that it would be quite nice if they would not steal the name which legally belongs to us.
The next day the Daily Mirror runs the story as a side bar on the front page and all hell breaks loose. By 4pm we have to cancel one of our workshops as The Sun have sent a camera crew down to see if they can persuade one of the young people to call Mr Cowell a tosser, or hopefully something worse. My phone number is on the website, so every journalist in England is calling it every two minutes trying to get ‘Charity Boss Mark Davyd’ to say something I shouldn’t. The following day it is in every newspaper from The Mail to the Times. The Express, who I have declined to speak to entirely, have an interview with me which they run under an opinion piece describing the children’s music charity Rhythmix as ‘money grabbing chancers’ who are ‘seeking their moment in the spotlight’. Meanwhile, our social media has gone stratospheric, evenly split between people who want to know where Mr Cowell lives so they can burn his house down and people who want to know where I live so they can burn me down. I’m not joking. People are leaving me death threats. Someone phones a bomb alert into our the reception of our office.
It’s an insight into two aspects of a mainstream entertainment world I still don’t really understand. On the public facing, audience part of it, I am suddenly forced to confront the reality of the oeuvre which is that these programmes mean the absolute world to people in a way that seems, politely, borderline deranged. The young women on the show have been formed into a band with a name we legally own on Saturday night. By Friday of the same week I am receiving emails from people who say they will find me and kill me if I don’t let them have the name as they are the group’s biggest fans and will love them forever. It would be easy to get quite judgmental about what some people’s lives must be like if six days after they saw someone on TV they find themselves compelled to phone a children’s charity threatening to kill the founder of it for daring to suggest that the programme the young women are on shouldn’t have stolen a legally trademarked name. In retrospect, while I felt like that at the time, it’s more of an indictment of the barrage of media that people are subjected to, the terrible role of the press in pushing this at people, that I have a remaining bitterness about. No sane person of their own volition phones in a bomb threat to the office of a charity because there’s a dispute about the name of a girl band. You have to be pushed into that behaviour, told it’s reasonable, encouraged to do it. And the press loved this show for its controversial possibilities and treated this as just another episode in the never ending soap opera.
The second aspect, and one we should be judgmental about, is the way that SyCo handled this. To describe their behaviour as arrogant would be incredible unfair on Sir Arthur Arrogant, the famously conceited and overbearing ruler of the Land of Haughty. Cowell and his team weren’t just full of themselves. They literally could not give two fucks about anything except getting what they wanted. A member of their team, who needless to say was subsequently sacked for taking a mildly ethical view of life, privately and off the record sends me a version of what happened in the office when the name was being chosen. It was suggested by either Cowell himself or someone in his close team. The name is called out, everyone agrees it is great, and someone says it seems familiar, let’s check it. They checked it, found us, and then, and this is a direct quote of what I was told was said, someone, I’ll let you guess who, said ‘fuck it, take it off them’. Just to reiterate; this is the name of a children’s music charity. Nor is it their first offence - you won’t find any record of this anywhere, but you might want to do some of your own investigating on whether the name One Direction is quite as unique as it sounds.
This carries on for weeks. They never contact us. Literally not once. They never answer the phone, never respond to emails, never deal with us directly at all. SyCo make lots of statements to their friends in the press about their legal rights and what they can do and how the name isn’t ours and how they never knew this or that or the other, 99% of which is evidently lies. They think we are going to go away, but we don’t because we can’t. It would be almost impossible to just give them the name and start again, plus really quite expensive, so we have no choice but to slog on and on trying to get anyone to pay attention and resolve it. Our social media posts are attracting tens of thousands of reposts, comments, reactions. The open letter I write is seen by 14 million people on Facebook alone. I do interviews with the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5, and I just keep saying the same thing: It’s legally our name, pick another one. I’m advised several times to ‘do a deal’ and make some money off it, and am pretty much offered a five figure sum personally to do a front page interview on the condition that I will deploy the word ‘cunt’.
If you are reading this it’s probably because you’ve taken an interest in how someone ends up doing the things I am doing or have done. So here is another one of those highly informative snippets of information. I have stolen stuff, broken laws, did things that were massively inadvisable and pushed way beyond the boundaries of what might be considered acceptable or polite, my entire life. Everyone I know like me, and that’s almost everyone, is exactly the same. And we all share another character trait, which is that we have a very deep and almost unbeatable sense of what is fair and ethical and we tend, even against the best advice available, to stick to it. The Punk Singer who featured in the very first chapter of this book is widely known to be one of the most appalling examples of human existence ever to disgrace the planet. He’s also, just like everyone else who features in these pages, an incredible driven and deeply moral individual with an overwhelming sense of what is right and wrong. It’s probably not what you think is right and wrong, but don’t ask him to change it. Everyone I ever met who society considered to be lowlife scum who would kill their own grandmother for a sixpence was actually a fine and upstanding citizen of an alternative society that has its own deeply held values. And those values, despite what the media might have you believe, are more closely aligned with basic human empathy and respect than the people we are supposed to look up to. I’m not getting a knighthood, Jimmy Savile did. You work it out. I won’t give in to SyCo or Simon Cowell, and I cannot be bought to do so, either personally or on behalf of the charity, because it would be the wrong thing to do. Somebody has stolen something that doesn’t belong to them and they aren’t going to get away with it. That’s my moral code and even if it’s stupid I don’t actually know how to do it any differently.
Six weeks later, mid morning, my phone rings.
“Is that Mark Davyd?” I assure the cockney voiced geezer on the phone that it is. “Max Clifford here. What’s all this Rhythmix nonsense about then?”
Max Clifford was a very well known crisis management PR professional. His clients consisted of incredibly mainstream entertainers, he’d had a go at representing Sinatra and Ali, but his usual MO was to get bizarre coverage for someone who needed a bit of a boost, or to do the reverse and shrink a bizarre news story for someone who needed it to go away. “Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster” was his headline in The Sun. On his long list of clients is a certain Simon Cowell, for whom he keeps troublesome things out of newspapers. I explain our troubling thing. We need our name back, we need the group to stop using it, and we need the ridiculous legal fees we have been forced to run up trying to defend our trademark repaid.
“This is rubbish. I’ll make it go away. It will be gone in thirty minutes. Is that all you want?”
I consider this. Is it all I want? This is a multi-million pound company running the country’s biggest TV show. Their budget for coffee stirrers would probably keep us going for the next ten years. I give it a thorough consideration, but I don’t pause too long before saying yes, it is all we want. My pesky moral code again you see. We don’t want their money, or their patronage, or their good wishes, we will just have the name and they can pay the bills for the trouble they caused. Because that was the right thing to do six weeks ago and it’s still the right thing to do now, even if they have let people threaten to kill me and have done nothing at all to stop it. And quite a bit to encourage it.
“That’s done. The agreement will be with you in twenty minutes, call me back in thirty”. He hangs up.
The agreement arrives 18 minutes later. It gives us full legal rights to the name, which is nice of them but we already own it, agrees to stop using the name, agrees to pay the legal fees, and has only one clause they want in return. It contains a non-disclosure agreement. I think we’ve won everything we can win so I sign it and send it back, non-disclosure agreement included. Every single word you’ve just read in this chapter is a breach of that non-disclosure and SyCo should definitely sue me for it if they think it’s going to make this story any better.
I call Max Clifford back. He has our signed agreement, the legal fees are already being transferred. I suggest we make a joint statement to the press, Max says yes let’s do that. While I’m still on the phone discussing it with him, SyCo go ahead without us and release a statement to the press saying they have kindly donated the name to us, hope that’s the end of it, and wish us well. No one from SyCo ever writes to me or acknowledges our existence.
“This Rhythmix charity then… what is it you do?” asks Max. I explain what we do and how we do it.
Gentle reader, I do not intend to go through the entirety of the extremely chequered history of Max Clifford, nor am I going to drag out in this chapter exactly how that history ended. You should do that if you really want to give yourself the heebie jeebies about who he was and what it says about SyCo that he’s making the call to me. This is how this story resolved itself, this is who did it and this is what they said. And so I will tell you, word for word, the last thing Max Clifford ever said to me. Verbatim, not exaggerating, not part of any loose recollection of events. This is exactly what he said.
“We should talk again” said Max. “I’ve got a lot of clients who are really interested in kids”.
About an hour later I am walking along the road towards the bread shop holding one of my kids by one hand and the other by the other. My phone rings, so I carefully hold both of them from running off with one hand, press accept to an unrecognised number and stuff the phone under my chin.
“Mark Davyd! How does it feel?! You must be over the moon!”
“Sorry, who is this?”
“Ha ha! Mark, it’s BBC Radio One Newsbeat and you’re live on air! What an incredible victory, you must be elated!”
I’m busy buying bread with my kids, so it takes me a moment to get my head back in the game and realise they are calling about the name change. I’m still waiting for SyCo to send me the joint press release which we had agreed on, not knowing they had already put one out while getting me to sign a document that swears me to secrecy, so obviously I’m not expecting that BBC Radio 1 will have a press release in their hands that I’m officially not allowed to comment on.
“Oh… er, yes. Well, it’s great news for the Charity and obviously it’s good we can get back to focusing on the important work we do”.
“Sure, sure. But I think everyone listening wants to send you a massive congratulations. The man who took on Simon Cowell and won! It’s like Robin Hood! A David and Goliath story! A lot of people are saying you’re like a modern day folk hero! What have you got to say to that?!”
I have a think about what I want to say about that. And then I tell him and all the millions of people listening.
“I strongly suspect those people have not met me”.
Read the previous chapters of Our Johnny is the Only One Dancing in Time here: