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she was enjoying turning up the heat and being humorously flirtatious with a raw broadcaster.
    Although I’d previously interviewed that legendary hit maker Cliff Richard on hospital radio in 1975, I did my first lengthy and professional interview with him a year later on Radio 210, when he was promoting his new album,
I’m Nearly Famous
. We ended up in the cover shot of a magazine, with me wearing my hair down to my shoulders and decked out in badges to promote the station, while Cliff sported a badge that plugged his record.
    Former Shadows bass player Jet Harris came to do an interview and bizarrely turned up again the following morning. ‘He’s back,’ I said to Neil. ‘What shall I do?’
    ‘Interview him again, he was bloody good yesterday.’
    It transpired that Jet too had been so happy with the way things had gone that he’d checked into a local pub, determined to return the next day. By lunchtime on the second day, the general feeling was that he might be going for three days in a row, but the once-blond James Dean lookalike suddenly leapt up with ‘My God, my God’, and began staggering towards the pub door. Wright and I came to the instant conclusion that the interviews had been seriously debilitating and he was on the verge of collapse, but it turned out that in all the excitement he’d forgotten that he’d left his dog in his caravan in Gloucestershire without food or drink for two days. A month or two later I produced a couple of tracks with Jet at Sun Studios. Reading, not Memphis. We recorded ‘Spanish Harlem’ and ‘Riders in theSky’, the latter track sounding like the old Jet. I added some ghostly backing vocals and banged two blocks of wood together for the highly essential whiplash effect and the result was pretty good. Ten years earlier and we might have had a hit, but neither track was released, although ‘Riders in the Sky’ somehow escaped onto YouTube and has had 20,000-odd hits. Ah, if only YouTube hits counted as sales, how happy we’d all be.
    As a kid, there’d been a lot of records that I’d found inspirational, but I never linked them together until later. Many of them had been produced by the legendary Joe Meek and the best ones written by a chap called Geoff Goddard. I knew only a little about Geoff, but I discovered that he lived in the catchment area of our radio station and so, not surprisingly, put a call out. At length a very shy and reluctant Geoff turned up at the station, which is when I discovered that he had actually played the organ on the global multi-million-selling single ‘Telstar’. I came to know Geoff over the years, writing a couple of songs with him and hearing how, after Joe’s suicide, he never really wrote again except for the odd creative excursion. He told me how one of his songs was stolen from him and went to number one. He had the squeeze put on him and even Joe, who knew that Geoff had written it, failed to support him, with the result that the courts ordered him to desist from claiming ownership. The deception not only destroyed his will to write, but also left him with severe headaches for many years. I consider myself privileged to have written and recorded two songs with Geoff, ‘Flight 19’ and ‘Yesterday’s Heroes’. Geoff died in 2000 and I feel that, as he was probably my earliest influence in wanting to write songs, I should record here the fact that he was a truly great songwriter, a gifted musician and an unusual man. He worked in the refectory at Reading University, clearing away the plates at lunchtime and generally cleaning up. He didn’t have to do it, as he still made enough from his royalties, but he enjoyed the camaraderie and it gave him something to do. He was heavily into the spiritual world and confessed to me that he often left his tape machine running while hewas asleep in case it picked up any alien or spirit voices. I still experience both joy and sadness when I listen to the two songs we wrote together and