Philip Norman recalls his father Clive Norman who ran the Seagull Ballroom on the end of Ryde Pier. His account is set on the night that he learned that Buddy Holly had died in a plane crash. How a young songwriter from Lubbock, Texas is indelibly linked to a rock'n'roll ballroom on the end of Ryde Pier. Hear the story on:
Vaguely Sunny - Isle of Wight Rock anthology CD, price £10 p&p
PHILIP NORMAN
The Skater's Waltz
Philip Norman grew up in Ryde when it resembled a Victorian colonial outpost hanging onto the last vestiges of an Empire that had all but gone up in the cordite smoke of two World Wars. With Europe still in turmoil the Island became a tranquil haven for droves of holidaymakers.
    The Skater's Waltz is an autobiographical novel concerning Philip Norman's childhood in Ryde. It is an upbringing that was caught between his long suffering mother and his estranged father who ran the Seagull Ballroom on Ryde Pier while romantically entangled with its skating rink teacher. The Seagull Ballroom has passed into local folklore:

"It was a series of things. First of all it was, in the Summer, a slot machine arcade with a restaurant upstairs on the sun roof and the Winter it became a skating rink and then he changed that. He made it a kind of cafeteria, first a restaurant then a cafeteria in the daytime in the Summer, moved all the slot machines out, kept a few, virtually gave them away, a few years later they were worth thousands of pounds each.

Then he made it first a restaurant then a self service cafeteria, with dancers in the evenings and when rock and roll came in he decided that was the way to go, but because he couldn't stick at anything, because he couldn't apply his mind, he lost interest after a few weeks and of course it just deteriorated into this kind of lurching brawl on Friday and Saturday nights as well." - Philip Norman
    Another local story concerns the Seagull's grand piano, a tale that takes on all the charm of a Secombe/Sellers/Milligan Goons sketch:

"It was a grand piano, my father had painted it grey, it had yellow keys. The first season he had a Hammond electric organ and a piano and Nick Olsen used to play the organ which just an old Hammond organ then turn round and play this tinny grand piano. Then my father stupidly wanted to get rid of it. If he'd kept the cheap Hammond organ he would have saved himself so much money but he didn't, he got rid of it. He bought a new organ and they heaved the piano into the sea. And it floated, just floated away. They watched it for hours, you know sort of making its way out to Spithead." - Philip Norman
    Philip Norman performed in skiffle band The Rave-Ons at the Seagull Ballroom as well as venues like the Vine Inn at St. Helen's which was an early haunt the beat generation. When he left the Island in the early sixties he became a successful journalist, author and playwright. He has brought his journalistic knack for digging out the facts to Shout about the Beatles, a book on Elton John and his latest biography on Buddy Holly.
   His times on the Island are occasionally featured in the colour supplements of national newspapers or columns. His description to the Archive of the characters of Ryde included this gem:

"Twinkletoes was a platinum blonde with a dress knotted above the knees. She was mixed up with the La Boheme gang. There was Dotty Doris, familiar eccentrics you used to see everyday. I have the travelled the world, interviewed Colonel Gadaffi, but I have never encountered people like I met in Ryde in the fifties." - Philip Norman
    Also by Philip Norman and highly recommended reading is The Road Goes On Forever - Legends and Superstars of Contemporary Music (Corgi Books 1982). These pieces were originally published in the Sunday Times and Times newspapers. One chapter is called Pop Promoting The Blues and deals with the Foulk Brothers who promoted the three Island Festivals.
    Philip Norman is currently writing the film script for a film about John Lennon who is to be portrayed by Jude Law who is receiving notice for his role in Anthony Minghella's film The Talented Mr. Ripley. Philip Norman is also writing a book on the Island characters he encountered during his years growing up in Ryde.
Philip Norman recalls his father Clive Norman who ran the Seagull Ballroom on the end of Ryde Pier. His account is set on the night that he learned that Buddy Holly had died in a plane crash. How a young songwriter from Lubbock, Texas is indelibly linked to a rock'n'roll ballroom on the end of Ryde Pier. Hear the story on:
Vaguely Sunny - Isle of Wight Rock anthology CD, price £10 p&p
BUDDY THE BIOGRAPHY
Buddy Brilliant ...

"I had vowed never to write another pop music biography, but this not quite the same as Elton John, the Rolling Stones or the Beatles. Those books had been motivated by the promise of a good story. This one would be motivated by three decades of love, fascination and gratitude." - Philip Norman, Buddy The Biography.
Philip Norman is a craft served journalist by trade. His pen is equal to many a sword. With an eye for meticulous detail he seems adapt at putting his foot into all kinds of closed doors. He leaves no stone unturned in this rivetting biography of Buddy Holly. Who better to write a biography of Holly than a journalist who had already nailed the lives of the Beatles, Rolling Stones and Elton John. None judging by this absorbing work.
    What Philip Norman brings to this 400 plus page tome are three essential ingredients. He has an eye for sorting the wheat from the chaff which enables him to draw the story out between the lines. A crafted, sometimes poignant, often humourous writing style (witness his description of Jayne Mansfield as 'Two Zeppelins coming to a dead tie in a race'). Finally the author has a great love for the music of Buddy Holly born from his own formative years growing up in Ryde.
    This book is a pier's length from the formalised, dime a dozen biogs that run through dates and places like a speaking clock. This is the real McCoy. The author visits Lubbock, travels to Dallas, anywhere to find an interviewee, to gather his source material. This he sifts and pieces together the script with all the precision of a dark Hitchcock movie.
    The scene is set in the fifties bible bashing belt of the West Texas Panhandle in the then fiercely racist town of Lubbock. Through Philip Norman's descriptive power you can literally taste the arid Texas dirt, hear the Tabernacle Baptist Church choir and sense the innocence between Buddy Holley and his first love Echo McGuire.
    There is a fascinating picture in the book of Elvis Presley on tour in Lubbock with Holley in a crowd of awe struck teenagers. Elvis's handful of appearances in Lubbock setting the seal on Holley's inspiration to become a star.
    Holley's own career (including that mispelling of his name) and that of his buddies false starts when Decca drop them in January 1957 after recording sessions in Nashville. If Sam Phillips would finally kick start Elvis's career from Memphis before Colonel Parker took control it is Norman Petty in Clovis, New Mexico who changes Holley's luck.
    Philip Norman follows in Holley and his band's footsteps when he travels the ninety miles North East from Lubbock across the Texas border into New Mexico. Just as Buddy Holley did in 1957 the author arrives at Norman Petty's Clovis recording studio aback of Petty's parents gas station. The writing, as ever, is chock full of descriptive gems:

"Inside this bizarre little compound, almost everything a pop record could ever say was definitely said between February 1957 and the summer of 1958. It is all now history as distant as Clovis Man; yet, in common with all thrilling archaeological sites, one has the sense of life interrupted rather than extinct. The fish-shaped clocks, the swan necked cats, the dime-slot Coke machine, the Fender Pro amp, all seem to await the crunch of Oldsmobile tyres on the forecourt, a yell of Texan laughter, a clatter and ruffle of drums being set up, then a voice, melodious but commanding: 'OK let's do it."
    While acknowledging the genius behind a string of hits that included 'That'll Be The Day', 'Peggy Sue', 'Oh Boy', 'Not Fade Away', 'Words Of Love', 'Loves Made A Fool Of You', Philip Norman does not shy away from telling the story as it was. For example he highlights Holley's taste for 'far less respectable girls' while Echo McGuire is away at the Christian University in Abilene. Further he presents the evidence on Holley's alleged illegitamate offspring leaving the reader to decide.
    Much of the bite in the book surrounds the almost Anthony Perkins, in Pyscho persona, of Norman Petty. From the very first time Philip Norman describes Petty as 'Clovis Man' who smells of aftershave the reader is drawn into hating the bastard. A guy so manicured, so clean, so precise but with something underneath which Philip Norman whispers but never brings to the surface. For the book's main target is the uneasy relationship between the artist caught by the manager's web.
    Philip Norman brilliantly exposes Petty's slight of hand in adminstering the band's bank accounts. The author also notes the sublime manner in which the man at the mixing desk weasels his name into the song writing credits at the expense of Holly and his band. In direct contrast Philip Norman's notes Norman Petty's insistence that the boys 'tithe' a percentage of profits to their local churches.
    The brilliance really shines, for me, when Philip Norman brings the Clovis set to life in vivid cariacatures. The strange relationship between the sauve Norman with his Bible close at hand, his organ playing wife Vi and his overtly 'butch' secretary Norma Jean Berry. The piece that made my flesh crawl was:

"Even death was not to give Vi her husband's undivided company nor silence the persistent rumours about that strange triumvirate which ruled so many years at 1313 West Seventh Street. With them under their headstone at Clovis city cemetery lies their ever faithful bookkeeper and amanuensis, Norma Jean."
    The book claims that Clovis Man was responsible for Holly being forced on that ill fated Winter tour. Holly already parted from Norman Petty, The Crickets, to a man sidled with Clovis Man. Holly was living in Greenwich Village with his pregnant wife Maria Elena. He was broke, living courtesy of Maria Elena's aunt awaiting final settlement of funds from a Clovis bank account controlled by Norman Petty. While letters between solicitors and Petty ping ponged between New York and New Mexico Holly took to the road for cash.
    That final tour is so brilliantly described by Philip Norman that my living room virtually freezed over as I read it. By the time the story reaches that midnight airfield there is no way you can put the book down right to the inevitable end. You can almost see Holly's breath in the cold when Waylon Jennings tells him that he has swapped places with the Big Bopper. "Hope your old bus freezes up," jokes Holly. "Well I hope your ol' plane crashes" replies Waylon. Then Ritchie Valens out flipped Holly's guitarist with a coin and grabs the last seat.
    From West Texas to a smashed airplane strewn across an Iowa field, the life of Buddy Holly told as though Philip Norman had been there. Revealing, sad, funny, ironic. When the author is handed the last picture of Buddy Holly it becomes poignant:

"It is not, as I had feared, a shocking or gruesome picture. It is just terribly, terribly sad. Silhouetted against some burst open luggage, a long figure in a pale coat lies face-down in the snow. I remember those light-hearted words of his very first hit, 'That'll be the day . . . when I die.' I realise he was a young man with everything he needed - everything except luck."

Buddy the Biography by Philip Norman. A masterpiece.

Mike Plumbley

Philip Norman recalls his father Clive Norman who ran the Seagull Ballroom on the end of Ryde Pier. His account is set on the night that he learned that Buddy Holly had died in a plane crash. How a young songwriter from Lubbock, Texas is indelibly linked to a rock'n'roll ballroom on the end of Ryde Pier. Hear the story on:
Vaguely Sunny - Isle of Wight Rock anthology CD, price £10 p&p
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