Fact #154793

Maurice Bacon (Love Affair) : Because (Love Affair's co-manager) John Cokell was (managing director) at Decca, he heard Robert Knight's 'Everlasting Love', which was on their subsidiary label, Monument.

Steve Ellis (Love Affair) : The management put it on and we all loved it immediately. Muff (Winwood) wanted us to record it on our own - no orchestra, no nothing. Somewhere, there's a version just by the Love Affair.

The Love Affair recorded Everlasting Love at Island with Muff producing, but nobody thought it was a single. Another session was booked and I did it on my own with a big orchestra, Clem Cattini on drums, Herbie Flowers on bass and Sue and Sunny on vocals. It turned out great and consequently all the A-sides were made in this way and the sort of hybrid soul/pop we achieved became our sound. Unfortunately it didn't marry up live. As I said before we were a kicking band. Morgan could not feasibly achieve the sound of a 40-piece orchestra with a Hammond organ, but we banged them together and rocked them up a bit for gigs. A bit of a paradox that one.

Madeline Bell (backing vocalist) : Everlasting Love by Love Affair. That was myself, Lesley Duncan and Kay Garner. It was all session musicians and the only member of Love Affair was Steve Ellis. We did the backing vocals, and it is me doing all that soprano bit at the beginning. It was just a session.

A couple of years ago I heard it on television selling MacDonald's and we didn't get paid for it. Another singer Clare Torey - she did Dark Side Of The Moon with Pink Floyd - had retired from singing but she was interested in the legal side and she contacted us. She got in touch with MacDonald's and the advertising agency and they said they had brought the rights and been told it was Love Affair. Clare got a fax from the arranger Keith Mansfield and he had a list of everyone who was on it, and she made sure that everybody got paid. We got £400 but we had only been paid six guineas for the original session.

Maurice Bacon : We didn't play on any of the singles. We'd only have three hours so the easiest, most efficient way was for Keith Mansfield to score the whole thing, bring in session guys like Clem Cattini on drums and Herbie Flowers on bass and do it in two takes.

Herbie Flowers (bassist, Everlasting Love) : Yes, I played on that, but it was the kind of job where you'd roll up, Keith Mansell tells you what the bass line is, and can you play it with a plectrum to get a very toppy sound? So you do it, and it sounds great, because nobody ever did that then, but now everbody does that. There wasn't much to copy in those days. You had to invent it.

George Webley (session player) : Herbie was actually told by the engineer that the bass sounded terrible.

Clem Cattini (session drummer) : I never talked about it at the time, although newspapers from all over the world would ring up and ask if I played on the Love Affair singles. I couldn't say 'Yes,' because I would have lost all my work. It wasn't that the groups' drummers couldn't play. It was down to time and money. I could go in and record four tracks with a band very quickly when studio time was at a premium, because it was so expensive. I had the discipline of a session man which save the producers money.

Maurice Bacon : Mansfield was only involved with the singles, when we used orchestras. Otherwise, it was John Goodison. We were allowed to play on the B-sides and the album and write some of the tracks for the LP. We did the LP in Bits And Pieces at CBS's studio just behind Oxford Street. You had a day to record two numbers - on eight-track, everything was done pretty much live.

Maurice Bacon : It was probably John Cokell's idea to do 'Everlasting Love' with an orchestra. None of us could read music and all these singles were made within three-hour sessions…They had a 40-piece orchestra and you'd be in the back door at CBS Studios - bosh and you're on, three takes and that was that. I put the vocal on and the number was a bit special so everything just clicked.

Steve Ellis : We had this superb publicist, 'Biffo' Bryans. He had these mad ideas. One day, we're all walking up to Piccadilly Circus and he said, I got it, climb up Eros. We said, you're havin' a laugh! No, we'll take some photos. I got to the top with the bow and arrow, two got to the middle, the other two are frothing about underneath in the water and we couldn't get down. Biffo's going, get down, the police are coming.

The next thing, the whole of Piccadilly Circus has ground to a halt. It's two o'clock in the afternoon. The fire brigade came with ladders, the police came and we got arrested. (outlaw) The papers had 'Hippies invade Eros' on the front page, because our drummer had a twinky perm like Jimi Hendrix and a kaftan - he never did have any dress sense!

So we got taken down to West End Central police station and bailed to go to court for a breach of the peace - and when we went back, the record was No. 1.

You couldn't buy publicity like that! We went in the box and got fined £8 each. Our bass player looks at this sergeant and says, that buys a year's supply of truncheons and police whistles! The bloke went ballistic! Our drummer was Jewish and when he took his oath, he had to put a skullcap on but because he had a perm, the cap was wobbling about. We're sitting behind this dock falling about. The judge is going, order, order, order! Our guitarist actually wet his pants he was laughing so much.

Maurice Bacon : From starting the band to recording 'Everlasting Love' was less than two years. I was 16 the week it went to No. 1. We did Top Of The Pops five weeks in a row - three as it was going up the charts and then it was No. 1 for two.

Steve Ellis : It was mental, complete madness. Imagine you've got five fellas - I was 17 - who've never seen anything of life. I came straight out of school into an apprenticeship and had to do the band at nights. I was getting about three hours' sleep. Then, all of a sudden, this went off."

We were on Jonathan King's show, Good Evening. He likes notoriety so he says to our bass player on live TV on a Saturday night, 'You didn't play on your record'. We looked at each other: 'No, we didn't'. He said, 'But you did sing on it, didn't you?' 'Yeah.' The next thing, it's all over the papers: 'Band admit...'.

We did a pre-recorded report on News At Ten once with the head of the Musician's Union. He questioned the band's authenticity, a string of expletives was forthcoming from us and the clip wasn't used. It's a common misconception that we were hyped. We wasn't.

People thought we were manufactured, like The Monkees. That's bullshit. We were a gigging, functioning, up-and-running band. We got a lot of unfair flack. Morgan was a really good keyboard player and we were a tight little unit. But when it kicked into teenybop, you couldn't hear anything - ask Andy out of Amen Corner, The Small Faces, the Herd. It didn't matter what you played. It was just noise, complete chaos. You'd have to back a car up to get in the venue - and straight out. It was dangerous. Kids used to pull chunks off your hair.

So we got blacklisted from Top Of The Pops. One of the executives used to say, if you want to be on the programme, you have to buy my wife a washing machine as a token gesture of goodwill. We said, bollocks, no! We're in the charts, anyway. We refused so we got banned. There was loads of fuss but we were cocky and 17/18 so we didn't care - as long as we were playing to a good crowd.

I remember going up to Robert Knight on a TV show. I apologised to him - sorry we re-recorded your numbers - but he said, it doesn't matter to me. He was really nice."

Maurice Bacon : Afterwards, CBS offered Steve a big deal to stay on the label as a solo artist - I think they gave him ten grand. That's why he stayed on CBS. Steve was getting fidgety. It was always him and us - well, Steve was a bit out there and some of the excesses were setting in. It was weird. We were all getting fed up with it and there was a bit of bad blood.

The problem was, we started as a credible band and then became this sort of joke - with the stigma of not playing on the singles. Things were changing, too. We played with the Episode Six, a pop harmony band like The Beach Boys, and suddenly they were Deep Purple (laughs) and we wanted that same credibility. Steve did as well. Singers always get affected more. I can hide behind a drum kit but the vocalist is, like, naked out front and takes everything personally - good or bad - because they're the front person.

We had a big meeting in my father's warehouse one day. Steve said, I'm going, I'm fed up with all this. And none of us were really upset. We breathed a sigh of relief, although we knew it was pretty disastrous. So Steve left, with our manager John Cokell. And we were still only on £35 a week - when the average wage was about £25.

Eventually, Morgan Fisher and I left to form a new band, Morgan, with Tim Staffell, the singer before Freddie Mercury in Queen [or Smile, as they were then called], and Bob Sapsead, the bass player from another band my father managed, Springfield Park. We did the total opposite of pop - it was so obscure! We were into 13/6 rhythms, the whole hog.
(Source : not known)