Diaries 1969-1979_ The Python Years - Michael Palin [160]
From the Captain’s Cabin to the Work House – the studio in Old Kent Road where we are to re-record ‘Lumberjack Song’.3 The Fred Tomlinsons have been rehearsing for an hour by the time I arrive (just after 8.00), and up in the control room are Eric and George Harrison. George grasps me in a welcoming hug and Eric pours me some Soave Bolla.
Downstairs, noisy rumblings of Fred Toms. I get down there to find them in the usual hearty good spirits – no Soave Bolla in evidence down there —just huge cans of beer and cider!
Instead of dividing the song and introduction up into different takes, we just launch in, and soon we’ve done three versions straight through and my voice is getting hoarse from all the added shouting at the beginning. But one of the takes seems to please everybody.
George, Olivia, Kumar,1 Eric and I leave in George’s BMW automatic for a meal. We drive, if that’s the word for George’s dodgem-like opportunism, to the Pontevecchio in Brompton Road.
George’s a vegetarian, but he managed to demolish some whitebait quite easily, and did not pass out when I had duck. (I noticed everyone else ate veg. dishes only.)
Saturday, October 4th
At half past four drive up to collect Eric and take him out to George’s house in Henley to mix the song we recorded last night. Eric philosophical about his recent separation from Lyn. He laughed rather ruefully when he told me he’d taken Carey out to the 200 this morning – ‘With all the other divorcees,’ as he put it. But he cheers up when we get to Henley and in through the gates of Friar Park, the magnificent, opulent and fantastical mid-Victorian Gothic pile which George bought seven years ago with the Beatle millions. George’s flag flies above its mock embrasures – it’s an Indian symbolic design of the sun and the moon and bears ‘om’ mantra.
In the gardens there are grottoes with mock stalactites and stalagmites in mock caves and there are Japanese houses and Japanese bridges and all kinds of other ways in which an enormously rich Victorian can spend money on himself. George has endorsed it all by cleaning everything up and looking after it and generally restoring the place to its former splendours. The nuns whom he bought it from had let it rather go to seed and, according to George, had painted swimming trunks on the cherubs and cemented over the nipples on some of the statues.
It is delightful just to walk around and examine the intricate details of the carving – the recurring naughty friar’s head motif— even in evidence in brass on every light switch (the face is the fitting – the switch is the friar’s nose). It has none of the feel of a big draughty Victorian house, but one can’t escape the feeling of George somehow cut off from everyday life by the wealth that’s come his way.
Maybe he feels the same way, for almost the first thing we do is to walk through the grottoes, across the lawns and down to the elaborate iron gates and into the world outside. Henley, with its narrow streets and the fine church tower standing protectively over the little town, with thickly wooded Remenham Hill looming behind.
This was the town my mother was born and brought up in – in fact, she had been to Friar Park for tea when it was owned by Sir Frank Crisp, a barrister. Strange to think of the circumstances that brought me into Friar Park sixty years after she came here for tea.
Anyway, we all walked down to the local pub – where we drank Brakspear’s Henley Ales and played darts.
George was clearly anxious that we should stay the night, play snooker on his Olympic size snooker table, smoke, drink, mix the record and generally enjoy ourselves. But this was my second evening devoted to the ‘Lumberjack Song’ and I wanted to be back with Helen, so I reluctantly resisted most of the mind-bending delights of Friar Park and stuck to a couple of glasses