Tony... remains true to that mirror image

THOSE once glossy, dark brown, rock star locks may now have turned to pewter grey, but the remarkably unlined, slightly farmer’s tan face still breaks into the engaging and ready smile that so many of us knew a lifetime ago.

Tony Newman. Son of Churchover, Warwickshire country boy down to his polished black cowboy boots, and former Rugby factory wage slave who had a vision of a better existence beyond the hot, noisy confines of the British Thomson-Houston factory shop floor.

Yes, Tony Newman. Singer-songwriter, creator of 1966 chart-topping tune Mirror, Mirror and guitarist with Pinkerton’s Assorted Colours, the 1960s pop band that made England’s most central town famous for something other than a funny shaped ball and the global sport that went with it.

So. We’re having our annual get-together today in Rugby’s legendary Black Swan pub, more properly known as the Dirty Duck. Of course. What else would the place be called, eh?

There are five of us here. Tony, his wife Yvonne, my two daughters Amy and Alice, plus yours truly. We’re sat in a corner just underneath a wide-screen telly that is mercifully turned off. For there’s much to talk about.

And it’s not long before the conversation gathers pace, gaining an impetus of its own that takes it past the bar, out the front door, turning right down Chapel Street, then left along Market Place, North Street, and finally heading deep into Memory Lane…

Wind the tape back two hours. I’m perched on the metal seating that surrounds the famous Cobby Tree in Churchover. I’m on a journey, having travelled on the wings of a River Swift dragonfly back to the summer of 1959. Tangled knots of village children are playing on The Green, just feet away from where I’m sitting. One of the older boys – yes, it’s Tony Newman – is clutching a transistor radio to his ear. I can just make out those now familiar words to Teenager in Love, the season’s great summery hit, sung by the 20-year-old Marty Wilde. Each time we have a quarrel, it almost breaks my heart… the words ooze with an adolescent anguish that’s almost too much to bear.

Tony’s still very much an active musician. Last year, he embarked on yet another 60s tour with vintage chart toppers The Nashville Teens and Dave Berry of The Cruisers fame, fronting the present-day incarnation of ‘The Pinks’, which these days also highlight the fretboard skills of Phil Clough, veteran guitarist with another Rugby band of way-back-when, The Big Idea.

As for Tony, he’s been playing guitar ever since attending a bonfire night party during the late 1950s, at which Churchover villager Eddie Lowe demonstrated his skills on a highly unusual four-stringed instrument, a sort of cross between a guitar and a bass ukelele. The ever-curious young Tony Newman was transfixed. And the rest, as the cliché goes, is history.

A tractor rumbles its way out of Mace’s farm, heads down Church Street, and jerks to a halt in a shower of brown, earthen clods. Driver George Hirons switches off the engine and addresses the assembled throng, who have stopped their games, and are now eyeing the little grey Massey Ferguson machine with studied interest. George stands up off his seat, as if about to make an important announcement in the manner of a politician at the hustings. He’s wearing a grimy flat cap and a tattered overcoat held together with baling twine. “Ay-up. Gaffer would like some of you lot to go spud picking with me on Saturday. Are you fit?” Those hands shoot skywards, with Bob Coles being the first of the older lads to step forward. No surprises there, because Bob likes his potatoes, the evidence being plain to see…

Back in the Dirty Duck, Tony pulls out his mobile phone and starts flicking through a few pictures he knows will interest me. He finds one taken at the funeral of former Pinkerton’s bass player Stu Colman.

Pointing to a man standing behind the couple’s daughter Michelle, Yvonne says: “Who do you think that is, then?” This is a test I shouldn’t fail.

I rack my brains, but regarding this identification parade, I do indeed fail, and miserably so. Yvonne puts me out of my misery. “It’s Shakin’ Stevens.”

Rugby’s Stu Colman had a very eventful life. In the early 1970s, he led a street protest in London, calling on the BBC to play more rockabilly and classic rock ‘n’ roll records.

The BBC said “OK, if you want that, come and do your own weekly radio programme then.” And he did. Imagine that happening today. In fact, imagine any protest like THAT today.

Stu later went on to manage some very high-profile rock legends, including the late Billy Fury. He subsequently became a record producer in Nashville, Tennessee, eventually retiring to Gloucestershire, where he sadly died from cancer in April 2018.

Another name crops up. Tony Britnell, saxophone player with Jigsaw, an iconic Rugby band that like Pinkerton’s, enjoyed considerable success during the late 1960s and early 70s.

Here’s a bit of pop trivia then. My late father, a teacher at the town’s Eastlands School, taught the young Tony Britnell how to play the recorder, which arguably led him to later take up the saxophone and play with any number of bands. So yes indeed, Tony must have certainly enjoyed a full sax life.

Back to 1959. Village girl Maureen Gardner joins the happy throng on The Green, the soon-be-back-at-school late summer sun illuminating her golden hair, which falls across her face, protecting her apple-pink cheeks from burning in its glare. She nods a few hellos, but heads straight to Mick Lucas, who is reclining on the metal seating around the Cobby Tree, probably recovering from his exertions during a game of kick-can, held an hour or so before. She smiles and engages him in conversation. Quite suddenly, Mick springs to life, responding to the not-totally-unexpected attention. Wonder why the transformation? Can't imagine.

Like me, Tony Newman also remembers when it was nothing but fields between Churchover and the Eleven Arches, one of Rugby’s great monuments to the Railway Age, perhaps not the Warwickshire equivalent to the Pyramids of Giza, but still one of the town’s most recognisable and revered landmarks.

These days, with the grotesquely out-of-scale stores and warehouses that now reach right up to the M6, traffic noise and light pollution intrude on a once rural landscape that was formerly silent other than for the calls of lapwings, skylarks and night-time owls.

And we can both recall a time when the rook parliaments held forth in these north-east Warwickshire skies, partridges scooted out from hedge bottoms, and pop-eyed hares bounded with hare-like abandon – what else? - across ridge-and-furrow pasture. All gone.

This being 1959, I’m a child aged 10, and a scholar at Churchover Parochial School. At the moment, it’s the summer holidays, but soon I will be William Shakespeare’s eternal boy with shining morning face, creeping like a snail unwillingly to school. But when that day arrives, and Mrs Butler has rung the final bell that signals ‘home time’ at 3.30pm, it will be freedom once again for me to return to my feral outdoors existence, the only life that I recognise, or indeed want. For the rolling fields and meadows are our prairies, the River Swift will become the Rio Grande in Texas, and the Red Barn that stands next to the farm track that leads to the Watling Street is our hide-out. Unless former inhabitants the James-Younger outlaw gang decide to return, that is. In that eventuality, our Lone Star pistols would never be able to cope, and once we’d been run out of town, then Mick Lucas and I would have to undergo a fresh metamorphosis and be Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie instead. Such are the trials and tribulations of my life in 1959.

It's my round. Tony and Yvonne both request non-alcoholic drinks, which tell me that it will soon be time for us all to go our separate ways. Back at our table, Tony shows me more archive pictures of 1960s groups on his mobile phone, every black and white shot stirring a memory of the days when Rugby was very much a rock ‘n’ roll town before pop impresario Reg Calvert was killed and a dream died with him.

The Mighty Avengers. The Cataracts. The Solitaires. The Beat Preachers. Tony holding a fabulously stylish Burns guitar, the one he played on classic Friday night ITV show Ready, Steady Go. The weekend started here, remember?

The names, too. ‘Biffa’ Beech, Tony Campbell, Roger Meakin, Forbes Merrigan, Jackie McCormack, Des Dyer, Sam ‘Pinkerton’ Kemp. All legends in their own lunchtimes…

This October, Pinkerton’s will once again reform for a gig at The Railway Club, Hillmorton Road, Rugby, in aid of the Air Ambulance. This is a cause close to the band’s heart, and one that Tony has been championing for several years.

But this act of selfless charity should come as no surprise to anyone who knows Tony Newman, the eternally modest country boy from Churchover, who once upon a time ditched that factory job to become a star… one that still burns brightly for the Rugby folk who remember and will always hold him close to their hearts.