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Let us dwell for a moment on a mere fraction of the popular music that in one way or another, had been created by these five men jammed into that tiny carriage: ‘All I Have to Do Is Dream’, ‘Bye Bye Love’, ‘Cathy’s Clown’, ‘Bird Dog’, ‘(Till) I Kissed You’, ‘When Will I Be Loved?’, ‘Walk Right Back’, ‘Cryin’ in the Rain’, ‘So Sad’, ‘Wake Up Little Susie’. The ghost of Buddy Holly was of course with us; he was killed only the year before in a aeroplane crash and Phil Everly had been a pallbearer at his funeral.
The next week, back in London, Phil and I bought his first winkle-picker shoes in Carnaby Street. Swelling with pride that they were my friends, I took the brothers to the house of the great botanical artist and guitarist Rory McEwen; the dashing art dealer Robert Fraser was there, as was Christopher Gibbs. Peter Blake was already their friend. Those were heady days. Most intoxicating of all, though, was being burrowed into backstage life full of laughter and quick-wittedness; standing in the wings awash with Phil and Don’s soul-soaring harmonies, or otherwise sitting dizzy with delight in the best seats reserved for ‘the friends of the artists’. Never over the years did that exquisite pleasure diminish.
Thereafter we met whenever the brothers came to England, until in 1973 they had that fateful guitar-smashing break-up on stage at Knott’s Berry Farm theme park in California. Their sibling rows had been rife for years and it was no surprise that this nightmare of a place did for their act in the end; a 160-acre forest of rollercoasters and rides, so horribly fake that the very air you breathed seemed manufactured.
Ten years later there was a grand reunion concert, at the 5,250-capacity Albert Hall no less, and for two nights. Every seat was sold. I heard of it only by chance while I was in Oxfordshire photographing an Elizabethan home and, immediately downing tools, I was off, arriving at the Albert Hall in time to employ my intimately honed stage-door johnny tactics and to find myself in a seat on the stage but inches from my old friends. I won’t ever forget the surreal evocation of youth that night. The music didn’t just recall bygone days but submerged me into the very essence of being a 17-year-old again. Occasionally I tried to shake it off, but it was no good. It was the oddest warring of the senses.
In 1988, I was making a BBC film on the Great North Road and by the oddest coincidence found that we were to be in Edinburgh on the same day as the Everlys. So it was that viewers were treated to the unexpected sight of the Everlys and me relishing the glories of Edinburgh’s 1861 Café Royal as we celebrated our meeting, 28 years before, on the northbound Flying Scotsman.
My 47th birthday was spent in Don’s Cotswold vernacular manor house in Nashville. Dinner was a Chinese banquet on the ‘Strip’, along with all the Crickets most tunefully in song with their greetings. Another trump card was Don showing me the full-scale replica of the Parthenon in Nashville, cast in concrete with all the sculptures richly in place — as if Lord Elgin never got his toe in the door. For some publicity purpose I happened to be dressed as the Statue of Liberty. It was no mean moment, to find myself thus attired, in company with an Everly brother amid the pillars of the Parthenon in Nashville! Don Everly was particularly delighted by the company of my husband Peregrine Worsthorne: ‘You don’t meet guys like that on the road.’
Phil and Don’s lives and ours have been interwoven for years and in a multitude of ways: Perry and I went to Traverse City in Michigan to see Don’s then girlfriend’s grandmother, a star of the Gold Rush opera houses and still a great beauty in her nineties. Posters of her, with red hair to her waist were hung throughout the house.
The Everlys and I were last together during their sellout tour of 2005. It was to be a gala goodbye: cruising from Kensington High Street to the Albert Hall in a marble-lined bus, as well as gorging on dinner in Don’s hotel room, hung all around with tapestries. With his sensationally beautiful wife Adela and her sensationally beautiful twin sister Adelaida, we toasted our way through a vast Thanksgiving dinner which had been wheeled in on several tables, their white linen cloths draped to the floor
Sadly, there was no romance with either Phil or Don, though it got pretty near to it when Phil said that ‘I often wonder whether our teeth will end up in adjoining glasses!’ He once told me that whenever he was asked how to make friends in England, he always answered: ‘Take a train to Edinburgh.’
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