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Early in 1961, Shirley Owens, Doris Coley, Beverly Lee and Micki Harris were topping the US chart with ‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow’. Here was an extraordinary development; four young black girls had over-ridden all the obstacles of money, influence and power that the music industry and media had erected against them and forced their way into the big time through sheer talent and the popularity of their sound. Some three decades later I met Shirley Alston-Reeves (nee Owens) in a New York recording studio (she’d earlier recorded a new version of the Shirelles’ old hit ‘Mama Said’ for a TV ad, using Valerie Simpson and Patti Austin as back-up girls), where she told me her story:

“All the guys around were singing in groups, doo wopping in the basements to get that echo-chamber effect. Beverly and I were good friends – we used to babysit a lot together – and decided to do the same thing. We started singing together just for fun, but our two voices just weren’t making it, so we asked Micki to join us. We heard Doris singing in the school choir. She had a powerful voice, so we asked her to join the group too. That’s how the Shirelles were formed, although we called ourselves the Poquellos at the time. Beverly gave us that name – we were all studying Spanish at school.

“One day we were fooling around singing in the school gym and the teacher caught us. She said that we could either enter the upcoming school talent show or we could stay after school. Of course we chose the talent contest.

“We got all excited about that and went out and bought matching outfits: little black taffeta skirts and long-sleeved nylon blouses. We decided to be different and not sing someone else’s song, so we wrote a song of our own. A few nights before the show we all got together and wrote ‘I Met Him On A Sunday (Ronde Ronde)’. It was about the days of the week. We just picked a day and sang something. Simple as that.

“We sang the song on the talent show, a cappella of course, and received a standing ovation. Everybody loved it. A classmate of ours, Mary Jane Greenberg, asked us to sing it for her mom, who had her own company, Tiara Records. We weren’t really interested in recording, but this girl kept asking us. She was becoming a pest and we ended up changing our route home from school so that we wouldn’t keep bumping into her.

“Eventually Mary Jane persuaded us to go to her house and sing the song for her mother, Florence Greenberg. She loved the song and wanted to sign us straight away.

“Our parents thought that we were too young to start travelling around the country and wanted us to finish school, of course. But we got all that sorted out and the rest is history, as they say. Our favourite female group was Arlene Smith and the Chantels and we tried to find a name as close as we possibly could to theirs because it was so pretty. We came up with Shanels, but were told it was too close. Florence wanted to call us the Honeytones. We had to decide real quickly because they needed it for label copy, so we decided on Shirelles, which we spelled from my name.

“Florence released ‘I Met him On A Sunday’ in 1958; it did quite well. As a result we worked quite a lot: parties mainly and private functions. It was at a show at the Howard Theater in Washington DC that we first heard ‘Dedicated To The One I Love’. We were on a bill with a group called the Five Royales; two or three of the guys in the group wrote it. Every time they sang it we would run down the stairs so that we could listen, because we liked it so much. Doris was really in love with the tune, so we told her that if she learned the lead, we would do the background.

“It was about this time that we first met Luther Dixon. Florence Greenberg introduced him to us. She said that she had a new producer for us and that he’d had some success with ‘Sixteen Candles’ that he’d written. We were so excited to meet him. He really was very good and went on to become a big part of our lives. He created our sound.

“The first track we worked on together was ‘Tonight’s The Night’, which he and I co-wrote, although I had been writing songs for a couple of years. Not just ‘I Met Him On A Sunday’ but some B-sides too – ‘Look A Here Baby’, ‘Slop Time’, ‘Mama Here Comes The Bride’. ‘The Dance Is Over’ is one of Luther’s songs that we used to perform a lot at the Apollo. We had a little skit that we loved to do. We dressed Doris up as a little old lady with a beat-up fur coat; it was real cute. Other times we’d each wear one black and one white shoe. We always tried to come up with something simple but different.

“As our records started becoming successful we began to work more and more – Dick Clark tours, 30 one-nighters, every night you’re in a different town. Dick Clark was wonderful. He rode on the buses with all the musicians. In the beginning we did one of the first integrated shows to play Alabama. We had to play out in an open field where everyone had to bring their own chairs, because there was no seating. They really didn’t want the show to go on. There was Johnny Mathis, Nina Simone, the Shirelles and Joey Bishop. The stage actually collapsed when Johnny Mathis was on; it was sabotaged or something. I remember everybody crying and screaming and running across the fields. Everybody was so afraid.

“I remember another time Dick Clark trying to persuade a Holiday Inn to let us stay there, but no matter what he said they wouldn’t let any of the black groups book in. There weren’t any black hotels down south, so we had to stay in little rooming houses. I remember being so afraid that the four of us Shirelles took one room and all slept sideways in the same bed. They were gambling and drinking in the halls, so we made Ronnie, our MC, sleep in a chair all night, jammed up against the door.

“When Luther first brought us ‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow’, I didn't like it. It was a nice lyric, but I didn’t think it was my style. He played me the demo disc with Carole King singing, just her and the piano. It was very laidback with no strings or anything. To me it sounded like a country and western song. I told Luther that I really did not want to sing it, it was too country. I was so nervous that he would make us change our style. But he persuaded me to do him a favour and record the song on the understanding that if it didn’t turn out well they wouldn’t release it or put it on an album. The song came to life at the session and, of course, went on to become our first #1. I laugh about that a lot now. After that, if there was ever a song I didn’t care for, they’d put it out on a single.

“Nothing much really changed after we reached #1. We worked more and made more money – not too much, just a little more. We weren’t too interested in the business side of things. We were happy going along, going to work and looking forward to our next show. As a matter of fact, sometimes we didn’t even know when we had a new record out. We used to take the bus from Passaicin to New York and walk up Broadway to the Scepter offices. There was a big restaurant called The Turf where all the writers and musicians used to hang out. As we walked by they’d come out and show us our new record in the chart in Cash Box. We hadn’t even bothered to find out how our new record was going.

“Royalties! What royalties?! Well, we did get some, but I can tell you that we didn’t get what we should have got. We didn’t get a fraction. We were told that money was being put in a trust for us, but when we turned 21 we found out that there was no money. I don’t know what happened to all the money, but everyone at the company seemed to be living really well. Florence has told us that she never did anything wrong and persuaded us to drop our law suits. She told us that it was the people around her that wasted all the money and that she didn’t have much money herself. It never spoilt our relationship with her, we still loved her.

“In 1975 I left the Shirelles to have my daughter Amber. Doris had left the group in ’68 to have her twins. I called Doris and asked her if she would take my place for a little while because I was having a baby. But when I returned they were settled and happy working as a trio and, truthfully, they froze me out. No-one would talk with me, which is pretty uncomfortable when you’re all in a car together travelling to jobs. Well, obviously, I was very hurt. Had we stayed together we wouldn’t have the problems these days with so many different Shirelles groups going around. Most of them are fake groups. But I wouldn’t want anyone to think that we split up because we hated each other. The fact of the matter is I loved these girls, probably too much. We wouldn’t have stayed together all those years if we hadn’t loved each other.” 

We were sad to learn of Music Machine lead singer Sean Bonniwell’s death from cancer just before Christmas 2011. An admiring Alec Palao pays his respects.

Etta James, who died aged 73 on 20 January 2012, was one of the greatest and most influential soul and R&B vocalists of all time. A regular in the Ace catalogue since our earliest days, Etta is currently represented with six collections of her classic recordings for the Modern and Chess labels.

She was born Jamesetta Hawkins in Los Angeles on 25 January 1938. Her mother Dorothy was just 14 at the time. Dorothy’s older sister Cozetta and her husband James acted as Jamesetta’s legal guardians until she was six months old, when Dorothy handed her over to foster parents.

Lula and Jesse Rogers had no children of their own and raised Jamesetta well. They sent her for tap dancing, ballet and drama classes and every year to summer camp. On Sundays she accompanied Lula Rogers to St Paul Baptist Church where the renowned Professor James Earle Hines directed the Echoes Of Eden choir. Jamesetta took voice tuition from Professor Hines, piano lessons from his wife and became a local child celebrity, performing on weekly radio broadcasts.

When Lula Rogers died in 1950, Jamesetta was taken in by Dorothy’s older brother and his wife. The upheaval brought out a rebellious streak in her. She bounced from school to school and began hanging around with street gangs. She became friendly with the Balinton family and joined the Lucky Twenties gang with one of the girls, Umpeylia. After one particularly violent rumble, Jamesetta was sent to a juvenile home for a month.

In 1953 she began singing with her friends Abye and Jean Mitchell, naming themselves the Creolettes. They worked up an act performing jazz songs and numbers by their favourite groups the Spaniels and the Chords. While singing at a record hop they got to meet the Midnighters, in town to promote their hit record ‘Work With Me, Annie’. After the show the girls sat down and wrote ‘Roll With Me, Henry’ in response to the Midnighters’ song.

Abye, the eldest of the Creolettes, inveigled her way backstage at a Johnny Otis show and persuaded him to audition the group. Otis liked their sound and offered them the chance to make some records.

On Thanksgiving Eve 1954 the girls entered the studio of the Bihari brothers’ Modern Records, one of LA’s leading independent labels, to cut ‘Roll With Me, Henry’, with Richard Berry helping out as the voice of Henry. Within days Otis was playing a dub of the song on his radio show. As a gimmick he invited listeners to phone in and suggest a name for the group, but he’d already decided to rechristen them the Peaches and to switch around Jamesetta’s name to Etta James, giving her lead billing.

Lest it prove too suggestive for airplay, the song was re-titled ‘The Wallflower’ upon its release in January 1955. The record entered the R&B charts in February, rising to #1, where it remained for a month. The Peaches were unhappy with Etta getting the main attention, but not as miffed as she was when Georgia Gibbs took her sanitised cover version of the song to #1 on the pop charts, or when a legal dispute delayed royalty payments.

Etta and the Peaches took to the road as featured vocalists with the Johnny Otis Show until Dorothy Hawkins reappeared to help extricate her daughter from her contract. By this time Otis had also discovered and recorded Etta’s friend Umpeylia Balinton, dubbing her Little Miss Sugar Pie. The Peaches did not sing on Etta’s next hit ‘Good Rockin’ Daddy’ or any of her other records, but they continued to tour with her, sometimes with Sugar Pie’s sister Francesca filling in.

Etta spent the next few years working the chitlin’ circuit. More records for Modern followed – including some cut at Cosimo Matassa’s studio inNew Orleans– but none were hits. She made many friends on the road, including Sam Cooke, Johnny “Guitar” Watson, Little Willie John, Little Richard, Ruth Brown and Jackie Wilson.

In 1957 Etta met John Lewis, who became her manager. She worked on a bill with the Moonglows in Washington, DC and fell for their leader Harvey Fuqua. She and Fuqua recorded a single together, which Modern issued as by Betty & Dupree. With her career in the doldrums, at the suggestion of one of the Moonglows, Etta headed to Chicago, the home of Chess Records.

Her timing was good. Co-founder Leonard Chess was on the lookout for new female singers and signed her up, buying out her Modern contract. Her first job at the company was to sing background on Chuck Berry’s ‘Almost Grown’ and ‘Back In The USA’. While awaiting her own first session, Etta and the Moonglows took off on a tour of the South, where they all got busted for possessing drugs.

In January 1960 Etta recorded ‘All I Could Do Was Cry’, co-written by Motown’s Berry Gordy. The record was released on Chess’ jazz subsidiary Argo in March. It entered the Billboard Hot 100 two months later, peaking at #33 and at #2 on their R&B chart. By the end of 1960 Etta had amassed four hits, including two more duets with Harvey Fuqua.

Now 22, Etta began recording songs from a bygone era in an attempt to appear more sophisticated. Her version of the Glenn Miller evergreen ‘At Last’, with a lush orchestral arrangement by Riley Hampton, and her album of the same title were big sellers in 1961, setting the scene for ‘Trust In Me’, ‘Dream’, ‘It’s Too Soon To Know’ and many others.

Etta’s new success enabled her to buy a house in Los Angeles, but her mother got involved and messed up the deal. The place was about to be repossessed when Leonard Chess intervened and purchased the deeds, allowing Etta to remain there.

Etta was in New Orleanswhen she first tried heroin, thinking it was cocaine, and overdosed. In Indianapolis she was jailed for possession until John Lewis stumped up a bribe to get her out. On tour with her band, she witnessed her bass player and saxophonist both die from overdoses.

Leonard Chess came to the rescue again and arranged for Etta to be admitted to a convalescent home to clean up, but while there she was diagnosed with tetanus, from which she was lucky to survive. Months later, drug-free, she headed for New York, where she met up with Lewis; her downward spiral began again.

Etta and her friend Esther Phillips, a fellow addict, took to cashing bad cheques, for which Etta was caught and served time in New York’s Rikers Island prison. The dud cheque scam also landed her a four-month stretch in Cook County, a tough jail in Chicago. Other spells in prison and rehab followed.

But drugs did not impair Etta’s art. By the end of 1964 over 20 of her singles had reached the Billboard or Cash Box R&B charts, most of them also entering the Hot 100, including ‘Don’t Cry, Baby’, ‘Something’s Got A Hold On Me’, ‘Stop The Wedding’ and ‘Pushover’, all of which went Top 40. Her album “Etta James Rocks The House”, recorded live with her band the Kinfolks in Nashville in 1963, also sold well.

Etta yearned for a child. She attempted buy a baby from Mexico, but ended up getting ripped off. When the wife of Kinfolks saxophonist Garnel Cooper gave birth to twins, Etta offered to adopt one of them. She took care of the boy, but after six months his mother reclaimed him.

Despite all her troubles, Etta continued to make great records, including the duets ‘Do I Make Myself Clear’ and ‘In The Basement’ with her old friend Sugar Pie DeSanto (Umpeylia Balinton) and an excellent album, “Call My Name”, produced by Monk Higgins.

In 1967 Chess flew a pregnant Etta to Muscle Shoals to record at FAME Studios. The sessions yielded one of her biggest hits, ‘Tell Mama’; one of her greatest recordings, ‘I’d Rather Go Blind’; and the “Tell Mama” album, her best-seller. She returned to FAME in 1968, son Donto in her arms. It was the last time she would ever see Leonard Chess.

Later that year bounty hunters caught up with Etta and escorted her to Anchorage, Alaska to face charges dating back two years. After 10 days in jail she was bailed to await trial, which took three months, during which time she landed a regular club gig, where she met and fell in love with Artis Mills. The case against her was eventually dropped, with the proviso that she not return to Anchorage for five years. She and Mills married and headed back to Los Angeles.

When in 1969 Leonard Chess died, Etta was concerned she might lose her house, but a few days later she took delivery of an envelope he had left for her. It contained the deeds. Even in death Chess treated her well.  

By 1972 Artis Mills had also succumbed to addiction. Etta and he resorted to pulling scams, cashing stolen cheques and worse to raise the money for drugs. They were on the run in Texas when narcotics agents arrested them. Exhausted by their Bonnie and Clyde lifestyle, for the sake of his wife Mills took the rap. He was jailed for 10 years and Etta was released on the condition that she enrol in a methadone programme.

Chess gave Etta a desk job at their New York office and arranged for her to get treatment, but before long she was hooked on both methadone and heroin. Again she was arrested and forced to return to Los Angeles to face outstanding charges. While her lawyer negotiated a deal with the courts, Etta went to work on the “Etta James” album with producer Gabriel Mekler. The record revealed a more rock-styled Etta and reached the pop and soul charts.

When her case came up, the judge gave her a choice: serve time in the notorious Corona Institute women’s prison or be admitted for therapy at the Tarzana Psychiatric Hospital. She chose Tarzana. The programme was tough, but worked, and Etta became a prize patient. She was allowed out for more recording sessions with Mekler and in 1974 released the album “Come A Little Closer”. Etta left Tarzana after 17 months and set up home with one of her counsellors. Her second son Sametto was born in 1976, not long after the release of “Etta Is Betta Than Evvah!”, her final Chess album.

In 1976 Etta and her band flew to Switzerland to perform at the Montreux Jazz Festival. Her first post-Chess album was “Deep In The Night”, produced by Jerry Wexler, who also set it up for her to open for the Rolling Stones on their US tour of 1978. Her next LP “Changes” was recorded in New Orleans with producer Allen Toussaint.

Etta had just finished the sound check for a gig in Dallas in 1981 when she encountered her husband Artis, who was out of jail on parole. She returned to visit him after his discharge to a halfway house and they reunited. The couple would remain together until Etta’s death.

Etta’s career received a boost in 1984 when she was asked to perform at the opening ceremony of the Los Angeles Olympics. Although she never considered herself a blues singer, a resurgence of interest in the music kept her in live work, but problems with substance abuse continued to plague her. In 1988 she booked herself into the Betty Ford Clinic in Palm Springs to overcome a codeine dependency.

In 1988 Chris Blackwell signed Etta to his Island label, for which she recorded two albums produced by Barry Beckett. While in Nashville for the sessions she made a point of visiting the man she had been brought up to believe was her father, fabled pool player Minnesota Fats.

Etta received a Pioneer Award from the Rhythm & Blues Foundation in 1989. In 1992 she reunited with Jerry Wexler for the album “The Right Time”. Wexler also successfully campaigned for her induction into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame the following year. Etta also attended the 1994 ceremony to present an award to Johnny Otis, the man who had discovered her. Her autobiography Rage To Survive, co-written with David Ritz, was published the following year.

After several previous nominations, Etta won the Best Jazz Vocal Performance Grammy for 1994’s “Mystery Lady”, her album of songs associated with Billie Holiday. Seven further albums for Private Music followed, culminating in 2003’s “Let’s Roll”, which won the Best Contemporary Blues Grammy.

Etta had suffered from weight problems ever since childhood. A side effect of her drug use was that it had kept her slim. Without drugs she became increasingly obese. When all other remedies failed, Etta resorted to gastric bypass surgery. In 2004 a new slender Etta released “Blues To The Bone”, winning a Grammy for Best Traditional Blues Album. The “All The Way” album followed in 2006.

In 2008 Etta was portrayed by Beyoncé Knowles in Cadillac Records, the film based on the story of Chess Records. The two women posed happily together for photographers at the Hollywood premiere, but Etta made headlines later when she criticised Beyoncé for singing ‘At Last’ at President Obama’s inauguration ball.

Subsequently, Etta was treated for several serious health issues. While hospitalised she became infected with the MRSA virus and was diagnosed with sepsis. Her family also revealed that she had been battling Alzheimer’s disease for two years. Etta’s final album “The Dreamer” was released in 2011, a few months before her death.

About as far from Pat Boone as you can get are the true believers in the power of rock’n’roll to raise hell, whilst speaking in tongues and letting most all of everything hang out. Fuelled by the increasingly powerful radio stations broadcasting across America, post-war teens came out of the MOR closet and ignited by the spark that was Elvis, quiffed or bouffanted their hair and cut loosefrom the restraints of austerity. Suddenly anyone could be a rock’n’roll star, with a few chords and a backbeat and enough attitude to carry it off. As the big companies were slow to get it daddy-o, indie record labels sprang up to fill the void, and into the void was sucked the weird, the wonderful, the wild and the downright demented.

Some 30 years later these demented teens inspired a whole new desire to take apart rock’n’roll and reconstruct its constituent parts into a brand new monster. And so it came to pass that the meek may have inherited the earth, but the sun, the moon and the stars were domain of extreme rock’n’roll and long may it wail.

photo caption: The Meteors, courtesy Chiswick Records

14 November 1944 - 21 December 2019

Even before Peter Gibbon started to work with Ace, he would turn up at various studios where I was transferring tapes anxious to jot down every date and number from the tape boxes. In particular when I was copying the Stax tapes, he was totally in his element, not only getting to hear fantastic music every day but all those dates. Among the tapes was the motherlode of unissued sides from the early “blue” period and he finally got to compile CDs of Ruby Johnson and his all-time favourite, Carla Thomas. Peter did enjoy a female soul singer.

He was also very good company with an immense knowledge of doo wop and soul music in particular. I learnt a lot from him. At the time he was flying high with IBM, but was also one of the top discographers of American music of the post-War period. When he eventually left IBM, he joined the Ace team and built our fantastic US Singles Database, still invaluable to this day, even with the advent of 45cat and Discogs.

He could be irascible and did enjoy a drink, but it was all part and parcel of a man with a passion for the music that he not only documented but collected avidly and responded to emotionally. He was very much part of a generation of mainly middle-class British men who were in awe of these remarkable records wafting their way across the Atlantic. Peter was a perfect match for Ace, mixing a desire for as much information he could glean from the records while at the same time engaging in them musically.

One nice anecdote is that when we bought the Doré catalogue and the paperwork was shipped from the US, it contained boxes of shipping orders for records as well as the contracts. Under T for Teddy Bears, however, was an empty folder. We were going to ditch the pressing orders, much to Peter’s outrage – so much information to be had there. One day he came up from the warehouse with a contract. It was the Teddy Bears paperwork hidden by Lew Beddell in the middle of the pressing orders.

We have missed him for a while now as he had been getting progressively more ill, but I am sure he is logging the Celestial Choir’s repertoire up there somewhere. – ROGER ARMSTRONG

Peter and I met at Oxford University in the early 60s. As I recall, he was attending Wadham College and I was at Magdalen College. He was studying Maths and I was studying Chemistry. We met through a mutual interest in record collecting and discography. I had been listing record labels since my mid-teens and he had compiled similar lists. We used to compare notes and help each other improve our listings. Mine still contain some updates handwritten by Peter.

When we left University, Peter regularly visited my first wife and me in our flats in Wanstead and South Woodford, where Ray Topping and Norman Jopling were also frequent visitors. Later on Peter used to stay weekends with us in our cottage in Hatfield Peverel near Chelmsford in Essex. Amongst many other weekend and party guests at that time were Tim Rice and Storm Thorgerson, who photographed the “Atom Heart Mother” cow on the way home.

When Peter married Mickey and moved to Staines we didn’t see so much of him. Later on when I had remarried he became godfather to our second son, also named Peter. When he retired from IBM he became a consultant at Ace Records. – TREVOR  CHURCHILL

Peter came aboard at Ace Records as a consultant about the same time as me in the early 1990s. The label was expanding rapidly in the CD era, and Ray Topping and Ady Croasdell couldn’t handle it all.

Peter was an Oxford University graduate and former IBM executive who had a spell living in the US in New Jersey. He was a very serious record collector and discographer. I still recall being in awe the first time I saw his collection, including an enviable run of Golden World singles.

It was no surprise that he used his keen intellect, computer knowledge and discographical expertise to build an unparalleled database at Ace. He supervised many soul and doo wop releases. What a great time we had at the Ace consultants’ meetings – hard work and hard play, where we all bounced ideas off each other. Peter always came armed with a library of discographies. I also recall fondly his visits with Mickey to Shelley and me in Long Island on their annual trips to the US Open Tennis Championships in Flushing Meadows. His work in helping to elevate Ace to become one of the world’s leading reissue labels will always be treasured.

It is entirely appropriate that his life is due to be celebrated at The Bells in Staines, Middlesex, where he entertained many of us royally over the years. Please raise your glasses, everybody, in Peter’s honour. – JOHN BROVEN

I corresponded with Peter about soul label listings and discographies for Shout and Soul Bag magazines in the 1970s and we met up at various record fairs pursuing those elusive 45s. In the 1990s I was delighted to help Peter set up the Ace database and assist him on several compilations for the company. Peter and I took every opportunity to attend live music gigs, especially Ady Croasdell’s Cleethorpes Soul Weekenders. Our first visit there featured the amazing line-up of Barbara Lewis, Lou Courtney and Betty Lavette, all on top vocal form, sounding just like their records. We lost touch for a while due to his illness, but Bob Dunham and I managed to re-establish contact a couple of years ago. Bob will tell you more. – ROB HUGHES

I first met Peter Gibbon when I joined Ace Records in the late 1990s. In his consultancy role Peter was instrumental in training me up for the grand position of Tape Administrator and Archivist, a job that continues to this day, some 23 years later. I’ve also had the pleasure of working from the US Singles Database he instigated at Ace. I thank him.

Peter was bedevilled by leg problems which steadily worsened to the point he was unable to continue working, and contact was lost for some years. He was eventually confined to a wheelchair and mostly housebound, with wife Mickey becoming his main carer. On top of that, arthritis in his fingers prevented him from using a keyboard, a telephone and, heaven forbid, his trusty record player. Peter’s mental strength and sharpness got him through such challenges, and those powers continued undiminished.

These troubles all came to light when former Ace staffer Rob Hughes and myself eventually re-established contact with Peter, and in recent years we made a number of visits to Staines. Not to his house, mind you, but to The Bells, his local pub, to where Mickey would wheel him the two minutes from home. Occasionally she would stay but usually tended to disappear and return some three or four hours later to take Peter home after he’d treated us to an excellent lunch and stimulating conversation to go with the liquid refreshment. Despite the arthritis he still found a way to raise the elbow.

To add to Peter’s woes Mickey sadly passed away in late 2018. Without his main carer, Peter subsequently booked himself into a care home in Virginia Water where he would spend the last period of his life. However, our visits to The Bells were by no means over. Peter tracked down a cabbie with wheelchair access, and myself and Rob were able to meet up with him a few more times during what turned out to be his final months. A further visit was planned for early this year, but it wasn’t to be. – BOB DUNHAM

Although he never had any book or major work officially published that I am aware of, Peter Gibbon was to my mind one of the great discographers. He was the ultimate denizen of the dead wax, a man to whom you could throw the title of an arbitrary 45 release, and off the top of his head he’d immediately and knowledgeably respond with “Money 215”, “Arock 1006”, or “Stax 243”. While I’d hesitate to equate Peter’s mind with that of the fictional savant in the film Rain Man, he wasn’t far off in his grasp upon the runes and hieroglyphs of deep record collecting, particularly when it came to its black American tributaries. People consider me a nerd who purportedly might know who made the tea on the session, but while I have always loved collating discographical info – about the only maths I can stomach – I am nowhere near Peter’s league as a record scholar.

Of course, myself and the other consultants who work for Ace Records have been for many years the beneficiaries of his expertise. In the days before Discogs and 45cat, there were few readily accessible resources to assess what and what hadn’t been released on vinyl from the golden era of the 1950s-1970s. Peter’s computer skills collated all the then-available info from books and elsewhere into a series of tremendous databases that are still an effective tool for compiling. I would happily pass on my findings in the field to him at a regular basis, and we could talk labels all day long, no doubt to the exasperation of those within earshot.

Before his physical health prevented him from participating, I would often see Peter on the Ace team’s Stateside visits, beavering over his laptop as myself, Roger or whomever else was along for the trip pulled reels from a vault’s shelves and threw them on the tape machine. He seemed genuinely happy entering the relevant data while we worked. Like Roger, Peter did a lot of time at the Stax coalface when that particular catalogue was owned by Fantasy Records in Berkeley, California, just down the road from where I lived. We’d get together not just to talk Ace business, but also to make jaunt outs to record fairs and stores on the farther-flung reaches of the Bay Area. It was there that I first caught sight of Peter’s trusty, dog-eared notebook with endless and copious listings of labels in which he would furiously jot throughout the crate-digging.

I got to know Peter a little, and discovered that as well as an old salt at the record collecting game, he was somewhat of a foodie. Although my wife Cindy remembers the time we served him dinner at our apartment and he rhapsodised about the apple pie – she didn’t have the heart to tell him it came from the freezer at the local Safeway. He also knew his ale, and many of our conversations were conducted over a jar or three at a pub down the road from Ace Towers, or indeed the bar at whatever hotel was hosting the consultants meeting – a wonderful tradition that sadly no longer occurs, where everyone got together to discuss their latest repertoire leads and talk turkey on all matters Ace. It was at some of these post-dinner reveries that Peter would confide highlights from his youthful days as a fan, including the time he visited the London hotel room of a beloved American soul chanteuse and sat quietly agog while she nonchalantly changed outfits in front of him.

I hadn’t been around Peter since he had had to withdraw from Ace activities due to illness, so my memories remain of how he was. There is a wonderful photo that Roger took at one of the above-mentioned meetings that sums up Peter’s personality. He is leaning forward with a crooked finger upraised, making a point in inimitable fashion. That’s how I will always think of Peter Gibbon: a feisty, irascible, but always kind man. – ALEC PALAO