Peter Asher: Everywhere Man

That's that one chord.

-Yeah. Yeah. -You know?

We'll try it.

There was such a mishmash of people in those days...

And I'm talking about, I guess, the '70s? '60s?

Late '60s, perhaps.

...but nobody remembers how they met.

But Peter was always a kind of ghostly, legendary figure

that you heard about.

You always heard his name.

Peter Asher, Peter Asher.

This guru. Uh... you know.

Uh, record world...

I didn't even know what he did.

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.

My name is...

Eric Idle,

and tonight, it is my honor and privilege

to introduce to you all tonight

one of the finest names in show business today.

A successful pop star,

record company executive,

producer, manager,

and recognized throughout the world

as one of the greatest...

I'm sorry. I can't read your handwriting, Peter.

...one...

of the greatest...

things in the entire universe.

Uh...

"Humanitarian," blah-di-blah-di-blah-di-blah.

"Grammys," blah-di-blah-di-blah.

"Shagged Marianne Faithfull," I don't think so.

Um...

Will you welcome, please, tonight...

-Peter Asher. -Peter Asher.

-Peter Asher. -Peter Asher.

-Peter Asher. -Peter Asher.

-Peter Asher. -Peter Asher.

Peter... Asher.

Thank you very much.

Thank you very much.

Well, this is, of course, as it's billed.

This show is a memoir,

and so it may contain, I warn you,

the acceptable proportion

of self-aggrandizing revisionist history.

But I'll try to keep that to a minimum, I promise.

So I guess the question is,

one of the questions we're addressing tonight,

is how did all this happen?

You know, how did the son of an eminent physician

and a classical musician

end up doing all this other interesting stuff?

Actually, I kind of lurched into show business

entirely accidentally

long before I started singing professionally.

Now I can go and play my favorite game:

watching the grown-ups.

The acting thing came about in an interesting way.

I have two very beautiful and talented sisters,

my sister Jane, two years younger than me,

my sister Clare, two years younger again.

My understanding is it all began in the park

when somebody saw the three of us

and said to Mother, "Have you ever considered

putting your children on the stage?"

or something like that.

-The hair. We looked so cute. -I think it was--

-It was the hair. -Yes, it was the hair.

This is the actual page we found

in the Spotlight casting directory.

In fact, it even says, under "The Asher Family,"

"All have red hair."

I guess that was the sales pitch, you know?

It wasn't "All are incredibly great actors,"

or anything like that.

Daddy didn't tell me he was shooting this morning.

Aren't you going to say good morning?

I don't want to miss the guns.

Tell Daddy I'm coming.

Look out! It's a wolf trap.

If you got down under the net,

I could go and tell him you'd fallen in.

No, you get under the net.

No, you. I thought of it!

No, I'd be frightened down there.

Besides, boys can't act.

That was when my acting career kind of gently...

tapered off, should we say?

I went to what the English,

with their gift for irony, called a public school,

which means it's not public at all

and it's very hard to get into and expensive.

Vivat! Vivat! Vivat!

Now, by that time, I had persuaded my parents

to get me a guitar.

And while I was at school,

I noticed that there was somebody else,

another pupil walking around,

holding a guitar case from time to time.

His name was Gordon Waller.

Gordon, as you can see, was incredibly handsome.

I mean, all of us who played guitar and sang

used to stand in front of the mirror

and pretend to be Elvis,

but he actually did a very creditable job of it

and sang really well with his big Elvisy voice.

I don't know whether I heard Peter singing

or he heard me singing.

I think I heard him singing

and I started singing in harmony with him,

and we actually realized that we had a pair of voices

which sort of sounded okay together.

So we started working up a little repertoire.

And then eventually we took our combination of songs

and we started trying to get some actual paid gigs.

We would go into pubs and coffeehouses.

We bumped into a couple of people

who owned a place called The Pickwick Club

and they said, "Would you like to come and audition?"

And we did our usual sort of two or three demo songs.

They said, "When can you start?"

Pickwick Club was this sort of late-night

eating and drinking club

that all the cool, young actors of the day would go to.

We were making 40 pounds a week each

plus tips.

I know it was nearly as much as my father was making.

Now, at that point,

we had maybe a dozen songs we could sing.

And as a duo,

we had a special place in our hearts

for The Everly Brothers.

Every duo that there's ever been,

whether we're talking Simon & Garfunkel,

Peter and Gordon, or even Lennon and McCartney,

we all looked to The Everly Brothers

as the best close harmony singers of that era.

That music, gosh, you know,

it shaped rock and roll.

You know, I was born in 1957,

so I was listening to

Peter and Gordon and to The Beatles

before I was listening to The Everly Brothers

and I became interested in The Everly Brothers

because, "Wow, these are the guys

that Peter and Gordon and The Beatles..."

-Doing their best to copy. -"...thought were cool." Yeah.

We loved what they did.

We did lots of their songs.

We tried to sound as much like them as we could,

which wasn't very successful.

And then I realized how it all works

which is you try to copy people who you greatly admire

and in failing, you come up with something

kind of interesting and different, you know?

So one night, we were in the Pickwick Club

doing our usual gig,

and we were approached by this man in a very shiny suit.

He introduced himself to us as Norman Newell.

Said he was an A&R guy from EMI Records.

"Would you like to come and have a drink at my table?"

Then he said he wanted to take us in the studio

and record us.

Norman had picked out some songs

from the set he'd just seen in the Pickwick Club,

but he also said,

"If you know any other cool songs that you'd like to try,

feel free to bring them along.

Maybe even a new song."

And at that point, when he asked that question,

I thought, "Maybe I do know such a song."

And that's because

there was a whole other subplot to the story

happening at the same time.

When I quit acting, my sister Jane stuck with it.

-Where are you going, love? -London.

And of course,

she turned out to be incredibly good at it.

Jane was a proper movie star.

Can I get you a cup of tea, Alfie?

Take it easy.

You always wanna be doing something.

She was very well known

in England as an actor,