How a party with The Beatles and hiding from Princess Margaret led to a 1967 hit: “An amazing experience”
The Beatles were such a force of nature in the 1960s that it is hard to imagine how they even managed to find time to party.
Remarkably, the Fab Four played their first concert on a sweltering August evening at Liverpool’s Jacaranda Club in 1960. They officially broke up just under ten years later when, on April 10th, 1970, Paul McCartney announced the split in a press release. I’ve had tins at the back of the cupboard longer than that.
Within that time, they produced 12 official albums, 22 singles, and five films. They rode the unprecedented high of Beatlemania, dethroned Elvis Presley, embraced a slew of ‘bigger than Jesus’ controversies, grieved the death of their manager, took a notable trip to India, changed the world irrevocably, and when they formally called it a day, Ringo Starr, their oldest member, was only 29.
They also did it all largely out of their gourds… and to think that there are now endless ‘high performance’ podcasts that preach morning routines and being a terrible bore are the secret to ‘success’. John Lennon was ever referring to their tours as making the film Satyricon look tame. Given that the synopsis for Satyricon describes it as “an episodic barrage of sexual licentiousness, godless violence, and eye-catching grotesquerie“ you get an idea of their ‘morning routines’.
So, on top of their unprecedented status as a band, this ‘licentiousness’ made partying with The Beatles quite a bloody occasion. The Monkees not only lived to tell the tale of their encounter with the Fab Four, but they also managed to turn the get-together into a track aptly titled ‘Randy Scouse Git’ that became a big hit in 1967.
While the track’s title would be changed to ‘Alternative Title’ before it rose to number two in the UK, this nominative quirk is nothing compared to the story that spawned it. “We were in London doing press, and the Beatles threw us a big party,” Micky Dolenz recalled in 2011. “We were staying at the Grosvenor. Mike and I had turned up on Top of the Pops to surprise everybody by saying hello, and they’d smuggled us in in the boot of a car.”
If it sounds like a parody of the 1960s, then things get even more proto-Spinal Tap from there. “That’s where I met my first wife, Samantha, who was a Top Of The Pops DJ, the record girl. It was an amazing experience. I am told I had a great time. I met Samantha, and we had a massive love affair,” Dolenz continued.
The Monkees, famed for being a supposed manufactured pop band, were startled. “Brian Jones hid in one of our rooms when he was hiding from police,” Dolenz remembers with a smile, “And then we got a letter from Princess Margaret asking if we could keep the fans quiet as it was disturbing her sleep.”
Thankfully, the young royal was actually a huge fan of the Stones, with rumours even swirling that she was romantically involved with Mick Jagger.
Naturally, the party didn’t end there. Even Satyricon has a second act. “The next morning, there were a few people hanging around,” the name-dropping Dolenz continues. “Mama Cass was in town, and I’d met this girl, and I just started doodling with the guitar and singing about Samantha and my friend in the room and the waiter who came in with breakfast and the girls outside screaming.”
A song was beginning to take shape, and it was as free-flowing as the evening that seeded it. “It was like a diary, word association,” Dolenz admitted. “There’s no deep hidden meaning. ‘The being known as wondergirl’ was Samantha, and the ‘wonderful lady’ at the start was Mama Cass. I must have been watching Till Death Us Do Part on TV. Alf Garnett called the kid a ‘randy Scouse git’. I had no idea what it meant, but I thought it was funny, so I wrote it down.”
Fearing that the wording might be deemed rude, Garnett’s quip was quickly removed from the title, but the song still managed to capture the manic spirit of the age and soared through the charts, launching The Monkees as an entity with more edge than many would give them credit for.
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