This interview took place when Madeline Bell was in Liverpool for the Ultimate Divas concert at the Philharmonic Hall in October 2004. Madeline invited me for a breakfast meeting at her hotel so this interview took place over toast and coffee. Transcribing the interview has been great fun as there were discussions on permanent markers, Flora and fry-ups along the way as well as several breaks for telephone calls, particularly as some orchestral parts were lost in the post. Madeline may live in the music world, but her friends are around at 9am. The interview was broadcast in On The Beat on BBC Radio Merseyside on 29 January 2005.

SL: Let’s talk about the Ultimate Divas concerts first.

MADELINE BELL: The first time I did this it was Three Divas at Kenwood House in London, and it was myself, Sheila Ferguson and Ruby Turner with the BBC Big Band. It was wonderful, but it was just a one-off as far as I was concerned and I had no idea what it was going to turn into. The idea was to pick songs from the likes of Ella Fitzgerald and Nina Simone and Aretha Franklin, but over the past two years it has been changed to Ultimate Divas because there are more of our own hits in it. This time there is Pat (P P) Arnold and Sheila and myself, and I am the only one of the three who hasn’t had a hit. They are singing their hits but I’m okay. I figure I can sing anything.

SL: You did have hits with Blue Mink.

MADELINE BELL: Yes, but we don’t do them. Everything we do everything we do has been made popular by a female.

SL: You started in a group, I think with J, who was the J in R&J Stone.

MADELINE BELL: Yes we were both 16 and we were in the Glovertones: my cousin was Joanne Stone, then Joanne Williams. We were at school during the week and then at the weekends we might go 500 miles to sing at a church. We were singing and getting paid, but it was very little. So many of us from the church were from New Jersey like Dionne Warwick and Gloria Gaynor. I was born in 1942 and I grew up in Newark, New Jersey. We didn’t call it a ghetto but that is what it was.

SL: I first came across your name with Black Nativity in 1962, so how did you come to be in that show?

MADELINE BELL: I was singing with Alex Bradford’s group, who was a very popular gospel singer in the late 50s and early 60s. I had been with them for a year and a half and he got an agent as he wanted to spread his wings. They put us with Marion Williams and the Stars of Faith, who had been part of the Clara Ward Singers, Black Nativity opened off-Broadway in November 1961 for a month and it was sold out every night and on the very last night, this Italian gentleman spoke to the producers. He put on a festival every year in Spoleto and he wanted to take the show there. We would be in Spoleto for four weeks and some of us had never been on a plane before. It wasn’t a direct flight as we had to change three times. After Spoleto, we were going to London to record Black Nativity for Associated-Rediffusion and while we were there, Michael Dorfman – you see, my long term memory is really good! – saw us and he wanted to put the show on at the Criterion Theatre in London for two weeks with two shows a day. I was 19 or 20 then and the show just snowballed. It got bigger and bigger. We were supposed to be in Europe for six weeks, but we came in June 1962 and eventually went home at the end of August 1963. We played all over Europe and we played London four times and when everyone went back, I stayed.

SL: I’ve brought the album for you to sign.

MADELINE BELL: Oh my goodness! (sings) ‘Wasn’t that a mighty day, a mighty day.’ I think I’m singing Joy To The World as Marion Williams had left the studio. There was one song that we hadn’t done and so I did it. We recorded this album before the show opened and so a lot of changes were made.

SL: You’ve been involved with some similarly uplifting projects over the years like The Young Messiah.

MADELINE BELL: I did TheYoung Messiah with a Liverpudlian, my best friend Vicki Brown. We recorded that in 1979 and it was just a session. Six or seven years later we got a call from Tom Parker, who had put it all together, to say that The Young Messiah had been picked up in Holland and they wanted us to go over for a television show and some promotion, and it got bigger and bigger to the extent that we were playing halls that held 4,000 or 5,000 people. The Dutch are probably more musical than any other country, they like live music, jazz, pop, classical, gospel, all kinds, and they are a religious nation too. The way that The Messiah had been done interested them but it never picked up anywhere else. After The Young Messiah, we did Young Amadeus, Bach and then Verdi, and they were all popular in Holland, and nowhere else. Not even in Belgium which is just down the road.

SL: Did you meet Vicki through being a session singer?

MADELINE BELL: No. I met Vicki on my first recording with Norman Newell and Geoff Love. This was late 1963 and the backing singers were the Breakaways from Liverpool. Then we started doing sessions and they were so friendly to me as I didn’t know anyone at the time. Vicki was my best mate.

SL: She did No Charge and didn’t get a credit.

MADELINE BELL: I know, and that is why she was only shown in profile on Top Of The Pops. Good for her! (Sings) “For the nine months I carried you”. Good song though. All she got was the session fee but she was really popular in Holland. She eventually left the New London Chorale, the Tom Parker project, and she was doing concerts on her own. It was Vicki and a 1,000 voice male choir. It’s so amazing to look at the pictures and see her standing there in a white dress.

SL: There were a lot of great female session singers in the 60s – you, Vicki, Doris Troy, Kiki Dee…

MADELINE BELL: And Kaye Garner whom I still see. There were also the Ladybirds and the Breakaways, and I had a different sound. Mine was thicker and more gospel and that is what Dusty wanted. The first thing I did with her was In The Middle Of Nowhere. That was me and Doris Troy and Lesley Duncan who now lives in Scotland but we keep in touch.

SL: Do you regard Dusty Springfield as a British Aretha Franklin?

MADELINE BELL: Yeah, and also Dusty was the main cause of Motown breaking in Europe. She brought them over and she talked Vicki Wickham and the producers of Ready, Steady, Go! into doing a television show when they were doing a European tour. Dusty presented the programme and nobody had heard of them but Dusty said, ‘You have to bring this show over.’ She adored Motown.

SL: I’ve read a lot of tales about Dusty not wanting to sing. Are these true?

MADELINE BELL: She was very insecure and also very shortsighted. She was fine once she started but if something wasn’t right, she didn’t want to go on stage. I remember when she was playing the Talk Of The Town in London after being in America for a while. She was so scared and whenever something affected her, it went straight to her throat. It was sad but apart from that, I never had the experience of her not going on stage. She was often unsure of her lyrics and she did the Palladium once and as she put her hands in front of her face and then threw her arms out, and you could see the lyrics. She had a lot of respect for the singers and the musicians. What she used to get angry about was the band not getting enough time to rehearse. People were more temperamental then – nowadays there isn’t enough work going round for people to be like that. They will get someone not as good but more cooperative.

SL: Did she realise how good her voice was?

MADELINE BELL: She did but she was never given that much credit in this country. She knew the kind of sound she wanted because she liked the black sound, Motown, and the sound men and the producers in TV and radio started calling her a bitch because she spoke up. If a woman had too much to say, she was a bitch. A guy could do it, but a woman, no. They used to say, ‘Shirley Bassey was this’ and ‘Shirley Bassey was that’, but no, Shirley Bassey was a star and she was a woman. In the 60s that was difficult because everybody was ready to put you down: you know, ‘She doesn’t know what she’s talking about, she’s just a woman’.

SL: Were you on a lot of records with Dusty?

MADELINE BELL: I did the BBC-TV series and I did the album, Everything’s Coming Up Dusty. I was on In The Middle Of Nowhere and Small Town Girl, and Dusty used to do backing vocals for me. She is on I’m Gonna Make You Love Me and Picture Me Gone and she liked doing the sessions. She liked getting her envelope with six guineas in. There was me, Dusty, Kiki, Lesley and Kay ,who didn’t have a recording contract, and we all worked together. Doris got a lot of work for us later on because she joined Apple.

SL: Could you spot a hit?

MADELINE BELL: That happened with With A Little Help with Joe Cocker. We worked on it, myself, Sunny from Sue and Sunny and Rosetta Hightower: we did the vocal arrangement and we never got credit for it. Joe had already done his vocals and he sat watching us. We double-tracked and it sounds like there are lots of us on there. We knew it was going to be a hit when we heard it. Never did we realise that it would get to number one. Nobody had heard of Joe Cocker at the time. There were some that we never thought would be hits. Long John Baldry’s Let The Heartaches Begin was so unlike what he had been singing and that was a real surprise. Then there was Everlasting Love by Love Affair. That was myself, Lesley Duncan and Kay Garner. It was all session musicians and the only member of Love Affair was Steve Ellis. We did the backing vocals (sings) and it is me doing all that soprano bit at the beginning. It was just a session. A couple of years ago I heard it on television selling MacDonald’s and we didn’t get paid for it. Another singer Clare Torey - she did Dark Side Of The Moon with Pink Floyd - had retired from singing but she was interested in the legal side and she contacted us. She got in touch with MacDonald’s and the advertising agency and they said that they had brought the rights and been told it was Love Affair. Clare got a fax from the arranger Keith Mansfield and he had a list of everyone who was on it, and she made sure that everybody got paid. We got £400 but we had only been paid six guineas for the original session.

SL: You have also worked with Georgie Fame.

MADELINE BELL: Yes, I did some sessions for him and I have recorded one of his songs. Georgie and I are like a double act and he spends as much time away from home as I do. We work with the same musicians around Europe. He is such a sweet guy and I love him. In the 60s Georgie was in the Flamingo in Wardour Street and everyone came to the Flamingo to see Georgie Fame. Now these big stars have got knighthoods and they learnt their craft from him. He hasn’t got a knighthood and he should be honored. Georgie Fame has his sons, Justin and James, in the band now. They are very good, and Georgie wouldn’t have them in the band if they weren’t. It’s like Joe Brown. I remember Sam sang something wrong once and Joe let her know. He said, ‘You never ever go on stage unprepared’ and he made her practice.

SL: The counterargument to your quest for recognition is that you got paid for records that didn’t sell at all.

MADELINE BELL: They booked us, we didn’t call them! A lot of them were hits. Everybody deserves credit. I have had years of being in the studio and not getting any credit and it sticks in my throat, helping all these people to become big stars. Myself and Sue and Sunny did an album with Donna Summer in a day, all the backing vocals, and after we had done, the producer said, ‘I’ve got a couple of other tracks that I would really like you to do.’ We did them but he said that he didn’t have the money to pay us. In the peak of doing sessions, we were doing three or four a day seven days a week. We had no time for anything else. Usually it would be 10 til 1, then 2 to 5, then 7 to 10 but there could be a midnight session. We did That’s The Way God Planned It in the middle of the night, and Billy Preston sang with us in the backing too. We were in there from midnight til six in the morning. I suppose that was the only time George could go out and Eric Clapton, Klaus Voormann and Ginger Baker were also on the record. Billy’s album is wonderful.

SL: What about your time at Apple?

MADELINE BELL: Doris Troy was the only female signed to Apple. We did Power To The People with John and we did Back Off Boogaloo with George for Ringo.

SL: And you would be singing better than Ringo.

MADELINE BELL: This is what I meant about credit. Often we were better singers than the people we were doing the backing for. They got all the credit, it was like there was no one else on the record but them. That was a shame. P P Arnold said that Doris Troy had taught us all how to ask. They would doubletrack us and not tell us, and they should have paid us double. Sometimes they would get us to sing the lead vocal and then get the artist to come in and copy that. The star was double tracking what we sang. Until Doris came along, we were too shy to ask for more.

SL: And what about Phil Spector’s contribution to Power To The People?

MADELINE BELL: That’s the only time I worked with Phil Spector. We sat around for a long time in the studio while Phil Spector, John Lennon and Allen Klein had a big argument upstairs and we could watch it. John was the boss on that session. He told us to sing ‘Power to the people’. He wanted us to stomp our feet and put our hands in the air. We tracked it three or four times and that was it. Everywhere he went Yoko was with him: she was like his shadow.

SL: Did you know Elton John as a session musician before he was a star?

MADELINE BELL: He was Reggie to me, and when our keyboard player was sick in Blue Mink, he came with us to Finland. When he did his second album, he got all the guys from Blue Mink to come in and play on the tracks. Border Song is on that album. That has a 30 voice choir and then there was me, Lesley and Sue and Sunny and Tony Burrows. We were doing (sings) Holy Moses. A lot of time we would get booked for sessions and it could be Blue Mink: we would be booked separately and find that we were all together. If they had booked us as Blue Mink, the fee would have been a lot higher. Sometimes Roger Cook and I would be booked separately and they would expect us to sound like Blue Mink.

SL: Wasn’t Blue Mink really a group of session musicians?

MADELINE BELL: Yeah, all of them. Cookie and me became members by a fluke. I got a call from the keyboard player Roger Coollum, who said that he and some guys were making an instrumental album and they thought it might sound boring and wanted to add a vocal track. I did the vocal and left and two days later he phoned again and said that Roger Cook had written Melting Pot and thought that it might work better as a duet. We did the song in two takes and they wanted to put it out as a single and that is how I joined the group. That was in October 1969 and it came out the next month, and we never had any intention of being a working band. They couldn’t come with a good name and the guitarist Vic Flick said ‘How about something rare, something like blue mink?’ We disbanded four and a half years later. We only split up because we were being ripped off by our manager.

SL: Melting Pot makes a very serious point and yet it has a very playful lyric, like the reference to Mick and Lady Faithfull.

MADELINE BELL: Yes, that’s Roger Cook’s sense of humour. He is a great songwriter. He wrote You’ve Got Your Troubles and Talking In Your Sleep. I can tell his songs – I knew I Believe In You was one of his straight away. (Sings) “I believe in you”. See – I know all of them.

SL: Melting Pot was controversial too.

MADELINE BELL: Yes, it was like an underground record in South Africa. It was one of the songs that they weren’t allowed to listen to at the time. I went to Cape Town in 2000 and did a radio interview and the DJ played it. People were ringing up and thanking him for playing the record. People were saying that they had copies and they were stolen. Then I performed it with a little trio and as soon as I sang, ‘Take a pinch of white man’, the crowd went wild.

SL: What about Good Morning Freedom?

MADELINE BELL: Herbie Flowers wrote that with Roger Cook and he always had a message of some kind in his songs. He had sayings like “I’m sick and tired of waking up sick and tired.” Another person with a great sense of humour. Roger was so good at writing songs and he and Roger Greenaway and Herbie Flowers could write a song a night. Our World also had something to say – and it applies today.

SL: Were you losing session work while you were in Blue Mink?

MADELINE BELL: Not necessarily because we might be here at the Shakespeare in Liverpool, or in Sheffield and Manchester and if we had sessions, we would get in a car as soon as the show was over and drive to London and then drive back up for the next gig. We all worked hard and we were going up and down the M1. If you stayed away from the studio for too long, somebody else would step in your shoes and none of us wanted that to happen. We were a big time rock and roll group too. We had Rolls-Royce and Mercedes in the band, and the first time I bought a new car was when I was in Blue Mink. It was a Citreon, a lovely car.

SL: Over the years you have written quite a lot of songs for your albums.

MADELINE BELL: Yes, but none of them have been successful though. Unfortunately when I wrote a song it was usually the same four notes, but I did some B-sides which kept me happy. Alan Parker in Blue Mink wrote a lot of library music and he kept saying to me, ‘You should get into writing library music. You record it, you forget about it and ten years later, you are still getting cheques for it.’ He gave me a tape and said, ‘Can you write some lyrics for this?’ I did and we went to Munich to record it. We recorded 75 tracks in five days but they were only like one and a half minutes each and about 12 of them had lyrics. It was library music for when the actor would switch on the radio and hear a voice coming out. It was cheaper than having to pay PRS to the big stars. Alan was right as I still get small cheques.

SL: What about your hit single in America?

MADELINE BELL: I recorded an album and nothing happened with it and the tapes were sent over to America and this one guy took a shine to I’m Gonna Make You Love Me. He printed up 10,000 copies and he sent them round the radio stations and they started playing it. I got a call from Philips in London to say that I had a record moving up the US charts and I had to go to America to promote it. It got to No.26 and it was great to go back to my home town with a record in the charts. I was so happy to go home a success.

SL: You make jazz albums now.

MADELINE BELL: Well, jazz-orientated as I am not a jazz singer. I am a lot older and it would be silly for me to sing pop songs. Really though I am just a singer and if someone tells me what to sing, I will sing it.

SL: Do you have to do a lot of exercises to keep your voice in shape or does it come naturally?

MADELINE BELL: I don’t do any exercises and I never have. I just clear my throat and pray. I have been trying to stop smoking ever since I started 40 years ago. In view of my age, I must stop and it can be really hard on the breathing. I remember Dusty doing vocal exercises and she was doing it wrong because she couldn’t speak afterwards. She had no voice, but I’m a gospel singer, and gospel singers don’t do exercises.

SL: And when you hear old records on the radio, do you always recognise your voice in the background?

MADELINE BELL: Yes, even if I didn’t remember who the artist was!

SL: Thank you much and thanks for breakfast.

MADELINE BELL: A pleasure.