Ian Samwell

Songwriter whose early hits included 'Move It' for Cliff Richard

Ian Ralph Samwell, songwriter: born London 19 January 1937; married (two sons); died Sacramento, California 13 March 2003

It is often casually assumed that there were no rock'n'roll writers of note in the UK until John Lennon and Paul McCartney started recording their own songs in 1962. That is far from the truth: Billy Fury, Marty Wilde and Johnny Kidd were all performers who could write good songs, and Jerry Lordan, Johnny Worth, Lionel Bart and Trevor Peacock were fine songwriters. However, the songwriter who had the best grasp of American rock'n'roll was Ian Samwell, who wrote "Move It" and several other hits for Cliff Richard.

Samwell was born in Lambeth, London, in 1937, but raised in Harrow. As an adolescent, he wrote short stories and poems and even some hymns for his church. Early in 1958, Samwell, who had been conscripted to the Hendon airbase, bought a guitar and went to the Two I's coffee bar in Soho. He saw a young Harry Webb performing with two rhythm guitarists.

"I told him I wanted to play lead guitar as they hadn't got one," Samwell told me last year. "They were having a rehearsal on the following Saturday afternoon, so I rehearsed with them and played the gig that evening." When the group had a booking in Ripley, they needed a name. "Cliff's manager, Johnny Foster, came up with Cliff Richards, and I said, 'Leave the 's' off because everyone's bound to say 'Cliff Richards' and, when we correct them, they'll have heard it twice.' "

In 1958 Cliff Richard and the Drifters passed an audition for Norrie Paramor at EMI's Columbia Records and they were asked to cover an American song, "Schoolboy Crush". Ian Samwell had something for the other side:

The jazz critic Steve Race had written something for Melody Maker which said, "If rock'n'roll is dead, my obituary would be 'Good riddance'." I'm misquoting him but that was the drift of the whole thing – "I'm glad it's gone." "Move It" was inspired by Steve Race lyrically and by Chuck Berry musically. Chuck used to play a lot of stuff on two strings. The introduction to "Move It" starts with two strings and you move down that progression. I played that for a while and then, on my way to Cliff's house, the lyrics started to come. I wrote them on a guitar-string envelope. When I got there I said, "Look, I've got this new song", and we tried it out and it worked.

The television producer Jack Good wanted Cliff Richard for his new show Oh Boy!, and he realised that "Move It" was far more exciting than "Schoolboy Crush". It became the A-side and stormed up the charts, reaching No 2. Samwell said,

"Move It" was my first rock'n'roll song, and it may have been the first rock'n'roll song to be written in England. I became arrogant because there wasn't anybody else writing rock'n'roll and it's easy to be the best when you're the only one. No, Lionel Bart did write "Rock with the Caveman" way before me, but that was a stupid song. Tommy Steele, who did "Rock with the Caveman", got seduced into becoming an all-round entertainer because the people around him thought that rock'n'roll would never last. I didn't think it was ever going to die and that's what the song says.

Samwell played rhythm guitar on "Move It" but was edged out of the band when Hank Marvin and Jet Harris joined:

I don't think I was too bad, but they were much better than me, obviously, and I became a songwriter. I was offered a contract by Kalith Music and I had never heard of them. I showed it to my mother and she said, "Oh, they want you for five years. They must think a lot of you." They paid me a retainer of £6 a week and I thought, this is fantastic, £6 a week to write songs.

Samwell wrote Richard's second hit single, "High Class Baby":

I wrote "High Class Baby" standing at a bus stop in Barnet in the rain and imagining I was playing Jerry Lee Lewis's piano. The only thing was, Cliff Richard and the Drifters didn't have a piano so it finished up being among the worst records he's ever made. It's taken too fast, and I hate the chorus in the background going "High class baby, high class baby".

A lot of the early English rock records are like that. Norrie Paramor asked me to write a rocker for a girl he had signed, Janice Peters. I gave him the song "A Girl Likes", and she had a terrible time in the studio. They should have invited me to the session and I could have told them not to do it so fast. You see, when you listen to the American rock'n'roll classics like "Hound Dog" and "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On", they're not that fast.

I read later that Cliff had cried when he heard the playback of "High Class Baby" because he knew it wasn't as good as "Move It". I thought that too, but, when we recorded it, we didn't know it was going to be an A-side. We thought "My Feet Hit the Ground", which I'd also written, would be the single and that was much better.

Many of the songs on Richard's early singles were written by Samwell – "Steady with You", "Mean Streak", "Never Mind", "Fall in Love with You" and one of his and Richard's personal favourites, "Dynamite". He wrote songs for other artists including "Feelin' Fine" (Drifters), "Just Like That" (Joe Brown), "You Can Never Stop Me Loving You"(Kenny Lynch), "Sue Saturday" (Julian X) and "He's Got Something" (Dusty Springfield).

In 1959 Samwell went with Richard to America and spent a few days writing in the Brill Building:

One of the songs, "Say You Love Me Too", was recorded by the Isley Brothers and it is possibly the first R&B song by an English writer to be recorded in America. On the flight back, Hank and I wrote "Gee Whiz It's You" for Cliff after seeing the air stewardess.

Samwell said that he could not tell me much about many of the songs:

Having accepted that songwriting contract, I was writing every day. I would sit on the floor surrounded by pieces of paper and at the end of a few hours I'd have a song, hopefully. It's a terrific experience to have the ability to write songs because you work at a furious pace as you may forget what you're doing. I still work like that now. I have a circle of paper all around me with discarded lyrics on. I never throw anything away as you might always want to come back to a phrase that is just right.

In the early 1960s, Samwell started working as a DJ at the Lyceum Ballroom and Greenwich Town Hall and producing acts that he enjoyed. He made two singles with Sounds Incorporated and then produced a variety of acts including Georgie Fame (the LP Rhythm and Blues at the Flamingo), John Mayall (his first Decca single, "Crawlin' up a Hill") and the Small Faces (co-writing their 1965 hit single "Whatcha Gonna Do About It").

Accepting a job as a staff producer at the London office of Warner Brothers, he signed Linda Lewis and Al Jarreau and worked in various capacities with John Sebastian, Seals and Croft, Joni Mitchell, Frank Zappa and the Grateful Dead. He wrote the theme music for the television cartoon Fred Basset, and produced the original cast album of the hit musical John Paul George Ringo . . . and Bert (1974). His most enduring success was with the group America. He produced their first album, America (1972), and one of the tracks, "Horse with No Name", topped the American charts.

In 1991 Samwell suffered from ischaemic heart disease which led to a transplant. He kept on working and his second verse for "Move It" has been recorded by Cliff Richard and was included in his performance at Party at the Palace. Samwell lived in Sacramento and his final production was the album Blonde on the Bayou (1999), for a local band, the Beer Dawgs.

Spencer Leigh

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