Early in 1966, while The Paramounts were still struggling on and long before Brooker realised he would have to make it on his own, Guy Stevens introduced him to a would-be poet who was trying to break into songwriting. Brooker recalled the circumstances of the meeting to UCLA Radio in 2001:
One day, he said: ‘This is Keith Reid. He writes words’. And I said: ‘Oh, really? I’ve never written music before. Why would I want to do that when there’s all this good stuff around to play?’ But I remember being handed a bag full of his lyrics. In fact, I think I went home stoned and didn’t find it until quite some months later. There was a vague recollection of where I got it, and when I opened it up, I think there were about ten lyrics in there, which were absolutely marvellous. And as soon as I read them, I sat down and wrote a song with the first one.
ForSounds in 1971, he added:
I went to the piano and, for the first time in my life, composed a song. The words had to do with a tombstone following Keith around. I didn’t discover until afterwards that these were the first words he’d written. That same afternoon, I received a letter from Keith. It asked me to ring him and closed with a line from the words he’d written about the tombstone. We spoke and decided to work together.
That song, ‘Something Following Me’, became the template for all that followed: a sly, enigmatic tale of a man pursued – a little comically but with fierce intensity – by his own inescapable death.
Reid also asserted that this was his first song. In 1969, he toldCrawdaddy magazine that the song was ‘the first song lyric I wrote’, by which I take it he means the first set of words that became a finished professional song. It may just as easily have meant that Reid sent Brooker some very old and much- rejected work. ‘Something Following Me’ was certainly not the first time Reid had heard his words set to music. In his teens, he’d tried writing songs with neighbour Marc Feld (later Marc Bolan). More recently, Reid had given two lyrics to singer Michel Polnareff – ‘Time Will Tell’ and ‘You’ll Be On My Mind’ – which were released on Polnareff’s French-chart-topping albumLove Me, Please Love Me in spring, 1966.
That Brooker and Reid hit it off is surprising, given their quite different experiences in the industry. Brooker had had some minor success in The Paramounts, including appearing onReady, Steady Go! and playing a couple of dates supporting The Beatles. Reid – who was just over a year younger than him – had practically nothing to show for himself in his home country. The closest he came to a breakthrough was when he managed to get a sheaf of lyrics to Steve Winwood of The Spencer Davis Group, but Reid recalled that that band’s
