NOEL HARRISON's Profile

He was born in London on January 29th 1934. His father was Rex Harrison and his mother, the first of six Mrs. Rex Harrisons, was Collette Thomas. They divorced in 1940. During the war Noel lived by the wild north Atlantic in Bude, North Cornwall, with his mother’s parents.
He went to private schools until he was fifteen, after which his mother took him to live in the Swiss Alps and he never went to school again. He went ski-racing instead and was British champion in 1953.
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I’ve played guitar and sung songs all my life, and made my living at it some of the time. Nightclubs, supper clubs and private parties were my chief source of income all through the fifties and early sixties. I also got married and had three kids.
Then I moved to the States and my career took off there. I had a record on the charts (A Young Girl) and starred in a TV series (The Girl from UNCLE). I was part of the “British Invasion” spearheaded by the Beatles. I bought a nice house in Los Angeles. There was another U.S. charts record (Suzanne, by Leonard Cohen), and four years of endless TV appearances, theatre tours and star-studded social occasions. My wife and children and their friends enjoyed the house, the stables and the pool while I careered around the USA raking in the bucks.
I didn’t like being a celebrity. There are lots of perks, pretty women all over you, good tables at fancy restaurants, and all kinds of ego-inflating bullshit but my marriage was crumbling and I felt as if I was exposing my emotional and distressed state in a fishbowl.
In the meantime I had recorded “The Windmills of Your Mind” for the soundtrack of “The Thomas Crown Affair”. It didn’t seem like a big deal at the time. I went to the studio one afternoon and sang it and pretty much forgot about it. I didn’t realise until later what a timeless, beautiful piece Michel LeGrand and the Bergmans had written. It won best song at the 1968 Oscars and turned out to be my most notable piece of work. But all this was happening on the fringes of real life.
My wife went back to England, followed by the children. My new companion and I set out across America in a big Chevy station wagon with a tent trailer to find a simpler life. It was 1970 and back-to-the land idealism was spreading through the counterculture. We bought a 300 acre farm in the Canadian Maritime province of Nova Scotia. $23,000 for all that land, a house, two barns and a tractor.
We never became self-sufficient, but we ate from the garden all summer and put up vegetables and fruit for the winter. We married, had boy and girl twins, designed a house and built it ourselves, with our own hands. Hollywood was far far away. I sang in bars and at festivals with local bluegrass, folk and country musicians, and hosted my own half hour on CBC TV, “Take Time”, about songs and songwriters.
Fast forward to the 80s. The problem with living in the backwoods is you soon become like everyone else … broke. Looking for easy money we went back to L.A. where I was greeted with great disinterest. The marriage came to an end while I was traveling with my one man show about Jacques Brel, “Adieu, Jacques…”.
Free at last with visions of touring the country as a single man, a sailor with a girl in every port. It lasted about six weeks. I’m not cut out to be single, no matter how often I thought I wanted to be during my first two marriages. A new companion picked me up in a Blues bar in Kansas City, and we set off together by Chevy station wagon (not the same one), back to L.A. again, from whence she had recently escaped.
We lived there for fifteen years. I did “Adieu, Jacques…” here and there, appeared in a few TV shows, some live theater, played music gigs, and wrote screenplays for various aspiring producers. I did some construction work for my friends: fences, a car port and an eight foot high hexagonal redwood bird cage. How I spent my sixties. I was well out of the goldfish bowl and I liked it.
We’re living in south Devon now, in the west of England. There are grown children from my first two marriages, and grandchildren. I’m writing and playing music and trying to figure out who I am, what I really think, if anything, and if it matters. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t. Watch this space.

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