https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tyne-61600583
The Times wrote:One night in September 1969, Alan White was in the kitchen cooking a stew when he received a phone call from someone purporting to be John Lennon.
“I thought it was a friend trying to joke with me, so I put the phone down,” he recalled. Fortunately the caller was persistent; he rang back and convinced White it was not a prank. “It was John. He told me he was doing a gig in Canada and was I available to play drums and could he send a car to pick me up the next morning.”
White’s scepticism about the caller’s identity was understandable. He was 21 years old and playing in an unsuccessful group called Happy Magazine, sharing a communal house with them in Sussex. He had never met Lennon and could not imagine how the Beatle knew who he was. It transpired that Lennon had seen him playing in a club the night before and had asked for his phone number. At the time, Lennon was looking to establish a musical identity away from the Beatles and had been asked to act as the master of ceremonies at a rock festival in Toronto. Instead, he offered to perform with a new group he called the Plastic Ono Band.
The problem was that apart from himself and Yoko Ono, there was no group. With the festival two days away, he began looking for recruits. Eric Clapton came on board as guitarist and Klaus Voormann, an old friend from the Beatles’ days in Hamburg, joined on bass.
White met Lennon for the first time the following morning in the VIP lounge at Heathrow and the group conducted an impromptu rehearsal on the plane. “I had a pair of drumsticks, playing the back of the seat in front of me and they were playing acoustic guitars,” White said.
“When we got off we went straight to the show. Next thing I know, we went onstage. They had a drum stool and there [were] no drums. Eric plugged his guitar in and they built a drum kit around me while I sat there. Suddenly, the sticks were thrown into my hand and John counted, ‘One, two, three ...’ and we were in the first number.”
White accompanied Lennon on a handful of rock’n’roll standards and a version of Give Peace a Chance, plus two numbers on which Yoko screamed and wailed. “She was really off the wall, but I understood what she was trying to express,” White said. “I never had problems with Yoko. She was always very good to me.”
The show, which Lennon later described as “half rock and half madness”, went well enough for him to claim that it was the night that gave him the confidence to leave the Beatles.
The set was released as the album Live Peace in Toronto 1969 and six months later Lennon turned again to White to drum on the single Instant Karma!. He appeared with Lennon playing the song on Top of the Pops — the first appearance on the programme by a member of the Beatles in five years. Ono sat on a stool knitting, her eyes covered with a sanitary towel to signify that “everybody in the world is blind”.
Shortly afterwards the Beatles broke up and White played on Lennon’s 1971 solo album Imagine, making a key contribution to the gestation of the title track. “The song started with the drums and the band playing at the very beginning of the song,” White told Rolling Stone magazine. “John played it so good by himself on the piano I said, ‘Why don’t you do the first verse like that?’ We tried it and John kept it.”
On the songs Jealous Guy and I Don’t Want to be a Soldier he switched to vibraphone, which led Lennon to write in the album’s sleeve notes “Good vibes — Alan White”.
While making the album he stayed with Lennon and Ono at their home in Ascot and in their rented Manhattan loft. “We would all sit round on his king-sized bed and watch TV,” he recalled. “John took me under his wing and became a sort of mentor.”
Via Lennon he got to know George Harrison, who asked White to play on his first solo album, All Things Must Pass, which included the hit single My Sweet Lord.
After touring with Joe Cocker, in 1972 White joined the prog-rock champions Yes, replacing their original drummer Bill Bruford, who had left to join King Crimson. Like his first gig with Lennon, he had to learn on the hoof, joining three days before the first date on an American tour. Given Yes’s penchant for unusual time signatures and complex, symphonic-like compositions, it was a tall order — but he came through with flying colours.
“I said I’d give it three months,” he recalled. He was still there 50 years later, the band’s longest-serving member, having played more than 3,000 live shows and on 17 studio albums, starting with Tales from Topographic Oceans in 1973, the group’s first No 1.
He is survived by Rogena “Gigi” (née Walberg), his wife of 40 years, and his son, Jesse, a musician, and daughter, Cassandra. A long-time American resident, he kept a figurative link to his Tyneside roots, making his home close to Seattle in the small town of Newcastle, named after the city where as a teenage drummer he had played his first gigs.
Alan White was born in 1949 in the village of Pelton, County Durham, the son of May (née Thrower) and Ray White. He grew up in the nearby coalmining town of Ferryhill, where he was educated at the town’s Broom Cottages secondary modern and later Bishop Auckland Technical College.
His father worked as a shopkeeper and a bus driver but played the piano in local pubs, while Alan’s uncle Kenny was a drummer in a dance band. He took piano lessons from the age of six, striking the keys with such percussive force that it soon became evident he took after his uncle rather than his father.
His parents bought him his first drum kit for Christmas when he was 12. A year later he joined a local band, the Downbeats, performing covers of songs by the Beatles and other beat groups. “I used to deliver The Northern Echo every morning, come home, Mum would make my breakfast, and then after school I’d be going out to play in the clubs.”
They became popular around Newcastle, where the big group at the time was the Animals, and after a change of name to the Blue Chips in 1964 they headed for London to enter a Melody Maker talent show at the London Palladium. When they won the contest, and a recording contract with it, White abandoned his plans to train as an architect and became a full-time drummer. He toured Germany with Billy Fury’s backing band, the Gamblers, and formed Happy Magazine, later known as Griffin. “We were so poor, we were selling records to buy food,” he recalled. Then came the momentous phone call on which he hung up. He often wondered what course his life might have taken if Lennon had not rung back.
