BP Fallon is someone who at one time loomed colourfully large in my life, as he has over the years in the lives of many, among them John Lennon, Marc Bolan, Led Zep, Roy Harper, Ian Dury, The Waterboys and U2. I first met him in 1974, backstage at a Roy Harper show at Kingston Polytechnic where Beep regaled me with hilarious tales of his time as “media consultant” with Bolan and Zeppelin, stories he told in a language seemingly of his own invention, a kind of bespoke hipster-speak.

I mention Beep as he's just released his first single, produced by Jack White and released by Jack's Third Man Records as the first in its new Spoken Word-Instructional Record series. “Fame #9” is backed with “BP Fallon Interview By Jack White” and “I Believe In Elvis Presley”, on which White plays some demon slide guitar. Go to YouTube to see the video.

So how did all this come about? According to Beep, a conversation with Jack White in New York ended with an invitation to fly down to Nashville to cut a single.

“With Jack producing, we recorded my spoken-word piece ‘Fame #9’, and then Jack was chinwagging with me from the control room and that became ‘BP Fallon Interview By Jack White’,” Beep tells me from New York. “Next thing he's saying, ‘Where can I get a bottleneck?’ and doing the riff from my song ‘I Believe In Elvis Presley’, and I hear him on the phone saying, ‘Can you come over and play?’, and Patrick Keeler, the drummer with The Raconteurs, and the mysterious bass player/guitarist Society Red, they appear and, suddenly, backed by these three cats, we're cutting the song. It's all recorded live with two guitar overdubs and that's it. Wham-bam thank you, Jack White.”

So how does it feel to have his debut single out?

“I'm honoured by all this boogaloo,” he says. “Jack White is the main man in rock'n'roll right now. The cat is vibraphonic to the max. He gives of his heart and his art.”

As Beep himself has done, lo these many years.

allan_jones@ipcmedia.com