Ever been in a band? Anecdotes?
Discussion
Following on from a couple of posts in The Lounge, I was invited to relate an anecdote or two about my time in a band in the late sixties. I thought the best thing to do was start a new thread here, as I am sure there must be more people out there with a story or two to tell about the odd things that can happen 'on the road'. See if you can beat this one.
I'll kick off with the tale of when we nearly killed the lead guitarist of a rival group at a 'Battle Of The Bands' one night up in the Welsh Valleys. It's going to be a long one!
We played a little on the University circuit, but most of the time up in the Valleys. There was plenty of live music going on at the Rugby Club venues, and quite a few bands (including Tom Jones!) started off with gigs up there. One night we got involved in a 'Battle Of The Bands' event at a great big barn of a place - I can't remember exactly where it was, this was 50 years ago, God help me! - that may have started life as a Chapel. Three, perhaps four bands were booked, one I am sure was a band called Kimla Taz, who were about the same stage of development as us at the time. There was a bit of debate about who was going to go on last, as you can imagine, but when we said we intended to do our light show and a few added extras as well, that settled it, as nobody wanted to follow that.
Not many bands in South Wales, none as far as I know, were doing anything like a light show at the time. In fact we used to earn an unheard of £25 a night against the usual £15 on the back of it. It was all pretty home made, but quite effective. Our drummer was a physics student and used to built hi-fi amplifiers and stuff, and he constructed this control box for the show that used to sit on the floor by his feet. It had about 15 channels with master switches on the side and stamp buttons on the top. You just selected which circuits (effects) you wanted open with the switches and stamped on the top of the box at the appropriate moment.
We had a bank of footlights (made out of powdered milk tins with coloured plastic tops), a strobe (a spotlight with a motor-driven aluminium disc with a slit rotating in front of it, a bubble machine (the guitarist's hair drier with a motor driven set of wire loops dipping in and out of a trough of Fairy Liquid - went like stink!) and a UV tube which was very effective with white clothes and fluorescent face paint. I think only Arthur Brown was into face paint at this time. The combination of bubble machine and strobe was amazing, and the guy at the front of the crowd who fell flat on his face onto the stage one night is testimony to this. Must have been epileptic.
There was also a range of pyrotechnic equipment we picked up at a place in Covent Garden called Strand Electric (I think) on a trip to London.
This included a load of magnesium flares that we put on top of the amplifiers. You put a dollop of this silvery powder on an asbestos square, connected a length of fuse wire across it between a couple of open terminals and put the mains through the contraption. Flash! If you got too enthusiastic and put too much powder on them they would chuck off a fair bit of burning powder all over the top of the amplifier - our roadies were strategically stationed to put it all out if that happened, usually by beating it with their fists. They really loved these devices - especially while when packing them away at night, they used to pick them up only to find out the other end was still connected to the mains.
There were smoke candles, but we couldn't use these a lot as they seemed to be designed for really big spaces and it was hard to put them out once lit. We got permanently banned from the Union Building at Swansea for letting one off two weeks after they got the hall redecorated.
And theatrical maroons! Now we are getting down to the meat of the story. We bought three sizes, little ones like tuppenny bangers, inbetweeny ones, and then great big things about the size of those Humbrol model paint tins, with a couple of wires sticking out of the top to wire it up. Judging by the noise the smaller ones used to make, we were in some trepidation about these big so and so's, of which we had acquired two, and which used to live in an ammunition box in the van. One afternoon at the drummers house, while his folks were not at home, we decided to try one out. We put it on the lawn in a galvanised metal bucket, filled it in sand and rolled an extension lead into the house and plugged in. A quick flick of a switch and the bucket had a hole in the side you could put your fist through, and a lot of startled pigeons throughout half of Cardiff. Ten minutes later two policemen turned up at the front door to ask if we'd heard anything as the neighbours were reporting the electricity sub-station might have blown up. 'No officer, not a thing ...'
So back at the Battle Of The Bands, we decided that this had to be the night we would finally fire off the second big maroon. The instructions that came with the thing suggested it should be put inside a metal dustbin and covered with folded chicken wire to stop shrapnel flying everywhere from the shellac casing. A suitable bin was located, but we couldn't find anything resembling chicken wire. With some trepidation we put it at the back of the stage with a plank over the top, and the maroon suspended from the plank in the centre of the bin, the whole device wired up to a suitable channel on the light show control box.
The other bands played their sets and it was finally time for us to come on. We did our numbers, and finished as usual with a Who-type version of Summertime Blues, that turned into at the end what was called in those days a 'freak-out' - lots of noise and posturing, and very little musicality it must be admitted. We were almost finished, the smoke candle was burning and starting to fill the stage and creep into the hall, and it was time to end with the piece de resistance - the big maroon. The drummer looked round at the back of the stage, just to check, and there was the guitarist of Kimla Taz, a guy by the name of Tich, sitting on the plank across the dust bin. The drummer waved his arm frantically at Tich, who responded with an ingratiating smile and an encouraging thumbs up. More arm waving, and it was clear the message was not getting through. It was getting too late to do anything about it, and resigned to the inevitable, our drummer stamped down on the control box.
There was an almighty KER-BOOM that echoed around the hall. Visibility on stage was getting quite poor by this time, but I distinctly remember seeing my bass guitar flying vertically past my face. The noise of the maroon had caused some sort of muscular spasm and the thing must have flown upwards out of my arms involuntarily. The guitarist over the other side had been walking around with a whole tea-chest full of unreeled 16mm cine film over his head and shoulders (don't ask, it was the sixties - but it looked quite spectacular under the strobe) and he was similarly afflicted by the explosion and ran away. The guitars were left screaming and whining with feed back on the floor of the stage, until the roadies came on and shut the amplifiers down. The whole scene looked like the aftermath of an IRA attack.
None of us remembered seeing Tich at any time later that evening. We can only assume he was lead away (possibly gibbering) by other members of his band, for he lived a few years longer, played in some good Welsh bands before dying in a house fire in 2005.
As a postscript, when the hall emptied of bemused spectators, decanting with ringing ears into the night, we noticed that the clock at the other end of the hall, a great big railway station type of thing about three feet across, that was previously hanging on the far wall opposite the stage was now, in pieces, lying at the foot of the wall many feet under the fixings from which it was previously suspended. The wall must have shifted so far with the bang that the thing fell off the pegs. If it had landed on anyone's crust it would have killed them. We made a timely retreat out of the stage door at the rear just as the guy arrived at the front with the keys to lock up.
I promised a few photographs on the other thread so let's see if I can get these to work.
This is the band on stage in Bangor the night we supported Fleetwood Mac. The Orange amplifiers on the stage are theirs. Drummer has a Ludwig kit, I have a Fender Precision through a 100 watt Marshall stack, and the guitarist a Telecaster through a Marshall amplifier, Marshall top cabinet and two home made cabinets, one with two 12" Celestions and the other two 18" Goodmans. The keen eyed will spot he actually used to use my bass amp, and me his two channel affair. God knows why. In fact, his set up was possibly more suited to bass than mine, but then I used to use a fuzz box and even a treble booster on occasion, playing sometimes more of a lead roll than rhythm. Drummer insisted on using two bass drums, though we would have preferred it if he had mastered the art of keeping time with one
Here's me playing my furry bass. It was a L/H Fender Precision from the late fifties, I was told, in sunburst red, but had a horrible cigarette burn on the front where someone had left a lit fag on it to burn out. I went down to Swansea market and bought a load of black nylon fur material and covered it using glue and staples. A quick trim with a pair of scissors where the strings were supposed to go through and Bob's your uncle. It all seemed perfectly natural at the time.
Looking moody in a Cardiff cemetery. The tall guy in the middle of the group at the back, by the way, is Denny (Denim) Bridges, who played for The Third Ear Band in the early seventies. He was a good mate at the time, and I am glad to say we have re-established contact after all these years.
So there you are. You could write a book about all this - but someone already has. If you've never come across it, Deke Leonard of our fellow South Welsh group Man, wrote a book called Rhinos Winos and Lunatics, that you can still buy on Amazon for less than a tenner, and it is a really entertaining account of what it was like to play in a touring rock band at that time. I can't recommend it enough. There's loads in it that I can associate with our experiences, but then again I can say the same about Spinal Tap.
Sorry it's been a long read, but there's something about being in a band that invites lunacy, and I am sure that there must be many of you with experiences more remarkable than mine.
I'll kick off with the tale of when we nearly killed the lead guitarist of a rival group at a 'Battle Of The Bands' one night up in the Welsh Valleys. It's going to be a long one!
We played a little on the University circuit, but most of the time up in the Valleys. There was plenty of live music going on at the Rugby Club venues, and quite a few bands (including Tom Jones!) started off with gigs up there. One night we got involved in a 'Battle Of The Bands' event at a great big barn of a place - I can't remember exactly where it was, this was 50 years ago, God help me! - that may have started life as a Chapel. Three, perhaps four bands were booked, one I am sure was a band called Kimla Taz, who were about the same stage of development as us at the time. There was a bit of debate about who was going to go on last, as you can imagine, but when we said we intended to do our light show and a few added extras as well, that settled it, as nobody wanted to follow that.
Not many bands in South Wales, none as far as I know, were doing anything like a light show at the time. In fact we used to earn an unheard of £25 a night against the usual £15 on the back of it. It was all pretty home made, but quite effective. Our drummer was a physics student and used to built hi-fi amplifiers and stuff, and he constructed this control box for the show that used to sit on the floor by his feet. It had about 15 channels with master switches on the side and stamp buttons on the top. You just selected which circuits (effects) you wanted open with the switches and stamped on the top of the box at the appropriate moment.
We had a bank of footlights (made out of powdered milk tins with coloured plastic tops), a strobe (a spotlight with a motor-driven aluminium disc with a slit rotating in front of it, a bubble machine (the guitarist's hair drier with a motor driven set of wire loops dipping in and out of a trough of Fairy Liquid - went like stink!) and a UV tube which was very effective with white clothes and fluorescent face paint. I think only Arthur Brown was into face paint at this time. The combination of bubble machine and strobe was amazing, and the guy at the front of the crowd who fell flat on his face onto the stage one night is testimony to this. Must have been epileptic.
There was also a range of pyrotechnic equipment we picked up at a place in Covent Garden called Strand Electric (I think) on a trip to London.
This included a load of magnesium flares that we put on top of the amplifiers. You put a dollop of this silvery powder on an asbestos square, connected a length of fuse wire across it between a couple of open terminals and put the mains through the contraption. Flash! If you got too enthusiastic and put too much powder on them they would chuck off a fair bit of burning powder all over the top of the amplifier - our roadies were strategically stationed to put it all out if that happened, usually by beating it with their fists. They really loved these devices - especially while when packing them away at night, they used to pick them up only to find out the other end was still connected to the mains.
There were smoke candles, but we couldn't use these a lot as they seemed to be designed for really big spaces and it was hard to put them out once lit. We got permanently banned from the Union Building at Swansea for letting one off two weeks after they got the hall redecorated.
And theatrical maroons! Now we are getting down to the meat of the story. We bought three sizes, little ones like tuppenny bangers, inbetweeny ones, and then great big things about the size of those Humbrol model paint tins, with a couple of wires sticking out of the top to wire it up. Judging by the noise the smaller ones used to make, we were in some trepidation about these big so and so's, of which we had acquired two, and which used to live in an ammunition box in the van. One afternoon at the drummers house, while his folks were not at home, we decided to try one out. We put it on the lawn in a galvanised metal bucket, filled it in sand and rolled an extension lead into the house and plugged in. A quick flick of a switch and the bucket had a hole in the side you could put your fist through, and a lot of startled pigeons throughout half of Cardiff. Ten minutes later two policemen turned up at the front door to ask if we'd heard anything as the neighbours were reporting the electricity sub-station might have blown up. 'No officer, not a thing ...'
So back at the Battle Of The Bands, we decided that this had to be the night we would finally fire off the second big maroon. The instructions that came with the thing suggested it should be put inside a metal dustbin and covered with folded chicken wire to stop shrapnel flying everywhere from the shellac casing. A suitable bin was located, but we couldn't find anything resembling chicken wire. With some trepidation we put it at the back of the stage with a plank over the top, and the maroon suspended from the plank in the centre of the bin, the whole device wired up to a suitable channel on the light show control box.
The other bands played their sets and it was finally time for us to come on. We did our numbers, and finished as usual with a Who-type version of Summertime Blues, that turned into at the end what was called in those days a 'freak-out' - lots of noise and posturing, and very little musicality it must be admitted. We were almost finished, the smoke candle was burning and starting to fill the stage and creep into the hall, and it was time to end with the piece de resistance - the big maroon. The drummer looked round at the back of the stage, just to check, and there was the guitarist of Kimla Taz, a guy by the name of Tich, sitting on the plank across the dust bin. The drummer waved his arm frantically at Tich, who responded with an ingratiating smile and an encouraging thumbs up. More arm waving, and it was clear the message was not getting through. It was getting too late to do anything about it, and resigned to the inevitable, our drummer stamped down on the control box.
There was an almighty KER-BOOM that echoed around the hall. Visibility on stage was getting quite poor by this time, but I distinctly remember seeing my bass guitar flying vertically past my face. The noise of the maroon had caused some sort of muscular spasm and the thing must have flown upwards out of my arms involuntarily. The guitarist over the other side had been walking around with a whole tea-chest full of unreeled 16mm cine film over his head and shoulders (don't ask, it was the sixties - but it looked quite spectacular under the strobe) and he was similarly afflicted by the explosion and ran away. The guitars were left screaming and whining with feed back on the floor of the stage, until the roadies came on and shut the amplifiers down. The whole scene looked like the aftermath of an IRA attack.
None of us remembered seeing Tich at any time later that evening. We can only assume he was lead away (possibly gibbering) by other members of his band, for he lived a few years longer, played in some good Welsh bands before dying in a house fire in 2005.
As a postscript, when the hall emptied of bemused spectators, decanting with ringing ears into the night, we noticed that the clock at the other end of the hall, a great big railway station type of thing about three feet across, that was previously hanging on the far wall opposite the stage was now, in pieces, lying at the foot of the wall many feet under the fixings from which it was previously suspended. The wall must have shifted so far with the bang that the thing fell off the pegs. If it had landed on anyone's crust it would have killed them. We made a timely retreat out of the stage door at the rear just as the guy arrived at the front with the keys to lock up.
I promised a few photographs on the other thread so let's see if I can get these to work.
This is the band on stage in Bangor the night we supported Fleetwood Mac. The Orange amplifiers on the stage are theirs. Drummer has a Ludwig kit, I have a Fender Precision through a 100 watt Marshall stack, and the guitarist a Telecaster through a Marshall amplifier, Marshall top cabinet and two home made cabinets, one with two 12" Celestions and the other two 18" Goodmans. The keen eyed will spot he actually used to use my bass amp, and me his two channel affair. God knows why. In fact, his set up was possibly more suited to bass than mine, but then I used to use a fuzz box and even a treble booster on occasion, playing sometimes more of a lead roll than rhythm. Drummer insisted on using two bass drums, though we would have preferred it if he had mastered the art of keeping time with one
Here's me playing my furry bass. It was a L/H Fender Precision from the late fifties, I was told, in sunburst red, but had a horrible cigarette burn on the front where someone had left a lit fag on it to burn out. I went down to Swansea market and bought a load of black nylon fur material and covered it using glue and staples. A quick trim with a pair of scissors where the strings were supposed to go through and Bob's your uncle. It all seemed perfectly natural at the time.
Looking moody in a Cardiff cemetery. The tall guy in the middle of the group at the back, by the way, is Denny (Denim) Bridges, who played for The Third Ear Band in the early seventies. He was a good mate at the time, and I am glad to say we have re-established contact after all these years.
So there you are. You could write a book about all this - but someone already has. If you've never come across it, Deke Leonard of our fellow South Welsh group Man, wrote a book called Rhinos Winos and Lunatics, that you can still buy on Amazon for less than a tenner, and it is a really entertaining account of what it was like to play in a touring rock band at that time. I can't recommend it enough. There's loads in it that I can associate with our experiences, but then again I can say the same about Spinal Tap.
Sorry it's been a long read, but there's something about being in a band that invites lunacy, and I am sure that there must be many of you with experiences more remarkable than mine.
Budgie were certainly around at the time. They were a lot better and ultimately much more successful than us, but I think they really started to excel in the seventies. We broke up in 1970. I seem to recall seeing them play at Cardiff castle one night.
We were only a bunch of undergraduates having some fun. (Or at least two of us were undergraduates following the guitar player getting chucked out of college for dying the fountains on the campus fluorescent green with that stuff the cavers use for checking which way underground watercourses run.) The band was a way to earn some money during the vacations. Other groups around us had much more serious intentions. I suppose we all knew at heart we had professional careers ahead of us, so didn't take it too seriously.
There was a great music scene in South Wales in the sixties, though, with Budgie and Man especially making some good records, and of course Love Sculpture and Tom Jones making it nationally. TJ's original band really rocked, and the stories about him up in the Valleys at the time were legend. I suppose the number of places you could play really helped, with all the rugby clubs regularly having live music. It must have been one of the more important breeding grounds for British rock music at the time. And I nearly forgot Amen Corner. The other two lads in my group came from Cardiff and went to the same school as them.
I often think how lucky I was to be a young man at precisely that time and to have so much fun mucking about with music when it meant so much to everyone, and possibly was never bettered since.
We were only a bunch of undergraduates having some fun. (Or at least two of us were undergraduates following the guitar player getting chucked out of college for dying the fountains on the campus fluorescent green with that stuff the cavers use for checking which way underground watercourses run.) The band was a way to earn some money during the vacations. Other groups around us had much more serious intentions. I suppose we all knew at heart we had professional careers ahead of us, so didn't take it too seriously.
There was a great music scene in South Wales in the sixties, though, with Budgie and Man especially making some good records, and of course Love Sculpture and Tom Jones making it nationally. TJ's original band really rocked, and the stories about him up in the Valleys at the time were legend. I suppose the number of places you could play really helped, with all the rugby clubs regularly having live music. It must have been one of the more important breeding grounds for British rock music at the time. And I nearly forgot Amen Corner. The other two lads in my group came from Cardiff and went to the same school as them.
I often think how lucky I was to be a young man at precisely that time and to have so much fun mucking about with music when it meant so much to everyone, and possibly was never bettered since.
A strange thing happened this week that causes me to revive this old thread.
One of the friends who used to hang about with my old band in South Wales (he later went on to play for Third Ear Band, and work for George Martin at his studios in London and Montserrat) discovered an old poster for sale on the internet, and sent me a link.
I have no recollection of this at all.
We were actually called Esther's Tomcat, and that is a better attempt at spelling it correctly than usually was achieved, but what the 'now called' is all about I don't know. I wouldn't put it past our guitarist (and booker) to pull a stunt over the band's name.
I suppose it must have happened, but in the best traditions of the era, I suppose if you can remember it you weren't really there.
One of the friends who used to hang about with my old band in South Wales (he later went on to play for Third Ear Band, and work for George Martin at his studios in London and Montserrat) discovered an old poster for sale on the internet, and sent me a link.
I have no recollection of this at all.
We were actually called Esther's Tomcat, and that is a better attempt at spelling it correctly than usually was achieved, but what the 'now called' is all about I don't know. I wouldn't put it past our guitarist (and booker) to pull a stunt over the band's name.
I suppose it must have happened, but in the best traditions of the era, I suppose if you can remember it you weren't really there.
Yep, sex and drugs and rock and roll in our case tended to be a matter of not enough of the first, and probably alcohol rather than chemistry for the second. The Rock and roll was all right, though.
I had my 21st one night we were playing in Bangor, and I can't even remember who we were backing as I had invested in a bottle of whisky and was three quarters of the way through it before we hit the stage. My bass fell off the strap during the first number and I couldn't find it again. To this day I have retained a mental image that consists of a window of consciousness about four feet wide with my hands groping around on the floor feeling for the bloody thing. I was stood up by the drummer, and he held me up by my armpits while the guitarist slapped my face, offering words of encouragement. I am told the crowd viewed this spectacle with curiosity.
Oddly, by the time we had finished the set I was stone cold sober, but very, very unwell, and was driven back over the Menai Bridge to our digs in Anglesey with my head hanging out of the gap of the sliding door of our Dormobile, about a foot behind the front wheel. It was January, and snowing.
Another 'medical' emergency happened a few months previously on the way to a gig in Newport, Gwent. I was earning some extra money by cutting grass for Cardiff Parks Dept during the day. This involved getting up at some stupid time in the morning to get to work really early, and most nights after we had played at some Rugby Club or other, and stopped off for a curry on the way home, I was not in bed before two or three. I was really burning the candle at both ends.
On this particular night, just as we were passing the Royal Gwent Hospital I was sitting in the front of the van and remarked to the guys how odd it was that the fingers on both of my hands were curling backwards up towards my wrists. I can't even push them as far as they managed to get all on their own - some sort of spasm, I suppose. We turned directly into the hospital gates and to the front of A&E, and I was walked in, presumably looking very odd, but feeling oddly detached from it all. I was interrogated for a while about what I had been taking, but I couldn't get them to believe that it was the result of exhaustion.
An hour and a half later I was on stage, making my way through the first set, sitting on a chair with a bucket by my side just in case, living testimony to the recuperative powers of Brains Bitter.
I had my 21st one night we were playing in Bangor, and I can't even remember who we were backing as I had invested in a bottle of whisky and was three quarters of the way through it before we hit the stage. My bass fell off the strap during the first number and I couldn't find it again. To this day I have retained a mental image that consists of a window of consciousness about four feet wide with my hands groping around on the floor feeling for the bloody thing. I was stood up by the drummer, and he held me up by my armpits while the guitarist slapped my face, offering words of encouragement. I am told the crowd viewed this spectacle with curiosity.
Oddly, by the time we had finished the set I was stone cold sober, but very, very unwell, and was driven back over the Menai Bridge to our digs in Anglesey with my head hanging out of the gap of the sliding door of our Dormobile, about a foot behind the front wheel. It was January, and snowing.
Another 'medical' emergency happened a few months previously on the way to a gig in Newport, Gwent. I was earning some extra money by cutting grass for Cardiff Parks Dept during the day. This involved getting up at some stupid time in the morning to get to work really early, and most nights after we had played at some Rugby Club or other, and stopped off for a curry on the way home, I was not in bed before two or three. I was really burning the candle at both ends.
On this particular night, just as we were passing the Royal Gwent Hospital I was sitting in the front of the van and remarked to the guys how odd it was that the fingers on both of my hands were curling backwards up towards my wrists. I can't even push them as far as they managed to get all on their own - some sort of spasm, I suppose. We turned directly into the hospital gates and to the front of A&E, and I was walked in, presumably looking very odd, but feeling oddly detached from it all. I was interrogated for a while about what I had been taking, but I couldn't get them to believe that it was the result of exhaustion.
An hour and a half later I was on stage, making my way through the first set, sitting on a chair with a bucket by my side just in case, living testimony to the recuperative powers of Brains Bitter.
I am resurrecting this thread I started a few years ago because I have just discovered a (to me) amazing thing on the web site of the auction house Christies.
It is a ticket from a gig my band, Esther's Tomcat, played at the PJ Hall in Bangor in 1969, where we backed Fleetwood Mac. If you look at my original post, there is a photograph of the band on stage that very night. But perhaps more astonishing is that in 2013 somebody paid £1375 for this thing!
I remember the night very well, as I was a keen follower of the London blues scene through the early to middle sixties, a member of the Marquee Club, and also (bless) of John Mayall's fan club! I saw most of these musicians on the way up through the ranks.
The dressing room behind the stage was a large classroom full of examination desks. (PJ Hall is part of Bangor University College.) What gobsmacked me about FM was that with mathematical accuracy they positioned themselves as far away from each other as possible in the room. They barely spoke a word to anybody. I wandered round trying to have a chat, but it was obvious none of them were interested in talking. The atmosphere was funereal.
What the ticket does not say is that the supporting band - us - happened to have as its drummer the Entertainments Secretary of the college, so we got to support quite a few of the acts that were currently big on the university circuit, including Pink Floyd and Joe Cocker. They were just the opposite of FM, though, especially Cocker, who sat and chatted with us for half and hour after the show. Pink Floyd arrived late (we had played everything we knew twice by the time they arrived) but still gave us greetings and compliments as they ran on from the wings.
All however, are put in the shade by our night with Adge Cutler and the Wurzels, the first sight of whom was a brown corduroy trousered backside barging in through the band room door, the owner of which was the lead half of a pair carrying between them a crate of brown ale. What a show that was!
It is a ticket from a gig my band, Esther's Tomcat, played at the PJ Hall in Bangor in 1969, where we backed Fleetwood Mac. If you look at my original post, there is a photograph of the band on stage that very night. But perhaps more astonishing is that in 2013 somebody paid £1375 for this thing!
I remember the night very well, as I was a keen follower of the London blues scene through the early to middle sixties, a member of the Marquee Club, and also (bless) of John Mayall's fan club! I saw most of these musicians on the way up through the ranks.
The dressing room behind the stage was a large classroom full of examination desks. (PJ Hall is part of Bangor University College.) What gobsmacked me about FM was that with mathematical accuracy they positioned themselves as far away from each other as possible in the room. They barely spoke a word to anybody. I wandered round trying to have a chat, but it was obvious none of them were interested in talking. The atmosphere was funereal.
What the ticket does not say is that the supporting band - us - happened to have as its drummer the Entertainments Secretary of the college, so we got to support quite a few of the acts that were currently big on the university circuit, including Pink Floyd and Joe Cocker. They were just the opposite of FM, though, especially Cocker, who sat and chatted with us for half and hour after the show. Pink Floyd arrived late (we had played everything we knew twice by the time they arrived) but still gave us greetings and compliments as they ran on from the wings.
All however, are put in the shade by our night with Adge Cutler and the Wurzels, the first sight of whom was a brown corduroy trousered backside barging in through the band room door, the owner of which was the lead half of a pair carrying between them a crate of brown ale. What a show that was!
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