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CHAPTER FOUR Rock ‘n’ Roll Part 2

It was time to let my parents know that I wanted to become a musician rather than a scientist, so I summoned up the courage to tell them. My father, a draughtsman by trade, responded with the words, ‘Just what the world needs, another unemployed musician.’ His father had played the banjo in pubs around East Ham as a hobby, so I guess he thought it to be a precarious occupation.

It would be difficult to say exactly when Johnny Sox ended and The Stranglers started. I can be sure that Johnny Sox existed in London in early 1974, performing gigs in various pub rock venues. This circuit was very healthy at the time and many credible bands had been signed by record labels after building up a following, such as Dr Feelgood, Ducks Deluxe and Eddie And The Hot Rods. I had made contact with Paul Kennerley with a view to giving us some work – he was managing the Winkies at the time and putting bands in Fuller’s pubs around London. The last Johnny Sox gig was at the Brecknock in Camden Town and ended disastrously with Gyrth on the forecourt of the pub brandishing his studded leather belt at the landlord, who was armed with a chair. We didn’t get paid that night and, worse still, Paul Kennerley had turned up to see the band play. I can also be sure that The Stranglers existed in late 1974, playing their first gigs in pub rock venues, but the point at which the one transformed into the other is blurred.

Jet Black, formerly Brian Duffy, walked into my life at Gyrth’s squat in Camden Town in answer to an ad that I had placed in Melody Maker for a drummer to replace Chicago Mike in Johnny Sox. Mike had already expressed his desire to go back to the US to be with his family who had returned there from Sweden and had thrown in the towel. President Carter had granted an amnesty to all the draft dodgers abroad, so Mike could now return home without fear of imprisonment. Jet was a large man dressed in a suit, with a Beatles haircut. He was a bit ‘more mature’ than we had envisaged, but we immediately identified with his energy and resolve. He had a great sense of humour and everyone gelled with him. We played him a few of the songs we had been performing around the pubs, and he especially liked ‘Country Chaser’. Meanwhile, Gyrth got extremely excited when Jet revealed that he had an off-licence called The Jackpot in Guildford, which was FULL OF LIQUOR! Jet suggested that we all decamp to Guildford to escape the pressures of London, and help him run the off-licence and an ice-cream business he had, whilst working on the band. Summer was coming and the idea of getting out of London was very appealing to us.

The off-licence was sited at the bottom of the Farnham Road, a stone’s throw from Guildford railway station. It was also on a main roundabout, so there was plenty of passing trade, including Trevor McDonald, who would regularly drop by for a bottle of wine to take home and exchange pleasantries with Jet. The building itself was huge, with large, cobbled cellars where the ice-cream freezers were stored and there were parking spaces for a fleet of vans. As it was, there was only one state-of-the-art ice-cream wagon – complete with chimes – and a couple of beat-up grey minivans which Jet had picked up for twenty-five quid each from the local car auctions. Above the off-licence there were three floors of accommodation: a large sitting room and kitchen on the first floor, then two more floors of bedrooms, mostly empty. Constant traffic meant that there was a thick layer of grime on all the windows, which never got opened. I took a bedroom on the top floor and we had a room with a piano where we could work on the music. Two minutes walk from the off-licence one could be at the river which ran through the centre of Guildford, and in the mid-Seventies the town was much less developed than it is now. There was a semblance of the countryside to be experienced and it completed an ideal setting in which we could develop.