Читать книгу A Multitude of Sins: Golden Brown, The Stranglers and Strange Little Girls - Hugh Cornwell - Страница 8

One of the first things I can remember is my mum taking me in a pushchair on to Hampstead Heath to the Ladies’ Swimming Pond. She leaves me by the side of the pond to watch as she goes in for a dip. It’s the middle of winter and there is ice on the pond. The lifesavers have broken a hole in the ice so that the regular bathers can go for a dip. As I wait for my mum to change into her costume, I watch the hole in the ice and see a very large white fish come up close to the surface of the dark water. It’s only visible for a few seconds but that’s enough for me. My mum appears in her costume and gets ready to climb into the water. I tell her about the fish and say she shouldn’t go in, but she laughs and takes no notice. I’m horrified to see her get in the hole and swim around for a short while, oblivious to the danger. She gets out and scurries off to change, unharmed by the fish. I am very relieved that the fish hasn’t bitten my mum’s leg off.

We were lucky to be living near to the Heath, as it’s the closest thing to living in the country that you can find in London. My brothers (the eldest, Richard, and David, second eldest) and my sister (Vicky) and me were always roaming around there, and when the long summer break from school came you couldn’t keep us off it. We could play cricket all day long and even pick blackberries to take home for mum to make a pie with.

I would guess that my first gig took place when I was about 5 years old. We were living in what was known as a ‘prefab’ in Tufnell Park, north London, at the time. It was temporary housing erected after the Second World War on a bomb site, and it looked like a bungalow. I can remember being in my parents’ back garden singing to the plants when the woman next door came out and gave me some sweets over the fence in appreciation. I was a quick learner and set up a daily residency there after school. My mum was not too pleased when she found out I was milking the neighbour, so she cancelled my booking immediately.

Later on, I was able to learn from David about the power of the artist in ‘promoter relations’, when we were in the local church choir. We would sing at people’s weddings nearly every Saturday for half a crown each, and there were about ten of us in the choir. One Saturday, he told the choirmaster that we wanted a wage increase or we weren’t singing for anybody. This totally perplexed the man and he reported back to the poor bridegroom who begged us to perform. However, he was not negotiating from a position of strength, and David managed to double our wages on the spot. Like all the other choirboys I was very impressed. I used the tactic repeatedly before Stranglers gigs for pure entertainment value, managing to extract all sorts of dangerous drugs from unsuspecting promoters, who would do anything to retrieve the situation and avoid dealing with an angry audience.

The first record I owned was ‘What Do You Want To Make Those Eyes At Me For?’ by Emile Ford & The Checkmates, which my Aunt Audrey and Uncle Adrian gave me one Christmas. I was delighted and played it non-stop until I could sing along to the whole song, making everyone’s life a misery. The first single I went out and bought myself was ‘Here Comes Summer’ by Jerry Keller, which I learnt and can still sing now, but you wouldn’t want me to, as it’s pretty naff.

We all went to Burghley Road Primary School. This was ten minutes’ walk from the prefab and the journey involved going over a railway bridge, the scene of many fantastic spud gun fights that I thought were tremendous. Being the youngest, there was always one sibling to go to school with or see me home, but invariably we were late home due to the spud guns. There must have been a shortage of potatoes in many homes at that time as they were really popular.

I got into trouble with my parents when I was called in to see the headmaster and asked what I wanted to do in later life. All the boys were being called in and everyone was wondering what on earth to say when it became their turn. It’s not something you spend a lot of time thinking about when you’re 10 years old and we had no idea why it was happening. Still, there would be no careers officer at my secondary school, so I suppose I should be grateful that someone was taking an interest, albeit rather early. So I found myself waiting in line outside the headmaster’s office with no ideas whatsoever. It came to my turn and I went in.

‘So, Cornwell, what do you want to do when you grow up?’

‘I want to be a singer, sir, like Cliff Richard.’

My headmaster almost fell out of his chair.

‘I see. Thank you, Cornwell, you may go now.’

When I got home, he had already contacted my parents to tell them and all hell broke loose. I couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about. We had only been given a few minutes to consider what to say, and I thought it would be best to be truthful. Besides, train driving and fire fighting just didn’t appeal to me.

I had discovered Cliff quite recently and he could do no wrong. It may be hard to believe but back then he was a rock ‘n’ roll rebel. Eighteen years old, leather-jacketed and the star of a feature film called Serious Charge about a priest being accused of homosexual advances by a young tearaway. I was given Cliff Sings, his first studio album, the next Christmas. It had eight titles on each side, four rockers followed by four ballads. I must point out that this was when his backing band was called The Drifters, before the name change to The Shadows. Cliff had released a string of rock ‘n’ roll classics, starting with ‘Move It’ (which had been written on a London bus by Ian Samwell), progressing through ‘High Class Baby’/ ‘My Feet Hit The Ground’, ‘Living Loving Doll’, and ‘Mean Streak’/’Never Mind’.

I was extremely disappointed with ‘Living Doll’, it being a ballad, but the B-side was the superb ‘Apron Strings’, and was the reason for buying ‘Living Doll’. ‘Travelling Light’ followed, again a ballad, but again amply supported by ‘Dynamite’ on the other side. Many people now don’t realize how hip Cliff was when he first started, being the UK’s answer to Elvis Presley. He’d just released two EPs from a live concert, called ‘Cliff No. 1’ and ‘Cliff No.2’, on which the girls’ screams were so loud it was difficult to hear what was being played. He hit Number 1 in the charts with ‘Living Doll’ and ‘Travelling Light’, which made him the top artist in the UK in 1959, but by then my interest was waning as his sound became more and more manicured. I liked a couple of songs on the EP from his second film Expresso Bongo, particularly ‘The Shrine On The Second Floor’, but I’d already started looking around for other music to interest me. At the time, Elvis seemed much too obvious to pay attention to, and then I discovered The Everly Brothers. What great writers these people were, with fantastic melodies to sing along to and great lyrics as well.

I was about twelve when I met Richard Thompson at my new school, William Ellis. He was into music as much as I was and he could play amazing guitar. He lived a few minutes away from me and we were able to get together nearly every day to share our passion. I would visit him at his parents’ house after school, and find him playing along to sheet music of Charlie Christian material. We would also introduce each other to new artists we had discovered – I can remember being blown away by the Stones’ version of Buddy Holly’s ‘Not Fade Away’ when he first played it to me. It was at about this time that Richard suggested putting a band together. I couldn’t play guitar but he was willing to teach me bass. A bass only had four strings and they were easier to find with one’s fingers. I bought a homemade electric bass for £5 from a friend at William Ellis and Richard started giving me lessons. The neck was the size of a milk carton, which made it very difficult to play, but when I graduated to a Hofner violin bass – like Paul McCartney – which I had saved up for, I started making progress.

Richard’s father was a top detective at West End Central police station in London’s Soho, which just happened to be where the top music stores were, on Denmark Street. These stores were robbed on a regular basis and booty would turn up at the station and have to be disposed of after months of not being claimed by anybody. So Richard got hold of some great equipment for our fledgling band, which was loosely called Emil And The Detectives. We had an enigmatic lead guitarist called Elvis, plus another guitarist friend of Richard’s called Malcolm.

Remarkably, one of the first gigs we did was supporting Helen Shapiro at the Ionic Cinema in Golders Green. Our set was composed of rhythm and blues classics like ‘Smokestack Lightnin’. It was at about this time that we recruited a new drummer from school. His name was Nick Jones whose father was Max, the editor and jazz critic at Melody Maker. Nick had modelled himself on Keith Moon’s drumming style and he fitted in very well. He had a fantastic drum kit.

Richard’s elder sister Perri was a drop-dead gorgeous blonde, the social secretary at Hornsey College of Art, so pretty soon we were getting gigs at some of their parties. One was held on a boat moored at Eel Pie Island on the Thames. Richard’s dad and mine had been recruited to drive our equipment down to the gig in their cars but there was no room left for us, so we had to make our own way down by Tube. Nick was pissed off because he had dressed up in his Who gear, complete with black sneakers with white arrows on them, and felt very self-conscious.

I started going to gigs as well as playing them around this time. Richard and I went to the Astoria in Finsbury Park to see Chuck Berry play. The line-up was awesome. The Nashville Teens opened, and they were due to hit Number 1 that week with ‘Tobacco Road’. Next onstage were The Moody Blues, who had just been at the top spot with ‘Go Now’. Following them were The Swinging Blue Jeans, but we had been spoilt by the support acts and so the audience booed their set, which they cut short. Then Chuck Berry hit the stage and I loved it. It was an incredible line-up and at the time I thought every gig was going to be this good.

It’s a cliché that your schooldays are the best days of your life, but few people would agree. Mine approached perfection though, due to the fact that it took me about five minutes to walk to William Ellis from home. It was situated on the edge of Hampstead Heath, next to not one, but two, girls’ schools – one of which was a convent! Not that I had much idea about girls when I was a teenager and even less of an idea about what to do with them if they could be approached. The closest my school got to contact was a combined dance class each Friday afternoon with Parliament Hill Girls’ School, which sixth formers were allowed to attend, but I never went.

Due to the proximity of my school, I could get up at 8:30 each morning and still be there in time for assembly at 9. I went home for lunch and never experienced the infamous school dinners. It also meant that I could be home by 3:45 after our last lesson finished. I can see with hindsight that the overall result of this was that I never became part of a gang of mates at school. I didn’t have an extended journey to and from the school like a lot of the boys did, those daily jaunts during which camaraderie had a chance to develop. I think the most profound thing that happened to me whilst I was at school was the moment I arrived one morning wearing long trousers. More than any other event or personal experience, I really felt at that point that I’d grown up.

William Ellis School’s insignia is an oak tree, under which is the scrolled motto ‘Rather Use Than Fame’. We took great trouble to change it at every opportunity to ‘Rather Uxx Than xxme’ with the quick touch of a marker pen. There were houses to which we were all assigned, but this side of school life never took hold of me, and the loyalties to the house, which I’m sure assume importance at boarding school, never materialized.

One thing we did have an abundance of was teacher personalities. Our headmaster, Mr Baxter, was an affable, good-natured man who was more inclined to think well of someone than not. He lived locally, walked to school, and must have slept soundly most nights, happy in the knowledge that he nurtured a healthy atmosphere at school in which the majority of pupils obtained the best results from their work under his well-oiled academic umbrella. In fact, in my final year over 90% of the students secured places at universities.

Mr Armit (nicknamed Armpit) was the vice principal and our imaginations ran riot over which vices he was principal of. His subject was mathematics and he ruled with an iron will, which actually led to a surprising respect being generated amongst his classes. Of all the teachers, I think he had the balance of authority, discipline and kid gloves just about right.

Mr Wren was a Divinity teacher and had an extremely absent upper lip, which gave him the appearance of constantly whispering to himself. In fact, several of my class mates had great difficulty deciphering what he was saying, and looks of bewilderment would spread around the class as he opened his Bible at a designated place and expected us to follow suit. He had an obsession with fresh air and would have Ackerman, a lazy pupil, opening and closing a window for several minutes until he was satisfied at the angle of aperture through which the wonderful air of Hampstead Heath could enter and waft into our lungs.

Mr Marsh taught French and had a good sense of humour, so I enjoyed French lessons and looked forward to them. He would set translations to be done during class, which he would supervise with his glasses perched well down on his nose, so that he could keep a beady eye on us all while he marked papers. Marsh stopped me in the corridor after my ‘A’ levels had started, to tell me how disappointed he was not to find me in his French class.

Mr Browne taught English and I have the feeling that he and Marsh were friends, as they were similar souls. Browne also expressed dismay to me on learning that I was not to be one of his ‘A’ level students. Under pressure from parents and other teachers, I had been streamed into Science rather than the Arts, and I hadn’t thought to object. This streaming took place after ‘O’ levels at the age of sixteen, and unless you had a strong desire to pursue a particular career path, you could easily be directed by your elders.

Mr Smith hailed from Scotland and took over Mr Browne’s English class. He was very entertaining and would take great pleasure in awarding lines instead of detentions, which he would deliver in the following manner: ‘I must endeavour to remember not to show disrespect to dear, kind, exceedingly fair Mr Smith during his English classes, which I have the honour of attending, and, in my ignorance, I probably do not appreciate … fully.’

The rest of the class would groan and applaud during this recitation, which some poor unfortunate would have to copy down and then repeat back to make sure it had all been correctly recorded. It was normally Ackerman who hadn’t taken it down correctly, which would lead to the whole sketch being repeated and the number of lines doubled.

Doctor Prinz was an Austrian music teacher who was genuinely intimidating and could be quite frightening. Everyone dreaded his music classes except those who showed talent for an instrument. These fortunate few were favoured by Herr Doctor and sat permanently self-satisfied at the front, as Prinz meted out his terror on the rest of us, generally with a ruler in his hands, which he would alternately use as a baton and/or a palm slapper. The music classes were held in a newly-constructed annexe to the main school building, nicknamed Colditz, which added to our anxieties as we filed into his room’s chilly atmosphere. It is surprising that, given such an introduction to music, I should find myself occupied with it for so much of my life. I remember one Prinz class in which we were cross-examined by him as to why we weren’t learning an instrument. My parents had expressed to him an interest in my taking up the clarinet and Prinz interrogated me.

‘Vy do you not vant to learn ze clarinet? Mark my vords, in your future lives, you vill all regret not taking more interest in my classes.’

Aggie Clough was the Botany mistress and took great interest in me due to my ability to accurately draw most things that were put in front of me. This led to some teachers sitting for me for sketches to appear in our school newspaper, which I remember as a strange experience. It was as if there had been a weird reversal of roles, as I was the one with the power, asking them to sit still or turn in a certain way. Aggie Clough retired whilst I was still at William Ellis, and I was sad to see her go, as she really encouraged my interest in Botany. This was rewarded with an A grade both at ‘A’ and ‘S’ levels. She then tried very hard to get me to apply to study mycology (mushrooms and toadstools) at Wye College, Kent, which would have led, no doubt, to a completely different life to the one I’m writing about now.

Mr Pond taught Zoology and would pontificate on the subject, rather as if he were lecturing a group of army cadets. On the subject of sex he was particularly po-faced:

‘Just remember to get as much practice in as you can before you get around to procreating.’

Mr Barker’s subject was Latin and Mrs Malaprop would have been proud of him. He roared in and out of school on his motorbike and taught like an angry lion. Our Latin class was usually the last of the day, and after putting the fear of God into us for forty minutes, we would wait and watch by the windows until we could hear him roar off, signalling that it was safe enough for us to leave the building ourselves. Barker was a crack shot with the blackboard duster and we were surprised at Ackerman’s ability to survive so many direct hits. That said, we were in awe of Barker. We secretly admired him and the power he had over the whole school.

Mr Harris was the youngest of my teachers and I’m indebted to him, not for his expertise in teaching Chemistry, but for his awakening in me a love of cinema. All boys studying for their ‘O’ levels had to attend General Studies classes in an attempt to widen their knowledge and appreciation of culture. Amongst the choices on offer, Harris took one on contemporary cinema. At the end of the first class, he recommended Viridiana by Luis Buñuel, which was being shown at the Everyman Cinema in Hampstead. Curious, I went along to see it and was won over immediately. In fact, I cried with rage at the end of the film, which portrays a beautiful young nun providing refuge to beggars and cripples, only to be horribly raped by them at the end of a drunken dinner she treats them to. Harris was surprised that someone had bothered to go see the film, and we developed a rapport that I was sad to leave behind when he, and then I, left the school.

Harris was extremely easy to bait. Once in the hot summer weather, he berated us for our lack of respect towards the school uniform when we turned up for class without ties. Our response was for each of us to attend his next class wearing a different but gaudy tie. He was put out by this, but was also unable to keep a straight face. He would leave us busy building a chemical garden and return to find frothing vats close to explosion after inappropriate cocktails of chemicals had been mixed in his absence. Later, he won respect from us all when it became school gossip that he was having a thing with the very attractive young French language assistant, Mademoiselle Roux, whom the whole school was in love with, including me.

So, alphabetically by subject, here’s my report:

Biology – Pond: top value entertainment. Each class was approached like an army exercise, complete with Sergeant Major voice. Definitely took the piss out of himself;

Botany – Clough: very sweet lady, good at nurturing talent, despite an annoying accent from the Black Country, which made double periods very hard going;

Chemistry – Harris: high on entertainment value. Inexperienced at teaching, prone to making mistakes, so very watchable. Great sense of humour, didn’t take it too seriously;

Divinity – Wren: a true eccentric. Would rabbit on and on, regardless as to whether anyone was listening or not. Compulsive viewing;

English – Browne: quite intimidating, but an interesting speaker. Inspired one to work hard;

English – Smith: took over from Browne, his Scottish accent hard to follow sometimes, but he was laugh-out-loud funny. A born entertainer and he knew it;

French – Marsh: again high on entertainment value, especially with the glasses on the end of the nose. Prone to moodiness;

French Oral – Roux: wouldn’t have missed this for the world. An absolute babe;

Latin – Barker: terrifying and certainly demanded 100% attention, just in case those flying blackboard dusters came your way. But putting the fear of God into someone doesn’t necessarily guarantee results, very relieved at the end of each lesson. Owned a motorbike, so definitely a rebel;

Mathematics – Armit: pretty entertaining all round, with a good sense of fair play. Always interesting, quite disciplinarian, made you work;

Music – Prinz: needed some lessons in humanity, but I detected a cruel sense of humour in there, crucially balanced against a hatred of all small boys without musical talent.

I enjoyed that.

Sadly, Richard left school after ‘O’ levels and got a job as an apprentice in a stained glass workshop, so the band we had together was frozen. Yet within two years, and before I’d sat my ‘A’ levels, he had struck gold with Fairport Convention. We lost touch when he left William Ellis, so the only way I kept up with his progress was via the music press.

At about this time, I remember being on my way to a party in Hampstead Garden Suburb and walking past a pub in Golders Green. Outside on a sandwich board was an advert for a band that was playing inside that evening. It read: ‘ONE NIGHT ONLY! JIMI HENDRIX EXPERIENCE.’ But, of course, I didn’t go in.

I’d been pretty lucky with my influences up to this point as our house had been very musical for as long as I can remember. In the early Sixties, one particular TV programme revolutionized young people’s lives. It was called The Six Five Special ‘and it’s coming to town.’ It was on at five past six on a Saturday night and was arguably the first TV rock show. Don Lang & His Frantic Five were the house band, which featured Vic Flick on guitar. Anyone who claims to know anything about the UK rock scene won’t need to be told that Vic was responsible for that famous James Bond guitar line. Laurie Latham once told me that he had turned down the opportunity to record a Bond film title song with Duran Duran because none of them knew who Vic Flick was.

Anyway, Don Lang would lead his band behind all of the guest singers, and thus I was introduced to Marty Wilde, Jerry Lordan, Vince Eager, Adam Faith and Cliff Richard. Lonnie Donegan was one of the few artists who performed with his own band, but that was because, for a while, he was king. All the singers seemed to be competing to see who could generate the largest quiff of hair. It sounds pretty tame nowadays, but at that time it was cutting edge and very dangerous, honest!

I also discovered Saturday Club, which was introduced by Brian Matthews at 10a.m., and then later, Wally Whyton’s Country & Western Show early on Saturday evenings. My eldest brother Richard had inadvertently turned me on to jazz and country and western, while my other brother David had turned me on to Eddie Cochran, Cream and Hendrix. My sister Vicky took a lot of ballet classes and I would always find her sewing thread into the ends of brand-new ballet shoes, which I could not understand at all. I later found out that ballet classes naturally involve a lot of movements on tiptoe, and the shoes had to be strengthened to allow for this. My father was always listening to classical music, so it was inevitable that one of us would get the bug eventually.

David had lovingly restored a Spanish guitar and I would sneak into his room and play it at every opportunity. I was sharing a bedroom with Richard, who would tell me not to touch his jazz records whenever he went out, under fear of death. But, of course, as soon as he left I would go through them, finding stuff I didn’t understand plus some artists that appealed to me, such as Sonny Terry And Brownie McGee, Mose Allison, Jimmy Guiffre, Nat Adderley and Art Blakey. I would carefully put them back before his return so he never knew that I’d been near them. Then David went abroad to work for a year and I rushed up to his room to see if he had left the Spanish guitar. The fact that he had was probably very important for my future, as I found it very easy to mess around on it in his empty room by myself, with no one to listen to my mistakes. As a result, by the time David arrived back from overseas, I could play it better than he could and, as he had lost interest in playing music anyway, he gave it to me. It was at about this time that my father decided to get in on the act of playing music himself. He bought a clarinet and would practise every evening when he got home from work in his bedroom overlooking the street. His progress can best be measured by the fact that passing local kids would howl like dogs when they heard him blowing.

By the time I left William Ellis, I was an efficient rhythm guitarist, but I didn’t start to earn money from playing until I had reached Bristol University. During the first summer vacation I started looking for a flat and became friends with Boris Nicholson, a Russian drama student who’d actually dropped out but was looking to stay on in Bristol for a while. He was an experienced international busker and, as well as finding a flat, we also played music together. We were lucky to find a deserted first-floor flat in the middle of Clifton, which belonged to the owner of an Indian restaurant. It was in a prime location, being opposite a girls’ hall of residence.

We persuaded him to rent it to us under the proviso that we renovated it. We moved in and set about making the place habitable. The front room had a tall ceiling and lovely proportions, but it had a million cracks in the ceiling. We filled them all in and restored three beautiful sets of shutters. I even persuaded the landlord to split the very large front room into two, and then proceeded to rent out the smaller of the newly partitioned rooms. We threw a few good parties at that flat. We would drive out to Somerset to buy a plastic flagon of rough cider to get everyone pissed. It cost about £8 for thirty pints and was never finished. At one of these parties, I got bored and went out for half an hour for a stroll. When I returned I didn’t have a key with me, so I knocked on the door of the flat, which was opened by a complete stranger who then asked me who’d invited me. I was eventually admitted and the stranger apologized to me. He had gate-crashed, but I was pleased that he’d taken it upon himself to man the door responsibly.

Bristol was a great city to be a student in. Most of the halls of residence were grouped together in an area away from the city centre, although it wasn’t a campus as such, and all lectures took place downtown. The university buildings were completely integrated with the town, which meant that whilst you went around studying you didn’t feel cut off from the rest of life going on. The main benefactors had been the Wills’ Tobacco Company, who had built most of the original architecture, and they’d done a very good job of knitting it all together.

It was during my three years in Bristol that I discovered my fascination with religion, which I still have to this day. I attended a Biochemistry lecture and was surprised to hear the speaker enthusing about the precision engineering that occurs within nature, going on to doubt whether these systems could have occurred by accident. I went away realizing that here was a scientist, by definition a sceptic, being persuaded that some sort of divine intervention had occurred. It shook me.

At around the same time, a friend took me on a trip to Gloucester cathedral and introduced me to the misericords there. For anyone who doesn’t know, misericords are carvings that adorn the underneath of the choir pews, and form small platforms against which the choirboys can lean and take the weight off their feet when the pews are up during long services. They are an ingenious invention and happen to be quite beautiful as well. Although I’m not a devotee of any specific religious creed, I do have a fascination for all the artistic work that religion has given rise to. Of course, we would all be better off without any religion to belittle and divide us, but take away religion and you remove the biggest benefactor of art that has ever existed. And also one of the biggest sources of inspiration. That day in Gloucester, the cathedral was full of burning incense and I began to feel queasy, so my friend took me off and settled my stomach with a cooked breakfast.

It wasn’t just the mystic of religion that I was drawn to. I discovered Captain Beefheart And The Magic Band at Bristol and went to see him play at the Colston Hall. I loved the mysterious names that his musicians had: Zoot Horn Rollo, The Mascara Snake, Winged-Eel Fingerling and Rockette Morton. Before the band played the gig, the bassist Rockette Morton came out in front of the curtain dressed in a large white Stetson, a paint-splashed white suit, with a Fender Precision bass. He bowed to the audience and then proceeded to play his arse off for about five minutes. He then bowed again and walked off stage. From that moment I was hooked.

A few other gigs spring to mind during my time at Bristol. One was staged at The Victoria Rooms in Clifton and featured Pink Floyd, supported by Kevin Ayers And The Whole World. Kevin had just left Soft Machine – what a great band they were. A singing drummer, Robert Wyatt, with Mike Ratledge on keyboards, and Kevin Ayers on bass. Their first album is phenomenal and a complete classic. David Bedford started the evening by performing Terry Reilly’s ‘A Rainbow In Curved Air’ on acoustic piano. There were a lot of joints being smoked and the whole atmosphere was really groovy, man. The Stones came to play at the Colston Hall to promote their live album Get Yer Ya Yas Out, which had a strange picture of Charlie Watts on the cover, walking down a road carrying a bass drum. The tickets were to go on sale at the Colston Hall the morning of the gig at 9a.m., and many people, including me, resolved to sleep out the night before under the arches around the corner from the venue. There must have been about two hundred of us in our sleeping bags and, inevitably, a party developed. I woke up the next morning and looked around to find myself the only person left under the arches. I had overslept and completely missed out on the ticket queue. Fortunately, I managed to scrounge a ticket anyway. My old friend from school, Richard Thompson, came to the Colston Hall with Fairport Convention, supporting T. Rex. They were really good and went down a storm. I remember thinking at the time, ‘Hasn’t Richard done well for himself!’

I would sometimes hitch up to London for the weekend and once on the way back to Bristol I got a lift in a Range Rover. The driver looked pretty cool and told me he was a roadie for Led Zeppelin, on his way to a meeting with the band in Maidenhead. I was very impressed and thanked him for the lift.

During the second year at Bristol, I met Keith Floyd and played in his chain of restaurants. He had started by opening a bistro and had rapidly expanded to five or six, which regularly needed live acoustic music. By this time I had a repertoire of about a hundred songs that I could play, from Beatles through Hendrix to Dylan. If I heard a song I liked, I would work out an arrangement on acoustic guitar. I had regular gigs at several restaurants in Bristol, and this extra income supplemented my grant – plus, I would always get a meal thrown in. One day Keith opened a new place and asked me to play at the opening party. I agreed and was busy strumming away when who should waltz down the stairs but my professor, arm in arm with his secretary! We both realized the potential of this encounter and decided to ignore each other for the rest of the evening.

At one of my regular restaurant gigs, I also served customers and would sit on some stairs and play a little when I wasn’t busy waiting on tables. One evening I was just about to put my guitar away for the night when a businessman, who had his moll in tow, asked me to play some more. I was knackered that night and couldn’t be arsed, so I apologized and said it wasn’t possible. He then took this as an invitation to try to bribe me to play some more. He offered me twenty quid, but I explained that it wasn’t a case of the money. He went to fifty and then a hundred, but I didn’t give in. By now it was a case of my pride, and his losing face in front of his moll. I didn’t give in and he wasn’t very pleased. I don’t think he ever came to the restaurant again.

I can remember playing at a restaurant in Hampstead in London, and my friend’s sister (whom I had a crush on) coming in with John Madden, the film director-to-be, her boyfriend at the time. He was very supportive and they both applauded a lot. He ended up marrying her.

During the second summer vacation, I went to Amsterdam with Boris and had my first experience of busking, outside The American Hotel. I started hesitantly and was just getting into my stride when an organ grinder – complete with monkey – pulled up in front of me and drowned me out. Not knowing what to do, I packed my guitar and started to leave. To my amazement, about half a dozen people who had been listening to me play ran after me and started pressing money into my hand. I then met up with some friends from Bristol and we all headed for Greece. Whenever I was running out of money, my friends would wait while I busked in a town and gathered more funds. I even stopped off in Lucerne in Switzerland and told a radio station I’d just released a record in England and persuaded them to book me for a session. I have since met the producer of that show, who assures me that he suspected I was pulling a fast one but ran with it.