Читать книгу Guitar Gods in Beds. (Bedfordshire: A Heavenly County) - Mike Buchanan - Страница 7

If you can’t fight, wear a big hat!

Paul Bonas (56)

My parents – living in Clapham – motorbikes – early musical influences – my first guitar – blackmailing mum – ‘Chi-chi-boom’ – early gigs with brother Pete – the slum on Goldington Avenue – the wild Irishmen – ‘Donkey Knob’ Spinelli – The Blues Club – Donovan’s girlfriend, Saffron – dealing with drunk hecklers – women, the occupational hazards for musicians – my ads on Chiltern Radio – The Pump House Boys – the tragic tale of Sid Worth – The Ship – St Cuthbert’s Street – three daughters with three women – I terrify my girlfriend in Great Barford – the demonic businesswoman – Elaine

My mum Celine is Irish. She came from County Carlow in Ireland, and was one of eight children in her family. Her father was a clever bloke, but like lots of Irishmen in those days he was pissed all the time, so he was incapable of looking after the kids. They were brought up in all sorts of difficult circumstances. My mum was educated by nuns in a convent from the age of eight, when her mother died. At the age of 18 she decided she’d had enough of Ireland and came to England.

My dad Raney was English, he came from Southwold in Suffolk. He was a bit of a tearaway as a kid, and even did some time in jail. He was basically a pain in the arse. He joined the Army during the Second World War, and was immediately posted to the Far East. He saw three weeks of action, then he was taken prisoner at the fall of Singapore and spent the rest of his days as a Japanese POW. He actually worked on the bridge over the River Kwai. He told me all sorts of grim stories about his life at the time. Of the relatively small number of survivors, he was rated by psychiatrists as being in the minority of POWs who might be considered ‘sane’. But in fact he wasn’t really sane; he had been cowed by the terrible experience. Thereafter, he always had an awful fear of people in positions of authority, as you’d expect.

When he came back to England, my dad worked as a labourer on the building of the RAE, the Royal Aircraft Establishment, at Twinwoods Farm Airfield near Clapham. It was the same airfield from which Glenn Miller had flown in 1944, heading for Paris. He was due to play a series of concerts with the band he led, the US Army Air Force Band. But of course no trace of the airplane, pilot, or two passengers was ever found.

Most of the labourers at the RAE were paddies. My mum was working in the canteen, and that’s how they met. It was a particularly unromantic affair. My dad said to her in the canteen, ‘If you fancy a drink, love, I’ll be down The Angler’s Rest tomorrow lunchtime, playing darts.’ That was his idea of a chat-up line.

When the RAE was finally built, my dad got a job as a stoker in the boiler room, working 12-hour shifts. But there was actually very little work for him to do. Maybe once or twice in a shift they’d have to turn a tap on or off. The boiler room became known as ‘Rest Camp’.

I was the first of their five sons – the reason they got married, you might say. I’m now 56, Pete is 55, Brian is 48, Steve is 46, and David is 44.

Dad died in 1981, when I was 30. He had all sorts of illnesses, including Parkinson’s – although he never got the trembling side of it – but pneumonia got him in the end. He got very forgetful, even forgot the dog’s name. It was terrible.

Mum did all sort of jobs to bring some money in, like cleaning at Texas Instruments and other places. She’s still alive, functioning perfectly well at 78 or 79. She still lives in Oakley, near the first house we had there.

I was born in Bedford Maternity Hospital in 1951. The first place we lived in was a bus on a caravan site called The Folly, by The Fox & Hounds pub in Clapham, near Bedford. There’s still a caravan site there, but in those days it was much more basic.

When I was a year or two old we moved into a double wagon, a showman-type double caravan, in Carriage Drive, Clapham, between North Brickhill and Kimbolton Road in Bedford. There was a Catholic church and nunnery near there at the time. After a year, the farmer who owned the land where our caravan was situated wanted to use it for something else. So he towed the caravan to the edge of the Clapham golf course. I distinctly remember assuming, at the age of three or four, that the setting for the Rupert the Bear books was the Clapham golf course. The nuns were very kind and compassionate. They would give us a lift to school. Not many people in those days had cars.

I remember Pete and I waking up in the caravan in the middle of winter and it would be perishing cold. There was ice on both the inside and outside of the windows. My mother would put her blancmanges and jellies in our bedroom to set.

When I was five, I started going to my first school, Clapham Voluntary Primary. It should have been called ‘Involuntary’, really! In those days you’d stay in one school for the duration of your schooling. But the secondary system was introduced when I was 11, so I ended up going to Lincroft School in Oakley.

My parents weren’t really musical, although my mum would sing arias from operas. I didn’t like opera then, and I still don’t. The first connection with music I can recall was to do with the BBC Light Programme. When I was about five or six, Pete and I would have to go to bed before the newsreel, at the end of The Archers. But before The Archers, there was a programme called Smoky Mountain Jamboree. Bob Foley remembers it well. We really loved the programme – it was full of bluegrass and hillbilly music.

In 1958, when I was about seven, we moved to a house in Clapham. It had a plaque outside which said it had previously been the village dog compound. As a kid I wasn’t embarrassed. In fact I was really proud of it. There’s an Asian shop there now.

Apart from an early interest in music, my other passion was motorbikes. 1958 was a good year for British motorbikes. England was top of the league for hot motorbikes then. Everybody rode bikes. I was only seven, but I’d gawp over fences at the bikes, and would press people to give me a lift on the back of them.

When I was nine, we moved to another delightful dwelling, a pre-fab in Prince’s Street in Clapham, which was a real notch up after the dog compound. But they’ve all since been demolished. In fact, they’ve systematically demolished every place we ever lived in.

Do I have any resentment about being brought up in poor circumstances? Of course not, why would I? It’s like if you’re brought up in India, and you’re in a totally impoverished state, you don’t know, do you? I mean if you’re not in agony . . . I was recently listening to a recording of Mississippi John Hurt, and he said that when he was a boy he had nothing but his mother. And I thought, ‘There’s something really brilliant about that statement.’ We live in a desperately materialistic world now, don’t we? For all the toys . . . I mean, I feel like I’m rich, though by modern standards I’m not at all. But I’ve got too much, too many choices. Who needs more than one bloody guitar? If you only have one, you play it and make a bloody good job of it, don’t you? Has my upbringing made me the person I am? Who knows? But there’s no doubt that material wealth does nothing for anyone spiritually.

I really wanted to play the guitar when I was about nine or ten. I’d listen to bands like The Shadows on my 78rpm wind-up gramophone. My first record was Wake Up, Little Suzie by The Everly Brothers. I was really jealous of the boy next door, who was a spoilt only child, because he had a Dansette which played 45rpm records. It had an auto-changer, which was cutting-edge record playing technology at that time.

I begged my mother to buy me an old record player which played 45rpm records, and she bought it. It didn’t have an auto-changer, so it wasn’t quite the swish thing that the kid next door had. My first 45rpm record was Kon-Tiki by The Shadows. You wouldn’t believe how many times I must have played that. To this day, I still love that record.

I just had to get a guitar from somewhere. When I was about nine, I saw a plastic Elvis Presley guitar that had four strings. Why the bloody hell it had only four strings, I don’t know. It cost ten bob. I pressed my mother to buy it, and she did. I’d play it, then Pete would have a go. I tended towards rhythmical things, while Pete would tend towards melody. That’s interesting because it’s exactly where we’ve ended up, with me playing mainly acoustic guitar and Pete playing lead electric guitar.

There was a girl at my school whose father was a Teddy Boy. He’d been playing guitar in a jazz band. He nicked one of the guitars and was offering to sell it for a fiver. Now I had 30 quid left by an aunt, which in those days was a small fortune. It was held in a bank account, but I needed my mum to sign a bank form before I could get hold of any of it. I asked her if I could withdraw five pounds to buy the guitar, but she said I couldn’t. She thought it was a very frivolous use of so much money.

So I had to develop a plan to get the money. Now we’d got into a routine whereby – quite unknown to dad – we’d give mum two pounds a week to help with the household bills she frequently incurred. In exchange she let us bunk off school one day every week. I spontaneously arrived at the idea of blackmail. I told her I was going to let dad know she was letting us have days off school and that we were paying towards the household bills with our own money, unless she agreed to help me withdraw five pounds for the stolen guitar. So that’s how I came to get the money for my first decent guitar.

I went to the Teddy Boy, who lived in The Folly caravan site in Clapham, where we had lived ourselves. He gleefully parted with the guitar, because a fiver was a lot of money in those days. You must remember that a fiver would have been half of my dad’s weekly wage at the time.

So I had a good guitar. Pete was green with envy. In those days I’d ‘open tune’ the guitar, so when I strummed all the strings, I’d get a particular chord – C, G, or whatever. I didn’t know there was a ‘proper way’ to tune a guitar. A local band had seen me play and said I needed to tune it properly, but I didn’t listen to them.

When I was 12, the family moved to a house on Station Road, Oakley. My youngest brother still lives in the same house.

A year or two passed, and eventually Pete cottoned on to my trick. He too blackmailed mum into releasing five pounds from the bank, and bought a crude electric guitar.

Pete and I never received any formal music training, or read sheet music or anything. We just played and learnt everything by ear. The local band – The Dell Vikings, or something cringy like that – were older than us, maybe 16 or 17. They saw Pete and I play, and were impressed. So when they bought some new equipment, they very generously gave us their old amplifier, a Linear 30-watt affair with a couple of speakers in it. We thought it was fantastic.

Then we bought the Bert Weedon book, as everyone seems to have done in those days. I distinctly remember reading, ‘These chords will seem impossible to you now, but soon you’ll be able to play them easily.’ I thought, ‘Well, I doubt that!’, but of course he was right.

We met up with a kid who played drums, who lived just down the road. A red-haired kid, Andy Mason, he worked in the chip shop on Saturday mornings. He now runs an agency for musicians. I say he played the drums, but he was particularly fuckin’ useless at them. He had the nickname in the youth club of ‘Chi-chi-boom’.

Pete’s mate Ray Nicholson played bass guitar, although he wasn’t much better musically than Chi-chi-boom. And so we formed a band, The Vultures. I chose the name by opening a dictionary at random and blindly sticking a pin into the page. Maybe The Eagles did the same. We were 13 or 14. Pete drew a picture of a vulture on the bass drum.

By this time we’d moved out of the pre-fab and into a house in The Close – number 12, I think – in Clapham, behind where the new shops are. That was the first proper house we’d ever lived in. We had a nice big back garden and we’d practise there. It drew the heat a few times. People would complain and get the cops round. Some people liked our music, but mostly they complained.

We then used to play down the youth club. First of all we played at the Methodist Junior Youth Club, where kids up to 12 or 13 went. Someone gave us an old applecart and we’d put our amplifier in it and walk to our early gigs. I wish to God I had a picture of that, that would be epic. Some of the older kids would come to the junior club just because they loved to hear us play. Most of them were bikers. But after a time we only went to the youth club for older kids.

The song that always got the best reception for us back then was Smokestack Lightning. We’d get to a point where we’d play to a wild crescendo and roll about on the floor like we were having fits. The kids thought that was fantastic. We were soon playing all sorts of places and were billed as ‘the youngest group in England’. We played at the Bedford Corn Exchange when I was 12 and Pete was 11, on the same bill as The Pretty Things. 1963, I suppose.

The Bedford Corn Exchange, The Granada, and The Empire used to put on big-name bands. The Beatles, The Who, the bloody lot. The people who ran these places were local, and where there was a chance to put on a local band to warm up the audience, they took it.

We’d also get gigs at working men’s clubs. I remember being offered beer at one of the clubs when I was about 12. It seems ridiculous now, but in those politically incorrect days you could do almost anything you wanted to. To me it seemed the ultimate sin to drink beer, and I would only drink orange squash.

We’d see a band called The Odds in Bedford. I still see one or two of the guys around. They used to play at the Drill Hall, and we’d sometimes play with them. We got around a bit and started to get really good.

I left school as soon as I could, at 15. Pete went to the Pilgrim’s School in Bedford and was expelled. I did all sorts of shit jobs after I left school. I worked on a farm in Clapham. I must have had 20 jobs in the first year after I left school. I just wasn’t cut out for ‘normal’ jobs, with shifts and so on. At an early age you don’t realise that while you’re not cut out for certain jobs, you may have some other talents to exploit. Everyone was moaning at me about my lack of work ethic and all that. But of course in those days you could go and get a job anywhere in ten minutes. You didn’t need a bloody degree to land some second-rate fuckin’ job. The sort of jobs you need a degree for nowadays, I could have landed back then by turning up on the doorstep. But I wouldn’t have wanted them.

By the time I got to 16 or 17 Pete and I didn’t play together much anymore, apart from the odd party. I left home at 18. Pete and I lived in a real slum for a year, a shithole of a bedsit dive at the top of Goldington Avenue, Bedford. Pete never paid any fuckin’ rent. I always had to find the money. I worked in a junk shop at the time.

Pete and I were pretty boys in those days, with long hair, and we shared a bed in the bedsit. In the same house, which was basically a doss house with shared facilities, there were a load of wild Irishmen. They were hilarious. At first, they thought we were two queers living together. But when they found out we were brothers and our mother was Irish, they were fine with us.

The Irish guys would have fights, throwing each other out into the snow in their underpants. It was unbelievable, really wild. They were roadbuilders, and they befriended us. They’d run out of food mid-week, then come to us. Now we didn’t have much ourselves – maybe a few tins of beans and a bit of bread – so we fed them. When the weekend came and they’d had their pay-packets, they’d give us tons of money, beer, fags, and so on.

At this point ‘Donkey Knob’ Spinelli enters the scene. What’s that? Will he object to his nickname being used in the book if he reads it? Well, would you, if that was your nickname? I didn’t think so. Not only did Donkey Knob have the biggest cock you’ll ever see, he was the tightest bastard known to mankind. At this time, he was the only person in our circle with a car, a Jag. I think his parents were fairly well off. He was quite a good drummer. I wasn’t so wild about his singing, though. He went on with Pete to play with Brand X, Phil Collins, and all that lot, so he was fairly talented.

A guy called Pete Hampton then figured quite strongly in my life. He wasn’t a musician, but he had hundreds of records and he loved blues. He kept bringing me into Carousels in Bedford and other music shops where you could go in and listen to music in the booths. He told me I was a good guitarist and should learn to play ragtime music.

A few people were by now starting to say I should try to earn some money through music. Now at that time I had very little money. I was completely brassic in fact, and still living in the shithole at the top of Goldington Avenue. And so it was that I realised I should really try to knuckle down with my guitar playing, and learn the ragtime songs that Pete Hampton would bring me. I did it all by ear. You couldn’t buy books on ragtime music.

At this time in The George and Dragon pub in Bedford they had a club, Club Mezz. It was a jazz club, but then a friend said he was going to open a blues club there on Friday nights. I thought that was great so I turned up on the first night, but there was nobody there. It turned out that the guy had not arranged anything in the end and the event had been cancelled, but nobody had told me. I wasn’t very happy.

Now at this time I’d been playing the odd gig with an Italian band. You wouldn’t want to play in an Italian band; they’re so traditional. They wouldn’t allow you into the wedding because you were English. I mean, God help us. But they were kind enough to let me borrow their van and all the amplifiers. So I called Pete and we quickly cobbled together a band with Donkey Knob to play the first Friday night, which should have been arranged by the other guy.

There weren’t many people the first Friday, but through word of mouth the place was packed the next week. Bingo. The gig was a knock-out, and we called those nights ‘The Blues Club’. Two or three weeks after we started, another local guy, Bob Carter, started playing there regularly too. By the time it was taken over two years later by a local businessman, Angie Russo, it was really throbbing. But what got me was that after six months the bloke running the event, Dave Balfour, had the cheek to demand entrance money from me. I said, ‘Fuck off, Dave, if it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t even have a fuckin’ Blues Club.’ So I never paid and I just walked in. When Angie Russo ran The Blues Club he tried to turn it into a money-making business, and the event completely lost its edge.

We’ve got to about 1969 now. Bob Carter went on to form a band called Lynx. They got into the charts. He was a good writer, and he was taught by Dave King. Bob died some years ago of a strange illness.

We were all mainly playing blues by this time, mainly standard blues covers, though some of it was original. Spinelli wrote some songs.

Pete was in a band called Little Women. Don’t ask me how they came up with that name. The band was entirely blokes, so it was quite bizarre really. Phil Trenworth played in the band with his brother. Now around this time, Pete was increasingly picking up guitar work in London. He sort of disappeared into the metropolis and started to get to know and play with some relatively famous people, such as Jim Capaldi.

In Pete’s absence I obviously had no playing partner, but I’d become pretty good at ragtime, so I started to go around the folk clubs. But in the early 1970s folk clubs had customers wearing chunky white Arran jumpers, and the singers stuck fingers in their ears. They were jolly decent people, but ragtime music didn’t really fit into the traditional image. It was too American, and they didn’t like it much. I stood out as a good musician, but I aggravated them. They allowed me to play, but I always got the distinct impression that I was part of the furniture.

In the 1970s I did little manual work. In 1976 my New Year’s resolution was to not do any manual work in 1977.

I met some quite interesting people on the folk circuit who are now famous, including Martin Carthy and Saffron, Donovan’s girlfriend. You may recall his lyric on Mellow Yellow, ‘I’m just mad about Saffron, Saffron’s mad about me’. She was bloody good.

I thought that if I carried on playing the folk clubs, I’d eventually break through. Folk clubs are very traditional and you do have to be a ‘known known’. Really, if you’d just fuckin’ sit there for 30 years, you’d become famous. That’s what they’re about, they’re not about spontaneous flavours. And while I now play some folky stuff, back then – in my twenties – I was still only playing ragtime. I had fuck all to do with folk music, I didn’t like it one bit.

But I was still doing pretty well. Sometimes I’d play an hour-long set while people were filing in for a gig by some famous band. I played the Milton Keynes Bowl once, and a big place in St Albans – the Corn Exchange, I think – and lots of other places, wine bars and so on. The money was good. I’d have to deal with the hecklers, some of them already drunk, which I always enjoyed. Someone would shout out to me, ‘Fuck off!’, and I’d respond with something witty like, ‘No – fuck off yourself!’

Women finding musicians attractive is actually an occupational hazard, as drink is. This isn’t bragging but . . . well, it’s fuckin’ terrible really, because what happened was, a girl invited you back to her place, you spent the night with her, and had a great time. But you might already have a regular girlfriend who you saw more often. Then you’d meet a third girl at a party, who would ask you if you were good at fixing broken record turntables or whatever. So you’d go back to her place, look at the turntable, discover it was working fine, tell the girl, and she’d say, ‘I know.’ That sort of thing happened a lot.

Now the problem came when you were doing a gig and all three girls turned up – and of course you were trapped. Normally I’d stop for a break during the gig, to rest and get a drink, but in those circumstances I’d just keep playing.

It’s like the Dire Straits lyric, ‘Money for nothing, and chicks for free.’ The funny thing is, I didn’t see it as anything special. I saw it as a problem. I think women are just attracted to musicians, for whatever reason.

But you also have to look at the arse end of it, jealous boyfriends. In the early ’80s, when I was in my early thirties, Nick Edwards – a fiddle player – and I were playing everywhere. Pubs, barn dances, you name it. Now, if you’re on the dance floor and some girl comes up to you and is drooling all over you, the boyfriend obviously gets shirty. I’d get weird phone calls in the early hours of the morning where nobody would speak. Eventually, I used to pull the cord from the wall to stop the problem. I never came to blows with jealous boyfriends, but there were a lot of uncomfortable moments.

I knew of Nick because he’s Patrick Knight’s stepbrother, and Patrick had always lived in Oakley. I was giving guitar lessons to John Duffield and John suggested Nick and I should get together, because Nick was a great fiddle player and our styles would work well together. And so we teamed up. It was a bit lightweight at first, but we soon developed a good repertoire. An early gig was in Fletcher’s Food and Wine Bar in Rushden, and we went down well. Then I did a few adverts for Fletcher’s on Chiltern Radio in Dunstable, composing blues songs. The lyrics were along the following lines, to the tune of Alice’s Restaurant:

You can get anything you want,

In Fletcher’s Food and Wine Bar,

In Queen Street, Rushden.

You know where I mean.

There’s even room to park your car.

There’s wine and beer to put you in the mood.

Just try our delicious home-made food.

You can get anything you want,

In Fletcher’s Food and Wine Bar,

In Queen Street, Rushden.

And to the tune of Nobody Knows You, When You’re Down and Out, I sang another advert:

If you need a place to go,

Just in case you might not know,

Queen Street, Rushden’s where we are,

Fletcher’s Food and Wine Bar . . .

The funny thing was, it could be embarrassing. I’d walk down the road on a Sunday morning and people were washing their cars with the radios blaring out Chiltern Radio. When I did gigs, people would say, ‘You know, you sound just like that bloke who does the adverts on Chiltern Radio.’

Nick and I got picked up in the mid-80s by a barn dance band, Bricks and Brussels. I did six years in it, and Nick’s still in it. Pete’s played in it. They just pick up people who can play all right. Nick and I would also play Irish clubs in Luton, all sorts of terrible fuckin’ places. But we also played in some good places, like the Civic Theatre in Bedford. I have a great recording of us playing there. The response was phenomenal.

Nick and I – and sometimes Pete – played at The Angel in Elstow Road, Bedford. It’s no longer there. That was fantastic – it was like being a bloody pop star. Len Whale, the landlord – now deceased – invited Nick and I to play. So we went along to play one night, and it was shit useless. It didn’t work. Nick didn’t want to play again. He was coming to the end of his tether, he didn’t like playing in pubs. He didn’t really drink, unlike me. Then Len suggested that my brother Pete play with me. I said that Pete was rarely around, because of commitments, but Len was persistent. At first Pete and I just played again as a duo, then John Murray (on bass) and Jim Piggott (on drums) asked to join us, and we agreed, calling the band The Pump House Boys. We were incredibly successful. I couldn’t believe the response. We also played The Flowerpot, and I’ve got recordings from there.

Eventually John and Jim faded away a bit. Pete’s mate Teryl Bryant, who played in Pete Murphy’s band, was a knockout drummer, absolutely brilliant. So we performed as a three-piece band. I played bass by using an octaver, and put the acoustic guitar through it.

It worked, but it was loud, hard work. It was ridiculous really. It got more and more aggressive. Pete would do half-hour-long solos while I kept opening my gob, waiting to come in on the next verse. Fuckin’ madness, but most of the audience loved it because they were out of their heads.

It was a period I didn’t like, and I always had tinnitus at the end of a gig. I used to put shotgun earplugs into my ears, stuff like that. I’ve played in a number of rock bands over the years, but I can’t stand the row, the sheer racket. I like good music, but not noise.

This all came to an end in the early 1990s when I broke my left wrist in a pushbike accident in Chicksands Wood, near Clophill. It was smashed to smithereens, and I didn’t think I’d ever play the guitar again. So Pete took over the band, still calling it The Bonas Brothers, because our brother Brian played drums. But it wasn’t the same, partly because Pete isn’t an organiser. He couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery. But his girlfriend – Sara Turner, who lived with him at that time – was good at organising. You know Sara, the one who plays the tea chest bass, the one you fancy like crazy. I remember you told me recently that you thought she was ‘sex on legs’.

Pete’s current girlfriend, Carole Sproule, was then playing bass guitar in the band. But Pete then started dating Carole, which caused the break-up of the band, and obviously the end of his relationship with Sara.

Sid Worth is worth a mention. A lot of local people remember him. He was a dreamer, a bit idealistic and trusting, totally uncommercial, and in the end he paid a high price.

I knew Sid for a long time, starting when he was working for the Mr Music shop when it was down at St Mary’s, the other side of the bridge. Before that, it was run by ‘Black Cloud’ Martin Fallon, a good guitarist but rather a glum bloke, hence his nickname. Sid had been one of Joe Brown’s sound men. They closed down the St Mary’s branch, it wasn’t making money. I didn’t know why, at the time, but then they set up another branch of Mr Music in Bromham Road. Sid worked there too. He lent things out free to customers and sometimes didn’t get them back. The perplexed owner of the shop had faith in Sid, but it didn’t make any money, so it closed in the end.

In 1982 Sid started working at HMV in Silver Street, Bedford. They had a pilot scheme, selling musical instruments alongside the records and so on. I then got a Saturday job with Sid, which lasted for years. I suddenly realised why the businesses he’d worked for before had got to their knees. Sid operated in complete chaos. You’d look under the counter and things which he’d promised people were stuffed under there.

Eventually HMV closed that operation, so already Sid had been responsible for the closure of three or four places. Sid and Bruce Murray decided to set up a shop on their own, and asked me to join as a partner. Well, my aunt had previously offered me ten grand if I wanted to go into a small business venture, so I asked her for it, but she refused. She felt the business wouldn’t work. So I had to apologise to Sid and explain I couldn’t get the money. But Sid and Bruce asked me to join them anyway. Sid remortgaged his house to get the money.

And so Union Street Music was born. Now I knew a local guy, Mick Newman, who did any electrical work I needed in connection with amps, speakers, and so on. So when I learned that Union Street Music were looking for someone to do electrical work, I recommended Mick to Sid and Bruce. He turned up, was asked if he’d come about the job, and when he said he had, he was told, ‘Congratulations, you’ve landed it.’

Mick and I then started working together. I hired out PAs and Mick did all the electrical work. We started making some real money on the PA hiring.

In the meantime Sid was spending all the profits, giving stuff away and lending stuff and not getting it returned. By this time I’d done years of it and I’d had enough of the fuckin’ place, so I jacked it in. It was at this time I smashed my wrist in the pushbike accident. The lease ran out on the shop so they moved to what is now The Music Centre, on Tavistock Street in Bedford. Bruce still runs it, and Mick still runs the electrical workshop.

Bruce got so sick of Sid in the end that he told Sid one of them had to buy out the other. So Sid asked Bruce to buy him out. Sid then decided to buy a shop in Harpur Street, thinking he’d be viable competition to The Music Centre. He teamed up with Gary Clarke, who put up some money for the property. Now Gary was a clever businessman. He saw the benefit of Sid’s musical connections, but also saw that Sid wasn’t a businessman. So they came to an arrangement whereby Gary owned the property and Sid owned the stock.

Sid tried and tried, but the business failed. This time it was on his head. And so in 2002 Sid killed himself; he hung himself. Gary Clarke got the property back.

Gary employed me in the days after Sid had killed himself, and you should have heard the people phoning up for money, his suppliers, who hadn’t been paid. I started off being polite: ‘I’m sorry, there’s been a tragedy. Sid Worth has committed suicide.’ They’d explain they were owed ten thousand pounds, so I’d suggest they speak to Gary. But so many suppliers phoned up in the end, I’d say, ‘He’s brown bread. He’s finished. He’s deceased.’ It got to that.

By the mid-90s Pete was away a lot on tours in the States, the Far East, and elsewhere. He was playing lead guitar for some big names, like Jim Capaldi. When he was back in the UK he’d play a bit, sometimes with me, mainly recreational for pocket money.

Over the past ten years our audiences have become significantly older, so now we do ruby weddings, retirement parties and the like. And of course your 50th birthday bash last December at The Red Lion in Stevington. It’s usually for people who have a few bob. They have nice houses and gardens and so on. We’ve done quite a few house parties, which are usually great fun.

It’s difficult to find good live music locally, especially if you’re over 50. Over the past five years in particular, I find people asking me where I, or Pete and I, play. I explain that the pubs are reluctant to book bands, they’re all little puppets in big brewery chains. The landlords are on a fixed wage, regardless of how well the pubs do. If they work hard and turnover rises, the brewery chain just ups their rent. So I suggest to people that they get a few mates to club together and pay for a gig, maybe in someone’s back garden, and that’s exactly what’s been happening. And that’s great, because you’re playing for people who have actually paid and therefore want to hear the music and enjoy themselves. We get all age groups when we play. If you’re good, people will come to see you.

In about 2000, after a whole series of relationship catastrophes, I was living alone in a flat in Ashburnham Road in Bedford. Now there are only two pubs where I’d consider drinking in Bedford: The Flowerpot on Tavistock Street and The Ship on St Cuthbert’s Street. Ian Wagstaff – ‘Waggy’ – took over The Flowerpot, Ray Foster The Ship, and they both wanted Pete and I to play. We played a few times for free, with various guest musicians, and it always went down well.

Then Ray had the idea of paying me to do a regular Thursday event at The Ship, and it went well for a year and a half. But the sheer fuckin’ repetition got to me in the end. It had become like a regular job. I didn’t want to do it, so I took a break. After about a year I went back to it, but it was never the same, as is usually the case second time around. The Ship is a nouveau riche den, really. You don’t agree? Well, they’re all small-time businessmen, investors, and so on.

Now live music always has a dynamic curve. It’s of its moment. If you set something new up and it works, great. But God only knows what makes it work. Whatever the fuck that is, I don’t know – still.

It’s something to do with having the right people there. You’ve got to have stars. Not stars in the sense that they’re famous, but they know who they are, in a funny sort of way. And they won’t come if they think the event is going to be shit. But if you get four of five stars together, it will work and there will be a real buzz. Sara Turner’s a star. And the stars inspire other people.

But if you get someone’s company leaving party and they invite every dull bastard on earth, anyone who is a star will fuck off with another star, and the result is a shit party. That’s exactly what happens. So you need to keep the stars in the party.

If I have a choice between seeing a live band or getting their DVD out, I’d normally choose the DVD. I want to see bands as I want to see them. There was a woman who lived in Devon when I was playing there who told me she lived next door to John Renbourn. She said she could introduce us, and would I be interested in meeting him? I said, ‘Thanks, but no thanks,’ because if he turned out to be a wanker, which he might be, I wouldn’t want to know that. I’ve heard him play the guitar and I think he’s fantastic. But I don’t want to know him as a person. I think there’s something sacred about great music, but it doesn’t mean the musician is sacred.

Good live music has to be just there, and just happening. It shouldn’t mean dragging everyone down to the same pub to listen to the same stuff every week. Then it becomes a job, and horrendous.

Now I do a lot of guitar teaching, mainly with kids, who I get on well with. I’ve got some great testimonials from their parents. People also ask me to do musical arrangements. Pete does the same, but on a grander scale. I’ve always loved the recording side of music, and I’m doing more of that here, in our house in Sharnbrook.

I’ve got three daughters, by three women. I never married any of them. The first woman was Carmel, and our daughter is Charmaine, who is now 36. I see Charmaine from time to time; she lives in Newcastle now.

First of all we lived in various flats in Bedford, then Harrold. Now there’s a funny story here. I suspected that Carmel had started an affair with another man while she was living with me. Over some weeks she’d kept denying she was seeing anyone else, but I wasn’t stupid, I knew. While I was looking after Charmaine, Carmel would go out for the evening, supposedly with her friend Judy. Judy would pick Carmel up in her car, but then drop her off down the road somewhere. A mate of mine called Charmaine’s new boyfriend ‘Judy in disguise with glasses’.

One night, when I was again looking after Charmaine, Carmel said she was going out with Judy again to a party. I asked where the party was, and she told me Great Barford. So after she left, I phoned my brother Brian up and promised him as much beer as he wanted if he’d come over to babysit right away. I put some party clothes on, leathers over them, and rode my bike to Great Barford. I soon found where the party was, loads of cars outside one house. I took my leathers off, tidied myself up, and knocked on the door. Someone opened it, and I pushed a bottle of wine in their hand and marched through the door with a cheery, ‘Good evening, I’m Paul.’

I walked slowly around the house and soon came across Carmel and her new boyfriend on the sofa, kissing and cuddling, and oblivious to everyone else. I sat down beside them, had a few drinks, and it was 20 minutes before they realised who was sitting next to them. Their faces were a picture. I asked them if they wanted me to fetch them a drink, and they both looked terrified.

So off I went, and rode back home. Now it was a freezing night. The boyfriend dropped Carmel off nearby, and she walked to the door. But I’d locked it, so she had to call the boyfriend to pick her up. This was before the era of mobile phones. I later told her she had to give the bloke up, or I’d leave her. She wouldn’t give him up, so I left her.

I then slept on various friends’ floors for a time and lived over the hairdresser’s shop here in Sharnbrook. Basically, I dossed around for a time. A friend of mine, a girl, went travelling around the world, and I looked after her house in Commercial Road in Bedford. She then told me one of her friends, Annabelle, was also going to stay in the house. She’s the one you fancied, the blonde-haired one in the photo. Annabelle became my girlfriend, and she found us a granny flat in Pavenham.

Annabelle in due course gave birth to my second daughter, Georgia, who is now 17. After three or four years we had to leave Pavenham, then we had a flat in Bedford. After a time Annabelle got on my nerves so much I couldn’t take any more, so I left and bought my own flat in Milton Ernest. They live in Bath now, and Georgia doesn’t speak to me.

Not long after I met Annette, who in due course gave birth to my third daughter, Lucy, who is now 13. After I lived with Annette for three or four years, that relationship became unbearable and I had to leave. I was heartbroken at leaving Lucy, but that’s how it was. They live in Felmersham now, just down the road, and I see a lot of Lucy.

Then I had a relationship with another woman. I can’t name her because of the slander and libel laws. Let’s just say she was a fuckin’ mad argumentative alcoholic, and demonic when drunk. I spent more nights in the bed at the police station than in her bed, as she’d call them to pick me up when she was drunk.

I didn’t bother getting married. I didn’t think I’d be able to honour a marriage any more than I could, or would want to, hold down a regular job. I didn’t plan to have children. Their mothers, as they usually do, planned that for me. That’s fair enough as long as they don’t expect me to be responsible, in the sort of way that they ought to be, for having done that. I don’t mind helping out.

I’ve known my wife Elaine since she was a little kid. I went out with her elder sister Julie when I was about 16, and her family lived in Harrold. Elaine was a little stick insect of a girl, about 12 at the time. I always liked Elaine. I’d seen her in various places about town over the years. We always had very pleasant conversations, but she was bringing her own family up. She was, and is, a maths teacher, and she was taught to sing very well, by a proper singing coach. She and her husband had two sons, who both became King’s College choristers. William, who is now 26, studied law, but decided to teach piano instead. Henry, who is now 21 or 22, is a cellist, pianist, and clarinet player, and conducts orchestras. They’ve both travelled around the world in connection with their music, and they’re superb musicians. I get on well with both of them, no problem. Henry recently became the Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for the Lib Dems, in Bedford and Kempston.

In 2001, in the final days of the Ashburnham Road flat, Elaine asked me to record some backing music for a track. She was coming round to my flat more and more, but it wasn’t really for singing. She wanted to start something up with me. Her relationship with her husband had pretty well finished by this time anyway, and she was in the throes of divorce.

When Elaine’s divorce came through, with the proceeds of the property sale she bought a place in Bletsoe, The Old Post Office, and I moved in with her then. We later moved to this house on the High Street, Sharnbrook, in August 2007.