Читать книгу Buzzcocks - The Complete History - Tony McGartland - Страница 26

Garth Davies is fast becoming a competent bass player and, as word gets around the Leigh area, several keen musicians are talking about him.

‘Pete McNeish was in the year above me at Leigh Grammar, and so, as is I think usual, I had no contact with him in my first years at the school. He was quite well known by about everyone in his fifth year, as he’d been playing guitar in a school group, Kogg.’

Both teenagers had a small part in the annual school play, and Garth also volunteered to help during the play’s run. He was trying to get a band together at the time and act as makeup artist to the cast (which was mostly garish, Ziggy Stardust and glam-rock-type facial patterns).

‘My fellow makeup artist happened to be Pete, who was in the upper sixth, and we got to know each other during the play’s run. I was playing with a short-lived band backing a singer who sounded like Elvis, and was also starting out with another band at the time. Finding out that Pete was between bands, I invited him to one of our rehearsals at a youth club in Tyldesley over the Easter holidays, with a view to him possibly joining us.’

Pete didn’t turn up, but, when they returned to school after the holidays, he presented Garth with an alternative proposition.

“How do you fancy forming a band with me?” Pete asked. ’At this point neither of us had heard the other play! So I got a lift from my brother David one weekday evening with my Framus bass guitar and drove over to Leigh. Pete played a twelve-string acoustic with a pickup fitted and we played some Bowie and Velvet Underground songs in Pete’s bedroom, and from that came the band called White Light, after the Velvets’ song “White Light/White Heat”.’

Garth remembers the band rehearsing for their debut gig: ‘We practised initially in Pete’s bedroom, then in the front room of Steve Christie’s house in Mersey Street, Leigh. Steve was our first drummer.

‘Joe Naylor was a contemporary of Pete’s at Leigh Grammar School and he talked his parents into letting us use the first floor of an unused outbuilding as a practice room. It was hard work lugging the amps up the stairs! We practised there in the summer of 1973. Jets of Air only ever played about ten gigs, but we made a good impression around Leigh and Bolton.’