16. poster boys
A comedown from the high? Nah, none of that.
The deal had always been a one-off gig then back to student life. Homework and the girlfriend, neither of them what I wanted but part of the way things were. At least the football was better now.
But Pat's party changed something. We wanted to do it again.
How? Not sure. But we thought we should probably advertise. Design a poster and put it up in colleges and libraries, flypost it like rock 'n roll outlaws.
This wasn't hubris. We weren't stupid. Today a birthday bash, tomorrow the world? Ha. It's one thing to play for your guitarist's mates, quite another to perform in front of people who don't know you and judge you on your abilities. We knew we might well not go down well.
But we didn't care.
That comes with being in a band. You against the world. People don't like what you play, or think you don't play it well? Fuck them. Play for them anyway. Play for anybody.
We decided the poster should have a picture of us. So we set up a photoshoot.
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Paul Woodruff was behind the camera. One of Bernie's mates (they shared a house at one time). He went on to become our roadie and more. We took a picture of him for posterity.
This was a week after the gig, at 88 Banbury Road yet again. The back garden this time, with snow on the ground and dusting the bushes and frosting the back wall.
Bearing in mind the name of the band, we weren't going to be taking any serious pictures. The punk thing of looking mean and moody in an alley, that hadn't hit Oxford yet. Within a year, overweight advertising people were doing it (I know because I worked with them). Here in early december 1976, the Atrocious Les Milkins Band mucked about in the cold.
Even so, the photo of the five of us against the garden wall is an icon.
Not very rock 'n roll - because everyone's smiling. Bill in a sweater with a shirt collar edging out, hand in a pocket of his flares. We're all wearing those, me hands on hips in a Worcester College Second XI football shirt: black and pink vertical stripes. From my expression, you wouldn't know I'm effing freezing.
Patrick's on one knee in the middle, wearing gloves, Harry peeking in from the right like he's asking to be allowed into the frame. A puffa jacket and a santa stocking cap with a white pompom at the end, Bernie in a blanket and floppy hat with a deliberately gormless expression.
Everyone's trying to keep warm except me. Pat and Harry are even wearing gloves, our not very punk guitarists protecting their valuable fingers. I got a cold wet arse from sitting on the snow-covered wall.
That group shot really is a classic. Especially when Pat gave it a sepia tone.
I got the four of them to write their signatures, then cut them out and stuck them under a print of the photo and put it an album.
I kept every picture of us, any piece of memorabilia. I told myself I was the Bill Wyman of the group, the least talented keeping the scrapbooks. That sounds unfair on Bill - but the Stones did leave him off most of Goats Head Soup and a track on Exile, and it's Keith who plays bass on Honky Tonk Women, Live with Me, and Sympathy for the Devil.
There again, hear Bill's bass lines on Gimme Shelter, Under my Thumb, and especially Yesterday's Papers, or the divebomber attack on 19th Nervous Breakdown. And he may have been the first to use a fretless bass, as if I know what difference that makes.
Mind you, his solo albums were unspeakable. I bought Monkey Grip on cassette, then gave it to Patrick with the note 'To a good friend, something I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy!'
Anyway you don't have to be the weak link to keep stuff. I also did it with things I was good at. So did Vittorio Pozzo, and he was the best.
No other coach has won the football World Cup twice. In between, Pozzo's Italy added Olympic gold in 1936. When I worked for FIFA, they were thinking of setting up a Pozzo exhibition, so three of us travelled to Turin to go through his collection.
It was a jaunt really, especially for a sports anorak like me. Pizza and wine every night. We were there three days, and we saw only a fraction of what Pozzo collected. Because he'd kept everything, even boarding passes and laundry receipts! Boxes and boxes of stuff. Good times.
His fellow italian kept all the photos and contact sheets from our first photo session as a band.
There's a particularly silly snap of the five of us a line. Bill's pretending to play a guitar, I'm holding the tip of another one, its head in the snow, looking down at it with my hand held out as if to say what's one of these for? Bernie's doing his impression of a tortoise, and Pat's decided to wear a cymbal as a hat. The Stranglers we emphatically are not.
In another shot, we're lined up in that gear like the start of a race. Bill was never going to win with the cymbal now on his head.
For some reason, I took my top off in that weather. Not very Iggy Pop: I look decidedly unmuscly on the contact sheet. There's an extreme close-up of me with my head back and mouth wide open, which became became the photo on the welcome page of this website.
We went back inside for another rehearsal (if no-one ever hired us, we still had those) and more photos.
Bill held his brushes under his nose like an overgrown moustache (I had the feeling he'd done it before). I pretended to sing into something that wasn't a mike. Mouth wide and eyes shut again. In another shot, I'm holding a guitar across my knees with a forefinger pointing down onto it, again as if I don't know what this alien thing is.
I'm wearing a cardigan over the football shirt. Not as Fine Young Cannibals as that sounds. It was a chunky knit in a kind of speckled grey and black, with a big collar. A cool and manly thing, knitted by my girlfriend, who had her talents. She was studying art as well as teaching, and she drew a head and shoulders of me and framed it, soulful with long hair. But it wasn't behind glass, and I spilled shampoo on it one day (yes, over the hair!). Happy to bin it, as things turned out. She could cook as well.
Good dancer, too - though that can be a mirage. In 1998 I had long natters with my old aunt in Genoa.
She'd had a hard life, with a heartbreaking tragedy, her little boy dying at three years old. For the rest of her life, she wore his photo round her neck. Then the father of the child died too.
I wondered if she might've found someone else. She'd always been beautiful and hadn't wanted to be alone.
Zia, you could've had your pick. Men must've been crazy about you.
She didn't bother with any false modesty about that! But the thing is, she said, she wasn't interested in sex. Non ero portata allo sesso.
Talk to people and they'll tell you things. Including an octogenarian aunt who was happy not going to bed with men.
She adored dancing when she was younger. The bars and clubs in Genoa's dockland. Men would ask her for a tango, then try to take her home. They'd plead with her. Maria, if you dance like that you must like doing rude stuff. Sorry, guys.
We've all known the feeling.
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In this rehearsal cum muck about, Bernie had a go at the drums, which he was good at, then put on goofy faces with Harry next to him being cool and good-looking. Patrick flopped on a sofa.
A really good day. Silly photos and only one gig, but we felt like a real band. Just the five of us. Because one thing I knew for sure after the first gig. Blond Steve wouldn't be joining in.
*
I still wanted him to. To have another of my mates in it, adding to the gang mentality! I told him I was keeping his place open - but I knew he'd never take it up.
He justified it in various ways. First of all, he didn't know Pat and Harry very well.
Nor do I.
Then he said my voice was louder than his!
Mate. We've got a thing called a microphone.
He claimed he was too busy for rehearsals - and that was fair enough. Finals exams mattered to him, so he got his head into the books. And he was always itching to get back to Germany to see his girlfriend.
But these weren't the real reasons. He just wasn't cut out for it, which is perfectly normal. When you can't sing, you have to be a particular kind of mad extrovert to get up on stage.
Also, he would've complicated things. After the party, Bernie urged me to 'Ditch him and become a star'!
He was joking, of course - but the last thing the band needed was a second duff singer as well as an extra personality to accommodate. Steve was fine with Bernie and the others but never really mates.
So it was just me up front. Interesting that Steve didn't come to that first gig, or any others at Oxford. I thought he might want to see for himself that he'd made the right choice!
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If we really were going to appear in public again, my equipment needed an upgrade .
Not the vocal chords, brave little things. My microphone. Bernie took me to Tandy on The Plain.
That's a junction at the end of the High Street, past Magdalen College and just over the bridge. There's a covered fountain on an island in the middle of the roundabout. St Clement's on the left eventually turns into the hill towards Headington and our rented house. Straight ahead beyond the island, at the corner between the start of the Cowley Road and Iffley Road, a pub called the Cape of Good Hope is still there. More of that later.
The branch of Tandy was on St Clement's. The new microphone was heavier and sounded better. Once I paid for that, we had a look at a stand for it. Taping a mike to a piece of wood was fun but not sustainable in the long run.
The guy in Tandy showed us various models. There was one with a hinge in the middle, which let you angle the top half towards you so you can play a guitar. A folk singer's stand, he called it.
It's not strong enough for you, he said. To prove that, he gave it a nudge with his toe - and it flew across the floor. There, he went. Solid as a rock.
I bought a straight one that now reminds me of the Slik tripod I used for birding many years later. You could knock it about and it stayed firm on its short legs. I felt equipped after that. A mike stand makes you look like a proper singer, and that's all I could ever do.
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In the photo opportunity in the snow, every snapshot made it clear our poster was going to be deliberately frivolous.
The house on Banbury Road had a short flight of metals steps leading into the garden from the ground floor flat, next to a basement window. We congregated on that in order of ascending silliness.
I'm standing at the bottom of the steps on the left, leaning on the bannister, a big empty glass jar in the same hand. One of those with two handles near the lip, probably had cider in it or something.
Bill's sitting on the fourth step alongside his bass drum. A guitar's leaning against the steps just below him, with Harry's cap on the top of the neck.
Further up, the three guitarists, Bernie and Pat posing as if they're playing, Patrick with gloves on. Bernie's pulling a goofy face again, floppy hat and a fag in his mouth. Pat would look serious if he wasn't wearing the santa cap. Harry's further up, his turn to have the cymbal on his head.
For all the world, we look like a bunch of Goodies on a bad day. But that wasn't the photo we used on the poster. When we started packing up and leaving the staircase, Paul took another one.
I'm bending from the hip to pick up one of two glass bottles, both of them full. Pat's nearly at the foot of the steps, Bill higher up with his back to camera. Bernie and Harry are about to start their descent, Bernie with his bass up by his neck. No attempt at humour, just a set being dismantled. But we turned it into something else.
When the poster came out, that was the picture on it. At the top, from the window behind Bernie's head, we added a speech balloon, with a message in capitals. 'And ●★★+!!★● stay out'. Exactly those symbols, in bold typeface. To our eye, it looked like we were coming back down the steps after being thrown out of the flat. How droll.
Under the photo, again in caps, a line telling people that if their function required 'a vastly entertaining rock dance band at atrociously reasonable rates, don't other phoning the consistently' - then the name of the band. For some reason, we spelled it Atrocious Les Milkins Banned Band. My fault.
Jesus, was there ever so much sledgehammer wit on one page? No wonder we didn't use it! Or if we did, it didn't get us any bookings. Nor did Roger Wickstead's ad in the Oxford Journal.
No-one had heard of us, and our poster was infantile. Who the fuck would trust us with a second gig?