25. st peter's groupie
St Peter's is one of those colleges no-one's heard of outside Oxford.
So is Worcester, where I went. Because it's named after a town. It used to be called Gloucester College. No-one knew about it then either. Same with Exeter College, Lincoln, Pembroke (where Bill went), Hertford.
If you recognise a college by name, that's because it couldn't be anything else. Christ Church, Balliol, Trinity, Oriel, Corpus Christi, maybe Brasenose because it's funny.
Some people may have heard of St John's or one of the other saint colleges, but even they won't know St Peter's.
It's on the site of some medieval buildings, but the present ones are 20th Century and it didn't become an actual college till after I was born. I doubt it's on any guided tours.
But it was mecca for us.
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We never set ourselves any goals.
Remember this was going to be one small gig and out.
But we ended up climbing a ladder. A party for your guitarist's friends. A party for people who didn't know us. A paid gig. A residency in a pub.
And I guess we always thought playing at an Oxford college would be a kind of pinnacle. We were at Oxford colleges ourselves. The Cape of Good Hope was a find, but we always suspected we might not fit in there. To be asked to play at a college - hired for a function like a proper band - well, we thought we'd arrived.
Not sure when St Peter's decided on us. The gig was only three days after our debut at the Cape. Hard to believe someone from Peter's saw us there and decided hey we need these. For a start, they printed a poster, which must've been out for a while beforehand.
Maybe someone clocked our own poster somewhere and decided to take a chance. Or the small ad we'd placed in Daily Information a month earlier. After all, they were risking only fifteen quid, same as our fee for Ironbridge. Fine by us: no petrol to pay this time!
The St Peter's poster was vaguely similar to one of ours: nothing too serious. A xerox of King Kong holding Fay Wray over Manhattan, with the line 'You never know what you'll find at an S.P.C. J.C.R. Party'. JCR is junior common room. Theirs was bigger than Worcester's and all on one level, just right if a rock band did its job...
The poster said there'd be a buffet, plus jazz and folk in the bar, which thankfully I refuse to remember. But the Aardvaark disco was good. I'm crossing the room after setting up, and they've got Caroline on full blast. What a track that was. What a band they used to be.
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Hard to believe Status Quo once had street cred. From when they ditched the psychedelic bollocks of Matchstick Men and donned the denim, to their drummer and bass player leaving. After that, forty years going downhill (Margarita Time, anyone?). Even at their peak, most of their lyrics were puerile - but for a while, no-one else rocked that hard.
I'm sitting in a pub with Bernie, somewhere near Howard Street. Ordinary looking place, but jukeboxes were good at the time. And I see Status Quo's new single is out.
Wild Side of Life is a cover of a famous but feeble country song. The Quo version starts quick but quiet, with a bass pedal but no bass, which kicks in to make it all work. Quo lumbered themselves with Francis Rossi's weedy vocals (italian singers, ay), but the track powers through. So do Paper Plane, Down Down, Drifting Away, and Mystery Song.
Their best is Caroline. A magnum opus of uncompromising intent. The riff never changes, so fuck you. And there's a punk feel to the sound as well as the attitude.
Incidentally, people are forever naming the first punk song before punk, to try and claim some spurious street cred. One idiot even suggested a track on the second Roxy Music album, just because Bryan Ferry speeds up for once. For what it's worth, my tuppenceworth is Led Zeppelin, of all people. Robert Plant couldn't sing like a punk when he tried, but the riff is right and so's the title: Communications Breakdown, from 1969.
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So I'm here in the St Peter's JCR, Saturday 5 March 1977, and hearing Caroline and thinking fuck this is good. We should've covered it, for various reasons. It's a storm from start to finish; the verses are spoken, which suited me; and it isn't by Chuck Berry or the Stones. Instead, of our fifteen songs tonight, twelve are by him or them or both.
My main memory is one of the other three. Down on the Corner near the end, the track Bernie hated and I didn't like much. And we were right, because people just stood and listened, never a good idea with the Milkins Band.
Other tracks went down a bit better. We did the right thing by leaving out Can't you hear me knocking, and everything else was a dance number. But St Peter's was a men's college, and the party didn't attract all that many women. Without them, you don't get much dancing, though I remember a few guys headbanging with their thumbs in their belts, which shows how big Status Quo were.
So the show was no better than alright. It was clear people weren't overwhelmed by this covers band from their own student ranks. But we did get called back for an encore (Roll over Beethoven for the second time), and we weren't unhappy. We never were.
There were a couple of band firsts. A cheque, not cash. And after eight gigs, we were in the black at last: a whole £1.50!
Plus we had our first groupie. Though she didn't have any of us.
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None of us started a band to meet girls.
It never occurred to us that anyone did. Naive or what. We just wanted to play on stage, even just the once. So St Peter's was a surprise.
The gig's over, and a few of us are standing by an open door into a corridor. A girl walks between us. Short and tubby, glasses. She runs her finger down my stomach, gives me a look, and breezes through. Bernie takes the piss just by spluttering.
Had to admire her chutzpah, and it was worth a try. If she'd been good looking, I'd have followed her. As it was, part of me wished I had, the way things turned out.