30. rag time band
End of April 1976 and I'm sitting in a room in Wadham College.
I'm having coffee with someone called Ivor, and he's given me a form to take away and fill in. A slim grungy guy with a loose-limbed attitude. If he wasn't one of the rare Oxford students smoking weed at that time, he should've been. I liked him from the start.
He was in a band himself, he said, though I got the feeling it wasn't a going concern. In fact I'm not sure they'd ever played live before. He wanted to - so he put together an entire show!
Something similar happened in the early days of organised sport. People who wanted to call themselves international footballers organised the first international matches. Charlie Alcock in England, Bob Gardner in Glasgow, Llew Kenrick in north Wales. John McAlery captained the first ever Ireland team. He wasn't much of a defender and they lost 13-0, but he got his name in the record books. Alex Hunter was even worse.
Ivor's band went by the name Piston Broke. Same level of seriousness as Far Call and Atrocious Les Milkins. Like us in the beginning, he was happy to appear in public just the once.
To do that, he organised an event involving twenty other acts. Rag Week was coming up, the perfect opportunity for a wannabe guitarist.
Ivor's brainchild was A Song For Oxford, the first ever Oxford University Song Contest. Maybe the only one ever staged. Can't remember where we first heard about it, but our ears pricked up.
Winning never occurred to us, and we didn't expect any gigs from it. We weren't putting ourselves in a shop window. It was just another chance to play live again. We'd run out of those. Lucky that Ivor wanted one too.
*
At Oxford, I was never one for joining in. Perfectly happy with that, it's just the way I was.
I never took part in anything during Rag Week. Not once in the three years I was there. I was never even aware it was on. Apart from sport, I didn't join any college clubs either. Nor did Blond Steve. And we hardly ever used the college beer cellar. In fact when I applied to take part in a college football weekend, I was turned down for being 'not a PA', well known as not a piss artist!
If you were, Oxford spoiled you for choice. A lot of atmospheric pubs.
Not the Nags Head so much, on the bridge by the canal outside Worcester College - though I was in there quite a lot with Steve for dinner and the jukebox. There were older places like the Lamb & Flag and Eagle & Child on opposite sides of St Giles. The Lamb & Flag is owned by St John's College, like so much else. When I had my first book of fiction published, I sat in CS Lewis's seat there. I grew up with the Narnia books, though his religious leanings turned the last one into a betrayal of children.
The Perch and the Trout were on the same stretch of the Thames, therefore not imaginatively named, but good for the views on summer evenings. I went to one of them with Angie, met a friend of hers who'd been in the merchant navy. Some great tales, including a frogman catching one of the Queen's turds! A story we all wanted to believe.
The cosiest pubs were the Turf and the Bear, both medieval and tiny, though I always got a seat, even when I went back over the years. The Bear was the oldest and smallest, in Blue Boar Street, a great name, near Christchurch.
It had a big collection of ties in glass cases, the best place for a tie. They really are ludicrous things to wear, suffocating you while flapping across your belly (one look at Boris Johnson should be enough). I haven't owned one since school. The last time I went to Wembley, I was invited to dinner before the match. Exchanged autographs with Claudio Sulser but had to borrow my kid's tie. Took it off at half-time, but two people told me to put it on again! Like being back at boarding shool, where we wore ties even though no-one ever saw them except us. Ridiculous things. I left Wembley before the post-match drinks.
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My last Rag Week, this one in 1977, had a few things I might've fancied. A street party in Broad Street, a sponsored 24-hour bop. But I wouldn't have bothered looking at the schedule even if I'd known where to find it. That was me.
Anyway, some of the other events were bollocks. A folk evening. A concert by John McLaughlin, who played a fusion of every kind of music I hate (his Mahavishnu Orchestra, for fucksake). The Rag Week cliché of a three-legged pub crawl, strictly for PAs.
Don't even know how I found out about the song contest.
*
The entry form was a hand-typed photocopy in capital letters. This being Rag Week, it had its touches of low humour.
The second space you had to fill in: HAVE YOU GOT ONE? (A SONG, I MEAN!)'. Oh dear. My reply in black biro: 'YES (AND A SONG TOO)'. Oh dear oh dear.
'BRIEFLY DESCRIBE THE STYLE'.
Me: 'ROCK 'N ROLL (DANCE)'. Then I added 'no style'. Oh dear oh - you get the picture.
For the name of the college, I wrote 'WORCESTER + PEMBROKE', then 'call us what you will'. God save us from literary flourishes. Bernie wasn't at any college, of course, so we were an illegal entry. Call him our ringer.
The form asked how many members in the band, what instruments we'd be using, and how many microphones we'd need. One for me, three for the drums because Bill was more important.
I was still persisting with writing our name BANNED BAND. I could argue it was in keeping with the spirit of the contest, but we should've ditched it at birth. 'The name should be written exactly as above'. Not that I was pompous or anything.
The last question: would we be able to sell tickets to 'friends and relations, prior to the performance' - at 50p each.
My answer's interesting. 'POSSIBLY. BUT, AT 50p NOT MANY. At 20p or 30p, MORE LIKELY.
This gives you an idea, again, how cheap things were at the time. But I was being too cautious. Tickets did cost 50p, maybe more, and they sold out.
Right near the top of the form, you're asked the name of your song. I wrote it out in capitals, then added 'yes, you read it right first time'.
Our entry had the silliest title in the whole show. The Milkins Band had to write something of their own at last, but this was Rag Week and we called ourselves Atrocious, so don't expect anything deadly serious.