43. working clothes
I'm wearing Bernie's jacket all over town.
I've got it on in a room at the Taylor Institution, waiting for a lecturer to come in, when Martin Neubert appears instead. And he's juggling.
It was a fad at the time, and a number of students got quite good at it. Martin's keeping three coloured balls in the air while chatting to me about some french text I probably haven't read.
I never had a go at juggling. I never had a go at a lot of things. I didn't see the point of them for heir own sake. Rubik cube, skiing, wolf whistling. I never had a paper round, never learned to drive, and my only holiday job was at the mental hospital. I'm not an expert in anything except punctuation.
Meanwhile, in his sixties Martin Neubert started a course in persian and got into Stuart court masques. As you do. I smiled while he enthused about them at his mum's house near Bonn. He started learning turkish after that. Each to his own.
I wore the rest of the Song Contest outfit too. And it worked.
One day I'm walking down Broad Street with an empty holdall. I've just sold all my books to a secondhand bookshop across the road from Blackwell's. Exams were underway, so I didn't need to do any more reading. I had maybe forty paperbacks, including weird things like the thoughts of Chairman Mao in italian. Got only a fiver for the whole lot, but they were worth less than that to me.
I'm zipping up the holdall when I see someone striding across the road towards me. I don't know him but he's smiling. He recognised me by what I'm wearing.
You're in the Les Milkins Band, aren't you.
That's right.
How much do you charge?
Fifteen quid. (We hadn't put up our prices to match our sudden fame.)
Oh good. I'll be in touch.
Bernie had a similar experience, and Harry stuck the Milkins name on the back of his Renault. We turned ourselves into mobile adverts for Oxford's hottest student band.
Alright, ask how many others there were. But it was still something. Remember we started with no ambitions at all; now suddenly we're in demand by people who'd seen the Song Contest or read the review.
*
Oxford student magazines had a fixation with the rivers there. Named themselves Isis or Cherwell. One of them, Tributary, mentioned the Song Contest but called us the Les Milheus Band! Another mag, not named after flowing water, got it right and went further.
Intone was a student music mag. Banged out on manual typewriters and xeroxed, either as a punk look or because that's all they had. In those days before PCs, you had to know where to insert the hyphen at the end of a line. The Milkins Band were in Intone's first ever issue.
Someone called Tom Morrell watched the Song Contest. I couldn't help noticing he mistyped 'a an act', a pitfall of DIY publishing in those days - but he liked some of what he saw.
There's more to a an act, he wrote, than undiscovered potential. 'It doesn't matter so much about musical talent in show business. What you need is presentation, style, and the know-ledge that what you are doing is pre-cisely what people want.'
Then he said what we felt that night.
'The bands with self-confidence stole the show - and won it, of course.'
The Magdalen Clerks were 'suave', and 'less raw' than us. Yup, we noticed that too. But our performance 'was superb parody of rock cliche and rock gestures'.
Er, no. We scratched our heads at that. If anything, we were the opposite.
This was never a piss-take of rock 'n roll. OK, a daft song title for Rag Week reasons - but we played it that way because we meant it. We were a rock cliché, with off-the-peg rock gestures, perfectly happy to be a covers band.
Patrick made some of those gestures - and the review singled them out:
'Particularly memorable was the bandy-legged lead guitarist, dressed in an ill-fitting suit and tie, who looked all the time as if he was just about to be sick.'
Christ!
Pat's been chuckling about it ever since. He hasn't got bandy legs (he left me behind on training runs) - but it's true about his facial contortions. In some photos, he looks like he's yawning! But it doesn't matter what you look like when your single-note lead break hits the spot.
And it wasn't the last Milkins gig reviewed by Tom Morrell.
*
Talking of our donkey song, life threw up a coincidence you couldn't script.
The following year, 1978, I'm watching the World Cup Final with Blond Steve. It ended badly, with Argentina winning while their junta were torturing and disappearing thousands of people. But for us it was a good weekend.
We watched the match in the place Steve was renting while doing some teaching in his home town Bognor. His room was above a café in Littlehampton.
'The owner was called Gil and didn't like Germans (definite Brexiteer potential), and his daughter Shirl accused me of disloyalty when she heard I'd eaten in a different caff! I was an Oxford graduate working as a dishwasher in a hospital and sharing a bathroom with five other unfortunates.'
But it was just a holding operation and he went to teach english in Paris, where he's lived ever since.
The point of all this? The name of the caff was the Dinky Doo Diner!
When its lease ran out, the owners bought a similar place up the road in Littlehampton and renamed it. The new Dinky Doo closed down in 2019 but re-opened. Donkeys are durable creatures.
Dinky Doo means 'little and good' apparently. I didn't know that when I wrote the lyrics, but we'll take it.
*
Back in 1975, I'm walking along St Giles when I see someone hanging around outside the entrance to St John's College. He's got very long hair, long as mine, and he's sitting on a very big speaker. His legs can't touch the ground.
The speaker has the band's name on it. Good For Your Ears. I saw them at a couple of college discos that year, including the one where I met Angie D.
The whole band had long hair, but Francis Rossi long not hippy style. One of their numbers was Honky Tonk Women speeded up to sound like Quo. Easier to dance to. They wrote their own stuff too. I remember the chorus to a song called Penny in my Pocket:
Ain't got a penny in my pocket
But I want you to live with me
Seeing one of them sitting on a speaker, for no reason but why not, I thought it must feel good doing that.
You're in a rock band, which is generally considered a cool thing, and you're showing it off, but not in a way that gets anyone's back up. I liked his style.
Never crossed my mind I might do that one day. Now, two years later, I often stood alongside speakers in the street - but I didn't sit on any. Usually too busy hefting them up flights of stairs.
Not on my own. I remember a back-breaking 4x4 with Furnace stencilled on the rear. Bernie had a Simms Watts 200 watt amp with Cockney Rebel on it (he bought it from one of their roadies).
According to him, we switched to H & H equipment because 'it lit up in green and weighed less than ten tons'. Bernie rented his from Laughing Gear on the Plain, then when it moved to the Cowley Road. 'Harry and Patrick bought theirs - rich bloody students!'
A couple of weeks after the Song Contest, I'm helping to heave speakers upstairs again.
Never thought we'd ever be back at the Cape.