46. turning it up to eleven
Should feel odd.
Walking around in a black t-shirt under a jacket too small for me, among all these men in penguin suits and women like birds of paradise.
But I'm used to it by now. I've been parading in this gear for weeks.
Our three guitarists are in their stage suits, so they blend in more. Same with Bill, who kept his bow tie for the performance.
Actually I can't remember much about the Pembroke Ball except the gig itself.
One of Patrick's flatmates, the one who thought we were stars of tomorrow at the Song Contest, he was there with his girlfriend, Oxford's best-looking couple and still married in 2024.
Apart from that, the only thing in the mind's eye is a quick look in the college dining hall, where the main bands played.
We weren't one of those. In the advert on Daily Information, we're on the third row down, alongside a disco by Happy Jack and below a steel band! On the poster for the event, they had us in sixth place, below a folk group (but above the steel band) - and mispelled our name. They paid us no more than our basic £15, which says it all.
So they put us in the junior common room - which was exactly right. I'm not sure we'd have filled the main hall, and we shared the JCR with the duo of the evening.
Top of the bill, and the people I caught a glimpse of, were the Albion Dance Band.
Daily Info called them 'a Fairport Convention / Steeleye Span Conglomerate' - so you can imagine how much I liked them. When I looked in, their frontman was trying to teach a couple of people how to dance to renaissance music or some such. He had a beard and medieval costume, so I didn't stay long.
I remember thinking how empty the hall was and we couldn't have done any worse. But they were on for a while - including a fifteen-minute break, two and a half hours - so maybe the audience grew at times.
Pembroke College has a chapel quad, where I think they put the marquee, over the grass, where people went for dinner. In that quad, the usual suspects of folk group, jazz trio, and steel band, plus a magic show. I don't remember any of these, or the reggae act on the poster.
In the JCR, between the two bands, the disco ran from nine till three in the morning, with the bar open before that. I think we arrived pretty early, even though we weren't due to play till one o'clock. Just enjoying the event.
It may not have been a full commemoration event, but the poster and printed programme were good enough for one.
They were both black and white, with a collage of images cut out of photos, what looked like hundreds of them. Laurel and Hardy in between a pair of hares and Britannia holding an electric guitar, a clarinet player behind them, a jazz band in suits at the bottom.
Normally, when you throw images at something, you haven't thought of a single idea to define the event, but the poster worked. Bees and moths flew among the words, which came from a cheap typewriter, to give the lettering a punk look. I kept the whole thing and framed it, then lost it. Don't think I did my usual stupid thing of cutting out a scrap of the poster to fit it in one of the albums. It just disappeared in a move.
After that quick look at the Albion Band, we went back to the JCR to set up our gear. The act before us did the same, but they had only two instruments and only one of those needed an amp, so they didn't take long. At ten o'clock, we're rubbing shoulders with John Otway and Wild Willy Barrett. Be very afraid.
*
John Otway is one of the great eccentrics in british rock music. His act is probably studied lunacy rather than the real thing, but he showed off even more than I did, so I was a fan.
He's played a colossal number of gigs, in inverse proportion to his commercial success. In 2002, what did he want for his 50th birthday? A second hit, he said. He got that at the end of the year, when Bunsen Burner was pushed up the charts by an internet campaign. His response was typical: very proud of having the letter S on the right side of the word 'hit'! You couldn't help liking him.
He lost his hair over the years, but at Pembroke College he had a floppy mop of it, jet black to match his trousers, with a white shirt, the same outfit he's always worn, including on The Old Grey Whistle Test, when he tried to jump over a speaker stack and crushed his nuts! Bunsen Burner got him on Top of the Pops, but Whistle Test was better: he mattered more then.
His previous hit, Really Free from here in 1977, was typically tongue-in-cheek and bonkers:
Your ma and pa just wanna kick me
I say 'Cor baby, that's really free!'
With a chorus to match:
Really free, really free, really really free
Kick me!
To me, he'd already had a great second song, the B side, the perfectly normally titled Beware of the Flowers (cos I'm sure they're going to get you yeh). Note how he spells 'yeh', same as me ('yeah' leads to the wrong pronunciation, so theah).
Thanks to another fan campaign in a BBC poll, the lyrics to Beware of the Flowers were voted the seventh best of all time, ahead of anything by Dylan! They're certainly better than the usual yawns above it: Imagine, Bohemian fucking Rhapsody, two by Robbie Williams.
I saw you in the garden, baby
You looked so debonaaaaaaaire
Beware of the flowers
Cos I'm sure they're going to get you yehhhhhhhhh
Priceless.
I didn't talk to John Otway at Pembroke. Nowadays I'd go over, but I wasn't quite like that then. I did have a word with Wild Willy Barrett, though. There was no escaping him.
The pair of them were at school together, when Otway drank a bottle of ink for a dare and Barrett used to 'beat the crap out of him'. No surprise in that, from their onstage personas.
Wild Willy had very long straight hair and a beard and a leather waistcoat over bare muscles. When he came over and muttered something at me, I honestly couldn't understand a word. Maybe he was threatening to deck me for being too shit to share a stage with him. He scowled when I asked him to repeat what he'd said.
Turns out he's asking if it's alright to do their sound check. Asking me!
Maybe we were about to do ours before them. Patrick all these years later: 'What an honour!'
We came back to the JCR to watch them play for a bit. Their act consisted of Otway half talking half shouting in a manic way (man after my own heart) while strumming an acoustic guitar you couldn't hear. The only sound of music came from power chords played on Wild Willy's fuzz guitar. There's a limit to what you can do with that, but in a small space like the JCR it worked well and they filled the room. That meant only seventy people or so, but enough for an atmosphere.
Decades later, Otway 'vaguely' remembers that gig. They were hired to play at Pembroke because they 'had a bit of a student following' from their residency at a pub on St Clement's, not far from ours! 'The Beatles had the Star Club in Hamburg, we had the Oranges and Lemons in Oxford.'
In April 2022, John Otway played his 5,000th gig. Five fucking thousand! A hundred a year for fifty years. Don't say he should've got a life. That is a life.
The concert was in Shepherd's Bush, where I lived for 24 of those years - but with the coronavirus still round, I wasn't tempted. Anyway I preferred to remember him when he was young and Wild Willy asked my permission to do a sound check.
I did email Otway to congratulate him on the landmark occasion. Said I'd spent all these years telling people he'd been my backing band! His reply: 'Always good to hear from the headline acts!'
They were on stage for an hour at Pembroke, finishing quite early at 11.30. We didn't follow them for nearly two hours. When we did, we played maybe our most confident gig. It didn't attract the same numbers as Otway and Barrett, but there were reasons for that.
*
By the time we came on, saturday night had turned into Sunday 29th May 1977 - and the Hollywood Killers were playing in the dining hall
They were the main rock band of the evening, brought out albums and so on. Halfway through our set, the Killers were followed by Whiskers, not the first or last time they shared an event with us.
So there was always an attraction in the other room, which cut our audience. But we still did alright.
At first, people probably thought the organisers had hired an out-and-out tribute band. Our first ten numbers were Rolling Stones tracks! But that's fine if you want to dance, so the place was full - except when it was almost completely empty!
I didn't understand that. People had been dancing to us and now they'd all decided to leave? I asked someone who was still there. Are we suddenly shit or something?
No no, he said. It's just that you're so loud. Everyone's dancing on the stairs!
While the band played on, I crossed the room to the door in the left-hand corner, and sure enough there's couples in suits and dresses dancing on the landing and down the steps. They actually cheered when they saw me!
It's a story to tell, but you want them back in the room really. So you need to turn the volume down a notch.
Bernie. Bern.
What?
Turn it up! We're not loud enough.
This was rock 'n roll, for fucksake.You don't turn the level down from eleven. People eventually came back in and adjusted their ears. I nearly changed mine permanently
During one song, Bill looks up and he can't see me. He can hear me, but I'm nowhere in sight.
I was lying on my back with my head inside his bass drum! I thought if I sang into the mike down there, the feedback might burst an eardrum or something! I didn't take drugs and we'd hardly had a drink, but I was high from being on stage. Pete Townshend said when he performed he was so demented he once kicked a policeman in the balls. Even if that's not true, I knew how he felt.
A fun moment that didn't damage my ears. Townshend's were wrecked by Keith Moon hiding dynamite in his drumkit!
When the room filled up again, we were playing right in people's faces, the way I liked it. Out of the crowd steps a young black lad, maybe nineteen or so. Comes up right next to me and says he wants to jam with us.
In the early days, I'd have told him where to go, protecting my fragile place in the band. But I'd been irreplaceable for a long time, so I said sure, go for it. But, um, you haven't got an instrument...
That's alright, he goes. I just want to move with you guys.
So he does. The two us dance together for a couple of numbers, in rather different ways.
We're so loud as a band he's having to shout in my ear. You're great, he says. You should play at the Corn Dolly. But I guess you're better than that, yeh?
Fucking hell, praise indeed. I'd watched rock groups in the Corn Dolly with Bernie. Oxford's main live-music pub. I doubt we'd have gone down well there (people would've listened, not danced), but it was quite a compliment for someone like us. The young black guy melted back into the audience and I didn't see him again, but I never forgot dancing with him. He was in our band for a while.
*
I call this our most confident gig. Not the best, because not many people saw us. But the photos show how comfortable we felt.
The same guy who'd taken the ones at the Song Contest, Patrick's schoolfriend Bo who hired us for University College, he took these too, and a lot of them. It was so dark he had to use a flash, which blasts out all the mood. When I look at them, I have to imagine the blackness, with just a few low lights. Our monochrome gear matched it perfectly.
And we put on the punk attitude we had only on stage. The photographer took shots of the whole band but also stuck his camera in our individual faces, and every one of us scowled back at him, or frowned, or looked disdainful.
Bernie smoulders, eyes framed by his long hair. Harry's got a fuck-you fag in the corner of his mouth. Patrick looks mean and suspicious, I'm staring back through my shades like a lizard, the flash bleaching my face. It was all for show, but fun theatre.
The camera didn't catch Bill's eye, but his image fits. While the rest of the band are in black white and grey, he's wearing jeans with a belt - and he's stripped to the waist with a bow tie round his neck! I couldn't have got away with that, but he had the physique.
He used his muscles on the drum solo on Jailhouse Rock, one of the few non-Stones songs that night. We finished with the usual Chuck Berries, got called back for an encore, and even tried a song by Hot Chocolate.
Not our usual fare, but as a teenager I quite liked the strings on Love is Life, and we all danced to Sexy Thing. Tonight we premiered You could've been a lady because it opens with a driving bass riff, and the way the words and guitar answer each other is quite punky. It had potential, but we didn't get it quite right and I sang even more badly than usual, so it appeared just this once -
- until years later, when I resurrected the tune and changed the words to something about a dog. Well, we'd done a donkey. I called it Rover from Dover, one of many things I wish I didn't have to admit.
Even during the original version at Pembroke, we felt at ease. There's one particular photo where we all look coolly bored. Sometimes a shot like that means the band's actually unhappy, not connecting with the audience because the song's going badly, like the one at Ironbridge.
But this was the real thing. i.e. completely fake - pretending to be world weary because we thought it was a good look.
As usual, I'm glad there was no sound recording! But I think we looked the part. And the photos show what I believed at the time: all the way through that gig, we felt in complete command.
*
It had an irritating postscript, but even that showed how united we'd become.
Another band turned up - except they weren't even that. Just a group of guys from Pembroke, mates with the organisers. They didn't even have their own gear - which led to a standoff we hadn't been warned about.
They expected to use ours.
I have a feeling someone asked Bill if that would be OK, and he said yeh sure why not. Except he either forgot to tell us or assumed we'd be alright with it.
I wasn't keen, Bernie even less so - but what surprised us was Pat Slade's vehemence.
If you want to form a band, he informed them, you've got to have your own equipment.
This set me off, Bernie too, because Patrick was forever borrowing someone else's stuff before finally buying his own. What a hoot.
When we turned them down, things got a bit heated. But they did get to play in the JCR - because Otway and Barrett lent them their amp and speaker!
One of the organisers pointed this out afterwards. I said it was alright for them because they were a bigger act than us.
They haven't had an album out yet, he goes. Not true: they'd released one the previous year. Anyway, that's beside the point. They were being paid a lot more than us, so they could afford to take a risk with their equipment. The organisers lobbed us fifteen quid and expected that to include lending our gear to people we didn't know. Fucking liberty.
Looking back, we were put on the spot - and you might say we picked the wrong option. We embarrassed Bill in front of people from his own college. Yes he should've checked with us first, but he was young and didn't see the harm. I mean, what are the chances of damaging an amp and speaker just by using them?
Well, it does happen. They break when you drop them. And who would've paid for the repair? Lessons for all of us.
We watched this pick-up band play a few verses, then left. We were probably half their entire audience.
*
If that had been our last gig, we'd have gone out on a high. An Oxford Ball, by a band that never expected to play more than once.
But there were others coming up, and they promised to be huge. And not just because they both happened on the same night.