49. in the rock garden
Never mind who writes our scripts. Which of the Fates set this up?
When the idea of a deliberately bad band came to me, I imagined a single concert, in the music room at Worcester College. And that's where our final gig was staged. On the grass in front of that music room. Worcester's famous lakeside gardens.
The college had a tradition of staging outdoor events in the summer term. Usually plays or musicals. One year while I was there, they put on a performance of that student staple Oh, what a lovely war!, with a cast of christ knows how many and rehearsals that seemed to take a month. I think there was a Midsummer Night's Dream too. Another cliché, but at least the surroundings were right. Trees and bushy flowerbeds round that extensive lawn.
This year, 1977, Worcester decided on an outdoor music event. Kismet or what.
*
A poster was drawn up. A small understated thing but colourful and easy to read. Yellow background, yellow letters hand-written and outlined in black. I've still got it in a frame.
Proceedings started at 8.00 and didn't finish till two in the morning. Six hours of music for only 90p - tailor-made for us.
There were four bands on the poster - and we were the fourth. So the organisers thought we were only fourth best? OK - but since we were from Worcester you'd think they'd have given us a higher billing.
Maybe we were last because that was the running order. Except it wasn't. Alternatively, they placed us fourth because they thought the other bands had more of a following, though I don't know how true that was.
Top of the list: something called Dee Turgent and his Silly Suds. Apparently a kind of local supergroup, put together from members of well-known bands - though I doubt anyone knew that, so what following could they have had? But they were supposed to be good, so fair enough if they were the main attraction.
Underneath them, our old pals Nightshift and Whiskers, who didn't play in the order on the poster. Better musicians than us, but we'd finished higher than them in the song competition, and they didn't make you dance much, so we thought we might do alright...
Because the Fates had seen to that.
They arranged for the Borocourt gig to take place on the same day. So I told the organisers at Worcester that we wouldn't back in Oxford till very late. Maybe that's the reason they put us on at the end...
...though I'm now about to flatter us. They must've known we were a dance band, and you want to put those on at the end. I could even stretch it by thinking (how's this for arrogance) they put on the entire show because of us! Because we were at the same college.
That's a conceit too far - but it turned out to be the right move. For them, for us, and the audience.
*
One band who weren't on the poster: American Express. They simply hadn't enthused anyone at the Song Contest.
Their frontman was called Bill Faber. Bernie heard that his dad bankrolled them for two years to try and make it in the music business. They didn't. But they achieved something unique - and beat us to it.
Apparently we were in line to be the first rock band to play at the Oxford Union. But Bill Faber's dad was in with the powers-that-be, so American Express got the gig instead. At the time, the president of the Union was that well-known rock 'n roller Benazir Bhutto. Thirty years later, she was assassinated. Nothing to do with us.
I never went to the Oxford Union. I hated debates at school even though I won the main prize - and I didn't own a suit, let alone a fucking bow tie. Or a fully developed pomposity gene. Graham Chapman got it right by taking part in one of their debates dressed as a carrot.
In some of those coincidences you get in life, Bill Faber's mate was the brother of the girl who became Bernie's wife. Faber went off to run a language school in Italy. Many years later, Bernie's son studied there. Can't imagine they discussed live music at the Oxford Union or an old concorso di canzoni.
*
The yellow poster. No idea where I got it from, because I don't remember seeing it on any noticeboards. And the event wasn't on Daily Information. Whenever we appeared on that, I cut it out and kept it for the archives.
So the whole thing was 'hardly advertised'.
Tom Morrell wrote that. He'd reviewed the Song Contest, now he was here again tonight. Despite the soft sell, he reckoned 'several hundred rockers' turned up. I agree with that. More people than in the Newman Rooms. Six hundred or so, maybe more. So we played in front of our smallest and biggest crowds on the same day!
The six hundred were all there by the time we arrived. So the scene was set.
And it was fucking wonderful.
All these hundreds of people under soft yellow lights hanging from the trees, with a spotlight on the temporary stage. Pastoral and bacchanalian, and the crowd looked bigger because it was all in one place, covering the lawn, surrounded by trees and buildings, with a few people drifting back from the darkness around the lake.
Jesus, I thought. If you can't perform here, where can you?
We stood to the right of the main crowd, looking towards the stage, with the stone archway to the lake round to the right. At our backs, the medieval buildings where Harry lived during first year and we had tutorials with Keith Gore.
Across the lawn and behind the stage, in among trees, the squash courts I used with Martin Neubert in the small hours. And the music room I'd thought of playing in - so things had come full circle.
I never saw the bar, but it had been open since eight and people were ready to rock.
Patience, everyone. It's not our turn yet.
*
We arrived too late to see Whiskers perform. So Pat Slade couldn't play his trombone with them. Tom Morrell wasn't the first to notice that 'Sarah Nagourney on vocals showed tremendous talent.'
By the time we got there, the first rock band were on stage - and about to be damned with faint praise.
'Nightshift took the stage competently, if not perhaps by storm. Often a little difficult to dance to...Nightshift began to wear a little thin'.
Ouch. You could see what he meant - but that was too hard on them. At least they wrote their own songs. And they were 'nevertheless far preferable to the appaling [sic] drunken mess which filled the gap.'
That was Dee Turgent and the Suds. Tom Morrell decided they were beneath naming! Maybe they'd been there a long time and found the bar. Just as well they didn't close the show.
I don't remember them being pissed, and anyway a lot of the audience were in the same state. Actually the band sounded alright to me. The only one I ever saw live who played Hi ho silver lining, a party song you couldn't escape in those days. Jeff Beck was someone else who died while I was writing this. Rated one of the top rock guitarists, but best known for this bit of fluff (certainly not for the Johnny Depp collaboration album 55 years later. Their version of Venus in Furs is a particular shocker).
*
I'm enjoying the hell out of this.
We all are. It's like an outdoor version of the Song Contest, only more - I don't know - sumptuous. What a setting.
The lights were threaded between branches twenty feet up. Look higher and you could see they lit the tops of the mature trees the college is known for. People moving in and out of shadows, but most of them in a big crowd in front of the stage.
I'm seeing this in full caravaggio colour, because I haven't put the shades on yet. I was eager to go onstage but not in a hurry. This was our last gig and you want to savour it, including the prelims.
Halfway through Dee Turgent's set, I turned to my left.
Ber-nard.
Hello.
I think we might be alright here.
Why?
Because no bastard's dancing...
Aye, he said. I noticed that.
*
At Woodstock in 1969, Creedence Clearwater Revival had to go on after the Grateful Dead.
My views on the two bands are fully aired in Chapter 11. And John Fogerty agreed with me, so I'm right.
With the other members of Creedence, he'd been to see the Dead live, if you can call them that. And he couldn't believe how shit they were. So stoned they couldn't play in tune, in front of crowds who didn't notice because they were just as far gone. This, thought Fogerty, is the opposite of how we're gonna be.
At Woodstock, the Grateful Dead took LSD before going on. Then they blew up their amps, so they had to suspend their act for an hour. One of their tracks lasted that length of time. Then the amplifiers fried again. By the time Creedence got on stage, it was early morning and most of the crowd had passed out with drugs and boredom.
Looking down, John Fogerty saw a pile of naked bodies and compared the scene to Dante's Inferno (told you it was the best of a bad bunch). 'The Grateful Dead put half a million people to sleep and I had to go out and try to wake them up again.'
After performing in front of a Dead audience, Fogerty refused to let Creedence's set appear on the album. Another of his dumb moves - and a shame, because they sound just fine. Their opener, Born on the Bayou, is heavy and sleazy and really cooks the darkness. Cosmo's confident as fuck on the drums, and Fogerty's voice is Fogerty's voice.
After a while, he peered out into the night and asked if anyone was actually alive out there. A lone figure flicked his cigarette lighter. We're with ya, John!
'For the rest of my big Woodstock concert, I played for that guy.'
In a rather different setting, earlier this evening, we'd done exactly the same. Now, a bit like Creedence, we went on after bands who hadn't got people moving.
Worcester College Gardens 1977 wasn't Woodstock 1969. But it was our Woodstock.
Time to shake the dead.
*
Don't know about Nightshift wearing thin, but Dee Turgent certainly did. Before the end of their set, people were applauding politely and the atmosphere was a bit restive. Everything was working in our favour.
If we'd played earlier on, to a half-empty space, we'd have gone down with a thud. But now we felt like this was our gig and no-one else's. Sounds boastful, but I'm just saying we were lucky with the timing. None of the bands before us made people dance - so they turned into ideal support acts!
By the time we went up, the clock had ticked over into Sunday 5 June 1977.
I put the sunglasses on and led the way onstage, from the right-hand side as the audience looked at it. There was a short flight of steps, maybe the same as the ones at the Song Contest. I'm halfway up when the main organiser comes down. He's just been introducing us to the crowd.
For christsake, Cris. Wake this lot up!
He was in the year below us - John something, I think - and he was friendly but feisty, ideal for organising an event like this. I said we'd do our best.
No! Get them going. I've heard you're great!
My response, mustering all the inherent wit of an Oxford student: Fuck off! I was so shocked, nothing else came to mind.
Jesus. Who would say that about us? He obviously hadn't seen us play, so whose word did he take before hiring us? Great? Fucking hell. I stepped on that stage in a bit of a daze.
*
The first thing that hit me up there was the light. I asked people to switch it off!
Well the spotlight was smack in my eyes. I'm being interrogated here. Why have you been impersonating a singer? Get that out of my face.
I hadn't noticed the light at the Song Contest, but maybe that one came from higher up. Here, even with shades on, I was blinded. My first words into the mike were something like 'Can someone turn that light off?' - which would've meant people couldn't see me at all. Elton John once said something similar about the sun!
I must've looked a berk when I ducked under the beam! But I got used to it before we started playing. You find a way of looking round it.
Same set-up as before. Bernie to my right, the guitarists on the left, Harry between me and Pat. Trees behind us, the old buildings beyond the crowd in front.
And they were ready for us. Tom Morrell again:
'I guess we were all waiting for the Atrocious Les Milkins Band to show'.
Say what?!
That phrase kept Bernie Cook in smiles for ever. He'd let out a long drawn out 'Haaaa'. People had come to see us.
We didn't know anyone thought that till we read Morrell's review - but I have to say I wasn't too surprised. John the organiser had heard we were good, we'd gone down well at the Song Contest and Pembroke - and looking down at those hundreds of upturned faces, I swear I detected some expectation there. In the dark of the Newman Rooms, I hadn't seen any faces at all.
Here we go, then. Last gig of our lives. We start it with Carol as usual.
Not my favourite, as I say. A very basic intro by Chuck Berry standards (we used it at the start of the donkey masterpiece), and I had to try and hit a note on the first word. But the intro's short, so you're into the dance beat very quickly. And jesus what an effect it had.
*
Soon as Pat takes us into the twelve-bar, this great amorphous mass of people begins to break up at the edges (I remember looking down at the left-hand side mainly). Then the middle starts to crumble - as everybody begins to dance. Everybody. Half-lit like a fun circle of hell. And I know what a night this is going to be.
*
At the end of the first track, we got the level of applause we expected. Hundreds of hands clapping in the air under the lights. Before it died down, we moved into Around and Around, then Not Fade Away. Not an exciting start if you ask me, but each of those tracks stops and starts, which can be good for dancing - and this crowd had been starved of that, so we played our weakest numbers while people were still ready to move to anything. Then we hit them with Sympathy for the Devil.
That track was one of the reasons Tom Morrell thought 'Most of the repertoire seemed to be classic Stones numbers.' Bloody cheek. Only ten out of fifteen, including the first seven! Down from the totals at Pembroke! Four of the ten were covers, but even so.
After all the anticipation, if Morrell was disappointed we sounded like a tribute band to an era that was on its way out, he didn't say so. 'Les Milkins brought the occasion back to life with vivacity'.
And though we only looked like punks, that was enough to persuade someone who wrote a review in the Worcester College mag. It was called Wuggins, the shorthand name for the college, which I thought smacked of public schools as well as sounding dead wet.
Some reviewers use their allotted space well, like Tom Morrell. Relevant details and tight prose. Others are like the one in this college mag:
'Wuggins' very own punks, the Atrocious Les Milkins Banned Band (sic)(sick)(ad nauseam)'.
Fucking hell, look what I started.
The sledgehammer humour didn't end there. 'Worcester members of the band, Harry Hatfield, Chris Freddi and Pat Slade are to be interviewed on the Old Grey Whistle Test as a direct response to their hit single, 'Dinkey Donkey Doo', which won the Song for Europe contest in 1923.'
He could've used that number of words to write something about the actual fucking event. Note the reference to the Eurovision Song Contest: the reviewer didn't know it's what led to the name of the track.
Among all this padding, one nugget: 'They rounded off the night with some nasty rock 'n roll that got the barbed-wire-enclosed audience jumping up and down on their heads.'
There was no barbed wire, but Tom Morrell agreed about the dancing: despite all the Stones tracks, 'the set was pretty varied [?!], and the bopping inspired by the band was an adequate testimony to their success.'
That's the point. The whole reason for our existence.
We never wanted to be American Express or Nightshift or Whiskers, writing their own stuff in the hope of 'making it'. We just enjoyed playing and singing some of our favourite tracks - and everyone does that. The first few Stones albums were mainly other people's songs, Creedence and the Clash were great covers bands, Bryan Ferry brought out two LPs of old standards, Lennon's needy Rock 'n' Roll - it's a long list.
Above all, we liked making people dance. There aren't many better feelings. If a stand-up comedian uses someone else's jokes to get a laugh, the laugh still sounds good.
And within our closed student world, we got what we wanted a lot of the time, especially on this night of nights. So we played other bands' songs. So how many people have moments like this? We went down a fucking storm.
*
Including two as an encore, we played a total of fifteen numbers. At say four minutes each, including the gaps, that's only an hour. But we were up there a lot longer than that. We stretched our material out.
We didn't have to do that with some of the Stones tracks. Sympathy for the Devil or Can't you hear me knocking? (why was that still in?) or Midnight Rambler. But I kept an eye on the crowd, and if they were dancing hard I'd get the guys to add extra verses. And the audience were always up for it.
I'd already written a third stanza for Honky Tonk Women. There's a live version in which Jagger sings about sauntering naked through Paris. I changed the location to somewhere closer.
I'm strolling down the boulevards of Oxford
As blasé as the day that I will die
The tutors, they're so charming here in Oxford
But they just can't tutor you off my mind
Well it got cheers at the time. I monitored those too, mainly looking towards the right-hand bloc of the crowd. After a second lead break in Honky Tonk Women, I urged a fourth verse, a repeat of the first, and Patrick was happy to oblige. He could see it was working.
That year was the queen's silver jubilee. We'd never have believed she'd be celebrating one in 2022. Until then, most of us hadn't lived under another monarch. On stage, I said 1977 was a special occasion. The last gig by the Les Milkins Band, ho ho. But we'd heard there was something else going on, so here's a song for that. And we went into Little Queenie.
We'd refined that track by now. There's a famous Stones live album called Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out! Grown-up title or what. They slow down every track and play them boogie fashion, with plenty of piano. Feels like they were doing a lot of puff, and it doesn't work all that well - even though NME rated it the 7th best live album of all time!
Little Queenie's the only track that really suits that style. It starts off in such a leisurely fashion you can hear Jagger shouting 'Slow fucker!' Too quick for us. We dropped the pace even lower, with Harry playing the opening lick on his own for a minute or so, before Bill starts using the high hat then Bernie comes in on the bass. And there are spaces for Pat's sexy guitar. Apart from me on the chorus, it was an ideal dance number. Again, we played it virtually twice over to give people more of a good thing.
And Six Days on the Road, premiered earlier that evening. went down well. The first non-Stones number in the set!
*
At one point, close to the edge of the stage, I see faces I recognise. Two or three guys I played football with in the Second XI. We'd had a good season, but now they're staring up at me, eyes widening when I give them a leer.
I don't know about impressed, but they're obviously thinking christ there's someone we know, and he's up on a stage - and you could see they enjoyed that.
But maybe they also thought that as a singer I was a good midfielder. If so, they weren't the only ones.
In his review, Tom Morrell not only referred to Sarah Nagourney's 'tremendous talent' but didn't slag off Nightshift completely: 'again the lead vocalist was a man of some style.'
He didn't say anything about me!
Someone who did was a girl Blond Steve knew. He wasn't there himself as always, but he asked her how it went. What were Les Milkins like?
Very good, she said. A lot of dancing.
And the lead singer?
Hm. Plenty of front. But not much behind it.
So the 'modest PA' (below) meant people could hear me!
I agreed with her completely. I was a frontman, not a singer. I had front and I was a man.
And if I wasn't mentioned in dispatches by reviewers or spectators, all the better. It meant they were watching a band, not my back-up musicians.
There was never a moment in any of our gigs when I felt like a rockstar, even a very minor one. I couldn't sing well enough and had nothing new to say. Anyway people don't dance to a voice.
They do need one, though - because no-one's going to bop to an evening of instrumentals. So I made a difference.
If you can't sing, don't just stand there and mutter into a mike. My job included occasional patter between numbers, dancing when appropriate - and reacting.
You'd move to what the others were playing and the words you were reciting. If the audience danced, you danced harder, then they'd see you and do the same. You really do feed off each other. Like it says in our University College gig, the crowd are in the band too, no bollocks.
'Working' a song, as Uncle Bob put it.
And I was the only one doing that.
The rest of us were a static bunch. You couldn't imagine Pat or Bernie running across the stage, whereas there's a photo of me doing exactly that. But that was fine by me; it meant I did something they didn't, which added to my usefulness. Meanwhile they looked good just playing their instruments.
Offstage, I was the only one who danced much at parties. Bernie never at all, the others only if they were dragged into it - though Harry gave us a demonstration of the moves in Saturday Night Fever, which he claimed were John Travolta miming drying himself with a towel! Have a look next time: you'll never see it the same way again.
If you jump around on stage, you might get the audience to do the same. If they really aren't up for it, you probably look a prick. But you do it anyway. It's required - and you can't help it.
Because I couldn't sing, I always needed a mike stand. It's a useful prop: you can move it around to match the attitude in a song, it looks a confident thing to do. And without it, microphone in hand, I'd have felt exposed. It would mean people paying more attention to me - and that was never what this was about.
On nights like these, it was the group that succeeded, not individuals. Our memories are warmed by having done it together.
*
Here at Worcester Gardens, Sympathy for the Devil was fun to play, with Bernie's bass-guitar bongos and me shaking the tobacco tin. I saw people reacting to both. I enjoyed singing all the verses, which suited that semi-darkness. And it's got a dance rhythm, so people moved to it.
Same with Midnight Rambler. I still thought we shouldn't have covered it, but it bounces along, the audience were up for it, and the creepy sound and lyrics fitted the setting like Sympathy. The first lines I ever sang were going down better tonight!
We were so 'uniquely relaxed' (Bernie's phrase) that nothing could go wrong. Even when it did.
The only track anyone knew us by was the donkey ditty from the Song Contest. We risked not playing it in the main body of the set - because we knew there'd be an encore. When we pretended to walk off, the applause brought us back.
On that song, every time the chorus stopped dead, Harry came in with his Status Quo riff. Tonight, halfway through, there's a problem with feedback. Maybe that's what happens with a 'modest' PA.
I remember it coming from the amplifier behind me to the left, between me and Harry. When it goes on for a bit, he takes charge and starts fiddling with knobs. He's still concentrating on that, roll-up in the corner of his mouth, when the chorus stops again. Seconds tick by in silence. Harry turns round and realises he's not doing his day job.
If this had happened at our first gig, we might've been embarrassed, though I doubt it. But here it became part of the act. I was already grinning when Patrick pointed his finger theatrically across stage from the far left.
You!, he shouts.
Oh, says Harry calmly. Me.
And he goes into his riff. Audience whistles and laughs, then starts dancing again.
Tom Morrell's piece ends on a slightly pompous and sniffy note. 'The only complaint one might voice would be to moan at the mix which was often insensitive.'
Oh, might one? Actually one didn't notice. Nor did most of the multitude who danced the early hours away. But I'm sounding ruder than I mean to be. It was a very well written review.
*
The encore turned into a double. Like several other tracks, I got Pat to expand Johnny B Goode.
For the last chorus, the band dropped the volume and I sang quietly, then back to an extra verse at normal volume, followed by another chorus. Yet again, I'm gauging the audience and deciding they don't want the night to end any more than we do. So when Patrick went into the ending, I waited for the first handclaps and cheering, then made circular motions with my fist - and we carried on for two more verses.
The first song I learned was the last one we played. And the crowd reaction after the last note: oh yes.
Unlike the Song Contest, we stood and waved and Bernie wasn't going to drag me off. A review from another gig of ours: 'Les stole the show at Worcester Gardens.' Damn right. Stuck it in our swag bag and carried it home for ever.
*
And then, very suddenly, it was over. We didn't wave for long.
The moment we trooped off, everyone left. Immediately - before their carriages turned back into pumpkins. I watched them stream away to our right, in the direction of the archway leading to a tunnel and out onto the main quad. They fled even faster than the Song Contest crowd. Comes with going on last at a student event.
So we never had a moment with anyone, not many 'nice one, guys'. Can't remember if we did anything by ourselves - but it was two in the morning, so I suspect we just went our separate ways, though I might've ended up at Bernie's again.
A downbeat end, then. But it took nothing away from the biggest night we ever had as a band. We'd come a long way in eight months.
*
Shame, then, that's there's no record of it. Except this.
As I say, people simply didn't take so many photos then. A lot of us didn't own a camera; even instamatics were a bit of a size; and people just weren't in the habit of recording every event in their lives. You didn't carry a camera to a student gig, let alone a cassette recorder.
No shots of the Song Contest either, far as I know, except the ones by Patrick's schoolmate. No videos at events like these.
That's the main reason for this website, really. To write everything down before it fades from the memory.
Throughout this memoir, maybe you've wondered how I remember so many details. Well, you do as you get older. You forget what you did yesterday but remember a lot that happened in the distant past. Anyway my memory's always been good. It's what got me into college.
So I can picture a helluva lot of things from our gigs, including this one, even the lights shining on Patrick's glasses as he called out to Harry. One day I won't. Hope I enjoy reading about it as much as you did.
