51. studio album
As a band, we kept reaching landmarks I never dreamed of.
Me in rehearsals. With musicians.
An audience.
A paid gig.
An Oxford college.
An Oxford Ball.
Winning a song contest. (Still can't believe I get to write that).
A recording studio.
Our own Oxford college -
Wait. A recording studio? As in laying down tracks? For a debut album or something? Come on...
No well it wasn't like that. There are limits, especially for us.
*
Patrick knew Andrew Burnham, who did a lot of recording at the studios of the university broadcasting society. And one day AB decides he'd like to practice with a rock band. So we lugged our gear over to the OUBS building. Not far in Pat and Harry's case: just a few doors along the Banbury Road.
It was a fun day. Like a rehearsal but with an engineer asking us to go over things again, sometimes individually. Wearing headphones was new. Made it easier to hear what I was singing, and it sounded better, I thought. All in all, some Proper Band stuff.
There were three engineers. Andrew; Peter Hancock, who looked like a young Brian Jones from the Stones; and John Shaw, a hefty guy with a tache that used to be a beard at Pat's party back in November.
We treated that session as work. Someone took a number of photos, which all ended up in one of my Milkins albums. What strikes you is how seriously we're taking it, with no clowning around.
We're all in shirts or sweatshirts. The guitarists are concentrating on their guitars, Bill's staring ahead while he drums. I'm either singing into the mike with headphones on or pressing them against my ears to hear what's being played. We look like a working band.
I do come across as a bit of a prat in a couple of them, but it was just me hamming it up. In one, my fingers have gone all expressive as I look like I'm imparting some profound truth about drumming while Bill looks at me nonplussed.
In another, I'm leaning back from the mike with my eyes shut and a hand in my pocket while Harry seems to be wondering how we got so far with this as our lead vocalist. I'm wearing shades each time. Indoors, with no audience. Both photos are always going to make me smile.
The contact sheets include all three engineers plus Bernie's girlfriend, who went on to become a well-known journalist. She was a student at the time, in dungarees like the girl at the Cape, doing her reading under one of the mixing desks with her back against a padded box. She got us a gig a couple of weeks later.
As far as images go, the session went very well. Then we heard the playback. And reality's a serial gatecrasher.
*
More than 25 years later, I took my fiancée to Bristol to stay with Pat and his wife and daughter. We had homemade curry that night. A lot of chickpeas, with interesting results overnight. It ups your intimacy as a couple!
Between them, the women convince me I'm getting too old to have decorations on my leather jacket (metal badges of animals, especially a cool bat with its wings out, and a gold identity bracelet). So I succumbed, took them off, and lost the lot!
The badges I've no idea where they got to, and the bracelet was a personal tragedy. I'd had it since I was eighteen months old, so I got someone to extend it with some silver chain. The jewellers thought I'd made a mistake, so they made the extension out of gold, to match the colour. I sent it back. No, I wanted that strip of silver, to show how short it used to be. The catch was small and I presume weak, because the bracelet fell off somewhere and I never found it again. A real loss. It was the oldest thing I owned.
I had a backup on that wrist. In 2017, I bought a second bracelet. Went to H Samuel on Oxford Street and came out with a hefty silver one, a right bit of bling, then took it to the engraver they recommended, in Bond Street tube station. I had my name put on the front - just Cris - and on the inside 1966, 1982, and 2006, the years England and Italy won the World Cup during my lifetime.
In photos, I've got both bracelets on my right wrist. Still stings that I lost the pair of them. Wouldn't have happened if I'd ignored the three witches.
*
But at the time, that wasn't the worst thing.
First evening there, I go upstairs to use the facilities. Coming back down, I hear an unholy din.
Pat's wife had been extolling our exploits as a band - and put on a tape of that recording session all those years before. She'd waited till I left the room because she knew what I'd have had to say about it!
Wouldn't have been so bad if she'd played something from our gigs. The vocals in those are muddy and you get a sense of how it's going down. The only two Milkins tracks on my ipod are live - and my fiancée was pleasantly surprised when I sang at our wedding.
But a recording studio exposes what's really there. The sound I'd been hearing through the cans was clearer, not better. And now it was blaring across Pat's kitchen diner.
Forming a rock band when you can't sing shows you're not easily embarrassed, but this was too much even for me. Every note was toneless, and loud with it. I made them turn it off.
Apart from anything else, that recording session was when the band realised I'd been playing the mouth organ in the wrong key on stage!
I've kept the cassette, like all the others. When I look at photos, which make us look like a real band, I could play the recording to stop me getting too big-headed. But I don't need reminding.
Still, you can't keep some people down. Even though it wasn't just the vocals which were substandard, back in 1977 I sent a cassette to a beach club I'd been to in Italy, with a note saying if they ever needed some authentic british rock 'n roll...
(One of the reasons our band existed at all was my complete lack of shame.)
Italian rock music is the pits, but even they aren't completely clueless. I didn't get a reply!
*
A word about our three engineers that day.
John Shaw went on to have a career in broadcasting as a 'new John Peel' (I can imagine what he thought of our singer!). Patrick: 'John Shaw came to stay with us a few months before he died - that was quite a shock at 56.'
I didn't find out till the end of 2023 what a high flyer Peter Hancock was. Right up in the stratosphere of science. Professor Pete, with a degree in chemistry (a first, of course), an MSc in intelligent sysytems, and a PhD in computing science, before lecturing in psychology. Respect to the swot among swots!
His time at university was the opposite of mine, he made use of his degree, and presumably had a good social life. But I wouldn't have swapped for anything.
Late 2023 is also when I discovered Andrew Burnham was something else besides an engineer. I didn't know he played the bass. He even won a song contest! A real one.
The following year, 1978, his band won their heat of a Melody Maker competition, then played in the final at the Marquee, no less, finishing second to Splodgenessabounds, who can't have been serious (their well-known single proves it: Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps Please). Andrew's group reformed after decades away and started making albums. Fair play.
The OUBS doesn't exist any more, but we enjoyed our day there. Shame about the sound, but I'm happy we looked the part. In the next batch of photos, too.
shooting our loads
Our time at Oxford was nearly over, and I thought we should have a record of it. So I arranged another photoshoot.
We'd organised one after our first gig. Photos in the snow at the back of 88 Banbury Road. Football shirts and blankets and goofy facial expressions. This time I wanted us to look more serious, to remind ourselves we'd once been in a punky band. Time to put on our stage gear and affect a mean look. I knew there'd still be some pratting around, but that's normal.
We found a building site with no-one working on it. And a basement with bare bricks and abandoned TV aerials and other bits of junk. Ideal for these kinds of photos, which were in all the music magazines by then.
Our photographer was Andrew Burnham, one of the studio engineers from the session at the OUBS. Black-and-white film, of course Punk didn't look the part in colour.
I insisted on taking everything we had into the basement - and the others went along with it. Every guitar and amplifier and giant speaker, all Bill's drums and cymbals, every poster from our gigs, my mike stand, even a banjo and mandolin we never used on stage or in rehearsal.
By then, we'd started sticking L plates on our speakers, like the ones on a car. The standard big letter L on a white background. L for Les and because we were beginners, gettit? A few years later, Harry sent me one from Madrid, with a green L.
We had a load of paraphernalia. But we didn't just pile it up. We put some thought into the arrangement, the photographer with his eye for composition. The posters lined up across the tops of the speakers and amps against a background of bricks.
I sat on the floor in the middle, with my back against a speaker and Pat and Harry on either side. I'm wearing shades, and the razorblade jawline (where did that go?) makes me look even more like Graham Parker. Harry manages to be menacing even in toy sunglasses, Patrick in his specs.
Bernie and Bill, both standing up, book-end the shot. Bernie on the extreme right looking in, hand in his pocket, joint in the other one, like something out of Feelgood. Bill's on the left with the brick wall behind him. No-one could've looked less like a punk, with his jeans, dark waistcoat, and head band! But he had shades too, and his attitude was right. It's a classic photo in our archives.
In other ones, Bernie's passing the reefer across me to Pat; then Patrick takes a puff while I blow into the mouth organ and Bernie and Harry look solemn. The four of them, including Bill, hold guitars while I give the camera a look, with the word Pow! above my head, stuck on the amp behind me. Pretending to be punks is a fun day out.
We took pictures outdoors too.
At the building site, we spread out and looked quite cool in my opinion. Bernie lighting a spliff, Patrick staring out from a doorway. Bill twanged his headband like a slingshot, and I'm in the foreground (sitting in profile shows the flare in your cords: not a punk look). I've changed into the striped top I wore at the first gig, but the shades and jacket stay on.
It would be quite a smart shot if Harry wasn't creeping across the back of it carrying an enormous long plank! In both photos. Oh well, we never took ourselves too seriously.
Pat reprises his Song Contest look with those white socks and trousers a touch too short. Harry in his suit and shades. Another with him pulling a face while I'm next to him in a dustbin! Where my voice belonged, ha ha.
I took one of the other four walking away, Harry with Milkins chalked across his shoulderblades, a touch of the Abbey Roads. Then snapped them pulling faces through the windscreen of Harry's car.
There's a picture of Patrick lying under that Renault with the band's name across the back of it. And the best shot of the day, also involving the Milkinsmobile, photographed from the back this time, with the band facing the camera.
The four of them are attached to the car. They've opened the left-hand front door, and Bernie's standing on the running board with a fag to his face. Patrick's lower down, in front of him, leaning against the side of the vehicle, adjusting his tie like Buddy Holly's surly brother.
Bill's climbed up on the right-hand side at the front (the back as you look at it), with Harry's elbow leaning on the roof at this end of the vehicle. For some reason, he brought an umbrella along, trailing behind him in his left hand, bit like the Penguin in Batman.
As befits the frontman, I'm on my own. A few feet away to the left, leaning back against the trunk of a thin tree with the branches stretching out over the car. Sunglasses, hands in trouser pockets, obligatory surly expression.
That picture of the five of us: years later, I put it on a t-shirt, wore it at Patrick's house, then gave it to Bernie in 2021. The photo itself is in a silvery frame on a shelf in my study. Wouldn't part with it for anything.
Same goes for another team shot, this time in a line against a wall. Again, I don't know the exact location, but we're on a pavement with a big house the other side of the wall behind us, so probably Banbury Road again.
We got the attitude right for this one too. Bill's glowering in from the right with his arms folded, Patrick and Harry inside him in their suits with mean faces on (though I'm not sure what Pat's doing with his right hand!), then Bernie looking into the right-hand distance as if he's seen something worth killing. Me on the left again, looking in that direction, away from the others, puffing my cheeks as if life's a right pain. Ripped sweatshirt, elbow on the top of the wall. Bill, Harry, and me in sunglasses.
It would be quite an impressive picture if you cropped out the three pairs of flares and broken umbrella! Put it alongside the snow scene to see how we changed over time.
Harry was in a whimsical mood. In another shot, he's hanging upside-down, the umbrella below his head, while I'm on the other side of the wall holding his ankles. It would've looked more intriguing if I'd ducked my head so you couldn't see it, instead of looking at the camera between his thighs!
None of these photos were intended for public consumption. We weren't going to be playing live again, so we didn't need publicity shots. They were just for us, our memories, a nostalgic note to end our days as a band.
For now.
