52. wilde fire
The midnight gala at Worcester Gardens was meant to be Les Milkins' final fling. Tom Morrell's review called it our 'farewell gig'. But he was right to put it in inverted commas. Because our drummer knew someone at Magdalen...
*
It was the second time Bill got us a gig in a college. First his own, Pembroke, now this, right after the end of our last term. An Oxford Ball, then a private party, both good.
Magdalen's pronounced Maudlin. Magdalen the Oxford college, that is. Same with the bridge near the college. But Mary Magdalen the Oxford church, near the Martyrs' Memorial, you say that the usual way: mag-da-len.
One of the guys who shared the house I was in, Colin, had a group of mates from somewhere up north, including a girl who could talk hind legs off (her boyfriend's description, everyone's opinion). They all pronounced Magdalen the college as mag-da-len, a sad little attempt at being subversive. Showed they didn't know their history.
In the 1400s, there was a switch in english. They dropped the G in Magdalen and spelled it Maudelayne. That's when the college was founded. The church was built before this change, hence the usual pronunciation of Mag-dalen. But the college kept its original sound, though not the spelling. And yes the word maudlin comes from Mary Magdalen. All clear as day.
*
For every Oxford student, Magdalen College looms large.
For a start, it's got the biggest grounds, its own deer park gets lost in it. The Magdalen Plane is one of the mightiest trees you'll see. The chapel, where the Clerks sing, was built in the 1400s. And you can't miss the tower.
In my third year at college, I probably saw it every day, on the way between the city centre and the house in Headington. Around the time I left Oxford, they gave the tower a clean, which left it looking too pale and modern to my eyes. I'd thought it had the patina of centuries, but it was just years of soot from cars.
Same thing happened with the other Magdalen, the church near the memorial, though not for another twenty years, so a certain piece of graffiti wasn't scrubbed off in all that time.
You'd do the Magdalen Walks, usually with a girlfriend, going through a gate onto grassland with a pair of streams that ran alongside each other. I remember the moment when the blonde in the italian class made it clear that things might happen between us. Not even a kiss yet, but female softness on a warm day with the sun going down.
That evening, or another one there, I looked at the thin mud island between the streams, willows hanging down, and pictured one of those places in Africa where crocodiles hang out. I put one in the first book I ever had published, a collection of short stories about animals. It was set in Britain, so a killer croc came as a shock of the imagination.
*
The party at Magdalen College was our last gig as full-time students. And it was a good one. So I'll get the aftertaste out of the way first.
Bill had arranged a fee of twenty pounds with one of the three organisers. On top of that, we'd pass around the 'dreaded hat' for the last time. That brought in about a tenner. So a couple of days later, I went to collect our thirty quid. I got badly short-changed.
I can't remember which of the three I dealt with. Either a Joseph Schwartz or someone called Campesino. When he handed me twenty quid, he said the deal had been for that amount including the hat. There's no doubt it was for twenty plus the hat - but short of punching his smug face, there was fuck-all I could do. Bill was pissed off too.
Stitching people up who've made your party better than it would've been, for the sake of ten pounds. He probably went on to do well in business. The tight-fisted cunt.
*
But it didn't spoil my memory of the actual gig. As I say, the evening went well. Even before it started. For the first and only time, I used one of our gigs to ask someone out on a date.
A couple of the chefs at Worcester College were young girls just out of school. Both of them were good looking, and our eyes met from time to time. Just before the Magdalen party, I walked over to where one of them was serving lunch in the dining hall. Did she want to go to see a band? I mentioned it was a Milkins gig. so I must've expected that to mean something to her. She blushed when I asked. Actually went pink. But she said yes.
Sarah Walker was tall and slim and genuinely pretty, something of a little girl's face. Dark brown hair and long limbs. She made the lemon mousse in the chapter on food.
If she was the Sarah Ann Walker born in Oxford, she wasn't quite 19 when I asked her out, though she seemed nearer my age than that - and she'd already been engaged, to one of the college groundsmen.
She lived on the Blackbird Leys estate and I stayed there a couple of times in the summer after college, while her mum was away. We had our moments, including certain activities in public places, like the Forbury Gardens in Reading, where I used to play as a kid, and even a cinema in Oxford (a japanese version of Emmanuelle). And we didn't stop when someone called her on the phone one day.
But we were never in it for the long haul, breaking up before I went to work in London that autumn. I dated one of the other chefs instead.
Angie was just as attractive. Hair black as mine. Like me, she had italian roots, though they were probably in the south, because she was strikingly dark-skinned.
Some time after I left Oxford, I went back to Worcester to take her out. Met her in the kitchen, where Sarah was a bit miffed to see me.
During my year abroad, Angie had a few dates with another Worcester student, a good-looking guy with hair almost as long as mine (reminded me a bit of Greg Lake from ELP) and a much better footballer. I chatted to him at a party once, planning a double date with two girls there. That never happened - and I never saw him again. For no reason I ever found out, while he was still at Oxford he killed himself on a railway line. Angie's dad worked on the trains.
When I was still seeing Sarah, we were walking home from somewhere with Angie and a friend just ahead of us, and I made a really terrible joke about the guy's death. There's a time and place for gallows humour, but this was emphatically not it. I still clench at the memory, and of course your heart goes out to her tragic ex. He seemed to have a great future ahead of him.
I never actually apologised to Angie (I'm doing it now), but she must've forgiven me because we went out a couple of times. But she was about to go to Bristol University, and we decided the distance was going to be an issue - so I kissed her goodbye at Oxford Station one night and didn't see her again. I imagine she did well at college. Like Sarah, she was younger than me but more grown-up.
If Sarah was SA Walker, she found a husband the following year, before she was twenty, another girl who married young after going out with me. Hope their lives were happy.
*
Have to say I don't remember much about her at the Magdalen gig - though I can picture another Sarah there!
I think she may have been someone Harry knew from back home. Very nice looking, classy somehow, curvy in a long pink dress . Her name was Sarah Beaumont and someone said she'd expressed some interest in me. But when she came into the room at Magdalen, on her own with just a few of us already there, I didn't go over. I really liked the look of her, but I'd just invited someone else.
Sarah Beaumont wasn't the reason I didn't spend all my time with Sarah Walker that night. For most of it, the band were setting up and playing. While we were doing that, rumour has it that she nearly went off with someone else! On our first date! Though the rumour came from only one source.
There was someone in our languages set at Worcester College. He appears on these pages as the one who thought we might be plotting to send hundreds of students to his room during the Milkins practical joke. It was him who told us he was the best in the group - then went to hospital for sleeping pills during exams.
He was part of the great majority who struggled at college discos. One night he gets to dance with a young secretary from the Ox and Cow - only to regale her with his views on Turner and Bach, which left him open to me calling it his Bach & Turner Overdrive, a pun on a band's name.
Tonight he came to the Magdalen bash, then told Steve (who didn't, as always) that he'd nearly pulled the girl I was with! He'd generally had to do without female companionship in his time at college, and now he was beside himself with glee, even though nothing happened. Bless. Still, he had a novel published after leaving Oxford, so fair play.
It's possible Sarah flirted with him a bit, for something to do while I was otherwise occupied - but we were full-on after this, so it was a non-event really. She quite liked watching us perform, too.
*
Ah yeh, the gig itself.
I was coming to that.
This section's been about girls so far. And they get their share of space throughout this website.
But what am I supposed to do: leave them out? Pretend they didn't cross my path and the band was all I had? I was a 22-year-old student, for fucksake. Remember what you were like at that age.
Anyway, on Monday 20 June 1977, we're in the Oscar Wilde Room, quite an elegant space from what I remember, with a big wide door leading to another one. Bill sat on a window seat to play the drums.
We started quite late, by which time people had drunk their allocation, so the room was ready to rock. Wall to wall and right up against us, the way we liked it.
That generation of students obviously liked dancing to the Rolling Stones. The party invitation called us 'a solid Stonesy dance band', which hit the nail: they were our first eight numbers this time!
I remember thinking this was a really good warmdown from Worcester Gardens, a low-key but appropriate final gig, mellow but exciting, with quite a big crowd. I have to say there were moments when we torched the place.
Someone from the press thought so too, because our last review as a band was another good one.
I think it was in Charlie Horse - though, typical of me, I cut out the article and binned the rest. Someone called Andy Gledhill spent the evening with us.
Writers vary. Some know how to fill a given space with words, others struggle.
Andy Gledhill was given an entire page - and used two-thirds of it to describe what wasn't happening before we went on!
You might say people write flabbily when they've got too much space. But it's more about the individual reporter.
When the Worcester College magazine reviewed our appearance at the Gardens, they had only a hundred words or so - and still used half of them to make a weak joke.
Meanwhile Tom Morrell had just three paragraphs but filled them with pertinent comments about the entire event, all four bands. Lean and efficient writing.
You could say young writers haven't learned their craft, but I presume Morrell was a student, and tutors wouldn't have let me pad out my essays. Same with my group head when I started writing advertising copy later that year. Even at an early age, you should know when you're applying a lot of filler.
Andy Gledhill knew. He reminds himself there's been 'enough lyrical crap, now for the gig' and to 'cut the impressionism and hit the facts'. So why didn't he? And why not check your spelling? 'Faboulous', 'cacoon', and 'An if' look like part of a rush job.
Maybe he really did have too big a page to fill. The top of the article has quite a big illustration, a schoolboy in a cap running a line of chalk through the word Banned in our name. Quite fun, but it could've been smaller. Maybe there wasn't all that much to say about us!
But it was a great review! He liked our band.
The whole piece starts with 'Last night I had adrenalin, now I have only superlatives. In short, Les Milkins are really ace'.
And I don't mind all those words setting the scene. He builds the atmosphere, with 100-watt stacks in the middle of the room and people telling him 'Les stole the show at Worcester Gardens'. Excitement is brewing.
The Roxy Club in London was a well-known punk venue, and he thought we wouldn't have been out of place there. 'They have a sort of fresh-faced strictly Roxy (Club not Music) fashion' - though he's astounded by Bill's headband. 'Is this really 1969?'
'But trendy downers on headbands don't count when you play like Bill does.' Good to see our talented young drummer getting his due in print.
The rest of us, as a unit, appealed to our reviewer too. He thought we played 'in an impressive fashion'.
The remainder of the piece is mainly a list of tracks. He thought Carol seemed to be our favourite, even though we played it only once like all the rest. He references the fact that we knew Note Fade Away [sic] was a Buddy Holly song, so I must've said so on the night.
'Good party stuff, eh kids? and they play it in a very uncompromising fashion' - which is what you have to do whether you're just a covers band or performing your own material, however frivolous:
'Like one of their songs called, for some incomprehensible reason, 'Dinky Donkey Doo' is good proof that they really mean it.'
Now that's a good use of words!
And Andy Gledhill did something no-one else did. He interviewed us.
I say 'us'. I wasn't there. Attending to Sarah at last. But he talked to Bernie and I think Bill and maybe the other two. And we ended up with another example of why you couldn't leave that band to their own devices!
They tell their interviewer 'they may be soon on wax (that's what they claim, and I hope it's true).'
Being on wax meant bringing out a record. Seems our recording session went to Bernie Cook's head! But as porkies go, it was a positive way to end our time in Oxford, as if we had a future there.
The write-up ends with the line 'Good enough Les?' He obviously thought I was Les Milkins, and he was asking if his review met with my approval. Always will, AG.
Right at the bottom of the page, there's a line drawing of a rose. No idea what it had to do with anything. They really did have too much space!
*
Our final gig had a chaotic finale. Made us look like real punks.
The three co-hosts were all american, I think. Their invitation trumpeted 'a dynamite party tape sent straight from Cambridge USA' by someone's kid sister. Can't remember what was on it. To express surprise at something, one of them shouted out 'Horseshit!', which we'd never heard before and couldn't stop repeating for a while. Naturally Bernie added it to his list of phrases.
I emitted a few of my own when the hosts suddenly pulled the plug.
Literally. One of them went round behind us and switched off all our equipment.
Apparently the college grandees had warned them they had to stop at midnight or something. On pain of what? Turning back into mice, losing a glass slipper? What a load of shit. Maybe in America they'd have been drummed out of college after a public defrocking. but this was just pitiful. Not very rock 'n roll, guys.
It was their party - but it was our farewell show and we still had two numbers to go. No way were we going to stop without the donkey song followed by Johnny B Goode. The first track I'd learned was the last we'd play. And fuck our transatlantic employers. I plugged us back in.
They pulled it out again!
Cue a bit of a shouting match, during which I used the microphone to thank them for wrecking our goodbye gig. The audience enjoyed that.
There was only going to be one winner in all this. The crowd chanted for us to play on, even if the hosts all fucked off to sulk. Maybe that's why they didn't pay us our full fee, the small-minded pricks. But it was worth it. I sang Dinkey Doo and Johnny B with righteous punk anger.
Then we were gone.