54. side lines
After leaving Oxford, we played for another eleven years!
*
Of course, it was never the same again.
Think of this chapter as a freeze frame. Those actors at the end of a film, with a voiceover telling you what happened to their characters afterwards. This isn't part of our film, just an extended wind-down written for when my memory banks empty. And it's long. So feel free to skip it and go straight to the next one. That's even longer.
*
In 1977, I spent the summer holidays seeing Sarah, abandoning the first chapter of a truly terrible novel I'd started at college (if I say the best part was the name of one of the twelve disciples: Cunt...) - and applying for jobs in advertising.
I still had no idea what I was going to do for a living, but the girlfriend in London had a friend at the same college, Judy Spiro (see below), and Judy's boyfriend worked as an advertising executive. He suggested I should apply to be a copywriter.
Why?
Because you write a bit and it's well paid.
Hm, not sure about that. I'd hardly written at all. But then he said it wasn't all that hard, and my ears pricked up!
The first agency I tried asked me to write an ad. I took it dead seriously and they gently turned me down. Same with another one when I tried some humour.
The next lot I sent various bits of rubbish writing to and got called in for an interview! A woman told me I'd have to come back for a second chat with someone else, but she very much wanted me to work there.
I know how this is going to sound, but I wondered if maybe she liked the look of me or something - because she had nothing to go on. Was she impressed that I'd been to Oxford? Her colleague was the complete fucking opposite. He enjoyed getting me to come all the way back to London to hear he wouldn't be hiring me. Fair enough from what I'd shown him, but still a dick. He even offered me a fiver for the train journey home. A really small dick.
The fourth agency was the biggest in the world, but I didn't give a toss by then. It was obvious I wouldn't be working in that business - so when they sent me a copy test, I nearly binned it.
I'd just bought a couple of books. The Reader's Digest pictorial tome on british birds, which I still love and which helped with the short stories I wrote a couple of years later. And Roget's Thesaurus. Maybe I was half-serious about becoming a writer. I used a string of words from it in my copy test, generally took the piss, and got the job! Go fucking figure. By October, I was living in Paddington and working in Berkeley Square.
*
Meanwhile I hadn't given up completely on the rock band. For a start, I shared a flat with Pat and Harry.
But what to do now we'd left our natural habitat?
Try writing Proper Songs. No donkeys allowed.
Before moving to London, I spent a couple of afternoons with Patrick at his parents' place in Bourne End, not far from Reading. He'd come up with a pretty authentic punk riff - but my lyrics were about suicide as a pastime! The title was Dying for a good time, which showed I didn't have a clue what punk was about (though I might do alright with advertising puns).
Bill wasn't going to be our drummer any more, so we scanned the small ads in NME and Melody Maker. No luck - and I even went to the other extreme by alienating someone! I wrote to tell him he was obviously a 'wanking amateur'! I even added Pat's phone number, so he got an earful from this guy through no fault of his own. No idea what possessed me.
We worked on only that one song. It just wasn't our thing - and we'd decided we'd gone as far as we could together. Some time during the next scholastic year, the guy who'd hired us for Worcester Gardens got back in touch. He was planning another big event and wanted us to headline it again.
But I told him we weren't a band any more.
Come on, he goes. Comeback appearance. Name your price. Which was flattering to hear.
He'd paid us £35 first time. Now I asked for fifty quid - each! Two-fifty in all.
Ah no, he said, I can't go to that.
I know. Thanks, but we really don't want to do it.
We knew the original Les Milkins was finished when we left Oxford - and we were left in no doubt when we went back there. Turns out Bill Drysdale could be persuaded to try one more gig...
*
It wasn't just our man at Worcester who remembered us.
Someone contacted me from the Oxford University Rock 'Roll Society. They were holding a session at a famous old place called Brett's School of Dance, on Broad Street, above the really venerable Boswell's, one of the oldest department stores in the country.
The OURRS were serious about it. They put two ads on Daily Information, one with the headline OH BABY, I'M ALL SHOOK UP.
And they thought we'd do a job. In those days, invitations and announcements were all photocopied and handwritten. This one announced that 'the Atrocious Les Milkins Band will once again give Oxford the chance to hear its pulsating Rock and Roll rhythms'.
For those, they put their entrance fee up. The original invite charged 15p for members, 50p for non-members. These were replaced in ink with 20p and a whopping 70p - to cover our fee of £65, nearly double our previous highest and the most we ever got for a single gig. That's probably the only reason Bill agreed to play.
We hadn't seen him since the summer, and this was February. He was working on Other Projects and lost interest in us as a band, which was fair enough. This was the 18th of February 1978, going into the 19th, and the last gig he ever played with us.
I can't remember rehearsing with him, though we must have. I xeroxed some handmade posters and sent them to Pembroke, but I'm sure he didn't put any up. He'd 'moved on', you see.
And he thought he'd gone up, not sideways - because the only really memorable thing about this latest gig was Bill's personal sound engineer.
Now, Brett's was a good sized space but no more. And the ceiling wasn't very high. One thing you didn't need in a place like that was amplification for the drums. But Pat took it upon himself to hire a mixer from Laughing Gear. Bernie's usual joke: 'Miking up the drums, an entirely pointless exercise and another of Slade's ideas to drown out the singer!'
So here we were, with someone crawling around by the foot of Bill's kit, fiddling with the mixer, sometimes during the set itself!
By then, Bill was drumming for a comedy review led by Rowan Atkinson, who was at university there. In early 1980, it came to the Savoy (minus Drysdale) for the annual staff ball put on by the big advertising agency I worked in. Every year, a different well-known comedian. Billy Connelly had a bad night and cut his routine short, Jimmy Tarbuck was superb. Atkinson went down well too. The following year, they hired his oppo Rhys-Jones, who was deeply unfunny.
Atkinson appeared at Brett's too. It was him who looked after Bill's drums!
Same as with John Otway, I didn't go over and say hi. He didn't come over either, then or at a party near Bill's house, when Atkinson got on stage with Howard Goodall. Naturally he sang better than me. Maybe that's why he gave me certain looks at Brett's!
As an acoustics man, some of his activities were a bit Mr Bean, because eventually Bernie had enough of this creature crawling around by his legs - and kicked Atkinson up the arse!
Not a full-bodied half-volley, leg drawn well back, to send him halfway across the room - but more than a gentle prod. You didn't want to piss Bernie off too much. It was the best moment of the gig.
Which says something about the whole event. I doubt the rock 'n roll society thought they got their money's worth. But I honestly don't think that was our fault.
We came on after midnight, early Sunday 19 February 1978, with the best intentions and our usual set - but nobody danced much. So we should've done better, yes?
Well, maybe. But people did dance to the same numbers at Pembroke and Worcester - so this was a repeat of our early show at St Peter's.
Seems to me male students went to these events to meet women but women didn't go there much at all. In a single-sex college system, with far fewer girls, it must've been quite common for rock bands to play for mainly male audiences. Maybe men just went to more gigs, witness a lot of early punk nights.
There's a revealing photo from Brett's. It's a close-up of Bill, but Atkinson's squatting to his right while he plays, and there's a mirror behind him, with things going on in it.
The band's name is scrawled on the glass in white: Les Milkins. Doesn't look like my handwriting. Bernie's a real bass player, long-haired and purposeful, with his big white Fender Precision, temporary replacement for the red Hohner.
But what you notice most is a line of men. A couple of girls on the right, but mostly a roomful of guys standing watching - which was no good to them or us.
I'd guess some of those men came looking for girls, because they weren't there for any kind of greaser experience. The invitation offered prizes for the best-dressed couple: 'if you can come in formal dress (leather jacket, blue suede shoes, Teddy Boy get up, drainpipe trousers etc.) so much the better'. No mention of what girls might wear: it really was a male evening.
But by then no-one dressed in Fifties gear except middle-aged saddoes. So the room's full of guys wearing what you saw at football matches. Flared jeans, short jackets, sweaters. And they're looking at us and judging.
We can sing better than you.
You and the whole world. But I dance more than you. Move your arses.
After a while, faced with this wall of men staring back at us, I used a line of Johnny Rotten's. Equally exasperated by a crowd that just stood there, he asked 'Why aren't you lot dancing? What have you got between your legs anyway?' I imagine his version didn't go down well either. You could hear ours on tape.
And I have to say: generally speaking, we didn't sound bad. No better than a muffled garage band, but alright in parts. From the Milkins cassettes, I put a total of two tracks on the ipod. One of them was our Johnny B Goode finale at Brett's.
For the first time in a while, I forgot to leave a pause during the last chorus, and Bill's drumming nudges Harry out of sync for a moment. but these things don't matter live. The vocals are a bit deep and muddy, but I've heard worse. And I make the boys go round again at the end because Patrick's guitar is on good cat-strangling form. We get some applause, and maybe not because they're glad it's our last number!
That night Bill plied the cymbals too much for my liking (maybe Atkinson miked the actual drums too loud!), but we had our moments. Sympathy for the Devil, with Bernie's bass-guitar bongos and my tobacco-tin maraca (the bongos were really good). And Harry rocked when he stepped in while Pat was distracted during Six Days on the Road.
Plus we quite looked the part again.
Bernie's in a black top to match his hair, sleeves rolled up, musician at work. Bill in a red t-shirt with letters across it, Harry a white shirt and black tie again but trousers with the fly half undone! The usual roll-up in the side of his mouth. Patrick's gone in for a striped sailor top.
I've got another of Bernie's jackets, except this one almost fits. Reasonable brown check pattern. The pale grey cords are too tight as usual, but I quite like the brass ring on the leather neck thong. One of the photos makes it look like I'm singing not shouting, but the best has my eyes shut and the mike and mike lead coming down from my hand like an anteater's tongue! I did an Andy Warhol series of that.
All quite fun, though there was no uniform this time, so we weren't the band that used to put on a united front when it mattered.
Oh, and Patrick's mixer met a suitable fate. On the way out, someone (Bernie: 'not me') dropped it on the stairs and smashed it, leading to a hefty repair bill for Pat. 'So that will learn him!'
One reason and another, it wasn't a great gig. Too many men.
The two girls in the mirror photo both had boyfriends involved in the band. A friend of Patrick's, who took the photos again - and me.
This was the full-on blonde I'd started seeing, in the Pimlico pit.
There was a time when I used to attract women who liked to conduct certain activities outside generally accepted environments. Sarah Walker for one. The Blonde insisted on a tower in Caernarvon Castle, her flat while she leaned out of the window, her office with people working next door, and a laundrette in Reading - while it was still open!
Here in '78, our cars stops for a break on the way back from Oxford. Everyone else piles into the pub, but the pair of us stay in the back seat, though I keep an eye on the rear window.
The gig should've been as good as that. Instead it proved my point about band and audience becoming a single entity when things go well. This was the opposite. Felt like them and us.
Didn't help that Bill really wasn't up for it. I saw him only once after that, under some arches near Waterloo Station when he was playing drums in a winebar. I think he went on to become a psychiatrist. Another of our drummers, Simon Horton, was a speech therapist. Cue Bernie Cook jokes about an atrocious band providing them with rich material.
Drysdale the 'heart-throb drummer' was crucial to our first year, with his personality as well as skill, and our memories of him will always be fond.
*
We didn't play again for over a year.
In that time, I met up with Pat and Harry in London and Bernie in Oxford, where he bought a great little cottage. Socially we were always good.
But we didn't fancy getting back together as a band. So Pat and Harry formed another one.
I went to see them with Bernie, in a communal space at a hospital, and they were fine. I remember the singer had one of those slim mikes, didn't hide behind a mike stand, and sang Poison Ivy. But I didn't get the feeling the two former Milkins were serious about this either, and sure enough the group didn't stay together long. Partly because their drummer died horribly young in a traffic accident - but they never felt like a project to me.
So what did our former guitarists do? They came back to us!
Patrick invited me to share another flat with him. A proper one this time, him and me and three nice girls in a mansion block on the Earl's Court Road. Noisy on summer evenings, but that's quite exciting when you're young. We had good parties like before, only this place was too smart to trash.
I'm lying on my bed one afternoon, and Pat and Harry are standing either side while we discuss getting back together and doing it for real, a proper band.
If we do, says Harry, you'll have to have singing lessons.
Christ, you might think. Talk about polishing a turd. But I didn't scoff at the plan. Quite liked the thought of someone trying to improve my voice, go one better than Joe Strummer!
But, you know...
My heart wasn't in it.
I couldn't fool myself I'd be able to improve enough. And I was still writing childish lyrics and not many of them. When we tossed around names for this Milkins Mark II, I came up with The National Frunt. Oh dear. I thought it might be controversial and punky, but you see what I was like.
Pat and Bernie might've liked a go at being better than we were - but they weren't very up for it either. They both knocked about with other bands over the years, though Bernie was never really serious about his.
Meanwhile Harry Hatfield had his baby grand at home, and that was enough for him.
In 1979, Dire Straits re-released Sultans of Swing. When I heard it with Robin at his parents' flat, we couldn't believe someone was playing old-fashioned rhythm 'n blues during the punk era. Another case of doing your own thing and it might work. Some of the lyrics were written about our rhythm guitarist. They even reference his favourite instrument.
And Harry doesn't mind
If he doesn't...make the scene
He's got a daytime job
He's doing alright
And he can play the honky tonk like anything
Saving it up...for friday night
Quite a coincidence, ay.
*
Harry was full of surprises. One day he came in with a song he'd written.
It was based on the story of Faust, and the lyrics were erudite, as befitting a student of literature. It was about the devil, and we were Atrocious, so he called it The Diabolical Song. The structure was good. He didn't allow Patrick to play a lead break till the very end, when it sounded like the screaming fires of hell.
It wasn't a dance number, so we dropped it after a while. But if we'd written other good songs, it would've been worth keeping.
Instead I was coming up with titles like Jenny and the Bets (a play on the Elton John song, dontcha know) and two versions of Would you let your daughter marry the Pope?
But make allowances. Singing - music - was never in the blood. Even as a little kid, I was a writer. And certainly by secondary school. People still remember my essays in detention! A couple of years after leaving college, when I was 23, I started writing a set of short stories that were published in America and over here, followed by a novel. Les Milkins were never meant to be a serious proposition.
Still, we'd been a covers band who went down well at parties - and we made the decision to carry on as that. We played for anyone in our circle who fancied a band for the evening - including ourselves (we threw the odd Milkins party). And we kept getting paid sometimes.
After Oxford, we were only ever a sideline, a bit of fun from time to time - but that suited us all. We really didn't mind if we never made the scene.
Harry's birthday was coming up, and he found somewhere to stage a party, a space big enough to fit all the usual suspects. It was going to be our first gig in a year, and we were quite up for it.
Just one thing. We didn't have a drummer.
Time for another handwritten advert.
*
The big advertising agency I joined, it had corridors with noticeboards all the way along. In September 1978, I cut out letters from a newspaper and stuck them on a card to make words, like the cover of Never mind the Bollocks. DRUMMER WANTED.
Under that, a couple of phone numbers, including the one on my office.
It typed it on my huge great metal Adler, which was heavy enough to do arm curls with. The keys were so leaden I used only the middle finger on my right hand, supported by the thumb. When it was about to be replaced, I took it home and typed two books that got published: the short stories, then a novel. All with one finger! The metal monster's in the garage now, a monument to a triumphant age.
We didn't want any drummers who took themselves seriously, so I added a warning: 'no Billy Cobhams or recording artists'.
I thought that would attract only part-timers like us. Instead Phil Penn put his head through the door. He'd played drums on cruise ships. Uh-oh.
Older than us, stocky and hair-faired, with a perm and a sense-of-humour bypass - though we had something to do with that!
Actually I'd already met him. We'd played football against each other.
Though he wasn't exactly in peak physical condition, he was skilful on the ball. So were most of his team, the control department against the creative department I was in. We played each other twice, but it was a mismatch each time. The second game I was lucky not to have my leg broken by an over-the-ball tackle from a bearded cunt called Paul Bailey, the first match I did alright.
After it, Phil Penn sought me out to congratulate me on my drag-backs. And I scored a goal by chipping the keeper (there's even a photo). But the creatives weren't very, and the controllers did. Cheap line but dead true. One or two of the controllers played for amateur clubs. They pinged the ball about on the astroturf. We lost 8-2!
At the time Phil Penn enquired about our drumming vacancy, we had nowhere to rehearse. So I called my brother.
By then he was at university in Roehampton. And try this for extremes.
While I'd been at an all-male college, his place had about a dozen men - and ninety-odd women! Maybe a hundred. No idea how that came about, but the first party he invited me to I had to hang on to my tongue to stop it sweeping the floor. There were other evenings there, and I stayed with a couple of those girls, while my brother met his future wife.
By then, he was president of the student union, which was quite a feat and I was pleased for him. So I thought I might as well ask. And he was kind enough to let us use a room. But it was the wrong location for everyone. Us, other students there, and Phil Penn.
He rehearsed with us when we were at our worst, which is saying something. More sloppy than even the early weeks, when I was struggling with Johnny B Goode. At least we were aiming for something then. Now we didn't care much, just a bunch of amateurs practising for the birthday party of one of their members.
It might've helped if our new songs hadn't been such crap. Respectable, yet another Stones track, a pitiful attempt at punk. My singing on that was appalling even by my standards. Back in the USSR was a disaster (harmonies, anyone?), we had a go at Jungle Rock and some rubbish I wrote - and there was no good reason for trying Blockheads, by Ian Dury and the Blockheads. Harry's Diabolical Song was alright.
Plus we were in the way. The room was a bar with a couple of pool tables, and there'd be two guys there while we blasted them with this horrible loud racket. They played their games to a finish, but it was embarrassing all round. We went back there one more time, and it was just as bad. I asked my brother if there was anywhere else on the grounds, some cubby hole, but no.
This all led to two sets of people turning us down. Phil Penn, and that college.
After the parties I'd been to there, I fancied we might go down alright. But I was almost certainly wrong. We'd bombed a bit at my brother's 18th, and this was that same generation, who didn't want to hear Chuck Berry covers while punk and disco were all around.
Come on, I said. When are you going to give us a go?
Listen, bro. People heard you rehearsing!
There was no answer to that.
I'm still surprised Phil Penn agreed to a second rehearsal. Maybe he couldn't believe how bad we were the first time. But when we confirmed his initial impression, he said no to Harry's party.
To try and change his mind, I took him to a pub near work. Pint and a sausage. English mustard. I said I knew the practice sessions had been crap, but we came into our own in front of an audience. And these were people who'd seen us before, so we couldn't fail. Give it a try.
But he not only didn't play with us, he probably never drummed again. He actually sold his kit! Persuading a drummer it was time to retire: now that's the original spirit of a deliberately bad band. Waste of a good sausage, though.
*
So here we were.
A few weeks away from our first gig in a while, and no-one to drum with us. Looked like Harry's party would have to do without us. No loss, after the way we'd been rehearsing.
But then, out of nowhere, a real shock. The last person we could ever have expected.
*
Before that, here's what happened to Phil Penn's drums.
I can't remember the exact price, but I think he wanted only seventy pounds for the lot. I persuaded my oldest mate it was worth a gamble at that price.
Now, Robin de Rouen was about as musical as me. But I thought the idea of him joining our band was punky, and the crack would be good.
So he haggles, gets the drumkit for fifty quid, and helps me take it to the bottom of the stairwell of the apartment block where his parents live in Kensington, next to the lift shaft. Once we've worked out how to everything them together, he sits on the stool and says 'What do I do now?'
As if I'd know. Try bashing them, I go.
So bash them he does. And he finds the start of a rhythm somewhere, then another one, and he does that pout that says well you know there might be something in this...
After ten minutes of that, an old guy steps out of the lift. Um, sorry about this, but I can hear you on the top floor.
Oh. OK.
That was the end of Robin the drummer. But Robin the lifelong salesman sold the kit at a profit.
Or so he said. He could sell anything to anyone. Including a story.
*
Now then. A new drummer.
Paul Woodruff had been our roadie at Oxford. We couldn't afford to pay him, but he knew that when he asked to do the job. He shared a house with Bernie and liked hanging around with a band.
Paul had about as much musical talent as me or Robin - and Bernie showed me proof.
Here, hold this guitar. We're in the front room at Howard Street again.
What for? I slung the strap round my neck.
Put your fingers there and there, he goes. This one goes here. Now strum the strings. Right? That's a chord.
If you say so.
Now put this finger on that and this one over here. Strum again. That's another chord. Now take your fingers away. That's the open chord. You now know three chords. You're ready to play twelve-bar.
Two chords actually.
Now then, he says. Even you, with no musical ability of any description, you think if you practised you might get a tune out of it one day. Yes?
Yeh, maybe. Robin thought much the same about the drums. I strummed the strings a bit more, and yes you could imagine making a passable noise if you worked at it.
Why are you showing me all this?
Because Paul's been practising for months and can't play a note!
He'd driven the others mad by trying House of the Rising Sun over and over in his room. He never got to the end of the opening riff, and it's not a hard one.
*
Wind on a while, and Paul Woodruff suddenly gets it into his head to buy the most expensive drumkit on the market. Again, not the slightest suspicion of any talent, but he's determined.
He disappears for a year, then resurfaces ready to audition for a band he once roadied for. Shades of Robert Johnson learning to play guitar by selling his soul at a crossroads.
Talk about ugly ducklings. We couldn't believe it, Bernie least of all. Suddenly Paul could play. He didn't have an ear for the guitar, but fuck me could he hit those drums. A bit like me and singing, except he had some talent. Hats off to him.
*
So we played at Harry's party, and it was fine.
Saturday 17 March 1979. Harry was in a band with a guitarist called Pat and was born on St Patrick's Day.
For his 24th birthday, he discovered the crypt of a church in the East End, near where he lived at the time. St Augustine with St Philip, no less. The crypt was like a rough old warehouse but it was huge and we filled it for my own birthday the following year.
After Brett's, we changed our set. For the worse. Good Golly Miss Molly should've suited my shouty tendencies, but I made it too raucous and it's not easy to move to.
Back in the USSR should never have left the rehearsal room. Me agreeing to a Beatles song: a sure sign I'd stopped caring. At least it wasn't a Stones number, but I hated singing it. Made no attempt at those McCartney ooh-ah-oohs
Same with One more Saturday Night, a Grateful Dead track we covered only because Bernie liked it. He still thinks it's their best ever song, but this is the Dead we're talking about. It may have interesting changes for a bass player, but you couldn't dance to it in a million years. Can't you hear me knocking, now this. I shudder to think what his other band was like! Agreeing to this Dead number was another sign I wasn't bothered any more.
Not that it was any worse than the three original songs I penned. The tunes came from well-known tracks, but the words were execrable. I mean, Jenny and the Bets, the pope number, and Dennis the Dwarf. Jail me now.
This wasn't the last time we played all this rubbish. We were only a real band in that one year at Oxford.
Still, Harry's Diabolical Song had merit, and people at his party remembered the donkey track. Johnny B Goode closed the show as always, and we came up with two good covers: Summertime Blues - and the best thing we ever did.
*
Let it rock was the B side of Brown Sugar. A live version of yet another Chuck Berry cover by the Rolling Stones, about a construction gang on a railroad in the heat of Alabama, a rogue train approaching unsuspecting workers on the tracks.
The Stones play it as a boogie, with piano, and it's good. But Harry had an instinct for when to slow things down. He did it to effect with Little Queenie; now he turned a train song into a freight train song.
Bernie deepened the bass and Patrick played single notes in the lead break, like a train whistle. At one gig, he even blew a party streamer! Sometimes he wouldn't touch the guitar at all, letting the bass and drums rumble along, all those goods wagons in a row, very effective.
I couldn't hear the lyrics well on those vinyl singles, so I came up with some of my own, about a preacher, which gave it a new dynamic. And I spoke most of them, with a flourish on the last word of each verse to herald Patrick's guitar. I even resurrected the mouth organ once or twice, and it added something, quietly hooting along as part of the rhythm in the middle or the occasional one-off note to match Pat.
It was an atmospheric piece, and we let it rock. At the right parties, we'd play it twice through and no-one stopped dancing. At our last good gig, it featured three times! It still wasn't enough.
*
Apart from our choice of music, Harry's party went well.
At one point, he asked a gatecrasher to leave. I would've let the guy stay (the place was huge), but it wasn't my bash. Someone took a couple of fuzzy photos, and it was a good evening, which was a relief to our new drummer.
*
This was Paul Woodruff's first gig with us. The day before, he's in a room with Bernie and me, and he's fretting.
We'd finally binned the three Chuck Berry tracks we usually started with - and replaced them with another one! From then on, we liked to open with Roll over Beethoven, to explode out of the blocks.
But it bothered Paul.
The last verse before the lead break has a different pace, and it requires the drummer to play triplets. Paul's first live number with us would be a test, and he wasn't confident.
But Bernie wouldn't move it further down the set. Told Paul it's a great track to start off with, and he'd been fine in rehearsal.
I riffed on that. We're thrilled you're our drummer. Reaching deep into my knowledge of drumming, I assured him triplets were a piece of piss.
We didn't notice them during the gig, because Paul played them perfectly well. Bill Drysdale wasn't missed.
*
Paul was at our next three gigs as well. Then there was a gap of a year, up to March 1981, and we found someone else.
Simon Horton was quite a character. And the drummer who suited us most.
He lived in Norfolk, a friend of one of Harry's cousins. They'd been at Cambridge University together, but we still let him in! And he let us let him in because 'I think I was missing live performing. The kit was the same as the one I had in Cambridge, but I hadn't really played since then.'
Maybe it was rustiness that made him miss the occasional beat early on. That or 'having to adjust my 'beat thinking' (drummer's shorthand for groove) to go with the rock-n-roll feel of the band'.
But we're talking only one or two moments, and anyway for someone like me it was good to hear: meant he was one of us! No Drysdale drum solos. And when he rejoined us after a couple of years out, Bernie told him he'd obviously been practising! 'Which indeed I had, and I was pleased that it showed (a bit)!'
There was some mutual feeling: 'I really loved Bernie as a person and bass player.'
Simon Horton drummed like he was. Cool and relaxed. He wore glasses and played gigs in nordic jumpers, one with four toucans across the chest! His cords were an inch too short and he kept his sweater in the bass drum while he played. But he went on to play in different kinds of band for the next 30-odd years.
He seeemd happy enough with what we were doing, once he 'got my head round some of the wonderful/crazy tunes'. Wonderful isn't a word I've ever used for the track he remembered by name: Would you let your daughter marry the pope!
To improve our repertoire, and give him something he liked, I asked him to pick a song and we'd cover it. When I did that with Bill, he suggested something by Janis Joplin! Simon thought of Live with me, yet another Stones track! The Joplin song didn't make it on stage, but I wrote new words for Simon's choice.
When I introduced the band at our final gig, I called him the only drummer who didn't make us feel like he was doing us a favour. A bit unfair on Paul, but even he began to think he could move on to better bands - whereas Simon said it was 'always good to play with you guys.'
He had a nice-looking german wife, whom I managed to piss off with something I said, though I honestly didn't know what. Her husband's response was typical Si: 'Don't worry about it, she's fine.'
I used to think this laid-back attitude may have had something to do with things he smoked. But only because Bernie did - and Patrick when he came back from Sudan.
Teaching english? You can't talk english. Pat did physics at Worcester.
But there he was, with a classroom of muslim girls. No chance of any social life with them, and no alcohol - so he took to consuming enormous quantities of weed, which was plentiful over there. He came back with a taste for it.
One particular night, him and Bernie have smoked their share before we go on. Halfway through a song, Simon's kit starts to slide down the drum riser, and he can't stop it. Nor can I, because I'm out in front in the middle of a verse. So it's up to Bernie and Pat.
But when they take stock of the situation, they decide the only assistance they can render is bursting into uncontrollable mirth. Simon joins in with that, and it's left to me and Harry to heft the drumkit back in place while the audience enjoys the moment. Always a good feeling having Simon in the band.
He was in most of our gigs from then on, though we brought Paul back for a few in 1983, like the Clash re-hiring Terry Chimes after Topper left, or the other way round!
Like Harry and me, Simon got an Oxbridge MA, the one you don't have to study for. But he also put in the hours: an MSc and PhD at City University in London. 'So Doctor Horton to you!' Wotta swot!
If you include two who wouldn't appear live with us, we had almost as many drummers as Spinal Tap.
After Patrick's workplace, we rehearsed at Harry's house in Hackney, which was better. Back to a basement like the early days. In late '82, we practiced with a new drummer there, name of Nick Foster. Not sure why, because we had Simon by then and we liked him - but it didn't matter anyway, because Foster turned us down after that single sitting. Even Phil Penn gave us two rehearsals!
*
I lost touch with all our drummers before the end of the Eighties, then tracked Simon down after 35 years. Bernie had once shared a house with Paul, but didn't see much of him before moving back to Yorkshire.
Like the rest of us, Milkins was Paul's first band, and it was his ambition to be in it. Imagine.
The three who gigged with us were good while they lasted. Socially too. We did well to find them, and they enjoyed being in a band with the atmosphere we had. Great times.
*
By the summer of 1979, we didn't know what would be happening from now on.
Brett's hadn't been great, and after that we'd played only Harry's birthday bash. So we kept proving the old certainties: parties with people who knew us - fine. Paid to play for anyone else - not so good. But we'd never been put off by that. We'd still play for anyone - even if they didn't like us!
So we thought we'd put out feelers. Starting with a calling card.
It was a simple thing. All white, with the band's name in black caps across the middle. In the top left-hand corner: our logo, if you can call it that, a red L plate. Across the bottom, the word 'OFFICE' (Harry's idea), followed by my surname and initial and phone number at work, with the extension number.
Quite a smart item, and we liked it so much we printed a thousand! Overkill, of course, but they cost only £25 split four ways, and we'd have enough left over as souvenirs. They came in small neat boxes. I've still go one of those and it's half full.
Have to say: they didn't bring us any work! But they were just a bit of fun really, we handed them round to friends - and I inserted one into every envelope when I wrote to people offering our services. I contacted every prison in London!
sing sing
This was pure silliness - because I didn't want any of them to hire us!
I mean, imagine. You're a dance band or you're nothing. And you're going to play for a roomful of all-male convicts? They were going to sit and listen to us, maybe while we played Jailhouse Rock? Johnny Cash we were not.
No, like the calling card, this was just me looking for things to go in the scrapbooks. All I wanted was a reply on headed notepaper - from Wormwood Scrubs. I lived not far away and the name's the best. I fancied it as a souvenir and nothing else.
Well I did get a reply, but only one, and not from the right place. Most prison authorities were too busy to bother with a rock band no-one had heard of. But the chaplain at Wandsworth Prison sent a polite handwritten reply.
Due to structural problems in their chapel, they couldn't organise any kind of entertainment, so he couldn't 'take advantage of your kind offer.' Very nice of him, but I wish he'd been at the Scrubs!
*
So no prisons, then. But we were still hired by people who didn't know us personally. We even went back to Worcester College a couple of times, though neither of them was what you'd call successful.
*
Can't remember how we came to play in our old dining hall.
Hard to believe anyone remembered us from two years before. More likely Pat and Harry heard about a forthcoming event.
Worcester College was quite successful at rowing. Pat and Harry used to do it. On Saturday 16 June 1979, the boat club celebrated its 150th anniversary - and I presume our guitarists were informed and offered our services.
Whatever, we ended up on the poster. And on paper it sounded an ideal situation for us.
For a start, Patrick and Harry were in various boats over the years. And the structure of the evening was similar to the one at Pembroke College, only better because it was our old place.
As well as two rock bands, the usual sideshows were in place. Steel band and jazz band, punch and judy show, pimms bar and buffet dinner, all for only three quid. On Daily Information, it was advertised as a Rock Concert / Garden Party.
But I never thought it was going to be much good - because here's a couple of clues. The disco was a reggae disco (Addis Ababa sound system), and the other band, topping the bill, were a reggae band. A rock 'n roll covers outfit wasn't what anyone would be going for.
Plus we'd been away those two years. If we'd played in the dining room while we were still at college, especially after the Song Contest and the gig in the college gardens, it would've been as good as it could ever get. Instead, the best you can say is we got paid! Fifty quid, plus twelve for expenses. But they put us on at nine-thirty, when a lot of people were still somewhere else, eating and drinking and not ready to dance. We didn't get much of an audience - and we didn't do a good job.
We played too many crap numbers. We started well enough with Roll over Beethoven and Little Queenie, but we kept the boring Grateful Dead thing for Bernie's sake, and our three original tracks didn't work. Harry's devil song wasn't a dance number, and mine were plain shit: Dennis the Dwarf, for fucksake, and Jenny and the Bets. We stuck to Back in the USSR and Good Golly Miss Molly, both of which we played poorly. And no-one in the audience knew the donkey song near the end.
The acoustics didn't help. Guitars clashing off the stonework with not enough people to soften the sound. But the main thing was our choice of material. Of all our gigs, it's the one with the highest percentage of rubbish songs. If we'd ever played at my brother's college, this is how we would've sounded. He was right not to hire us.
We didn't disappear after our set. Had some free food and watched various acts, a pleasant enough evening. At midnight, we go back in the dining hall and have a look at the reggae band. They sound professional and people are dancing, which is fair enough. It was their gig, not ours.
So it's a shame there's so many photos of it! We could've done with a few from the better ones.
Again, we didn't bother with a uniform presence. We looked like we were just rehearsing. Patrick's cords were as flared as mine. There's him and Paul in white t-shirts, Harry a white shirt, Bernie a striped rugby top. I had the usual gear on, but it looked drab and greasy in all those black-and-white shots.
There's a couple I quite like, especially the five of us on a bench, and Harry still manages to look cool.
But in too many of them, none of us are looking at the audience, and one in particular says it all. It's on a wall in my study now, but only because Patrick had it blown up as a present, and I felt duty bound to keep it.
Just like the gig at Ironbridge, it shows we weren't connecting with the crowd. For a start, there's only me looking at them. Pat's turned towards Bernie, whose eyes are on his bass. Harry's are shut! The guitars all face the same way, which is a good image - but we didn't look or sound like a band that night.
*
All those photographs, but none with the star of the evening.
The reggae band had an enormous white roadie. He could carry a big amplifier under each arm and shift speakers like a sumo. We christened him Gargantua.
He was more brawn than brain and short of the social graces at first. But I've always talked to people, and he softened when I bought him a bottle of coke in the beer cellar (almost childlike gratitude when I ordered a second one) and played a bit of table football.
But he didn't hold back when he handed down his verdict on our performance that night.
One thing. I never tell a band they're good if they're shit. You were shit.
Inside that mammoth frame, the sensitivity of a connoisseur.
*
The best part of that weekend was a trip on the Thames.
Bernie owned a boat. Quite a big one. It slept four at a pinch, though I think three of us stayed at his cottage that night. We all had a go at piloting the vessel, though the most fun was mooring it and playing frisbee in a field. It was the first time I learned to throw one properly, under a cow at one point!
Even if the gigs didn't go wonderfully well, we still socialised, a main reason why we carried on playing for another decade and stay in touch now.
Bernie eventually sold the boat and bought something the size of a bathtub. I went out on it once, with him and his wife and a parasol for his infant daughter. Snug but fun.
*
Our other gig at the alma mater was just as bad in a different way, infinitely more bizarre. This time it was definitely me who made the approach.
Worcester College is quite recent by Oxford standards. Built at the start of the 1700s. It took the place of Gloucester College, which disappeared during the dissolution of the monasteries. As I say, colleges with the names of towns are the ones no-one thinks of. Lincoln, Pembroke, Exeter, Hertford. Ours was twice as anonymous.
On Saturday 12 June 1983, Worcester used the 700th anniversary of Gloucester as a good excuse for another mini ball in the grounds. Naturally by then no-one remembered us, but I wrote a note, wondering if they could squeeze us in somewhere. We wouldn't charge them, of course.
Well they did fit us in. And they gave us £35 for 'travel expenses'. But it was no fun and didn't add anything to the occasion. Because no-one saw us play!
This time they'd set up a big white marquee on the grounds. The only time slot they could find was before anyone turned up! So we played to an empty tent. A few organisers, and staff setting up tables. Even worse than the audience of one at Borocourt Hospital. Ludicrous, of course.
We might have had a bit of a crowd if my girlfriend had got in. For several years, on and off, I was with Rosie Gunraj, a guyanese princess of indian descent, the prettiest girl I've ever seen, let alone gone out with. She was raised in Oxford and turned up at the entrance with a few of her mates, but they couldn't sweet-talk their way in.
Just as well, I told her. Because we played another very average set (we hadn't thrown out all our bad tracks). They pulled the plug on us before the end, so we didn't finish with Johnny B Goode. The donkey song instead, which no-one had ever heard of.
We stayed for something to eat and a bottle of fizz. The event was on the same scale as the Pembroke Ball in '77, so it cost £17. For that you got the usual extras. Juliana's Disco, 'A Jazzband', 'Champagne and Sparkling White Wine,' ‘Bottle of Wine (Red/White)' (the writer was unglamorously specific), plus strawberries and cream, a cocktail bar, and 'Pimms of course'. No jazz band or steel band. Small mercies.
All of this was on the poster. We weren't, of course, But the main attraction was.
The Bluebells were one-hit-wonders from Scotland. The song was as lame as their name and only a hit when a car manufacturer used it in an ad years later. By an amazing coincidence, my wife-to-be, an actress, was in the video. She was also in one by the Kinks. Check out the cellist in Lost and Found.
The Bluebells' Worcester show was nothing special either. They even announced they'd run out of songs! So they used one or two from the start of the set. We knew the feeling. But they came on late, so people were ready to dance. We might've succeeded if the organisers had done the same with us, but that was never going to happen.
Oh well, a gig's a gig and a story to tell. But generally speaking we played only at parties for people who'd known us since college. And that was fine by then. We had a number of good nights in front of selected audiences. Even got paid sometimes.
*
We had a thing for church crypts and church halls.
A year after Harry's birthday bash in the East End, we held another one there, this time for my 25th and Harry's. Saturday 9 March 1980, nearer his birthday than mine, back under the Church of St Augustine and St Philip in Newark Street. And it was really good, up there with the best ones at Oxford.
I invited just about everyone I'd ever known. So did Pat and Harry, and Robin brought along some pals and girls - so the big crypt was packed. The girl I'd shared a floor with in Rectory Road, she came up from the south coast with her husband. She got my invite the day she found out she was pregnant. And shock horror: Blond Steve saw one of our gigs! He'd missed the first 21. Even the Other Steve came, from our first year at Oxford.
And the only benefit from the girlfriend I'd had in London was a college chum of hers, who became a friend of mine.
Like the girl I went out with, Judy Spiro was training to be a teacher. After she graduated, she asked me to donate a few copies of my animal stories as prizes for a writing competition at her school. To whet the kids' appetites, she got me to read one out in class. But she'd already read the best one to them, so I noticed one or two looking out of the window when it was my turn!
Judy Spiro also wrote songs. Very good ones, which she played to me. There was one she hoped to offer to Cliff Richard, and I could hear why. Her dad wrote the UK's entry for a Eurovision Song Contest as well as a football song which won an Ivor Novello award. Judy's stuff was better than that.
There was a dreamlike quality to Judith Spiro, as well as decency and rare intelligence. We lost touch in the early 90s but I was glad to find her again in 2024!
She was engaged before leaving college and still with her fiancé a few years later. Then, for my 25th, she turns up wearing a jump suit and beads, which wasn't her usual choice of attire. It's my liberation night, she said. She'd broken off her engagement. The photos of us together, her long blond hair when she danced, are among the best memories of a great night.
It showed - yet again - how much we needed the right audience. We still played the new rubbish about a dwarf and the pope, Miss Molly and the Soviet Union, plus the Grateful Dead's cure for insomnia - but it all went down well and we enjoyed it to hell.
You can see it in the photos. They're all on cheap cameras, therefore fuzzy as fuck - but that adds to the homemade feel and you get the size of the crowd. Someone even took a couple of my crotch! An accident, I presume.
We're clearly throwing ourselves into every song, confident now we're back in our security blanket. Judy still remembers the energy between us on stage.
The music was generally fine too, especially Let it Rock and Paul's thundering tom-toms on Summertime Blues. Not sure why we ever dropped that. The second set tonight was as good as any we ever performed.
We played well (even sang adequately!), partied hard, and went home with people of our choice.
It's the night I got together with Lyndsay Brooker, whom I saw again in Sydney. And met another girl I went out with later. There was also a blonde I hadn't noticed at the time. Classy and good-looking in one of the photos.
Look at her, Harry. Wonder who she was.
Well, um...
That bashful middle-class way of his. He met her for the first time that night and they carried on after the show. As I say, a dark horse with the ladies.
I was on such a high that when I took Lyndsay back to her place I paid the cab driver a tenner - for a six-pound ride. Cor, thanks, mate! Worth every penny.
*
The last Worcester fiasco wasn't the first time we'd performed in a marquee. One of Harry's many cousins paid us forty quid to play at her 21st in Rickmansworth. Saturday 8 September 1979. It went well, too - despite the usual crap songs. The short second set hit them with Beethoven and Carol, and Johnny B, and especially Let it rock, which we extended as usual.
Someone taped us on cassette, and it wasn't all terrible, though I was red-faced at forgetting his cousin's name when I introduced her! It's happened more often in recent years. Faces: no problem - but names hide in corners sometimes, even famous footballers I write about.
We sat down to dinner with the guests, me and Bernie looking out of place among those well-healed people, our same old punky gear and rugby shirt (Harry had a black tie and waistcoat). One of the girls I was sitting with said 'You think we're boring, don't you', which was furthest from the truth. Doubt I convinced her, but I did try.
Someone took a few photos, including a band shot which has Bernie and me looking vaguely like Jagger and Ronnie Wood. The one where I'm sitting on a sofa with Bernie and Paul has a series of what look like bullet marks, from something I'd used to stick the picture in an album. They're all on or around me, like someone machine-gunning the bad singer.
All in all, a good gig, with a fun coda.
After the set, with everyone loosened up by food and fizz, a group of us sat around jamming, some of them as unmusical as me. I got the mouth organ out and the session went on for quite a while - till Harry had enough and yanked the plug out! That's enough of that rubbish. We had to agree, but it was a laugh while it lasted. A deliberately bad band? Shame that didn't catch on.
*
Others who paid to hire us included people I never met before or since, a private party in the village hall at a place called West Clandon, near Guildford. Saturday as usual, 28 April 1984. Can't remember how they heard about us, though it was almost certainly through Pat or Harry.
Apart from me handing out prizes for something, not many details in the memory bank - but it went very well. Dark and atmospheric, and people danced..
By then, we'd binned the dwarf and pope songs, and the Grateful were now Dead. But we replaced them with things that weren't much better - Shake your Money Maker, a pedestrian blues, and Brown-eyed Handsome Man, a Chuck Berry song that didn't add anything new. For brown-eyed, read brown-skinned of course, a similar change to the one he had to make in Johnny B Goode. We also kept Jenny and the bloody Bets.
But the rest were surefire certs from our college days. We brought back Carol and played it in both sets. Same with Let it rock, Johnny B Goode, and Six days. And people enjoyed the donkey song because they saw the humour and were up for a laugh and a bop. They paid us fifty pounds plus another twenty for petrol, and I have to say they got their money's worth. So did we. A luxuriant night. Gratifying to be appreciated by people outside the usual crowd.
*
That happened one more time in our post-Oxford days, though not quite as much.
Can't remember who asked us to play at Broomfield Hospital, in Chelmsford. Maybe a contact of Harry's again, or Simon our drummer. And I'll never know what persuaded them to pay us sixty quid. Had they seen us play? Similar scenario to the gig in Ironbridge four years earlier. That hadn't gone too well, but this was better. Full of vivid moments.
To start with, I decided to get a t-shirt printed. To commemorate our tour - which consisted of a single night! A true Milkins approach.
So I went to a small shop on Carnaby Street, wrote Milkins Tour 81 on a piece of paper, and waited while they printed it. It came back with a misspelling. Mickins Tour!
I'm not paying for that, I said.
The asian guy's not happy. But you wrote a C, he goes. Look.
I have to admit my Ls did look like Cs at the time (touch of laziness creeping in when you write mainly for yourself). But I put my consumer hat on and insisted he print a new one and charge me just for that. Which he did. Which wasn't fair. What I should've done is pay for both. And worn the one with the C. Again, in the spirit of the band.
Instead I don't think I even wore the L shirt - except for a photoshoot. There's a couple of snaps of me sneering at the camera like a poor man's Sid Vicious, and Patrick holding the t-shirt over a dustbin, then leaving it on top. Cheap joke but fair comment, you might say.
The next memory is getting there. We travelled in two cars - but the drums were in Harry's french hatchback - and Patrick decided the only space for him was back there with them! I said I'd do it. He was more valuable if we had a crash. But he had that mad streak, Pat. Anyway my legs were too long.
Again there are photos, him in a black leather jacket against the chill. They had to keep the hatch up all the way as he observed the traffic behind him. Some approving looks, he said.
This was Friday 24 April 1981. When we got to the hospital, the room we'd be playing in was empty, with a noticeboard on legs. Green felt, with a single bit of paper on the top left. And you couldn't have written anything more apt. Working Group For the Mentally Handicapped Here! We took a picture of me in front of it, then Pat and Harry had the same notice behind them during the show. Said it all.
This was the time I managed to piss off Simon's wife. There's a photo of him and her with me and Pat, and I obviously hadn't said what I said yet, because she's smiling. She's in the christmas jumper Si had worn on stage a few weeks before. He played in a mauve/brown shirt that night.
Harry's was white again, Bernie wore a cream cardigan which looked cooler than it sounds, taking it off as the room got hot. Pat had the leather jacket over a white t-shirt and pale grey tracksuit bottoms tucked into socks, decidedly unstylish by his standards -
But quite sober compared with what he changed into for the second set. For some reason best known to no-one, he reappeared in saggy white trousers and a white shirt with no collar. To look like a doctor in this hospital? No, to impersonate Nehru!
He had one of those indian caps, in black, which he then exchanged for something like a black trilby. And he blacked up! Well, browned up - to look like an asian. Simon thirty years later: 'Oh my, different times!'
But on the night, he smiled like the rest of us. The idea came from Pat's 'fascinating trip to Nepal' - so it was done out of affection. And it was funny, end of. Naturally someone took a set of photos.
I couldn't match that. For some reason, I'd always wanted a fake wet-look leather jacket (my sartorial tastes have rarely been up to italian standards), and I eventually found one in Soho. Cheap looking thing, but I honestly believed it went well over a white shirt and black tie.
I always say I've been mildly eccentric all my life, usually not in good ways but generally harmless.In those days, I took to wearing my belt buckle slightly to the left. Not to look different; it felt more comfortable. A girlfriend put me straight for a while, then I solved everything by never wearing a belt again.
There's a lot of photos from that night. People are dancing, the organisers didn't regret hiring us, and we look as if we're enjoying ourselves. Even though the set had changed for the worse again.
A lot of old favourites disappeared, replaced by things like Brown-eyed Handsome Man, which we shouldn't have played at all, let alone in both sets. Blue Blood Blues was my rewrite of Live with me, Simon's pick. A Creedence song called It came out of the Sky, which is satirical and rocks full pelt, with guitar for Pat to get his teeth into and a pace that means you can only talk the lyrics, which suited me. But it was hard to dance to, I seem to remember
If I had anything at all as a singer, it was the ability to remember words sung at speed. The Creedence track, plus Roll Over Beethoven - and yet another Chuck Berry song we added, Too Much Monkey Business, which is precisely about rattling out a lot of words in a short space of time. I could do that, and it stops and starts like other Berry songs: Carol, which we played that night, and Around and Around, which we'd dropped, thank god. But Monkey Business wasn't an improvement on anything.
We also kept the second version of the pope song (mentally handicapped group, alright), and added something called One More Try, yet another early Stones song and not a good one. Hard-Headed Woman was a mistake too. Again, stop and start, but an Elvis song not suited to us, especially me.
We did get one new number right. Even the new lyrics. For once, in my opinion, I didn't change them for the worse.
Bernie found a J Geils number called Hard Drivin' Man, and I changed the narrative to the story of High Street Ken, who philandered his way round London. Obvious puns on the names of tube stations, but it was a laugh and doesn't embarrass me now.
Likes to do things Queensway
He's got a Cockfosters touch
Knows his way round the Oval -
But Seven Sisters can be too much!
Yup, I still like it. People danced, too.
That was mainly because we kept enough of the good Chuck Berry numbers. Roll Over Beethoven and Little Queenie, then the usual extended version of Let it rock followed by an endless Johnny B Goode, always the best two to end on.
We should've stuck to tracks like that. Things that worked. That's what we did at Oxford, same set over and over. I presume the musicians amongst us wanted to try different things, but if we carried on at all, it still had to be as a dance band - and we ended up playing too many numbers you couldn't move to. After leaving Oxford, we just weren't focussed any more.
Still, there were a lot of fun gigs. Here at Chelmsford, I met a girl who was interested in seeing me again. Trim and attractive, white trousers black top. But she was married and couldn't get to London without suspicion. A pity, because there was something there.
Round about 2020, Simon Horton drove past the entrance to the hospital, 'and the first thing that came to mind was...that atrocious band!'
*
The month before Chelmsford Hospital, March 1981, we played twice. One gig led to the other - though that was everyone's fault.
*
I used to write a lot of articles for When Saturday Comes, the football fanzine. One of those was about a World Cup qualifier at Wembley. Two years before that, I'd had people there turning round at the sound of my voice. This time I couldn't hear myself above the chanting, which meant I must've sung in tune. The article even mentioned me losing the sing-off at school.
By the end of the piece, I was proclaiming 'The rock band I fronted played at the ICA and the Almeida'. That was cheating, of course. I was intimating this was a successful band. I didn't specify that the ICA was a members' party I invited us to - and the Almeida Theatre was rubble at the time!
That was a private event too. Harry had a friend who ran a wine bar in Covent Garden. We had a couple of mellow evenings there. Then this guy moved on to renovating the Almeida, in Islington, which had been derelict since the early Seventies. On 14 March 1981, it was still a building site. The perfect setting for us.
We were probably marking Harry's latest birthday. He'd certainly dressed up for the occasion. Baggy black suit over a white shirt with its collar over the edge of the jacket. He even had a personal dresser. There's a photo of a girl helping him with his braces.
For our last few outings, our guitarists hadn't made an effort with their stage apparel, which was unlike them, another sign that we weren't for real any more. But this time Patrick matched Harry with a suit, a purple-brown number with a tie a shade lighter.
The rest of us were relatively understated. Simon had the scandinavian sweater his wife borrowed at the hospital, Bernie dark jeans and a black sweater. And I presume he travelled from Oxford with a brown leather jacket, because that's what I had on.
I'd borrowed two of Bernie's jackets over the years, and it looks like I did the same at the Almeida, because the sleeves on this leather job came down to just below my elbows! The bottom of it barely touched my waist. Thought it looked OK at the time, but the photos are unwelcome proof.
I took it off after a while. Underneath, a plain black t-shirt and jeans a size too tight as usual. Not a great look, but it didn't matter. I performed alright, apparently.
I had a girlfriend with me, a pal of someone I was sharing a house with, just up the road in Highbury. I told them both my voice was terrible. Result being that the girlfriend was scared stiff! She thought I was about to embarrass myself in public. I told her I'd been doing that for years, so no need to worry. She watched the start of the gig from the back of the hall!
But she moved further forward before long. We sounded good, she said - and the lead singer had genuine stage presence. Christ. No-one had told me that before.
So we did alright - better than Chelmsford - because yet again we were among friends. Harry's crew and a lot of Patrick's, the usual crowd plus a number of people who knew us but hadn't seen us on stage before.
As I say, the theatre was under construction. The stage was safe enough, but the walls were a patchwork of pale plaster and bare brickwork. Ideal for a punky rock party. Well dressed people dancing on a dusty wooden floor.
It's the only gig with a missing set list. I collected everything about the band, but this escaped me. We had a second mike stand for a change, and Patrick sang backing vocals, which helped the sound and the attack. We premiered the J Geils track, and it rocked. I got a relieved hug from the girlfriend.
A really good evening, then. There was a fair bit of it left after we came off, and I'm standing outside with a glass of something. Bernie's there, I think, plus Pat or Harry - and a pair of brothers. The two of them were about to make a mistake I tried to talk them out of.
*
Ceroc is a french version of rock 'roll dancing, a kind of formal jiving. I witnessed it at Blond Steve's first wedding in Paris, and it looked slick but a bit unemotional to me, rock by numbers. One of the brothers standing around outside the Almeida ran the first ceroc club in London. James something, I think. He was interested in hiring us for one of his dances. I told him we were the last thing he needed!
Ceroc prefers songs with a regular rock rhythm, so people can practice the steps without having to change too much. He proved my point by saying his club's ideal track was Blondie's Sunday Girl. I stated the obvious by saying we didn't play Sunday Girl - and we weren't going to be learning it any time soon.
Listen, I said. You saw us in there. The audience were all people who know us. They've had a drink, so they'll dance to anything. They don't care if their steps aren't just so. You don't need an amateur band. You need a record player.
But his brother wouldn't let it lie.
He knew Ashley Goodall, who was there that night. This was the second time Ash had seen us live: he'd performed at the Song Contest in 1977. Now he was working as an AR man for a record company. He told James's brother we might have a chance in the business if we rehearsed more and wrote our own stuff. But you can say that about any band, so he was just being polite, which was nice of him.
This James guy had decided a live band would make a change for his club. Fine, I said. But not a band like ours. You need professionals, who can keep a beat going.
Instead his brother tells him he has to hire us. Come on, you know they're great.
No we're not, I insist. You won't be able to jive to what we do. You've heard us.
But I can't talk them out of it. James invites me and Pat round to his flat. Knightsbridge, I think. An area of London to match his accent.
He used it to berate his own people. His club, he said, was made up of complete hoorays. I want you to get up there and absolutely smash them!
He was so animated it prompted a 'Steady on!' from Patrick. But we said yes in the end. We had our reservations, and the £50 he offered wasn't a deal breaker. But the venue was.
Bernie, I said on the phone. This could be the best thing we've done.
I said that to persuade him to play. He was going to be in Jersey for work, and we'd need him to fly back that afternoon.
When I said it could be the best, I meant the place, not the gig. Bernie didn't go to Jersey after all, so he appreciated the venue too. I'd had a look round and it was pretty fucking splendid.
Porchester Hall is in Bayswater. I presume it was a victorian ballroom or theatre, like Borocourt only infinitely more grand.
The stage was raised and deep, with big wooden panels on the back wall. On the sides of the main room, rows of wooden arches with engraved panels above, below another line of arches. A carved ceiling, big chandeliers, ornate wall lights. The wooden floor had age and polish. I looked into holding my wedding reception there, but it lacked some amenities and looked a bit tatty close up. Meanwhile, here on Tuesday 24 March 1981, the right band with the right audience, in a place like this...
But it was me who was right. They needed a cassette player or a disco, not a band that played stuff you can't jive to. Even for a weekday, there was quite a big crowd. And they did dance to us. Sometimes. But we weren't a good fit.
For a start, they didn't drink any alcohol. Orange squash instead. Not orange juice: squash, like we had when we were kids, for all the world like a school dance for twelve-year-olds.
That matched their attitude to clothing. They had uniforms. The men were all in white, including plimsolls. The girls wore flowing pink dresses (James danced with a particularly slim and pretty blonde). All quite neat - but sexless, not what rock 'n roll was ever meant to be. Sometimes they'd sit on chairs round the edge watching a few of them practising their steps.
Still, whatever my views on their way of doing things, we should've adapted our set to suit them. Played an extra long version of Let it rock, even let Pat and Harry reprise their instrumental jam from the french club. Anything but the pope song mark two, or the new Elvis, or It came out of the Sky.
But we had no time for rehearsals (this was only ten days after the Almeida), and James knew what he was getting. Though there's a photo in which he looks decidedly unsure about that!
He's dancing with the blonde, and she's got her eyes on the floor. Meanwhile he's watching the stage and beginning to realise his mistake. Told you so, Jimmy.
A lot of the photos make it look good better than it was. A golden glow to a lot of them, such as the one with me running across the stage! Must've been Johnny B Goode, because I always got into that, even if the gig hadn't gone well. At least people are dancing in the background.
Our two guitarists donned the glad rags again. Pat in the brown suit, this time over a flowery shirt with a long oblong collar. Harry had braces, and sunglasses you wear when you go skiing, managing to look cool even in trousers with the zip showing!
As usual, the rest of us dressed down. Me in the same tight jeans and black t-shirt, with a black tracksuit top for a while and a blue-and-white football scarf, not a look to match the surroundings. My clothes sense again.
Bernie had a check shirt over a t-shirt with something on it, Simon a plain white one, so he really wasn't trying. Mind you, it was warm in there, so fair play.
The cerocers jived to some of our stuff, but there are too many shots of the band playing while people sit with their backs to us. Great setting, shame about the gig. We really did warn you, James.
*
Most of our remaining shows were free concerts. Like the very first, at Oxford, they were often the best ones.
On New Year's Day, Saturday 1 Jan 1983, we travelled to Becket's Barn on the Sussex coast, a listed medieval building near Pagham, where I used to go birding in years to come.
When I had that t-shirt printed with 'Milkins Tour', it should've been for this, because it was our second gig of the day. We'd just played at a New Year's Eve party we staged in London. The only other time we did that was at college, driving from Borocourt to the climax at Worcester Gardens.
Today's show was the one when Simon's drumkit nearly fell over because two members of the band were too stoned to stop it, and an arsehole DJ told us he was in showbiz.
I can't blame him for thinking we weren't much good. Still playing things that didn't work, like Hard-headed woman and Shake your money maker, and adding to them with Sea Cruise and Jeanie Jeanie Jeanie, which went back in time, didn't suit us, and nobody danced to.
Instead of trying different things that were crap even in rehearsal, we should've stuck to the old favourites. Making people dance was our main reason for doing this at all. Here we did end with Roll over Beethoven, which was also our usual starter by then, followed by Let it rock and Johnny B Goode - so people got up and it finished alright.
The gig came from another member of Harry's extended family, and she paid us forty quid expenses, which was fine. The invite had a rainbow across the top, with the instruction to dress like one. Most of the partygoers went along with that, but my only concession was a yellow wristband. Otherwise the usual white shirt and black tie.
Bernie wore a tank top, which had been out of fashion for a years! Simon glowers at the camera in a burgundy shirt. But of course Pat and Harry jumped at the chance to dress up.
Harry sported a yellow t-shirt with a red bandana round his neck, but where Patrick found some of his kit I don't know. This time a pair of pink checked trousers with a tie to match, plus a white shirt with small dark diamonds and a pink wash down the front. Did he actually own this kind of stuff? He completed the look with a tinsel tiara on his head. Well, naturally.
*
If Becket's Farm wasn't bad, Battersea was better.
In 1977, one of Patrick's mates had hired us for a party at University College. That was in a crypt. Same again now, Saturday 21 May 1983. We're unloading the gear for a gig at St Mary's Parish Church in Battersea when I look across the river and the tide's out. In the mud, a long way away in bad light: my first ever heron.
I was 28 by then, and you'd think I would've see one before. They're prominent animals. But in the 60s and 70s not many people paid attention to birds. When you went to a river or pond, you'd notice swans and ducks and unidentified gulls, because they came for bread. Herons didn't. And most of us didn't own binoculars. I didn't get into birding for another five years, but I can still picture that heron across the Thames.
The party was in aid of the church's bicentenary appeal, so Pat's friend didn't pay us this time, not even expenses, but that was OK. Three of us lived in London, and Oxford isn't that far. Bernie and Paul (not Simon this time) came down in the same car.
After the Chelsea heron, the gig went really well. A church crypt has great acoustics for rock bands, everyone knew us, and we cooked the place.
Still too many duff songs (Brown-eyed Handsome Man twice, for fucksake), but people were in party mood and danced to everything, as seen in photos. We brought back the donkey song because they knew it from Oxford - and the set was a departure: our 28th gig was the first with no original Stones songs!
A great occasion. Lot of colour snaps, most of them taken by Patrick's brother Johnny, who was a sweet guy.
I was still in shirt and tie, but I ditched the wet-look jacket when I saw Bernie had brought along a mate of his, someone I'd known in college days. I nicked his black biker jacket for the occasion. Blue lining.
Pat dressed down this time, a simple white shirt. Bernie in a cream sleeveless sweater, Paul a blue t-shirt. He's drumming in front of a blackboard, and Harry's had another of his whimsical nights. He chalked instructions on it, including the two set lists.
On the left: '1st awful set'. On the right: '2nd appalling din'! At the top, 'If you can guess what key a number is in - £100,000'. In capital letters, he wrote 'PAY ATTENTION'. Then added the key alongside each track. A for Little Queenie and Carol, C for Six Days on the Road. Question marks next to two others! The three of them were forever forgetting what key something was in. That never concerned me, of course.
Harry really was in a mood. For the second set, he suddenly appeared in a full monseigneur outfit!
At University College, he'd painted a bruise on his face like mine. Then Pat dresses up as Nehru. Now Harry's in a black cassock and biretta, to go with the black guitar. And shades, of course. They're what rock 'n roll clergymen wear. Naturally a lot of photos of him that night.
We started with Roll over Beethoven as usual. It's one of only two Milkins numbers on my ipod. Pat scorches the opening, Paul nails the triplets, and you can hear Bernie's walking bass.
The vocals aren't my worst either. Shouty as always, but confident, and Pat comes in on the final chorus to make the chant work.
Near the end of the night, a surprise when Eamonn McCabe turned up. Beard and christmas jumper to a punk gig, but you can wear what you like when you're Britain's top sports photographer. I'd always liked his work, and Robin's parents bought me a book of his. I looked at that, and the photo of him at our gig, when he died in 2022.
He'd come to meet his girlfriend, but she drove me home that night. I was going to help with packing the gear, but Harry waved me away. He understood these things.
This girl, she'd had a few, so she scraped two parked cars on the way! At my flat, we promptly passed out. But we had our moments before she moved to Bradford to help run the National Photography Museum. Jo Whewell was half chinese and a class act. Hope I've got the spelling right.
*
I owned my own speaker at the time. When I moved into my first flat, early in 1982, a mate of mine from the advertising company was kind enough to drive me over to my dad's house in Reading to pick up my possessions. They amounted to a bed, a hoover, some clothes, and the giant speaker. When we dragged it out of the hire van, curtains twitched across the road. Uh-oh, someone's going to be making some really loud noise.
Instead I sold the speaker to Harry for £150 - though I couldn't rmeember doing it! He had to show me the cheque stub, not because I didn't trust him but because I couldn't believe my memory would let me down like that. Happens all the time as you get old, but I was 27 at the time.
I carried on using that speaker even when I didn't own it any more. At times we'd organise gigs ourselves. We wanted us to play even if other people didn't!
As I say, we found a number of places associated with places of worship. The crypt for my birthday and Harry's, the one at Battersea - and a couple of church halls. One staged our last ever gig, the other one we used twice, starting with a New Year's Eve party.
You always feel a bit uncertain hosting those. You think there must be a hundred others that people can go to. Truth is, there aren't many and everyone's looking for one. And if it's got a rock band...
So on Friday 31 December 1982, we set up in the hall at the Spiritualist Church on Kelvedon Road in Fulham, an unremarkable space with cheap curtains but just the right size for us. As usual, we packed the place with people we knew.
Robin brought a crowd again, a bigger one this time, including his mum, who was stylish as ever. The usual friends of Pat and Harry's, while I dragged in Blond Steve for the second time, and he danced with a recent ex of mine, the marvellous Jo Lumsden, who'd kept my spirits up in the summer. That and Italy winning the World Cup for the first time in 44 years!
Another fun bash, and we dressed accordingly.
I'd been working on adverts for a chocolate bar called Nuts. It came in a yellow wrapper with the name in red. I had a t-shirt made, all yellow with the Nuts logo on the left breast, thought it might look like a comment on the band and its singer. I had the fake black jacket over it till the room got too hot.
Bernie had a tight striped woollen top, a look he then altered with a set of keys on his waistband and a paper hat on his head! Patrick wore a paper hat too, and a t-shirt with a palm tree, while only Simon would've played drums in a brown sweater with four toucans!
Harry, being different again, had a green-blue boiler suit. At one point, he decides to play his guitar downwards, its head on the floor. The photo looks like there's a fire coming up through the ground, as if he's playing his way to hell. What any rock musician wants to do.
On Let it rock, in keeping with the party mood, instead of playing a note on the guitar, Patrick blew a party streamer, to replicate the whistle of the train. A fun touch and typical of him to think of it. There's a classic photo of the two of us either side of Harry, performing a call-and-response on vocals.
Let it rock came into its own that night. It was already the best thing we did, and now we not only played it twice but stretched it right out because everyone kept dancing. Extra verses, and a cool section in the middle, when everything dropped out except the bass and drums, like a long line of freight wagons rumbling past. Genuinely moody and exciting and matching the surroundings: like Pembroke College, the flash makes it look like we played in bright light, but the place was dark as a rock 'n roll cavern.
Just as well we had our usual strong ending - because we still played all the rubbish. After a good start with Roll over Beethoven and Little Queenie, we went into five poor songs in a row, then another five in the second set, including an Eddie Cochrane track in each one. Why we dropped his Summertime Blues and added these two, I'll never understand.
But we saved the day with a second go at Beethoven, followed by Let it rock, the donkey, Johnny B, then Let it rock again as an extended encore. A grand finale which took away the taste of the crap tracks. I never enjoyed any of them - even though I helped choose the bastards!
As a kind of nadir, we played My Old Man's a Dustman. The words are jolly, and the crowd enjoyed it, but fucking hell. What made it worse was Pat saying I sang in tune for a change! Looks like you've found your key. Oh joy. We played it again at our final gig, which showed we really had come to the end.
This was Robin's first Milkins show since my birthday nearly three years earlier. He spent part of it chatting up someone he didn't really fancy, because that's what he did. Over the years, I had to pin him against a wall at a couple of parties for standing between me and a girl I was talking to!
But we were mates since school, and that comes across in the photos.
We've both got what they call strong noses - though I never understood that. There's no such thing as a weak nose. They're not used for lifting things. Prominent noses. Big noses. His mum was jewish egyptian, his dad half native american, I'm italian. Bernie had a considerable conk too. We were forever sparring about them. He once pretended to read an advertising sign along mine: Eat at Joe's Caff! I got my own back by choreographing the rest of the band so they ducked when he turned round! His cigarettes stayed dry in the rain.
On this New Year's Eve, there's a shot of Robin and me linking arms as we drink from paper cups. My snout's already in, his is about to be. When I sent him a copy years later, I titled it Long Nose Point, one of the ferry stops in Sydney Harbour, where I visited him in 1985.
The photos show he always dressed better than me - but he was no improvement as a singer. He'd had that go at the drums, but when I called him up for backing vocals near the end, he admitted afterwards how hard it was, even just chanting 'Go, Johnny, go'. Well it took me a while too. In another shot, we're happily singing Auld Lang Syne with everybody else.
Patrick's invite referred to 'wines and spirits. no ghosts or phantoms'. But it redeemed itself with 'The Atrocious Les Milkins Band - and music'! It pointed out that this was our first gig of the year - on its last day. In fact we hadn't appeared live for 20 months. But the day after, we played at Pagham. Talk about waiting for a bus. Or a freight train.
*
Our other gig at the Spiritualist Church Hall looked like being the last we ever played. And it would've been a good way to go. Much better than the last show of all.
By Saturday 28 September 1985, we hadn't played since April the previous year. So we staged our own party. But we linked it to a good cause, which did alright out of it.
I designed and printed a rough invite, with a photo of David Bowie in his Slim White Duke days, holding a small poster for Live Aid, which took place a couple of months earlier. I called our event Hearing Aid, announced it as our first London gig in two years, and mentioned 'audial-link support' from Dexy's, Los Lobos, Elvis Costello, Stevie Wonder - you get the joke.
I added a line at the end, to remind everyone this was about raising money for people who were starving: 'There will be no food.' Entry was by ticket only, in the form of a cheque made payable to the Band Aid Trust.
And I had some badges made. London used to have a shop for everything. Like the left-handed store in Soho, for scissors and can openers and so on. On Shaftesbury Avenue, near Cambridge Circus, there was a badge shop. That's all it sold. You could buy ready made ones or bring in your own design on a circle of paper and they'd copy it and turn it into badges. It didn't cost a lot, so I walked out with several. White background, red lettering: the L plate and Milkins for Africa. I handed them out on the night but there weren't enough to go round. We drew a good crowd again.
The usual faces, plus a number I don't recognise in the photos. I had my latest girlfriend, a classy solicitor, and a friend of hers. There was also an ex of mine who'd been nervous at the Almeida, some mates of Robin's, one of the girls Pat and I once shared a flat with - and my brother for the first time since my birthday do. He brought a Reading posse: his fiancée, my cousin and her husband - and a proper guitarist. Uh-oh
When I was a kid, my mum and dad used to take in lodgers, like the mexican diving priest. For a while, we had a married couple from Italy. I went to the weddings of their two kids. The son wrote and performed a song for his sister's reception. When he was born, I watched his mum breastfeed him, something I'd never seen before. Now here he was, singing and playing guitar.
The two of them, him and his sister, came to our party tonight. I'm certain he didn't think much of us as a band, but we never cared about that. If you want guitar lessons, check him out. Silv Onofrio. He's a cool guy.
Because it was our own bash, we didn't try very hard sartorially. Call us colourful and relaxed.
Harry had a striped short-sleeved shirt with images back and front, what look like harbour scenes with yachts. Pat's shirt was zigzags of colour, though the trainers and tracksuit bottoms tucked into socks weren't his usual style. Simon a lilac shirt and jeans too short, Bernie a pale shirt and black headless Westone bass which was in his house 37 years later.
Me? I hear you ask so eagerly. Well, my ex took one look. What is that?
I'd just bought a couple of shirts. From a fashion shop in central London (Reiss?). One of them I liked a lot.
At the time, there was a trend for men's shirts with things on them. Not Liberty Print patterns but tigers' heads and suns with faces. In Australia that year, I spotted a shirt and knew it was special even when it was on its side. The entire surface was a primeval swamp with dinosaurs. I'd have bought it except it was a Gaultier and I didn't have the money. I was developing an eye for good gear at last. I joked about swapping the shirt for mine, with its industrial scenes in miniature, but all I got was compliments.
The two shirts I bought in London, my favourite was covered in printed autumn leaves, quite tightly packed so it was essentially red with gaps of white background. A splendid thing. But the colours ran after the first fucking wash, so I had to take it back. Got a refund but I'd rather have had the shirt. I missed it over the years.
The other one was what I wore for the gig tonight. All white, with patterns I can only describe badly. Thin palm-tree crowns in blue, drawn by hand in a japanese watercolour style. The photos would make that clearer if they were less fuzzy (we'd never heard of pixels, but most cameras can't have had many). The shirt wasn't downright bad, but not great, though at least the jeans weren't too tight for once.
Stage garb aside, the evening was a really good one, a satisfying way to end it all. Like our other gig at the same place, the photos are too bright and don't do it justice. In reality, the lights were low and booze in long supply. Just what any band wants.
The set was good, too. One of the best we ever put together. And about fucking time.
For some reason, we kept my Jenny and the Bets. But the rest of the new shit was thrown out. In its place, the old favourites, turning it back into a Stones-and-Chuck-Berry-a-thon. We played Roll over Beethoven and Six days on the Road twice, Little Queenie and Let it rock three times each (!), including a double encore.
Too much of a good thing? No, because it worked. We included Carol and Not Fade Away and even Around and Around, and people knew the donkey song. Sympathy for the Devil was always great to play, especially for an audience that knew us and joined in. My lawyer girlfriend danced the night away.
All this after the event didn't get off to an ideal start.
We had a quick rehearsal on site. Bernie had brought along a mate of his, someone I'd known during the time at Oxford, whose leather jacket I borrowed for a gig. Out of nowhere, Bernie now wants him to play a number on stage with us.
I don't know what a third guitarist is going to add, and it's going to take a bit of practice. But I've nothing against it, though I didn't know he could play at all. Anyway, the pair of them strum along with Pat and Harry for a bit while I'm arranging chairs and mike stands, but it fizzles out. Whereupon Bernie comes over to bend my ear.
Listen. If we're going to do this. If he's going to play with us. We've got to practice properly. Right?
And he's a bit steamed up.
But this is not my fucking business.
It's between him and the guitarists. Just like the very early days, when he wouldn't speak up in rehearsals, he should've been talking to Pat and Harry and not me.
But I took a breath and went over to Patrick. He said he had no problem with someone joining in, though he didn't sound over-enthusiastic. Fuck it, I left them to it, and the other guy didn't play, which was no loss. Sometimes Bernie Cook should've opened his mouth to someone other than me. He ran his own companies, after all.
Meanwhile - and I didn't hear this till 35 years later - Simon thought Harry might've been pissed off with him that night. No idea why. Harry rarely got cheesed off with anyone, and Simon Horton didn't cheese people off. Two cheese-free zones.
The start of the actual gig didn't go too well either. Right at the beginning of the first set, we blasted Beethoven - but instead of dancing as people normally did, the whole room just stood and watched. Ouch, not what you want at all. I'm jumping around and they're just observing. Like my recurring nightmare of singing for a few people in a pub.
Turns out they couldn't hear me at all! So they didn't dance to the music (I said you need a singer). For fear of feedback, I was always turned down quite low, but this time Pat and Bernie overdid it, though Cook would've said it was quality control. They had to fiddle with my volume to the edge of feedback, but it worked out in the end.
Near the end, a sax player came on board. All these years after another one turned us down, someone joined in for the last seven tracks. I didn't think we needed him, but he was a mate of Patrick's, so OK (though it probably fed Bernie's resentment). And there's sax on the studio versions of Brown Sugar and Honky Tonk Women.
It really was a Stones evening. I mean, Brown Sugar on top of everything else? But we all liked it despite the lyrics, especially Harry. At Dingwalls, I bought a bootleg cassette with a Stones version using a slide guitar. Tonight Harry played it with a bottleneck, the top of an actual glass bottle. Fun for him and a good noise. It's the song we ended on, though we knew we'd be doing an encore.
Let it rock had replaced Johnny B Goode as our finisher, and each of the three versions we played tonight was longer than the last one and not long enough. People would've been happy to dance to it till dawn.
When things went right like that, you could see the relaxation on the band's faces. Pat and Harry grinning, even a photo of Simon smiling. For a cheerful laid-back character, he could look grim behind the drums sometimes, though that was just concentration. And I'm singing full throttle because things are going well.
So our farewell appearance ended well - and not just for us. We raised £428 for Band Aid, so not a bad way to leave the stage.
*
That seemed to be that.
The following month, I started a four-month holiday in Sydney, visiting Robin with the last of my money. No plans for the band to carry on after that.
When I got back to London, I was skint - and fucking freezing.
I'd spent all that time at the height of an australian summer, with shade temperatures touching forty. Within a few weeks there, I was so tanned people didn't recognise me. The white swimming-trunk line lasted eighteen months. But I came back to a bright crisp northern hemisphere winter - and couldn't cope.
How the fuck do people live up here? Why did anyone migrate this far north? I slept under two duvets for the first week. Then started several years on and off the dole. Thank christ I owned my own place - though social security paid only the interest on the mortgage, so there were days when I didn't eat much.
Hey, just like being a student.
*
Same as our last gig at Oxford, we didn't formally announce our retirement as a band. We just stopped playing. Three years went by.
*
Pat Slade's wife had been married before.
She had two girls from that first marriage. One of them was born with cystic fibrosis.
That condition doesn't come with high life expectancy. But she's still with us in her deep forties, happily married with a kid and a new drug which revolutionised her life. I think about her quite a bit. I knew her mum would laugh when I said no-one should have an illness with my initials.
In late '88, Cath decides to raise some funds for research into CF. So our last two gigs made money for good causes. But apart from that, this final one was a poor way to bow out. We really could've done without it.
Pat and Cath found yet another church hall, the Ascension in Lavender Hill, and we made our way there on 3 December 1988. Meal in a caff beforehand, which was probably the highlight of the day!
On paper, the gig itself had everything going for it.
Again everyone went way back with us. And there was a piano at last. Harry had to wait till our 32nd show to play one on stage!
Another first at the last: someone made a video. But there was a full PA for once, so you could hear me properly, and there's only a few people I'd wish that on. They offered me a DVD, but no thanks, I'd already listened!
Even as a silent film, it wouldn't have been great. For a laugh, Rosie had given me a perm, which was still growing out, so I looked like I sounded. And none of us tried hard with the stage clobber.
Above all, we didn't put our heart and soul into the music. The set was good. Still the useless Jenny and the Bets, and we brought back My old man's a Dustman, which sounded really horrible on the video - but the rest was what we usually did well, i.e. Chuck Berry and the Stones, plus Harry's devilish song.
We began with a long slow start to Little Queenie, Harry playing the intro on his own while the rest of us came on stage one by one, a nice touch of theatre, like the Oxford Song Contest. And we ended with a barrage: Let it rock, our winning donkey, Johnny B Goode, Honky Tonk Women, Brown Sugar, Beethoven, then Let it rock again for the encore. On any other day...
But it had been a long time since it meant anything. The sax player was there again, and this time Bernie succeeded in bringing in a guitarist, one who could actually play. Meanwhile Cath did some backing vocals, and her brother even sang a folk song on his own, something I would never have allowed in our early days.
It wasn't just us any more, so you're no longer a gang. The mad unfeasible glory days of college were long gone.
Rosie drove over from Stockwell, but she couldn't find the place on the map, so she never saw us play. Our drummer Simon chuckled at that when she drove us somewhere, and I told her she was lucky, but it upset her quite a bit. That kind of evening.
Before the encore, I introduced the band for the last time, with kind words about all of them. Patrick responded by announcing I added the atrocious element. Would've been kinder to say I put the band together in the first place, but I can't claim he was wrong!
*
Even then we weren't entirely done.
I resurrected us when we were old. Though not for an entire gig.
When I finally got married, in October 2007, I wanted people to join in, to do stuff. I call it an italian thing, though it must happen everywhere. At italian weddings, family and guests provide things or perform.
Usually this means cooking. The womenfolk (traditionally it's invariably been women) make pasta dishes and salads and desserts or arrange flowers.
We did hire a catering company. Yummarooney, run by Jeremy Gibson, who valued his work so much he threatened to pull out in shame when we found a stray bone in his lamb curry! I do like an artist. I talked him round because he was just right for us. Not expensive and very good. Part of my wedding speech: 'I've been dreaming of his thai curry for months. And it's made an old vegan very happy If it's made any of you old happies very vegan, all the better.' Well it got a laugh on the day.
But italian man shall not live by caterers alone. I asked my sister to bake the wedding cake and my cousin to decorate it. Both did a great job.
Then I looked at other talents.
My wife's dad played the piano. I swear he had four children just so they could form a string quartet to accompany him! She played cello (I've mentioned the Kinks video), her sisters the violin, her brother a viola.
By the time of our wedding, the brother had a quartet of his own. I asked him to plan a string version of Jumpin' Jack Flash, which came out well. And I fancied having something composed for the occasion.
My niece, my sister's girl, was already a very good singer-songwriter in her early teens. She had a sweet voice, but one of my cousins had a daughter of the same age whose larynx could fill an auditorium. I asked the niece to write a song for the other one to sing at the wedding. Easier suggested than done.
One lived in Reading, my home town, the other in east London. But that shouldn't have been a problem. An adventure, in fact. No, I was told you can't get teenage girls to do something together. Bollocks, of course - and I still think people should've tried harder.
As it turned out, the niece wrote the song and sang it at a piano. When I announced it during the ceremony, one of my mates told me later he'd thought 'Here we go, a nine-year-old with a fucking recorder!' Instead she quietened the room and got the biggest round of applause when I thanked people in my speech. Some of the lyrics may have been written by her dad, my sister's vile husband, but it was a powerful piece.
Still, it meant my cousin's girl didn't get to sing at the wedding, which I regretted. I mentioned her voice in the speech, but that was poor consolation.
*
At the ceremony, one of the wife's friends read out the lyrics to a Cat Stevens song I'd cried to.
And there was another voice I thought we should have...
At my brother's wedding, back in 1986, I look up and see a jazz trio setting up on stage. One of them is the bride's dad. An amiable balding guy in glasses.
I knew he was a good amateur painter. His watercolour of my dad's back garden, all the rows of flowerpots in bloom. I didn't know about the saxophone.
Oh yeh, someone said. John used to be semi-pro.
Well now. Hidden depths.
Just before the trio started playing, he walked up to the microphone.
I've always wanted to play sax at my daughter's wedding. And no-one's going to stop me!
I liked that. So all these years later, I called Pat and Harry.
*
After the Atrocious Milkins finally stopped, Patrick carried on playing guitar. He'd been in a band for a while now, and their name showed they didn't take themselves much more seriously than we did: Bacon Lee Travis. Naturally I wanted him to play at my wedding.
But with John the Sax in mind, and the italian thing, I felt I had to get up and perform too.
After the wedding, one of my best men said I got behind the mike to relive being eighteen. Couldn't have been further from the truth. I'd never been interested in getting back on a stage, not for a moment.
No, I performed because it added to the occasion. People like to see a groom doing that kind of thing. Doesn't matter if he doesn't do it well. But I sang only the one song. The band were there because I wanted them - not, heaven fucking forbid, as backing for me.
So I told Pat to inform them I'd be appearing for one number. With Harry too. Fine by them. Now the worst part. A rehearsal.
*
Incidentally, yes I said 'one of my best men'. I had two. Robin, my oldest friend - and John Murray, twenty years younger than me, met him birding when he was fourteen. I'd been one of the best men at his wedding. He had three! Good speeches all round.
*
Harry came over from Kent, picked me up in west London, then drove us to Bristol. A really good day out, including a drink with Patrick's band after the rehearsal - which I hadn't been looking forward to.
I mean, never mind my dread of singing in front of six people and a dog. This was my tuneless voice in front of accomplished musicians, with no audience.
But it had to be done. We couldn't just jump into a song on the night. Anyway, I was paying for it! Five hundred quid, more than their usual fee. And with the exception of their lead singer, the guys were friendly as well as tolerant.
Again this was going to be Jumpin' Jack Flash, like the string quartet above. All things considered, it's my favourite track. The lyrics are atmospheric and fun to sing, and it's about optimism in the face of hard times.
Have to say the rehearsal didn't start spectacularly well. Their first run-through was way too slow, so I stopped it almost immediately. One of them had a quiet mutter, but the pace had to be right for me or forget it.
I'd sung this live with the band, sometimes with Patrick on backing vocals. Like Honky Tonk Women, the Stones stretch the syllables in the chorus, in this case the word 'alright': 'it's orrrrrrrl raiiiiiit night now'. On both tracks, I chopped it up to hide my deficiency: 'it's all, it's alright, now'. Jagger did it live sometimes.
Patrick sang better than me, so his backing vocals held the note. His lead singer did the same now - and once I started I felt fine, like the sound check for the Song Contest. One of the guys even said the final chant sounded good - though that was because I didn't sing it alone!
It's a simple repetition of the line 'Jumpin' Jack Flash, it's a gas' - though the original recording goes 'Jumpin' Jack Fla - shit's a gas'. No mistaking it. Another tedious drug reference? Whatever, it made us titter when we were kids.
*
At the wedding itself, some of the band's songs weren't dance numbers (the Diggines disco was good for that), but I was right to hire them. The lead singer played sax, and my wife's brother-in-law guested on Patrick's trombone. My father-in-law, in his deep eighties and accustomed to playing chamber music, asked me if it had to be this loud. I thought about it for a moment, then told him you can't play rock 'n roll quietly. It should be even louder!
And Jumpin' Jack Flash? Featuring a guest groom? Well, Dulwich College on Sunday 14 October 2007 wasn't his finest hour. For a start, he didn't have the stage gear he'd planned.
I got married in a very pale green suit with accessories to match. Liberty Print shirt (tiny green apples, since you ask), green suede shoes with a gold buckle (a gift from my first fiancée), pale handkerchief and even green striped socks. I was going to change into something altogether different for the party after the reception.
I didn't go a bundle on the loose white shirt my wife liked me in, but I wore it for her. Forgot to bring my black jeans, though, and some soft shoes. The baggy suit trousers didn't look the part, and the suede shoes have very hard soles, rubbish for dancing. My hamstrings got so tight they gave me violent cramps when I was asleep, so I woke up screaming on my wedding night!
Yes alright, enough of that. Never mind how you looked, Narcissus. How did the actual song go? Your great comeback after nearly twenty years.
Well, it would've helped if I hadn't made another mistake. I should've timed my entrance better.
I meant us to go on near the end of the set, Harry and me, after the band had warmed people up. But I hadn't reckoned on a number guests leaving quite early. Even when a few started saying their goodbyes, I didn't think on my feet and join in earlier. Result being the room wasn't as full as I'd have liked.
I'm not saying that because I wanted the maximum audience for my talents. I'm referring to participation again. A bigger crowd leaves a better memory for people watching a bridegroom doing something they didn't expect of him.
But I'm quibbling too much. It went well enough. And I say that though I've seen the video!
We had one for both our last two gigs. The wedding version was shot by Robert Marshall, a marvellous veteran who covered everything without appearing to.
Unfortunately he caught me dancing! Johnny B Goode again, with the wife of a friend of mine, then Brown Eyed Girl with my own, plus me on stage. But I forgive him.
I was 52 at the time. Harry the same, Patrick almost there. I'm told I was still ageing quite well at the time - but I found fault with just about every move I made during Jumpin' Jack Flash. There again, most people do when they see themselves, or hear their voice on the ansaphone. The video shows some of my mates enjoying me up there. And my wife wasn't embarrassed. Told her mum the girls must've loved me at Oxford. Well, some, I guess. Harry rolled back the years with a pair of shades.
When I got behind the mike, I took it upon myself to introduce the band. I didn't know any of them by name beforehand, so this added a tiny touch of stress to a day when you don't want any at all. Bit embarrassing if you stumble over someone's name in public.
Should someone else have introduced us? To mention the groom? It was my big day after all, and you don't get many of those. But I wanted to be the one to introduce Pat and Harry, called them simply my friends. And I didn't forget any of the other names!
The intro ended with 'This is the song I want at my funeral - when it'll be sung rather better than this.'
Having said that...
One thing I didn't think was too bad - can't believe I'm saying this - was my voice!
I know, I know. After all these thousands of words insisting how crap it's always been. And I'm not suggesting it was actually good that night. But I talked the lyrics as usual, and I was miked down! Not just me, the lead singer too, you can't hear him all that well on the video.
I forgot the chant at the end. It was supposed to happen immediately after the last chorus, but I just moved to the music. When I glance round, the lead singer's making a 'pull me up' gesture with his hands, like he's climbing a rope tied round his neck. But I just smiled and waited while the band went round again. You learn very early that audiences don't notice.
My final performance as a vocalist went OK and added something. Anyway, people have to be kind about a bridegroom with a mike.
Glad two other Milkins were up there with me.
*
Bacon Lee Travis were still playing in the 2020s, deep into their sixties.
Now, you can do that if you play an instrument or sing properly. But someone like me who was only ever a frontman, turning into a pensioner leaping about on stage: imagine.
I never liked watching bands once they grew old. When Cream made a comeback at the Albert Hall, I had a look on TV - but only for five minutes. Didn't want to see how Jack Bruce had turned out. Patrick was at Glastonbury when the Rolling Stones finally played there. I asked what that was like. Great, he said. But I'm glad we were right at the back!
In 2029 I'm in a pub in New Cross, watching our gardener playing bass in a Joy Division tribute band. Not my music, but I went because I knew him, and they were very good. One of the other acts that night had once been a promising punk band, who hadn't signed a recording contract because they didn't want to be ripped off. Good on them - but they weren't worth watching now. Fat men in shorts, looking like a house band in an english pub on the Costa del Sol, affecting a punk attitude in their sixties. What for?
If it hadn't got married, I would've stopped at 33. Only eleven years too late!
*
I say so myself, but my own wedding was the best I ever went to.
Not just me who thought that. People came up and told me. Best food and music and speeches.
Everything about it went right. The weather, even in early October, so the outdoor photos weren't spoiled.
The photos themselves, taken by a friend of the wife's brother, who didn't charge the earth but snapped absolutely everybody.
The video, by Robert Marshall.
The venue.
A public school like Dulwich College was the last place I expected to be married in, but it had all the facilities on the same site, so no ferrying aged relatives from church to reception. And every room was just the right size as well as looking the part. The ceremony itself in a room that felt like a chapel; a reception area with pillars and prosecco, rock band and disco; the huge dining hall. Pat and Harry's dads had both been pupils there.
Both my best men made speeches. Robin was rehearsed and funny but forget to mention what was good about me! John rectified that, telling people what I meant to him and pointing out the number of close friends I had, plus many others 'outside the immediate circle'. I mention that because I then lost touch with most of those guys. That's OK. Groups of men rarely stay together for long. But they were all great while they lasted. And a few are still around.
*
I got the wedding night right, too.
First place I looked at was a quirky B&B not far from the college, run by two gay guys with artistic leanings. Comfortable colourful little room, and I'd have been quite happy there. But the new Mrs enjoyed life on a grander scale.
On our first date, we met in a pub, then have a drink in a bar. More of that in a minute.
When she wants a bite to eat, where does she take her vegan date? A ribs and burger joint! The Texas Lone Star, on a corner of Gloucester Road. I'd been there for a working lunch when I was in advertising. It had a big wooden native american outside, head dress and everything. Closed down a couple of years after she took me.
But the bar left a bigger impression. It's where I pulled back her long curtain of hair for our first kiss. And I remembered the place when thinking about somewhere to stay after the wedding. The bar was attached to a hotel.
Trouble is: it was in Kensington, so I knew it would cost an arm and both legs. And sure enough. I went round there and asked them to show me a room.
It was perfect. Looked like something post-Regency, with a four-poster, antique chairs, and black nude statues in the bathroom! I knew she'd love it. Then I asked how much. Then asked to see another room!
This one was perfectly acceptable. Similar furnishings. A really good room for a weekend in London with your partner. With the added attraction of being half the price of the first one. But I had no choice really.
Money was no object. I'd already paid Robin's mum £150 for her and her boyfriend to find a hotel for the night before the wedding - so I could stay at her flat with my two best men. I'd spent countless evenings there, especially when her husband was still alive, spent the night when Robin was around. All those dinners they cooked: a good hotel was the least I could do. Meanwhile the three of us watched England reach the rugby World Cup Final, ate and drank well, and talked into the small hours.
A hundred and fifty quid wouldn't have got me the second room in the Kensington hotel. And I forked out a lot more for the first one, with the statues round a bath we didn't use! Worth it for the look on her face when we walked in. Complimentary champagne and flowers, of course. And when I told the hotel I was vegan, their chef made his own sausages, a small touch that completed the stay. I used a gym in those days, so I carried her over the threshold of our house!