56. what happened to the unlikely lads
After leaving Oxford in 1977, Les Milkins played for more than a decade. We carried on socialising for many years after that, and we're in touch to this day. The bonds have loosened with age and distance, but no acrimonious break-ups - therefore not a real band any more!
A potted history now. After that, scroll down for a more detailed look, or click on the next chapter.
*
I was best man at Bernie Cook's wedding.
Gives you an idea how we were, even after I left Oxford.
I went back there a lot, but only to visit him. You'd see other graduates staying on after their final year, ghosts unable to tear themselves away to the real world.
I'd take the Oxford Tube bus from Shepherd's Bush to Headington. Cheaper than trains, especially as I didn't have to take the tube to Paddington, and it dropped me off much closer to his house.
He'd left Howard Street by then. A smart cottage instead, a former bakery. We played poker there a number of times. Or we'd just chew the fat like we'd always done.
When he met his wife-to-be, I went round to celebrate his engagement. Pat and Harry came too. The night before the wedding, I got myself drunk instead of him! Sick all morning, but recovered just in time to make the speech, which went well.
In the summer of 1988, Bernie and Janet invited me on holiday to Ilfracombe with their two-year-old daughter. I took binoculars and it turned into my first birding trip, still one for the ages. We found a fish & chip place called Bernies!
In 1990, I cycled (not my strong point) from Reading to his cottage to say goodbye before the three of them went to live in Yorkshire. I didn't see him again for thirty years!
I thought that was my fault. Him not forgiving me for something heinous I'd done. He didn't call even though I stayed in the same flat for another sixteen years and he's still got that phone number to this day. Naturally I assumed he didn't want any more to do with me.
The real reason? He had business worries up there, then he just sort of forgot to call.
I lived in the same flat for another 16 years and he couldn't pick up the phone. Instead we got back in touch (I got back in touch) after three fucking decades. I missed him in that time, the wanker. He forgot.
We've joked about it since, but I'm serious. Thirty years of ups and downs (for both of us) and we didn't talk to each other, good mates though we'd been. And it was all his doing. He should've been a best man at my wedding, I should've seen his kids grow up. I'm genuinely anguished, the unthinking northern prat. He forgot!
Our first phone conversation in all those years lasted three hours. My wife said she'd never heard me laugh so loudly or so much. See what I missed. The dickhead.
You can never have those years back. But in the autumn of 2020, I went up to Harrogate and stayed with him, and it was like we'd never been apart. Went back there again over the years. He'd had three other kids, all grown up by then, and his health wasn't great - so I didn't give him a slap for the lost decades. Must be getting soft.
*
We meant a lot to each other once.
Near the end of our last term, I remember looking across at the rest of the band and thinking: I did that.
I put them together. No exaggeration to say it gave us a purpose and brightened all our lives.
Bernie certainly thought so. For him, it wasn't just that he got to play bass live at last. He says the Atrocious Milkins kickstarted his whole adult life.
'Had you not appeared and kicked me up the arse I would be languishing as a civil servant in the Social Security office or worse.'
Have to say I don't recognise myself in this. Don't remember doing any arse-kicking.
'Through our friendship I was able to mix with successful people.'
I presume this meant me and the other college boys. Blond Steve as well as our guitarists. But we were just good at schoolwork, whereas BS Cook was already on his way to becoming a big player in the computer world, working abroad a lot, setting up his own companies. He would never have 'languished' in any office.
But he insists the band was a launchpad.
'I got to see the ball and you made me kick it and everything since that time has flowed from that. Playing (if that is the word) in the terrifying environment of the Les Milkins Banned has made any challenge in life since a walk in the park!'
'Seriously, it was the first thing worth having that I had ever achieved.'
'Not just the band but everything about that time was a massive turning point and you were central to that and I am hopelessly indebted to you for it.'
You can't buy the feeling you get from hearing that. Makes you worth your place on this earth.
'Which is why I used to let you win at poker!'
Crazy that he should feel any gratitude at all. He was just as important to me.
*
Similar sentiments from Pat Slade.
In 2023 he said he was proud to be my friend. Flattering to hear, you might think - but actions speak louder. Same when Martin Neubert said he loved me, would you believe. Words are cheap.
*
For decades, I counted most of the Oxford crew as pals..
Three from the rock band, plus Steve Sutherland and Martin Neubert. Haven't seen them much in recent years, but their chosen abodes partly explain that. Steve in Paris, Martin in northern Germany, Bernie in Yorkshire, Pat in Bristol. Harry's just up the road in Kent, but my connection to him was always the loosest (and his wife doesn't like me!). As late as 2023, I got back in touch with Simon Horton, who was happy to reminisce, but he's in Norfolk. When you're tired of London, fellas...
But I did visit people over the years, and they came here. So a pretty strong network. And we lasted longer than most.
Peter Taylor, Brian Clough's right-hand man, wrote what I've always thought. Groups of men don't stay united for long. Football teams, political parties, rock bands. Birdwatchers too. I made more than a dozen good friends through that. Saw them all socially as well as twitching, stayed at their places, watched their kids grow. I was best man at one of their weddings, he was best man at mine. I remember looking at three of them in a car and thinking I'm going to know these guys all my life. Haven't seen any of them for years!
But that's OK. We had our time. I made only one friend from school, and only a temporary one from work - but that's normal too. Oxford though, starting in October 1973, provided some long-term confidants as well as chums. It really was a great time to be alive.
*
While they worked in London, I saw a lot of Pat and Harry. Shared a flat with them, then another one with Patrick. Went back to Oxford together for our BA and MA ceremonies. In November 2016, the three of us went back to Oxford on the 40th anniversary of our first gig and visited some old venues.
Sport too. We played tennis at Harry's house and football in various places, including Patrick's school in Pimlico, where we'd shared that basement. Pat and me, we ran in the same Fun Runs.
I went to Patrick's wedding but had to miss Harry's in Ireland because I'd booked a stay on the Isle of Wight for a girlfriend's birthday, They both came to mine. So did Steve and Martin. I went to Steve's wedding in Paris. Both of them!
There was a time when the three of us - Pat and Harry and me - thought we'd spend the Millennium together. Harry had the idea for a big party on an island somewhere. 'Your place is reserved', he told me. In the end, it didn't happen, but that's OK, plans change.
When I visited Pat in Bristol, we saw a punk band in a pub (The Sex Bristols!), and he played in his, the one I hired for my wedding. Patrick played his trombone as well as guitar - and sang. Johnny B Goode, no less.
And I danced and enjoyed watching my mate singing what I'd once sung myself, without wishing for a minute I was doing it again. Milkins was what it was, when it was.
*
Right. That's some basic outlines. Now to colour in. Enjoy.
*
I'm going to start by digressing. There's a shock. Couple of incidents away from the band but to do with music. Call them brushes with fame.
*
A mate of mine I went birding with, his brother wrote songs and sang in pubs. I got a CD of his and put a couple of tracks on an ipod I lost.
Maybe he got the musical talent from their dad.
Peter Crouch the footballer (that's not his dad), me and him are joined at the hip, though his hip's higher than mine. We share the same birthday and I saw him make his league debut.
I lived a couple of streets away from QPR's ground in Loftus Road. The year I moved, 1982, they were in the old Second Division when they lost to my team, Tottenham from the First, in an FA Cup Final replay. The only goal of the game came from a penalty, and QPR deserved to win. My heart bled for them.
In August 2000, I'm at Loftus Road for their opening league match of the season, against Birmingham City. I hardly ever went to any matches there, and I wouldn't have touched this one - if my birding pal hadn't suggested it.
QPR were his team. When they won a play-off for promotion back to the Premiership in 2014, he was right behind the goal when they scored their last-minute winner, and he and his son spent two minutes in each other's arms on the floor of the Wembley stands. Not a picture I dwell on, but I can imagine the joy.
In 2000, QPR-Birmingham was a goalless draw with not much to recommend it. But it did feature a six-foot-seven centre-forward called PJ Crouch.
We'd never seen a footballer that tall before, and he was thin with it, a real bambi. He didn't get any abuse from the away fans, and his touch wasn't bad - but he was weak in the air for a man of his height. You could see why my lot Tottenham had released him, and we didn't think he'd go far. Ten years later, I'm at Wembley watching him score in his last match for England.
As much as anything, my mate asked me along to meet his dad. Roy Austin was a Birmingham City fan, born in the Midlands. A pleasant white-haired man in his mid fifties. But he'd once been something else.
When I was a kid in the 60s, various pop groups came and went after the odd hit. The Overlanders, the Swinging Blue Jeans (there's a name), the Rockin' Berries (there's another).
Buy a Rockin' Berries CD and there's a lot of tracks on it. And a couple of those reached the top ten, especially He's in Town in 1964 (it's in Legend, the Kray film). I was nine at the time, and I remember only their name. But it's a good track, haunting. If you look at the video, the bass player is Roy Austin, my friend's dad.
I didn't talk to Roy about those days, at the match or when we visited his house in the countryside. I had the feeling he wasn’t up for it. And I spared him tales of my own musical prowess. Like a lot of Sixties pop musicians, he wasn't in his band for long. But helluva thing to say you did.
*
Years before that, in 1982, I'm in a nightclub on Piccadilly.
They weren't my thing. I hated disco music and the price of drinks. But a group of people dragged me into this one, and I'm sitting waiting for them to come back off the dance floor when a young middle eastern couple turn to me.
Excuse me. Is that the singer with Queen?
I look over his shoulder - and I see a man with his back to me. One of those singlets that go round your scaps at the back. Instead of the long hair, a short crop - and muscles. Woo, I thought. He's changed.
Yes, that's Freddie Mercury.
His ears prick up, he turns, licks his teeth (he did that a lot), and smiles at me. One of those smiles. It's not me you want, Fred, it's my dad.
My best man used this moment in his speech at my wedding. If things had worked out differently, he said, we'd be celebrating the marriage of Freddi and Freddie!
Queen were just a bunch of showtunes, but Fred didn't deserve to die like that and so soon. Nowadays I'd have gone over and introduced him to that couple.
*
It wasn't the first time I met a famous singer - though she wasn’t yet.
In 1963, we hadn't been in our new house in Caversham very long when a young girl paid a visit, a blonde teenager. She was the daughter of an austrian countess or something, and I've never known why she came to see my mum. She had a dalmatian called Sally, and the three of us went to the park with my brother and sister. I raced the dog and won. It's not very fast, I announced. Well, she said, she's only a puppy. They were both in the local paper one day.
Kid though I was, I thought the girl was very pretty. Her name was Marianne Faithfull, and a few years later she was going out with Mick Jagger. When I met her, she was sixteen. I was eight. You only had to wait for me, Marianne!
It's the only time I ever saw her, but you could say we linked up again at the end. She died in January 2025, on my 70th birthday.
*
Back to boys in the band.
And poker nights chez Cook were always a hoot.
We played for pennies. Literally. Two p stakes. So you never won more than a few quid. But of course you weren't really there for that.
There were always three of us, sometimes four, The third guy was a long-standing mate of Bernie's who lived in Oxford (I thought he might have made him best man instead of me), the one who wanted to play guitar with us once but it didn't happen.
I always felt he was a bit wary of me, though we muddled along. And alcohol and drugs softened some edges.
I had the alcohol, they did the drugs. Reefers that lasted all night while I sipped red vermouth. Not very rock 'n roll, but I've got a sweet tooth. It made for some truly terrible poker!
I remember one hand in particular, when I was bluffing an ace in the hole, admitted it on the last card, then realised there was another one to come! But the other guy insisted I take the money, because he thought he'd lost!
Narcotics aren't good for staying in control. One night, when they played somewhere else without me, Bernie smoked so much he had trouble driving home in the small hours. The road kept rushing up to meet him, he kept slowing down, it kept speeding up -
'Then I looked at the speedometer. I was doing seven miles an hour!'
No wonder they turn a blind eye to cannabis in prison. The whole word would be a gentler place.
But dope comes with other effects.
One night we'd been playing for hours without a break. So I stretched my arms above my head and my legs under the table. And blew Bernie's mind.
Hey. What are you doing?
What?
You touched my foot.
Did I? I'm stretching my legs. We've been sitting here all night.
No no no, what are you up to?
Bernard -
You're trying to psych me out.
By touching your foot? Get a grip -
Nah nah nah. He's trying to psych me out.
And he had to leave the table and lie down on the sofa!
I'd heard that dope can make you paranoid. Now I'm seeing some evidence. The other guy implores Bernie to come back to the table, but he needs to clear his head. Took him twenty minutes to start playing again. Oh well, we needed a break.
Usually we got one by eating. Bernie made his cauliflower cheeses, or the baked potatoes that looked raw when they came out of the microwave. Plus more dope and drink. Really good nights that didn't stop till he went back to Yorkshire.
I've played poker since. Maybe I might've won a bit more if I'd trodden on some toes.
*
Meanwhile, back in London...
Within a few weeks of moving there, I was sharing a flat with Pat and Harry. If you can call it that. What a dump. What a great place to start.
My first pad in London was a bedsit. There were loads of those at the time. A small room with a communal bathroom and toilet. The toilet had one of those push-in light switches which sprang back on itself and switched off. This one lasted thirty seconds, so you had to be ready to crap in the dark. But the place was a quick tube ride to work, and my everything I owned fitted into that one room.
I'd been there a month when Patrick asked if I'd join him in renting a basement in Pimlico. Yeh, good idea. Pat was always easy to be around - and I'd be paying a much lower rent. The bedsit was only twelve quid a week, but the Pimlico basement was ten pounds less! Seriously.
There's a reason for that. It was a total dive. The owners were refurbishing the upstairs floors, leaving the basement till last. They wanted it occupied to deter squatters, otherwise they wouldn't have offered such a place to anyone.
It was dusty, there was no heating, and the rooms were so damp my books came out corrugated! The back window was cracked in about ten places (the photo of the three of us in front of it is one of my prized possessions). One night it blew in and we pieced it together with sellotape. The place must've had a bathroom, but I'm glad I don't remember it.
There was only one power point in the entire place, so we had to cook on the floor in the main room, a small flat stove. One day I trod on our only frying pan. It was full of hot oil and I had bare feet, so I was off work for two weeks!
The frying pan was mine, and the two bastards ruined it. All they ever cooked was white pasta. They'd boil an entire packet of conciglie, then stir it into some oil in the pan and drown it with ketchup, the public school barbarians. Ketchup! Fucking anathema for an italian. One night, they left the pan on the stove so long it burned not only my left ankle but itself. Had to throw it out, the philistines. They were ideal flatmates.
My fortnight off work wasn't bad at all - even though it was winter and the place was freezing. The main room had an old grate, and we burned whatever we could find - though lino was a combustible material too far. With all the oil in it, it went up really well - but we had to abandon the plan when a neighbour knocked to tell us black fumes were pouring into the sky - in a smoke-free zone!
So we brought in a portable gas fire, with those blue bombs, and I was pretty snug during my enforced idleness. Partly because I had a red-blooded new girlfriend (the blonde who took the window photo), and she didn't mind slumming it even though her dad owned a fourteen-bedroom mansion. I'd had other girls to stay, and they thought it was grunge cool. Well it was the punk era and we were young.
When the foot got better, I jogged round Vincent Square at night. Not inside, of course. Heaven forbid. Westminster School owned it, the plutocratic bastards, so plebs like me had to stay on the pavement outside. Good, because it was much better for footholds than the grass inside, and there was never any traffic.
We loved that basement. It was a dump but it was our dump. The state it was in meant we could kick the shit out of it. We had a couple of good parties down there. At one of them, someone asked if I'd mind annoying the neighbours by playing Up Around the Bend by Creedence at top volume. Twice. Be my guest.
And it was an ideal home for three...
Pat and I were paying our pound a week each. When Harry visited one day, he liked the location (easy for all of us to get to work) and the chance of saving a few quid. So he moved in. He brought a camp bed and slept in the main room with Patrick. I'd taken the smaller bedroom so Pat could have more space - but once Harry came in, I did better out of the deal.
Now, all three of us had well-paid jobs. I was in advertising, Harry the money world, with Lloyd's I think, Patrick making super-conducting magnets for universities (our band rehearsed at his place of work, where we overdosed on helium). We could've lived in smarter flats. But none of us gave a toss about the surroundings if they saved us money. In the months we were there, we each paid 67p a week! Hard to know why they charged us at all.
*
Harry Hatfield was always good with money. Meaning he didn't spend much of it! The three of us paid that miniscule rent in Pimlico, and I used to tell him he saved on clothes. At Oxford, we'd both bought revolutionary new shoes which were supposedly good for your feet, but I gave mine up because they were custard yellow whereas he kept his brown pair for years. Cheaper than buying new ones! Well he was more interested in bricks and mortar - and he had the big salary and minimal outgoings for that.
After buying a semi near Clapham Common, he saved enough for the other half of the property. Then he knocked through, leaving a narrow space with an arch, and lived in the whole house for a while, with friends and relatives (he had a lot of relatives) as lodgers. Then he refilled the hole, sold the place as two separate dwellings, and made enough to move into an old parsonage in rural Kent, complete with historical ruins. The place cost half a million, a massive price in those days.
The three of us had those good times in the Pimlico pit, and in the nice house in Clapham. Glass of something in front of a log fire, with Doré's Don Quixote engravings on the walls and us setting the world to rights, e.g. planning how to keep the vocals down at the next gig!
*
Harry's parents had a big house in Kent. They needed it for their seven kids! The grounds had room for a grass tennis court, my idea of heaven as a teenager. We had a couple of fun parties there. Three-a-side matches in between pimms. I remember pushing an old roller to whiten the lines. Harry had a big serve when he connected (his toss was a lot higher than mine). Always a lot of girls at Hatfield bashes.
That included football. The matches themselves, on full-size picthes with goals, were part of a picnic with liquid refreshments. I can still picture two goals I scored. One I knocked the ball wide to the right, where Harry showed unexpected speed to race the length of the field before squaring to me after I'd kept pace. The other, he put me through the middle, and I had to swerve to beat a two-footed sliding tackle by the goalkeeper, a blonde girl in a white dress!
Harry's dad was a well-known astronomer, first good map of the moon and so on. He showed it to us through his huge telescope in the garden. White-haired character with a touch of the Patrick Moores. The unexploded bomb in Genoa Cathedral, which I visited in 1998, was dropped there by him!
I played quite a bit of football with Patrick too, at the school where he started teaching (couldn't keep away from Pimlico!). Activities involving a ball weren't Pat's thing, but his football improved - and anyway he and Harry were better at outdoor pursuits. They went rowing at Oxford (maybe that's how they met) and windsurfing and hiking elsewhere
Naturally they both jumped out of an aeroplane.
The RAF were doing cheap deals, so Pat and Harry spent a weekend with parachutes on. Had a blast, too. As you float down, Harry said, you never want it to end. They couldn't wait for the second jump.
And the first? What's it like when you leave the plane? Oh, he said breezily, you think you're going to die! That was enough for me. I kept my feet on the ground. It's what they're for.
All these activities kept them seriously fit. I played various sports and went jogging, but I struggled when I trained with Patrick for a couple of Fun Runs in Hyde Park. We used the streets round his flat in Mortlake, crossing the bridges, and he left me behind. So it's a proud boast of mine that I was faster than him in the 1985 Run ('You must have run like fuck!'), though not the following year. There are photos of both events.
We played some social cricket too. On a green in a village in Kent.
Again, it wasn't really Patrick's scene, and I can't remember whether Harry was a fast bowler or good batsman. He had to stand behind me when I kept wicket for the only time in my life!
One game was spoiled by rain. There's a photo of me and Eddie Knox, who was blamed for our Les Milkins con at college, both of us soaked to the skin.
Another match had better weather, and I even made my highest ever score, a whopping 23 not out (laugh, but my batting average as captain of the school juniors was under two!) - and even then only because you had to rotate your bowlers so most people got a go. I went in at number nine and faced a sixty-year-old spinner! Socially they were good days too.
*
As I say, the three of us went back to Oxford to commemorate our first gig. A major event, but I'll save it till the end of this section. Chronological integrity, you know.
*
Pat and Harry had a habit of thinking outside the box, in the band and out.
In the late Seventies and beyond, there was still some waste land in central London. What persuaded one of them to go prospecting behind some advertising hoardings one day, I never found out - but they discovered an area of rough grass right above the river close to Vauxhall Bridge. Unused for so long that gorse bushes grow big. Every summer for a number of years, the pair of them organised a party, bonfire and everything. We're in photos.
I met some offbeat characters there. Patrick's australian girlfriend, and a balding eccentric who used to cycle around looking for roadkill he could take home and cook! He wrote an article called Meals from Wheels! Suffered a bit from morons insulting him about his pastime, which was harmless and useful. Mind you, not something I ever fancied.The first time I met him, he said he had the head of a muntjac deer in his panier! Did I want to see it? No, that's fine, thanks.
One night I'm looking down at the shoreline, and I see there's a lot of mud, so the tide's out. There's a couple of young frenchmen down there, with Patrick's wife Cath, and I go down the steps to have a look. Next thing I know, we've decided the water level's so low we might be able to walk across the whole river. So we strip down to our underwear and set off. It was a summer night.
We got nearly halfway - then lay back and floated for a while. It was warm and we were drunk. When we eventually roll over to swim back, we realise we're a couple of hundred yards downstream and heading for the Thames Barrier, the current was that strong. We scrambled back to shore, then padded back along the Embankment, semi-nude and giggling, and dried ourselves by the fire. My girlfriend at the time was so annoyed with me she went home! Left me my clothes, thank god.
I enjoyed the moment so much I put it in my next novel, except that the people in it run around naked. You can do that with fiction.
That wasn't the only time Pat and Harry nearly got me killed!
*
They had their mad side, and they rocked. But essentially these were upper middle class boys from families with posh houses in the country. Property was cheap after the last war, so if you had any money you could buy a big one and watch it shoot up in value.
So we're talking decent chaps of a certain class. Butter wouldn't melt. When they organised piss-ups, they weren't down the local boozer.
Pat phoned me. We're having a cocktail party.
Oh yeh? What should I bring?
Any ingredient.
I turned up with a bottle of something blue and sweet and put it on the kitchen counter with the dozens already there. Patrick had a small booklet on cocktails. He read them out while other people made them. Soon there were thirty glasses on the counter. Everyone had to sip every one.
Within an hour, I was aware I was slurring my speech. Hey, Harry, I'm slurring my speech! He was driving, so he was about the only one who didn't get wrecked out of his mind. He took me home. Thanks, Harry. Hey look, I'm slurring my speech! Sleep well, he said.
I nearly slept for ever. And I heard of someone who did.
*
Years after this, one of my neighbours died. An irish builder called Liam. Friendly guy: we'd talk about football when we passed on the pavement, and I put some work his way. His wife was nice too. One day I asked her how long they'd been living in the street.
Twenty-five years, she said.
I've been here twenty. What's your name?
She laughed. That's London for you. You live that close but stay that private. My name's Pat, she said. First irish woman I knew with that name.
I'm Cris.
Oh god, she goes. I've been calling you Alan!
I know. That's London for you.
After many years, you could see Liam was drinking more heavily, and it contributed to his death. When he got ill, I was told his body wasn't strong enough to fight back. He was in his fifties.
They held a wake for him. Ironically, in the pub where he became a serious drinker, the White Horse on Uxbridge Road. I went out of respect, had a cider, offered my condolences to his two sons, and walked home.
That night, a lot of people drank a lot of beer. One of those was a friend of Liam's sons. He went home and crashed out. When his mum went up to call him in the morning, he was still spark out, so she left him to keep sleeping it off while she went to work. When she came back, she discovered he'd died in the night, choking on his own vomit. He may still have been a teenager.
Very sad story - and I nearly staged a repeat after Patrick's party.
Soon as I woke up in the morning, I could already smell sick, which was odd because I didn't feel like throwing up. That's because I already had. On the other pillow next to me, the classic pizza of puke. If I'd been lying on my back...another rock star goes out like Jimi Hendrix.
I binned the entire pillow just before Patrick phoned me. Do you feel as bad as I do?
Worse. I've already been sick.
Me too, he groaned. You could feel his headache from here.
*
The three of us collected our university degrees together. Both of them.
In Oxford, the degree ceremony was held at the Sheldonian Theatre on Broad Street. A grand building (designed by Christopher Wren), though what you remember about the exterior is the row of giant stone heads round the outside, bearded emperors or something, ugly and badly carved.
Inside, you sit in your long ermine-trim gowns (short ones as an undergraduate, unless you had a scholarship) and listen to someone make a quick speech. Then you go up and get your degree. Except you don't.
It wasn't like other universities. There you were announced one by one, and got your individual applause as you went up on the stage and received a rolled-up diploma. Happened to my brother and his wife-to-be at London University.
Not like that in the Sheldonian. Someone read out everyone's names in their latin form, then we went outside, in a single big group, after which the main doors opened and we all trooped back in to communal applause. Nothing was handed to you. In fact I've never seen a piece of paper proving I got a degree.
The whole ceremony was barely worthy of the name, perfunctory and too quick, no real sense of occasion. This was Oxford University, for fucksake. Some individual applause and a rolled-up diploma was the least you expect.
Patrick was especially unimpressed. Well that was pretty shit.
I had to agree, but my dad was happy enough. This was a massive thing for him. Little italian man of peasant stock, his son getting an Oxford degree. My brother and his future wife were there too. So I was OK with the day.
But Pat Slade wouldn't let it go. That was rubbish. Let's go round again!
What? Nobody does that.
But we did. We went back outside, tagged on to the next group, and walked through the theatre a second time. Naturally none of the dons had a clue who we were.
A jolly wheeze that livened up the day. My dad couldn't stop chuckling.
Until he saw the photos.
I took one, my brother most of the rest, and they were out of focus. Not our fault: a lot of cheap cameras in those days, and this was a normal result. But my dad wanted better shots, so he asked if we could ring up and do the ceremony again! Er, that's not how it works.
Except it does. All you have to do is wait four years.
A part of the Oxford degree system is a real joke, a laughing stock.
You get your BA after three years, four if you're a languages student and take a year abroad. In most universities, an MA is an upgrade, requires you sitting an additional exam. But at Oxford you're given one 21 terms from the day you matriculate, officially enrol as a student. So all you have to do is stay alive for seven years! Everyone knows an Oxford MA is a bogus qualification.
When the time came round, my dad jumped at the chance of another go at ceremonial photos, so we went back to the Sheldonian, the same crew of me, my brother and his wife, Pat and Harry, plus one of my aunts.
Much the same rigmarole as before. We recognised some guys we'd known at college, there to pick up their MSCs, which they'd sat an exam for. Both sets had a chuckle about scientists having to actually work for their Masters. I presume that included Patrick, who had a physics degree.
This time we knelt down, four at time, in front of a line of dons or whatever they were, and one of them tapped us on the head with a bible. I kid you not. The four of us were all from the same year at Worcester: me, Pat, Harry, and Neil Munro, a mate of theirs we played cricket with.
Another fun day out - even though my group didn't eat too well. Pat and Harry had lunch with one of the dons in college, same room where we'd held our finals dinner. I would've liked that, but I was with family, so I suggested St Michael's pizza parlour, which had been great in our student days. This time, though, they fried their pizzas! The technique's apparently older than ovens, but fuck that, these were just plain wrong.
My brother had a posh camera this time, a hobby of his by then. But he must've still been learning how to operate it, because the photos turned out blurred again!
class reunion
Went to a few gigs with Patrick in London. Harry came to a couple, Bernie to one.
Memphis Slim at Dingwall's wasn't my thing, though Harry enjoyed the piano playing. Taj Mahal was more like it, with all four of us. The Stones at Wembley with Patrick.
And a band had a reunion.
In November 2016, it dawned on me that an anniversary was coming up. One that ends in the figure 0, so you have to celebrate it.
Forty years earlier, the Atrocious Les Milkins Band had played their first ever gig. So I rang around.
On the 27th of the month, there were no trains running from Paddington to Oxford, the route I'd taken for decades, through my home town Reading. Instead I had to set off from Marylebone. Oxford had a new station by now.
It opened just the year before. Oxford Parkway, an uninteresting place out of town. From there, a bus to the real station on the edge of the city centre.
Bernie hadn't been in touch for years, and I hadn't seen Harry for a while, so I thought it might be just me and Pat for the day, which would've been fine. But when I got to the proper station, Harry was already there, then Patrick. Good. It's better to have a quorum!
First port of call: our old college, which is on the way into town. We looked in the dining hall, where we'd played as a band (and dined!). The porters didn't want people looking in there, which was just silly so fuck that.
We had a team photo taken outside by someone passing by, with the grass quad behind us and Harry holding a copy of a local paper. Pat had aged the best, me the worst (the usual weight problem).
From there, we went through a tunnel to the gardens where we'd played our best gig. No, I'll say it: our greatest gig. My website, my choice of words. Broad daylight today, but we pictured the scene that night.
Then lunch at Brown's, a favourite place all those years ago and very good again, even for a vegan. We all felt - I don't know - expansive.
We stayed all afternoon, planning to spend the early evening in a pub where we'd had a residency. But what I really wanted, and thought we couldn't have, was a look at the place where we'd had a series of firsts. Rehearsals, playing live, me using a microphone.
It's one thing re-visiting a college dining hall or a pub, but 88 Banbury Road was a private house. Even assuming there's anyone at home, you can't just turn up and ask to be let in. So we did.
It's a big house, very tall, still divided into flats. We rang the bell for the basement.
I had enough nous to let Patrick do the talking. Harry would've been fine too. That quiet public school charm.
Uh hello, says Pat. Sorry to bother you. I know this is a strange request, but...
He proceeds to explain that we're three sixty-year-old men, quite harmless, and we once played live in your flat, etcetera.
An american voice comes through the intercom. Come round to the back door. And if I think you look respectable, I'll let you in!
We must've looked really trustworthy, because this was a guy on his own, with a baby in his arms. In his thirties, cap and glasses.
When we saw the room where we'd played our first gig, we couldn't believe it. Really that small? How the hell did we get so many people in it? You could see where our gear had been, in the bow window and the alcove to the right of it. But the rest: no way, much too tiny.
It was carpeted now, in cream, with a three-piece-suite to match, a tiny trampoline and assorted other baby stuff. We took some photos, one of them with the guy himself, told him how unflattering it was that we'd looked so unthreatening! Then thanked him profusely and left him in peace. In a way, he made the day.
On the stroll through town, we passed Brett's, where we'd played with Bill for the last time, then promenaded down the High Street which had mattered to us in student life generally. Same with Magdalen Bridge. Over that and on to The Plain, with a pub still there on the corner.
The Cape of Good Hope had changed as much as the room at 88 Banbury. More like a winebar now, with soft lighting and a menu. We asked one of the bar staff to show us upstairs, where we'd played three times in 1977, then came back down for a couple of drinks and a lot of reminiscing. Stories from the Cape always made us laugh.
Had a cramped train ride back (gave up my seat so a young asian couple could be with their kid, which meant I had to sit next to a bike!) - but a warm memorial of a day. Might do it again in 2026.
*
In early 2007 my fiancée came with me to Germany to stay with Martin Neubert for the Cologne Karneval. Photos of that now.
So, then.
After fifty years, I'm still in touch with the three main men from the band. But that includes gaps, sometimes long ones. Whereas another member has always been around.
His name is Les Milkins.
For someone who doesn't exist, he'd had quite a presence.
My passwords for accounts I don't use much, like my M&S card or Millets, they all have Milkins in them.
And the name's been in print.
In 2005, when my latest novel came out, I wrote some of the press release. It includes the sentence 'Cris Freddi was born in Reading, England. He was educated at Reading School and then Oxford University, where he was lead singer in the Les Milkins Band.' I presume that's on the internet for ever.
In the two works of fiction before that, he's on the opening pages. Both books are dedicated to Les Milkins. Why? Because it meant me.