9. the dolly rockers
The band wasn't going to get in the way of a degree. I still did a modicum of schoolwork and my marks were just about alright. Anyway, I'd have needed to do a lot worse to fail the exams. I had a theory.
In my first term at Oxford, someone told me certain schools had a quota there every year, a guaranteed number of places. The ones you might expect. Eton, Harrow, Manchester Grammar, etc. Don't know if it was true, but it's what I heard. And it got me thinking.
What happened if you had a bad crop? Those years when Eton put a particularly large number of duffers up for Oxbridge (think various tory ministers). If they were marked according to ability, some of them might get no degrees at all. And that would show up the quota system.
So I reckoned most students would pass their finals almost whatever they did. Dangerous thinking, you might think - but I wasn't far wrong. You had to try really hard to fail. As I wrote on a college toilet wall, Oxford exams are an academic exercise.
They did set you tests after two terms, to weed out anyone who shouldn't really have got in. That nearly included me. I'd stopped caring about the work, and I failed one of the four exams. I thought I'd passed them all at first. No emails in those days, and some students didn't even have a home phone (my dad, for instance, until he retired). So they sent you postcards. I'd got one with my A Level results, the three letters on the back.
The one from Oxford listed the abbreviations I (for italian) and F1, which I took to mean the whole of french. But I didn't know there was an F2, and I'd failed that. I had to sit a retake.
I didn't mind at all. It meant an extra fortnight after the end of term, which I spent with my girlfriend. And I didn't mind that if I failed the new exam, I'd have to leave. To me, getting to Oxford was the achievement - and I was seventeen the last time I cared about that. But looking back, it's better that I passed that retake. Hard to tell people you were kicked out because you'd lost interest; it just looks like you weren't good enough. Plus I didn't fancy university anywhere else.
I knew two other people who failed those prelims in modern languages, both close to me. The other Steve - and the golden girlfriend herself.
She was so clearly the university pin-up that I didn't bother fantasising about her. What's the point? You'd have to join a queue to ask her out. But things fell into place in the final term. Then the roof came crashing down.
She didn't pass the retake. Nor did Steve. I missed them both. Especially her, of course, but him a bit too.
Other Steve liked Blond Steve more than he liked me (not unusual!), but the two of us kicked a ball around, went to a party in London together, and slept in Hyde Park after seeing the Who at Charlton. When he and the girlfriend left Oxford, the second year was all downhill.
Someone else who didn't last long was the star pupil of the italian class (where I met the star blonde). He went to university when he was only seventeen, and he knew the set books and language. Good looking too, I seem to remember. But he had the insecurity that comes across as arrogance at that age; he should've waited another year. They suspended him for a while, rusticated him, from the latin for the countryside, sending someone down from the city of Oxford. Soon he was gone for good. Hope he did OK elsewhere.
But the only person I ever met who passed the early exams but then deserved to get slung out was a guy called Neil.
Steve and I hardly ever went down the beer cellar in the Pump Quad. As I say, in all the three years, we never got drunk once.
There's nothing you can do better when you're pissed. So a rule of thumb: if you drank more than your share, you didn't have a girlfriend. A lot of Oxford students drank a lot of beer in the 1970s.
Our beer cellar was a sad sight to us. Several male students playing table football or just sitting drinking cheap beer. I did hear ELO's version of Roll over Beethoven down there, which prompted me to suggest it for the band. The place would've been great for a gig, too.
When we went down there, Neil was invariably around. I once asked him where his room was, and he said oh this wasn't his college, he was at Wadham.
What? But you're always here.
Well, the beer's better.
Someone calculated he'd done fifty hours work in a year! Even Oxford's famous tolerance wore out and he had to leave.
*
In October '76, I was back with the London girlfriend, so that side of things was stable if nothing else. It meant I could concentrate on all things band.
For a start, I got to know my way round a mike.
Doesn't sound the hardest form of human endeavour. Microphones aren't very big. And this was a plain ordinary one, with a head like a metal ice cream, single scoop. I didn't have to learn how far back to stand, because you could only be heard right up close. Remember: no PA. So what was there to navigate?
Well, Patrick, always thinking about my voice, found a second mike from somewhere. A little black thing that was very weak but gave your voice an echo. I suppose he thought it might take the edge off mine. Nice try.
But it was fascinating to hear yourself through it, and when they taped the two together you had to decide whether to sing between them or into just the one. I used the main one mainly, and I don't know that you could hear the echo in a crowded room, but it was fun to play around with.
*
Tensions or not, I always looked forward to rehearsals. I still couldn't believe I was going to any. Me in a rock band.
I remember one dark early morning, beans on toast with Bernie in a café on St Giles on our way to Banbury Road, the day James Hunt won the Formula One world title. It rained in Japan, and Niki Lauda dropped out, after his terrible burns in a previous race. The flames had damaged his tear ducts and he couldn't blink, so he couldn't see through the downpour. He lost the championship by just one point after missing two races.
But only technical infringements stopped Hunt from winning by a wider margin - so this added to a glorious morning. For some reason, I felt I really belonged in a band that day. Decades later, the caff was still there and still good.
*
Other times I'd be doing research.
The Corn Dolly didn't close down till 2019. It was near the Oxford Union, in Frewin Court, a tight alleyway off Cornmarket. A basement pub known for its live music. They chalked the names of the night's bands on a small board at the top of the stairs. I remember one called Far Call. Oh dear.
One night I get there early with Bernie, and a band's doing a sound check. This generally involved someone saying 'one two' into a microphone for an eternity. This night, the guy branches out into actual prose. Again it's interminable, culminating in 'Does anyone want to hear my microphone jokes?'
Laconic voice from the bar: 'Switch him off, Ron.'
'Microphone jokes' became one of Bernie's sayings over the years, shorthand for anyone who liked the sound of their own voice.
Another time, we're in the Dolly watching a band called Prism.
They were well known in the area, a covers band like us but with very different material. Doobie Brothers, Steely Dan - sets of americans I hated (no personality or poke) - plus a bit of Beatles, so not a group after my own heart. Like many bands, their stuff was more interesting to play than to listen to - and no use if you wanted to dance.
Looking back at them now, it strikes me this may have been the first rock group I ever watched in a pub. I was 21 and three-quarters.
*
I've seen very few live bands in my life. One or two aside - Dr Feelgood, the Clash - I don't feel I've missed out. It's just never been my thing. Same with stand-ups. Maybe I didn't fancy the queuing and crowding and waiting for acts to come on.
I didn't go to many live football matches either. Blond Steve was astounded I hadn't seen any league games before moving to Oxford. He'd watched a lot in his teens. So he dragged me to my first, Oxford United v Hull City in January 1974 at the old Manor Ground. I was so used to watching football on TV that when the first goal went in I instinctively looked for the action replay! The match wasn't much, so I'm not sure I went to any more there.
In later years, just England games at Wembley, usually with free tickets from someone I knew at the FA.
Meanwhile fuck music festivals. I was put off by a single day at Charlton. I went with Miriam, my girlfriend at the time, and Other Steve from college. We got the Who, Humble Pie, Bad Company, and Lou Reed, but give us more toilets. When we finally got back to Charing Cross, there was an oasis, a small caff open on Villiers Street, with a stream of festival goers ordering two cans of coke each. I had three. They cost 20p each. Rip-off London!
Then we had to sleep in Kensington Gardens. We were so used to hearing loud music all day the cars sounded like guitars and joggers like drummers. My mum wasn't around to hear cars and see people running. She'd died a couple of weeks earlier, there in London, at the age of 40.
*
By the way, note that I use the Oxford comma. After 'Humble Pie'.
I was at Oxford, it's grammatically precise, and in 2022 the tory health minister banned it from internal emails (there, I've used it again) instead of dealing with an NHS on life support. All good reasons for keeping it.
*
I never even went to the Reading Festival, my own home town. I strolled round the perimeter fence one night, between all the cars, people putting up tents just to listen to the music the other side of the wooden wall. I had a kitten with me.
I rescued him from the drains at the mental hospital, and I called him Zap, after Emiliano Zapata, Pancho Villa's sidekick. Can't think why. Maybe I just liked Zap and made up a provenance.
At the Reading Festival, I carried him or let him walk around on a lead, a nylon thread about twenty feet long. Pretty rock 'n roll, if you ask me. A couple of policemen shone a torch when Zap went under a car. What's that? Oh, a cat. Fair enough. I should've used him as a drugs mule.
I'd heard that a cat could fall from seven storeys up and land on its feet and walk away. I decided to test that theory by dropping Emiliano Zapata from our upstairs window. It was only two floors up, well within the theoretical range.
It has to be said: he didn't fancy it. I held him out with one hand and he wrapped himself round my wrist with all four sets of claws. But down he went in the end. I aimed him over grass, and he landed, on his feet, looked back up at me, and strolled into the house. No doubt the experience helped him in later life.
I was going to sneak him into my room at college. Except I didn't really want a cat. I hate the fuckers now (dogs too) and didn't have time to look after him then. But I knew my dad would fall for him, so Zap had a good life. He probably disappeared when old ladies fed him, which happened to all our other cats when we were kids. There were many more old women living together then. To do with the First World War. The loss of a million and a half young men naturally led to fewer marriages and maybe contributed to a rise in lesbianism. There was a documentary.
*
My first girlfriend did like gigs. Four years at boarding school meant I didn't go out with anyone properly till I was 18. Pretty girl, Kitty Burton. Long wavy hair, danish mum, intellectually rigorous. She saw me through my first term at Oxford before drifting away to London.
I loved her to bits, but she was a right little hippy and I kept being dragged off to the New Theatre in Oxford to endure acoustic tedium from Keith Christmas, Tir Na Nog, and the Incredible String Band, who sound like a bunch of dodgy birders but were dismal prog-folk wankers. I can still picture their singer trying to dance. Quite enjoyed Richie Havens breaking strings on his guitar, but the novelty soon wore off. I bought a cassette of his but didn't mind losing it. Freedom, the song he made up at Woodstock, is just bollocks repeated.
In the second term, my first love, Miriam Rovnick, took me to Reading University to see Gong, the worst of that kind of music - but at least she came to Charlton with me and Steve.
Meanwhile Bernie was following Dr Feelgood and other good pub bands, watching the bass players closely (he had the same sort of physique and 'bastard suits' as Feelgood's John B Sparks). He didn't tell me how good the one in Prism was, a bearded guy they called Marrow because he was overweight.
Marrow was approached by Whitesnake one day. They were recording nearby and saw him on stage. Ooh great, he's thinking. Yeh, they said. Your bass sounds good. Mind if we borrow it?
*
We got there late, so we missed most of Prism's set. Interesting that right at the end, their encore was Roll Over Beethoven. As I say, if you wanted to liven up a pub crowd in those days, you reverted to old rockers, some of them by Chuck.
I'm watching their singer, who I think was also their lead guitarist. Heavily built geezer who looked middle-aged to me, which probably meant thirtysomething. And he's belting out the words and I'm thinking this is exciting to hear and must be fun to do.
I didn't study his singing or anything so pointless. I took in how loud everything was, the difference the drums made (alright you can stay, Bill), watched how everyone just stood and played when I thought they should move more, something I intended to do. Divert attention from the voice.
You could hear every word the guy sang, the difference a PA makes. And I've wondered sometimes...If we'd had a proper sound system, I wouldn't have had to shout all the time. I could've tried actually singing, little bit of a croon. I might've sounded better. I'm kidding myself, but when we finally got to use a proper PA, it was alright.
At the end, Prism Man is bellowing the final chant, which is just the name of the song over and over, and I'm thinking: I can do that, maybe with more shading in the voice. Tell Beethoven to roll over and you can sound cheeky or downright subversive. It's a call to arms.
I got to put that theory to the test, but not till the next year.
*
Around this time, my position in the band was strengthened. By watching two of the others perform without me.
Don't know how it came about, but one night four of us are in a place called the Centre Charles Peguy on Leicester Square.
Bernie couldn't make it, but the rest of us went to London in two cars, driven by Pat and Harry. Bill and me, an amplifier and speaker.
The place was a 'cultural centre'. That can mean anything, including live music. When we walked in, there was a big handwritten sign: Rock dans le bar avec Len et Harry.
For some reason, Patrick's nickname at school was Len. Our two guitarists were booked to sing folk songs and the like to London's eager french community. This I had to see.
It went well enough for a while, though there wasn't much of an audience. Then, halfway through Freight Train: a seminal moment.
Harry's voice cracked.
Nothing to do with hitting notes (he wasn't aiming high and I was told he had perfect pitch). It was plain nerves. Harry was nervous. I already knew he wasn't a threat to my place in the band, but this confirmed it. Singing in tune wasn't the same as singing in public - and I wasn't scared of that. However bad I might sound at our gig, I was sure my voice wasn't going to quaver.
But it might've done if I'd been in Harry's shoes. My idea of hell would be singing in public with only an acoustic guitar for protection. I'd rather front a rock band at a sold-out Wembley than face a dozen people in a bar.
After that night, I suspect Harry and Pat felt the same. By the end of their gig, they'd abandoned the folk nonsense and replaced it with endless twelve-bar riffs - which the french got up and danced to. They like their old rock 'n roll over there (it's the only reason Vince Taylor made a living, and we played at a ceroc bash in London).
At one stage Patrick catches my eye, and I'd say our looks are openly hostile. This is during his 'cunt' phase!
But I'm also thinking we might be alright after all, the five of us. If these mecs dance to just a pair of guitars with no vocals, imagine them with a full rock band, even one that's under-rehearsed. Bill, sitting next to me, agreed.
The name we eventually chose for the band, Les Milkins, translates as The Milkins in french. They'd pronounce it Milk Cans, which we could've lived with.
We never did play in that Centre, which is a shame because we couldn't have failed. Maybe the managers were put off by Len et Harry. Lot better than Len et Cris.
*
Back to Oxford for more rehearsals - though they came to an abrupt halt one day. Something we should probably have expected.
We're in between numbers when the door's suddenly flung open.
In storms this old bantam in a pinstripe suit. Memory invents a trilby for him, and a cane, to fend off the delinquent punks he's come to confront.
He came across as a military man. And not a squaddie. He started barking out orders like he used to do it for a living. Small, but his voice filled the room.
I live next door! Right?
He was complaining about the noise, of course. And not by appealing to our neighbourly natures. He just told us how it was going to be.
This stops now! Not tomorrow, now! Got it?
Being polite young men, we didn't answer back, let alone swear. We were all used to obeying authority at school, so we stood there and took it. Patrick mumbled a quick apology. When the little martinet finished, he turned on his heel and stomped off. Bill should've played him out with a military march.
Phew.
Mirth all round - though we didn't curse him behind his back. I mean, the man had his rights. Imagine living next to a rock band playing full blast. Plus we were a bit stunned. So we just packed up and went home.
But not for good. There was nowhere else to practise, so we gave it a couple of days then set up again. We reduced the volume, and I presume Bill hit the drums less hard. We didn't have long before Pat's party, so we sneaked back in past the sentry. We never saw the old colonel again.
*
By the way.
Should we have a name for this beat combo?
Well, not necessarily. If you're going to perform only once, and only in front of the guitarist's chums, why bother? There again, thinking of a name is a fun part of the process, away from the stress of learning songs and glowering at each other!