The Gig is Up

I suppose music entered my life at an early age when I was encouraged by the music teacher, Mr. Freed, and eventually went on to join the choir at St.Jame's RC, Burnt Oak. We eventually sang the Hallelujah Chorus at Westminster Abbey & I believe one version was eventually recorded. The first instrument I learnt to play was the harmonica, eventually being bought a chromatic Hohner in a C, which I played every spare moment!
This sometimes resulted in getting the cane or strap for playing it in the middle of a lesson, but looking back, playing the fool was another great love!

At the age of 14, I was bought a "cheap" acoustic guitar, not that my mother regarded anything as "cheap" as times were sometimes hard. This instrument was nearly the un-doing of me..for as hard as I tried, I could not make a single note sound anything resembling what I was supposed to be playing! And my fingers were as sore as hell!
I kept leaving the guitar and went back to playing the harmonica, but every time I heard a piece on the radio, back I would go to practice the song on guitar. Years later, the two instruments were to dominate my life as I joined & left one band after another. A roller coaster of excitement, no two gigs the same.

Get It On!

That composition by T.Rex, and the first number I played live in front of an audience of about 200 at the Royal Standard, Walthamstow. It was a talent show, and Jim Simpson & myself were entered by his sister, Julie.
A couple of years earlier, we were both looking in a shop window drooling over a couple of guitars, one an EKO solid electric & mine...a red & white Vox. After plaguing the life out of our mothers, they backed us up on the finance & two years of washing cars & caddying golf clubs for arseholes ensued!! But it was worth it!
Jim's mother encouraged us every time we rehearsed in his room...and the row must have been deafening....but she was a diamond! That first performance at Walthamstow, and no, we didn't win, gave us a rush no drug will ever give.....and we were hooked!

1976, a really hot summer that year & I was getting married to a local girl, Lynda. Unfortunately I was also married to the band City Road...so things had to give, and it was the marriage that suffered, but we lasted five years.
That line up was to change slightly over the years, but Jim was always involved going from rhythm guitarist to bassist in the final yrs. The lead guitarist at the time was Alan Whitehead, who was involved in several projects and once gigged with Heinz from the Tornadoes, playing drums!!!, buts that's another story! Jim's drinking was getting heavier every week & he seemed on destruct mode culminating in him going through a shop window which done some major damage to his tendons..he was lucky to be able to still play!
I was going through a period of meeting several different musicians, Ian Middleton being one, and it was inevitable that I would leave City Road.

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