We were all mainly playing blues by this time, mainly standard blues covers, though some of it was original. Spinelli wrote some songs.
Pete was in a band called Little Women. Don’t ask me how they came up with that name. The band was entirely blokes, so it was quite bizarre really. Phil Trenworth played in the band with his brother. Now around this time, Pete was increasingly picking up guitar work in London. He sort of disappeared into the metropolis and started to get to know and play with some relatively famous people, such as Jim Capaldi.
In Pete’s absence I obviously had no playing partner, but I’d become pretty good at ragtime, so I started to go around the folk clubs. But in the early 1970s folk clubs had customers wearing chunky white Arran jumpers, and the singers stuck fingers in their ears. They were jolly decent people, but ragtime music didn’t really fit into the traditional image. It was too American, and they didn’t like it much. I stood out as a good musician, but I aggravated them. They allowed me to play, but I always got the distinct impression that I was part of the furniture.
In the 1970s I did little manual work. In 1976 my New Year’s resolution was to not do any manual work in 1977.
I met some quite interesting people on the folk circuit who are now famous, including Martin Carthy and Saffron, Donovan’s girlfriend. You may recall his lyric on Mellow Yellow, ‘I’m just mad about Saffron, Saffron’s mad about me’. She was bloody good.
I thought that if I carried on playing the folk clubs, I’d eventually break through. Folk clubs are very traditional and you do have to be a ‘known known’. Really, if you’d just fuckin’ sit there for 30 years, you’d become famous. That’s what they’re about, they’re not about spontaneous flavours. And while I now play some folky stuff, back then – in my twenties – I was still only playing ragtime. I had fuck all to do with folk music, I didn’t like it one bit.
But I was still doing pretty well. Sometimes I’d play an hour-long set while people were filing in for a gig by some famous band. I played the Milton Keynes Bowl once, and a big place in St Albans – the Corn Exchange, I think – and lots of other places, wine bars and so on. The money was good. I’d have to deal with the hecklers, some of them already drunk, which I always enjoyed. Someone would shout out to me, ‘Fuck off!’, and I’d respond with something witty like, ‘No – fuck off yourself!’
Women finding musicians attractive is actually an occupational hazard, as drink is. This isn’t bragging but . . . well, it’s fuckin’ terrible really, because what happened was, a girl invited you back to her place, you spent the night with her, and had a great time. But you might already have a regular girlfriend who you saw more often. Then you’d meet a third girl at a party, who would ask you if you were good at fixing broken record turntables or whatever. So you’d go back to her place, look at the turntable, discover it was working fine, tell the girl, and she’d say, ‘I know.’ That sort of thing happened a lot.
Now the problem came when you were doing a gig and all three girls turned up – and of course you were trapped. Normally I’d stop for a break during the gig, to rest and get a drink, but in those circumstances I’d just keep playing.
It’s like the Dire Straits lyric, ‘Money for nothing, and chicks for free.’ The funny thing is, I didn’t see it as anything special. I saw it as a problem. I think women are just attracted to musicians, for whatever reason.
But you also have to look at the arse end of it, jealous boyfriends. In the early ’80s, when I was in my early thirties, Nick Edwards – a fiddle player – and I were playing everywhere. Pubs, barn dances, you name it. Now, if you’re on the dance floor and some girl comes up to you and is drooling all over you, the boyfriend obviously gets shirty. I’d get weird phone calls in the early hours of the morning where nobody would speak. Eventually, I used to pull the cord from the wall to stop the problem. I never came to blows with jealous boyfriends, but there were a lot of uncomfortable moments.
I knew of Nick because he’s Patrick Knight’s stepbrother, and Patrick had always lived in Oakley. I was giving guitar lessons to John Duffield and John suggested Nick and I should get together, because Nick was a great fiddle player and our styles would work well together. And so we teamed up. It was a bit lightweight at first, but we soon developed a good repertoire. An early gig was in Fletcher’s Food and Wine Bar in Rushden, and we went down well. Then I did a few adverts for Fletcher’s on Chiltern Radio in Dunstable, composing blues songs. The lyrics were along the following lines, to the tune of Alice’s Restaurant:
You can get anything you want,
In Fletcher’s Food and Wine Bar,
In Queen Street, Rushden.
You know where I mean.
There’s even room to park your car.
There’s wine and beer to put you in the mood.
Just try our delicious home-made food.
You can get anything you want,
In Fletcher’s Food and Wine Bar,
In Queen Street, Rushden.
And to the tune of Nobody Knows You, When You’re Down and Out, I sang another advert:
If you need a place to go,
Just in case you might not know,
Queen Street, Rushden’s where we are,
Fletcher’s Food and Wine Bar . . .
The funny thing was, it could be embarrassing. I’d walk down the road on a Sunday morning and people were washing their cars with the radios blaring out Chiltern Radio. When I did gigs, people would say, ‘You know, you sound just like that bloke who does the adverts on Chiltern Radio.’
Nick and I got picked up in the mid-80s by a barn dance band, Bricks and Brussels. I did six years in it, and Nick’s still in it. Pete’s played in it. They just pick up people who can play all right. Nick and I would also play Irish clubs in Luton, all sorts of terrible fuckin’ places. But we also played in some good places, like the Civic Theatre in Bedford. I have a great recording of us playing there. The response was phenomenal.
Nick and I – and sometimes Pete – played at The Angel in Elstow Road, Bedford. It’s no longer there. That was fantastic – it was like being a bloody pop star. Len Whale, the landlord – now deceased – invited Nick and I to play. So we went along to play one night, and it was shit useless. It didn’t work. Nick didn’t want to play again. He was coming to the end of his tether, he didn’t like playing in pubs. He didn’t really drink, unlike me. Then Len suggested that my brother Pete play with me. I said that Pete was rarely around, because of commitments, but Len was persistent. At first Pete and I just played again as a duo, then John Murray (on bass) and Jim Piggott (on drums) asked to join us, and we agreed, calling the band The Pump House Boys. We were incredibly successful. I couldn’t believe the response. We also played The Flowerpot, and I’ve got recordings from there.
Eventually John and Jim faded away a bit. Pete’s mate Teryl Bryant, who played in Pete Murphy’s band, was a knockout drummer, absolutely brilliant. So we performed as a three-piece band. I played bass by using an octaver, and put the acoustic guitar through it.
It worked, but it was loud, hard work. It was ridiculous really. It got more and more aggressive. Pete would do half-hour-long solos while I kept opening my gob, waiting to come in on the next verse. Fuckin’ madness, but most of the audience loved it because they were out of their heads.
It was a period I didn’t like, and I always had tinnitus at the end of a gig. I used to put shotgun earplugs into my ears, stuff like that. I’ve played in a number of rock bands over the years, but I can’t stand the row, the sheer racket. I like good music, but not noise.
This all came to an end in the early 1990s when I broke my left wrist in a pushbike