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By Root 1043 0

they might be wearing sweatshirts with baggy trousers and loafers, on another maybe linen suits. An interesting bunch, because they seemed to be miles ahead of anyone else in terms of style, I found them fascinating. This group, all from the East End, included Laurie Allen, a jazz drummer; Jimmy West and Dave Foley, who were tailors and went on to start a business making suits for people like me, called the Workshop, on Berwick Street; and Ralph Berenson, a natural comedian and mimic. I would sometimes play at the Scene, and one night I was approached and asked to go and play a gig at another club called Esmeralda’s Barn, a nightclub in Mayfair owned by the Kray brothers. It was a weird evening because I played with the resident band, and there was no one else in the club except the Krays, sitting at a table right at the back, and I didn’t know what the hell I was doing there. It felt like an audition.

We were paid thirty-five pounds a week to play with the Bluesbreakers, which we used to collect from the Gunnells’ office in Soho. It was a set wage no matter how much work we did, and though there may have been a ruckus from time to time from other members of the band about trying to get an increase, I don’t remember really caring about it, because my expenses were very small. I was usually on the cadge, rarely paying for anything and living free. We certainly earned our money. The idea was that we would play a gig, and when we were done, we might have to play again that night.

Every Saturday they had an all-nighter at the Flamingo, at which we were regulars, which was fine if we were playing Oxford or somewhere not too far away, but quite grueling if the earlier show was in Birmingham, which necessitated making an exhausting trip back down the MI. Traveling to these, what seemed to us then, faraway places was important, as there was only so much work in the Home Counties, and it was essential for bands to play in the better-known clubs in the north in order to get recognition and consolidate their following. To name a few, there was the Twisted Wheel in Manchester, the Club a Go-Go in Newcastle, the Boathouse in Nottingham, the Starlight in Redcar, and the Mojo in Sheffield, where Peter Stringfellow was DJ. The concept of paying someone to play records in a club until the band came on was then entirely new, and he was one of the original DJs, playing really good sounds, mostly blues and R&B.

It was exciting to go to different parts of the country. Girls were everywhere, which meant I was having a pretty extraordinary sex life, dating and picking up anyone I could get my hands on. Most of the time it was just innocent groping, and only rarely did it go all the way. In those days you hardly ever had a dressing room, like bands do today; you just got on and off the stage from the audience. So she might be a girl I’d met while walking about before the show, or someone I’d noticed while onstage, and I’d just get talking to her and then go off with her.

I remember that I’d always meet a particular girl in Basingstoke. The band would do two sets, with a half-hour interval, and I’d see this girl after the first set and go off with her somewhere backstage, and come back onstage with the knees of my jeans covered in dust from the floor. This was quite normal, part of the geography of touring: Bishop’s Stortford, Sheffield, Windsor, Birmingham. For us it wasn’t a girl in every port, it was a girl at every gig, and the girls themselves seemed to be quite happy to have that kind of relationship, seeing me only occasionally. I can’t say I blame them.

We also loved to travel around England because we knew that was as far as we were going to get. No one would ever have thought of sending us to Ireland or Scotland, because they weren’t going to pay for hotels, so we had to get back home after the gig. Though it’s difficult to imagine it now, going to Newcastle then was for me like going to New York. It seemed like another world. I didn’t understand a word people said, and the women were really fast and quite scary. A not untypical night