An early night for us then but a great night none-the-less, as there were a few inflatable guitars being passed round the audience and we got people to come out with them to help us play some rock and roll numbers!
I was 12 when I got my first guitar and it was four years before I felt myself ready to sing in front of others. The first group was known as the Heywood Senior High School Folk Group... I know... We were never going to trouble the charts of 1970 against the likes of Marc Bolan - though The Beatles were sufficiently worried and disbanded shortly afterwards... I'm on stage with Bill Lloyd and yes, that's me with all that hair and yes, it really was all mine... These days I'd need extensions to even consider a comb-over...
The next year, Bill and I were joined by Barry Lord and we changed the name of the band to Anacreon. We added some three-part harmony to such staples as "Oh Sinner Man" and "Sun Arise", by heck we were really with it, man...
By 1972 I had left school and was approached to join a band as lead guitar. This was Spiral. We were young, keen, skint and so we stayed until I got married in 1976.
Then I bought a keyboard and gathered family members at weekends to sing old music hall and comedy songs. I gave them all word sheets with the bits they had to sing underlined. It meant I could get them to do things that sounded as though we'd have to spend ages rehearsing, straight off in one (well... ten...) takes - taking into account people making remarks, missing thir cue or simply belching at the wrong time... Singing went well with wine somehow... An example is The Old Bazaar In Cairo.
And then at Christmas, 2000 Creeping Bentgrass came together by chance, playing carols for the students at our workplace, Myerscough College. We agreed to carry on and are seen here as a foursome playing the Windows on Art Festival at Kendal on 8 September 2001.
Helen Fenton left and we carried on as a trio. The music, which had started out very folk-based, started to move towards 1960s pop and rock and roll! We released three CDs, see the band's website for details and more downloads.
Then this year Bob Snape dropped out to concentrate on his ceilidh band and we now carry on as a duo with myself and David Lancaster. The repertoire is currently expanding rapidly and creeping into the 70s, 80s, 90s and up to more modern songs. Our roots are in the 60s though and sixties music will always be the main feature of our act.It's Fran's birthday today!
To celebrate I took a day off work in lieu of working on Saturday and took her on a day out.
We went to look at this magnificent antique AA telephone box. Now before anyone takes a dim view and starts thinking of berating me, I should point out that not only is it rare these days but it is an icon of Britain's motoring past. Any birthday girl should be proud to have been taken to view it. When I was a lad there were many of these telephone boxes. They could only be opened by AA members (that's the Automobile Association, by the way, not Alcoholics Anonymous) who were issued with a special key that fitted all the telephone boxes. It meant that in the days before mobile telephones any driver who suffered a breakdown in a remote area would have to walk no more than, say, fifty miles or so before being able to call for rescue!
This box seems to have been fitted with a non-standard lock. Had I still carried my AA key about with me I could have tried it out, but:
1) I threw it away years ago
2) The lock definitely looks to take a large Chubb type key
3) After all the rains we've had the ground around it was boggy and waterlogged to a depth of several inches
4) I wasn't technically broken down
Anyway, Fran really enjoyed her trip out to see the telephone box, although I was a bit disgruntled when she stayed in the car and only got out when we stopped in places like Keswick and Kendal in the Lake District. Even then, she insisted on looking at boring things like shops, instead of searching for old telephone boxes. Women... just not easily understood...
