Al Stokes' Other Bands

AL STOKES’ OTHER BANDS

AL STOKES

AL STOKES’ OTHER BANDS ... the weird thing is I never intended to start a band, it was going to be me doing comedy and a bloke with a guitar then it took off with a life of it’s own ...

Copyright © Al Stokes 2013 Al Stokes has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be indentified as the author of this work.

This book is free to view subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be downloaded, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. all photographs are the sole copyright of The Trolley Men and must not be nicked

ABOUT THE AUTHOR AL STOKES was born into an era of steam trains, when there was a King on the throne & rationing, brought up in Greenford West London. He escaped a poverty stricken background and, in that wonderful psychedelic year of 1967, appeared in Anne Jellicoe’s stage play The Rising Generation at the Royal Court Theatre, London.

In 1968 Al joined the BBC Film Department as a trainee at Ealing Studio.

After five years at the Beeb, learning the craft, Al left to go freelance as an editor and eventually, after a series of strange misadventures which included a spell as war correspondent, he became a film director.

In the 1990’s Al went back to acting and appeared in a number of Hollywood films, TV dramas and MTV promos.

Claim to dubious fame: Al was the screaming creature in Chris Cunningham’s 1997 Aphex Twin, Come To Daddy promo.

In 2002 art school beckoned for a late degree to upgrade his analogue film making skills to digital. He got a 2:1, whatever that is?

Currently he lives in leafy Norwich, writes copiously about obscure aspects of local history and sings in his band The Trolley Men. “People keep telling me I’ve had an interesting life. I’ve always taken that to mean I’m an unemployable hippie who has lived too long. Anyone calls me a hippie, I’ll nut ‘em.”

Al Stokes, July 2013 website: www.TheTrolleyMen.co.uk

(right) Al Stokes; actor, writer and film maker who accidentally started a band which later became “The Trolley Men”

A STAR IS BORED When it came to poetry and music, where I grew up in the 1950s and early-60s, everything was so po-faced and up its own fundament it deserved to be parodied. And what did we have to relieve us? The Baron Knights and Flanders & Swan.

I recall our Secondary School English literature (poetry and fictional novels by another name) teacher Mr. Spooner, aka Hush Puppy partly because he must have thought fake suede shoes were the height of fashion but mostly he had a terrible habit of the silent approach especially when we weren’t paying attention or were up to no good. The man had had a humour by-pass whilst serving in the Royal Navy, fighting the dreaded Hun on the briny deep, or later when a master at a tough Borstal before he visited himself upon us at Stanhope Secondary School in small town Greenford (Middlesex). Later, in adulthood, we former pupils understood exactly what he was; a nasty, vicious little bully who used poetry as an offensive weapon with which to beat the boys senseless. A chap could enter his classroom full of the joys of the English language and leave an hour later like we’d just spent thirty years under the lash. Grey, drained and with a great hatred of rhyming verse.

He once had each pupil out in front of the class in turn, reading from Hornblower, then asked us the reasons why the hero of the story had to fulfil his mission to get the prize ship safely back to port. We answered full of enthusiasm, after all it was a ripping yard, until we had exhausted all possibilities but old Hush Puppy kept going at it, “there’s another reason,” until our brains started to turn to the consistency of luke warm oatmeal and dribble out of the ears. What ever jollity we’d started out with, reading the exploits of midshipman Horatio Hornblower in turn, under the steely gaze of old Hush Puppies we became ardent clock watchers waiting for the lesson to end. Willing it so.

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We couldn’t help notice this yo-ho-ho and probably several bottles of rum Spooner encouraged the brawnier members of the class, tomorrows pugilists no doubt, and doted on their words whereas those of us who liked the English language in all its glorious poetry where trodden down like the foulest knaves of the fo’c’sle we undoubtedly were. I didn’t look at a book of poetry for twenty years due to that man.

It was the accidents of life which always shaped my career. It was shear luck I’d got a part in Ann Jellicoe’s 1967 production of The Rising Generation at The Royal Court Theatre, London, at the age of fifteen and it was that format - the lyrics of a rock band ‘narrating’ the play - which stayed as an unformed project of my noggin and took years to come to fruition.

I was horribly unemployed during the early months of 1981 and relieved my lunchtime boredom by listening to BBC Radio-4’s Quote Unquote which occasionally played in moments of shear comic genius. That’s where I first came across the music of Tom Lehrer. The subject matter one week was nuclear war and the BBC played in We’ll All Go Together When We Go (All Suffused In An Incandescent Glow). What Tom Lehrer, Viv Stanshall of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, the Temperance Seven and Bob Kerr’s Whoopee Band were doing then, I wanted to be doing in an updated idiom. Punk poetry maybe or jazz rock.

However, I was too busy earning my living working in movies to do anything about it so the whole concept went onto the back burner of my life’s foibles and it didn’t have chance to surface again until the early 1990s.

ICEBERG, RIGHT AHEAD! In another of life’s weird co-incidences, edging towards poetry with music, I teamed up with Nick Morgan in 1992 who ran the band Virtually Fat Freez to perform the music (as narration) for my stage play Testament To Arrogance; the court of inquiry into the loss of the Titanic. We staged it on the eightieth anniversary of the disaster at Norwich Art Centre on the exact date, April 14th/15th, 1992.

The initial plan was to start the show at 11.40pm April 14th, the moment the ship struck the iceberg, and run it through to 2.20am April 15th when the ship went down. Norwich Arts Centre were having none of that due to the cost of staffing through the night. They also cited health & safety as the reason we were not allowed to use a fish tank in which to sink a large scale model of the Titanic.

‘It will ruin the newly laid parquet floor if you spill water during the performance.’

Alex (band roadie) was reduced to kneeing behind a black screen and sinking the ship by hand as the incident were described with dialogue.

Had we been allowed the water tank the plan was to get a volunteer from the audience to sink the ship - “Just roll up your sleeve, grasp the ship PAGE 2

by the bottom of the hull, tip it up and sink it gently” - before emptying the freezing contents of an ice bucket into the water. Hohoho. The volunteer would have been awarded an iceberg lettuce for their trouble. A note about that 1/350th model of the Titanic; I went to a major model shop in Norwich but they had sold out due to increased interest in the ship, what with the anniversary coming up. I sadly reported this dire news back to Nick who said he already knew.

‘Alex bought the last one and the entire band are currently building it.’

They did a marvellous job, even using luminous paint on individual port holes, so in low light the thing fairly glowed. Just like the real thing on the dark, cold waters of the North Atlantic. We recruited local actors, many of them troublesome am-drams, and rehearsed the show through March and April up to the first date.

One of the many controversies surrounding the Titanic story was whether Captain Lord, master of the steamer Californian, had failed to go to the aid of the stricken ship; he was heavily censured by both the American and British courts of inquiry in 1912 but in 1992 the Marine Accident Investigation Branch of the British Board of Trade reopened the case and were to announce their findings on April 14th, the date of our first performance. With good will on the part of the BoT, an official phoned us at the Art Centre an hour before we were due to go on stage to say “Captain Lord is innocent” so we could be up to the minute with the news and the first to announce it in live performance.

In 1993 we were booked to play Testament To Arrogance at the PAGE 3

Glastonbury Festival and, for some inexplicable reason, on the Croissant Neuf Circus stage. Apparently we were the last act to be booked for the Festival and we had to be content to go where we were put, with no guest tickets and unpaid. We figured the resulting publicity would make up for that.

We took a reduced cast, doubling up the parts because some of the am-dramas were ‘too busy’ to play at a major Festival. Nick and I concluded it was The Fear, that some actors were not so much held in the thrall of failure but of success because it takes dedication and jolly hard work to maintain that level of professionalism.

Norwich to Glastonbury was a long way, a 600-mile round trip, and we were helped enormously by Willie, a friend with a big bus, who offered to drive us down there and back if we paid his derv and got him into the Festival on a crew ticket. Done & done. The bus was equipped with beds, a gas stove and plenty of space for all the artists and props. I was not a big fan of sleeping in a tent. That 1/350th scale model had to be treated with extreme care and was cosseted better than any of us humans that weekend. The last addition to the troupe was a guy from the Maddermarket Theatre who came along as stage manager and dresser. There were a lot of costume changes.

We let it be known amongst friends that if they had a ticket for the Festival we’d be prepared to give them a lift for a nominal sum towards the derv. This later turned out to be a terrible mistake as our guests thought they somehow owned us which led to minor ructions, like we were their servants. The plan was to drop them at the main gate, where we diverged off to the performers’ entrance, but on the day it didn’t quite work out like that. The band set off separately from London and were to be the advance guard to secure our parking place for the bus in the performers enclosure.

This did not go entirely to plan.

Norwich Police were wonderfully helpful in coning off the space outside my house so we could park Willie’s great big bus directly in front for loading purposes. Come the early morning departure we discovered some swine of a neighbour had removed the cones because he couldn’t park his Chelsea tractor. In the ensuing ruction, we had to stop traffic to park in the middle of the road, the neighbour who knew his rights called the police to complain about these crusty travellers and was promptly nicked by the attending officers for unlawfully removing police traffic property; the cones, which they found in his front garden. They knew a complete tit when they saw one and further assisted us by controlling traffic while we loaded up the bus. They had seen the press coverage of us going off to Glasters, the only Norwich troupe to do so and offered a police escort to the City limits but we declined their kind offer on the grounds people might get the wrong idea.

They waved us merrily away as they turned their constabulary attention to PAGE 4

the outraged shouty neighbour in the back of their car.

The whinging guests in the bus complained bitterly about us leaving so early in the morning because, they said, they’d done the journey before and it only takes a few hours. In a car, probably, but not in Willie’s laden bus; top speed 45-mph, downhill and with a fair wind behind. I was determined to get on-site before the sun set as groping around in the dark on that site could be a nightmare. Been there, done that, nearly lost the will to live.

We set off across country: A11 to just north of Newmarket; A14 via Cambridge; A428 to St. Noets, south for a couple of miles on the A.1 to pick up the A.421 via Bedford; over the M.1 at Milton Keynes to Buckingham; A.4421 to Bicester; A.41 & A.34 to Oxford; A420 to Swindon; A.346 to Marlborough; A.345 via Pewsey to Amsbury; A.303 to Podimore then A.37, north to Pyle and the Festival entrance. It was the scenic route but kept us off the hard to be rescued from motorways in case of breakdowns.

Deliberately coming up from the south so we didn’t get clogged up in traffic jams coming down from the north. Brilliant forward planning, I thought.

The first hint of trouble was just shy of Cambridge when the bus broke down, a fuel line blockage which took Willie some time to fix. One guest kindly offered us the use of his gold card so we could abandon the bus and hire an aircraft to take us the rest of the way. Willie and I stared at each in bewilderment; how was that ever going to happen?

‘What? You’re going to land a plane here, in the middle of a trading estate?’

‘Well, we’ll have to hire a truck to get all your kit to Cambridge Airport,’ he said, haughtily.

‘You’ll need Dakota at least to get all this lot aboard. Where are you planning to land it? On the main stage?

‘Well …’ he began.

‘All fixed,’ said Willie, slamming the hood down.

Getting back in the cab Willie and I had a brief discussion about why a bloke with a gold card felt it necessary to travel third class with us. We set off, laughing, but the guests added to the journey time by insisting on numerous comfort breaks and meals enroute. I kept looking at my watch and the position of the sun. At Podimore we filled the gas tank, knowing that getting off the Festival site could drain a tank and the embarrassment that would cause in front of Festival officials. While Willie gassed up a couple of lads of the crusty persuasion, with their thumbs out overly confident of a lift, came trotting up at the sight of our bus.

‘Can you give us a lift to the Festival?’ they asked.

‘Have you got tickets?’

‘We’ll find a way in.’

‘Best of luck with that. We can take you as far as the entrance and after that you’re on your own.’

I opened the back door and let them in, much to the horror of the guests as the only crusties they’d ever seen before were on TV, being beaten up by the police. I have to admit I let them on-board out of impish mischief.

The look on the guests’ faces was a wonder to behold, them with their gold cards and not much in the way of social skills.

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The sun was starting to go down as we hit the lane up to the Festival site, a stop-go traffic jam which was mostly stop because the inward queue of vehicles consisted of both Festival goers and entertainers. Later the queue split in two, punters to one track and entertainers to another for check in; band passes, vehicle pass, wristbands, contracts all overseen by zealous security. In my haste to get on-site before we lost daylight I forgot to drop off our guests and hitchhikers at the punters gate but it was late in the day and security were tired so didn’t bother to check all our passes. We now had to find our allotted space in the sprawling landscape, despite our site map. Full dark was nearly upon us and the very thing I’d tried to avoid, driving a big truck round a Festival site at night, was a real possibility.

The thought of squishing stoned hapless hippie hordes under the grinding wheels of the bus gave me a fit of the judders. Security said they’d radio ahead so their comrades would be ready to keep us on the right route. It was that or me walking ahead of the bus with a big red flag and a klaxon.

I’d heard of a Festival tradition where security send performers round the site on a circuitous route just for the fun of it but I never believed the stories. I do now.

‘I’m sure we’ve been down this track before,’ mused Willie.

I grabbed a torch and the site plan and, as we were about to be directed off down yet another false trail, Willie spotted the Croissant Neuf Circus tent and to the disappointment of our security guides headed straight for it. We overshot the gate to the performers back-stage camping area by two feet and the stage manager decided it was too dangerous in the gloom to reverse up. There was talk of crushed crusties going under the wheels.

‘You’ll have to go up to the next field, turn round and I’ll be ready to open the gate for you when you come back,’ he advised.

‘Right you are,’ I said, pleased we had almost made it.

The next field turned out to be the Healing Field and what should have been a simple operation became a battle of wills. Willie had learnt his driving skills in the army and it was masterful how he executed a three point turn in his big bus. I got out to assist him so as not to run over anything. In the process a huge, matronly lady approached us full of worthy wrath.

‘You can’t come in here. This is the Healing Field. No travellers allowed,’ she boomed.

‘We’re not travellers, we’re performers and we’ve been instructed to come up here to turn round,’ I tried, politely.

‘Which way do I go?’ called Willie.

‘Down left, hard!’

‘I shall call security and have you evicted from the site if you don’t leave at once,’ instructed the matronly lady.

The bus roared into reverse and stopped.

‘Down right, hard!’

‘This is an outrage!’ she shouted above the din of the bus.

‘I’ll tell you what’s an outrage. Being sent on a wild goose chase all round the site by security, that’s what an outrage is,’ I replied, testily.

‘How dare you speak to me like that. Do you know who I am.’

I was tempted to ask, “Why? Don’t you?” but Willie had got the bus PAGE 6

pointed in the right direction and I had to scamper away to catch up with him. The words, ‘and don’t come back,’ were ringing faintly in my ears.

True to his word the stage manager swung the gates open as we came down the hill and we were in. Almost.

Because we were so late arriving some kindly soul had assumed we weren’t coming at all and erected the performers’ children’s play area exactly on our allotted space. We were now parked in the middle of it.

Outraged parents came forth to appraise us of our dastardly act. I had a few choice replies for them but, the better part of valour, decided to keep my gob shut. We could deal with our creative parking in the morning. While Willie unlocked the back of the bus to let the troupe, guests and crusty hitchhikers out I did that cheesy thing of kneeling on the grass and kissing the ground. We’d made it. Due devotion given to St. Jude, the patron Saint of lost causes, I realised there were a pair off boots standing right in front of me and, lifting my eyes, saw dangling tins of beer at his knee height.

Looking up further I saw Nik Turner looking down at me, smiling.

‘Welcome to Glastonbury,’ he said, ‘fancy a beer?’

That I did.

The irritation of the unwanted guests continued; the man with the gold card had decided to erect his tent in the only space he could find, hard up against the back to the Croissant Neuf Circus tent. There was a reason why the space was kept clear. It was where band trucks drew up to unload their kit onto the stage and Mr. Gold Card had claimed squatters rights.

There were draconian rules in Glastonbury artist contracts about keeping our troupes under control, the fact of which the stage manager chose that moment to remind me. I decided to disavow all knowledge.

‘He’s nothing to do with us,’ I said, ‘We gave him a lift down from Norwich but he’s not part of the act. By rights he shouldn’t even be in this backstage area, he should be in the punters field.’

So, armed with this knowledge, the stage manager rounded up some large gentlemen pf the night who evicted him forthwith. I could see the man trying to argue his ‘rights’ as he, followed by his half constructed tent and pack, were forcibly removed to the other side of the fence. I did wonder if he had insulted them by trying out his gold card on them. It made me smile for the first time all day. Schadenfreude. The toffee nosed git.

Actor Andrew Taft joined us next day and we arranged a speed read that afternoon to get our minds back on the job. He asked if I’d thought about getting an agent, which I hadn’t, and gave me a contact number for Galloways who were always on the lookout for new supporting artistes.

Months later they set me on a new career course as a TV actor. Thank you Andrew.

Whilst sunning myself of the steps of the bus, eating a pork pie, I was accosted by another matronly lady who thought it was an outrage I was eating meat in the Green Field.

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘Because there’s no meat allowed here,’ came the stiff response.

I let it go at that and if she wanted to bring down the food-nazis on me, best of luck with that. I’d eaten the pie. Going for a wander, I came across PAGE 7

the crusty hitchhikers we’d accidentally let in for free. They insisted on sharing their Special Brew with me as a Hero of the Revolution. I didn’t have the heart to tell them they got in by accident but it did give me a warm glow to know we’d helped people who couldn’t afford £58 apiece for advance tickets.

Later that day we found a dumped backpack under the bus, presumably robbed from a poor unsuspecting camper, and took it off to the Festival Welfare Services tent where it was later claimed. We had a warm glow over that, our good deed for the day.

2am next morning, safely tucked up bed, there came a knock-knockknocking on the bus door. Now what? It turned out to be Nik Turner, Ozric Ed and others unknown who were outraged their children were being kept awake by an illegal rave; new wave raves were banned at Glastonbury on the grounds all music had to stop at midnight which rave organisors tended to ignore.

‘We’re going to shut them down. Get your clothes on.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘go on ahead while I get dressed.’

Instead, I went back to bed. I didn’t fancy my chances as part of an angry mob, sickles and rakes optional, if the techno-heads got physical.

Later, at a decent hour, I asked one of the delegation what had happened.

‘Last we saw of Nik he was dancing in the crowd and this morning we found him spark out in the unofficial rave tent.’

We played our show the following afternoon to a large crowd although not helped by the Circus rolling up the sides of their tent in the heat, thus allowing the egress of air but also the solid roar from every rock band stage within gobbing distance. We were used to bringing our voices up in theatres but we were almost defeated by the cacophonous din. Afterwards PAGE 8

I asked the stage manager what he thought.

‘I loved it but it was a strange show to put on in a circus tent. More like theatre,’ he said.

‘Yes. Precisely.’

We packed our trunks and said good-bye to the Circus. Enroute home the fan belt let go on the A.4 near Heathrow Airport and we had to wait for the AA to arrive with a replacement. While we were waiting a police car showed up and, despite telling the tiresome guests to stay on the bus, they decided to wander about like a herd of excited kittens amongst the fast moving traffic. The police didn’t do anything, they were content to sit in their car behind us watching the loonies. Later, on the M.11, we had a tyre blow out which caused much consternation amongst the guests who, had busy lives to lead, became fractious when it became clear they were going to miss their Mums’ Sunday evening tea and cakes. And I’m not joking.

I swore I’d never give non-band members a lift again and in 2011 broke my own rule. Never say never again.

WE’RE SINKING FAST That same year Nick & I formed the Sinking Fast Theatre Company for future collaborative projects and we brought in Nick Danger on drums to perform with us on the play Foxhole at Norwich Labour Club, about a young war correspondent completely out of his depth and based unashamedly on my own days as a war reporter twenty years before. We were doing all right but we were not doing great. The main problem seemed to be finding actors who could work alongside musicians and vice versa. They had to be a team but since musicians are generally an undisciplined horde and actors are fairly staid there were ructions. Holding that lot together was rather like trying to herd excited kittens.

At Glastonbury 1994 we performed The Crusty Creation, written by Andrew Taft with lyrics and music between myself and Nick, twice a day for three days. Unfortunately the band got so bored with the routine they wondered off to enjoy themselves rather than play the last set with us on the Sunday night. The actors were so miffed with this mutiny they decided my music with theatre performance style was never going to work. Nick and I parted company soon after when he went off to live in New Zealand while I concentrated on my career as a movie actor. Stuff happens.

Determined to keep going, I changed tack and formed a stand-up duo with Andrew Taft playing the festivals and an ad hoc guitarist, whomever I could finagle on the day, to play us in. I had a shaven head and dressed like a skinhead thug. We’d let the guitarist play for a bit then barrelled noisily on-stage as if we were interrupting his set; I could guarantee three belly laughs before we opened our mouths; one for peering menacingly round the tent flap at the guitarist, one for our rowdy entrance and the third for battering the hapless hippie musician off the stage with (fake) baseball bats. It was pretty close to what I was getting at as an act but it wasn’t tight enough. Andrew couldn’t always guarantee he’d be available for shows and at one festival an organisor had to step in, reading the script off a heavily disguised book. The guitarist at that gig, Rufus, was really good and I PAGE 9

felt bad about battering him off the stage as part of the act. Sometimes we didn’t tell the musician what was coming so we’d get a better, funnier reaction from the foam rubber bats.

Later I had a squeaker inserted into a bat for real rib-cracking audience mirth. A few times I used a fake gun firing blanks but discontinued that after the Dunblane Massacre, as a mark of respect. One can go a little too far in comedy and the trick is knowing where to draw the line.

But by then my film acting career started to get serious and for a while nothing happened with the act.

AN ARCHETYPAL ART SCHOOL HIPPIE-TRIPPY DREADY-BOY Nothing continued to happen until I went to art school for a late degree in 2002, to update my film making skills from analogue to digital. I was 51-years old and wore my hair in dreadlocks as a result of a serious make-upFX malfunction on the film 28 Days Later; the make-up people skanked my hair up everyday which made it hard at first then impossible later to get the knots out afterwards so the next logical step was to dread it up. Then I brought the act back in somewhat surreal circumstances.

Whereas bands like Temperance Seven had searched the flea market stalls for 1930’s comedy songs to bend to their style I was looking at the works of Lehrer, Spike Jones and John Betjimen and throwing in some of my agi-prop socio-political material.

Andrew Taft, taking time out from screen writing The Bill and EastEnders, wrote an anarchist version of the Lords prayer for The Crusty Creation, a side-swipe at the benefits system if a heavily pregnant Mary and partner Joseph had been homeless and on PAGE 10

the social benefits. I played it with a guitarist backing, plinking away so I didn’t sound totally alone in whichever cafe bars I could get us into. It was a bit of a shock being that up close and personal with an audience after playing far away from them at festivals or not at all on TV. The intimacy of a close up audience makes a person mindful of timing, what’s funny and what ain’t. What I was doing was using my acting skills to play a character in the songs as poetry, poetry as songs.

I never actually sang so much as talked to the beat of the guitar. It worked pretty well but I knew the act had limited scope. I wouldn’t like to have tried that in anything bigger than a cafe bar because we didn’t have enough solid music fill to back us up.

THE GOBBO BROTHERS, 2002 One of my watering holes in Norwich was The Old White Lion in Oak Street, managed by another dreadhead James Alexander. One night I got to talking to a guy I faintly knew, Carl, who played bass with the Suffolk band, The Snords. We were doing that random rambly band member thing of complaining about the things we couldn’t change and put up with because no one understood us, honest guv’, until Carl said he understood perfectly.

What? He said his band were thinking of getting into performance art / comedy while I was unhappy with one guitarist and could have done better with a full band.

In a great moment of ale induced synchronicity Carl and I had hit on a plan. Andy Barber, leader of The Snords, agreed we’d give it a try-out at Doc Normal’s (Snord keyboard player) flat one Sunday in Halesworth.

I arrived with quite an entourage of guitarist Rick Dutton, with whom I almost nearly had a band back in July but we never got off the ground, Liam Wells the DV technician from the art school who had a mad plan to throw wibbly-wobbly visuals up on a back screen at gigs, my roadie Tristan and his extremely useful VW camper van since none of us lot had a car.

I was incredibly nervous of the try-out because of entering the preserve of an established band who’d played together for years. I had no friends in that room and feared being packed off home in a dullard’s disgrace. Ah, the insecurities of actors. After a couple of songs Andy and Doc disappeared off and I figured I had about ten minutes to get down the stairs and out the door or be thrown bodily from the first floor window as a time waster.

So before I wandered off I thought I’d best pay my respects and say goodPAGE 11

bye. But not so. Their main topic of conversation was how I’d managed to keep the tambourine banging against my leg to the off-beat. Hadn’t even realized I was doing it, just picked it up because as a vocalist without an instrument I never knew what to do with my hands.

The Snords decided we were good to go but under a different name when playing together. I chose The Gobbo Brothers, based on the nickname of a long-lost friend, and managed to finagle a try out gig at The Old White Lion with a view to us performing monthly. Meanwhile Andy set us up with a gig/rehearsal at a Suffolk pub which, by complete co-incidence, happened to be the pub where the walking wounded survivors of whatever rave had been going in Thetford Forest the night before came for Sunday lunch. And there we were, performing to a bunch blitzed-out Old White Lion regulars.

It was the best accidental promotion we could ask for.

In February 2002 local poet Tim Sillence died and, since I’d sometimes hung out with him at The Vine pub in Dove Street (Norwich), one of the Art Centre volunteers organising his memorial concert asked us to play.

This became the first official gig of The Gobbo Brothers.

The line-up; Guitar / Vocal - ANDY BARBER Bass - CARL Keyboards - DOC NORMAL Didge - STEVE COLLINSON Vocal - RICK DUTTON AL STOKES In a moment of classic ignorance I failed to realise didgeridoos came in keys. I honestly didn’t know that.

I thought the didge’ player shifted PAGE 12

keys with the mouth, all that circular breathing malarkey. Stupid boy. So when Steve asked what key the songs were in I just laughed.

‘Yeah. Right. Nice try. You nearly got me there, Steve.’

‘No, really what keys are the songs in?’

‘Ah ... erm.’

Finally Rick stepped in and set me straight.

Unfortunately no recording exists of that Norwich Art Centre memorial performance for Tim Sillence but I do recall some oddly irritating moments. We were called early to sound check although most of the other acts were unplugged acoustic.

We were due on second to last. This gave the other acts plenty of scope to fiddle about with the sound desk and for one particular performer to deride all electric bands as an affront to the memorial spirit and, to prove his point, he deliberately messed up the sound check settings. We know his name and are biding our time. I thrust my camera into Tris’ hands so we’d have some record of our show.

And it is peculiar that in the wide auditorium photo all The Snords are up one end of the stage and all The Gobbos are at t’other. The herding instinct, no doubt.

A foible of Rick, unknown to me at the time, was if he imbibed a lot of ale he could get fractious. This was exacerbated by the fact that whatever schedule the Arts Centre were running, it wasn’t working as acts consistently failed to get off the stage on time. This meant we’d either only be able to perform a couple of songs or the event would over run completely so we wouldn’t be able to play at all. T’is the same the whole world over, booking too many bands for a finite time slot and I could see PAGE 13

this was winding Rick up. We did get on, late, and Rick paid due respect to the dead poet before we launched into our set. All was going swimmingly well, even for Steve who had his left hand in a gigantic plaster cast, until Rick blew up on stage and walked off in the middle of a song. I had no idea what had happened and we all carried on like stoic troupers. Later a 75year old jazz band leader, following us on, came up and said how much he liked what we were doing but advised us to get rid of Rick at the precise moment Rick returned form wherever he had gone. More ructions followed.

Rock’n’roll!

Later we discovered Rick had misinterpreted a signal from Andy to me as a warning to step back from the mic as a solo was coming. For a first time out it wasn’t bad but I hadn’t seen that amount of raw temperament before, well certainly not on the film sets I inhabited. I learned a huge lesson.

Don’t, no matter how innocent the intent, make discrete hand signals or nods live on stage unless everyone there present knows exactly what it means. Thereafter I positioned myself on stage between Andy and Carl for protection, wimp that I was.

Our first paid gig at The Old White Lion was looming large so we had another rehearsal out at Halesworth to tighten up the act. Christmas was coming so I dyed my dreadlocks festive red & green and managed to drag along a huge contingent of fellow art school students who filled out the space nicely. I gave my camera to Richard Dinnis who during the course of the evening’s swift halves lost his power to focus on life but mostly on the camera which is how come there exists only one useable picture from that night. And what a strange night it became.

Andy and I decided we’d run The Gobbo Brothers first and The Snords set after the break. All well and good because that meant I could hang PAGE 14

out with my art school chums later.

Having a ‘home’ crowd of students helped except none of us expected the heavy duty punks who turned up to the disrupt the act and intimidate the students. One anarcho-punk with the unlikely name of Jonny Blades, decided we where an affront to his musical tastes and stood about a foot away from my face, shouting abuse. He pulled back the mic stand and let it go. I managed to dodge the mic as it swung back thus saving my teeth from ending up all over the floor. It was a tad scary that anyone could take such violent offence to jazz rock. I cowardly retreated with the mic stand to the back of stage.

About me and mic stands; being somewhat weak & feeble I have problems unscrewing the stand locking device to get the thing near my mouth. This has always caused great mirth amongst my fellow musicians and stage crews who came up with hilarious advice on how to improve my physical strength. Hilarious.

The punks got bored, left and we came up to the break with a happy crowd. All good so far. The big boss of the pub, Rod, was around and said as how he liked what we were doing, mainly one suspects because students are big drinkers, and offered us a monthly gig. Cor, blimey guv’nor. Of course we didn’t get paid that night because we’d managed to drink our fee.

I went off to join my art school chums for a convivial evening involving ale during The Snords set. This was marred by hearing my songs being sung by someone who I was pretty sure wasn’t me. Looking up from our conviviality we saw a guy called Chris, who saw himself as a Big Cheese on the local music and theatre scene, up front with The PAGE 15

Snords belting out my material. I stood in front of him to intimate I wasn’t happy about this but a band member mouthed words similar to Foxtrot Oscar so I gave up.

It was all rather bewildering but a due examination of events could wait until later. Somewhat deflated, the student chums dragged me off for further tiffin elsewhere.

THROWN AWAY LIKE A USED TEA BAG I sent a message round to the band saying Rod wanted us to play a monthly set at The Old White Lion if the dates were all right with everyone else.

There was no immediate reply so guessed the guys were checking their diaries but I was wrong. Very, badly wrong.

It had been a tough day at art school - tutors could be so harsh - and the only thing on my mind was a swift half in the Student Union bar before the bus home. But upon crossing the road two figures, Doc Normal and Carl, loomed out of the darkness and invited me round for a meal at Rick’s. They must have been standing there for hours waiting for me to emerge from the art school. There was a certain not rightness about being asked to a meal which could have been pre-arranged by phone.

‘Sorry chaps, I’m really tired and need to get home,’ I reasoned.

‘Rick’s cooked this meal specially, you can’t let him down.’

And if I’d been more alert I should have glimpsed the hint of the long knives in the night. Trusting fool. It was a long walk across the city to Rick’s and, lamb to the slaughter, the guys kept the conversation light and away from band related issues. The meal was good yet tinged with unease as I broached the subject of why someone else was singing my songs right in front of me.

‘Well you just went off and hung out with your student mates and didn’t come back for the second set,’ said Carl, nastily.

‘That was how Andy and I arranged it. The Gobbos first and the Snords second. If you needed me back to sing all you had to do was come and find me,’ I explained.

‘You can’t sing, you’re crap’ said Rick, bluntly.

‘I know,’ I responded, ‘I don’t sing, singing’s not what I do. Its performance art, I perform the words as a character actor with the band as part of that narrative.’

‘So we’re just your backing band? There’s nothing in it for us.’

Which was a fair point but not exactly as I saw it.

‘We should be complimentary to each other, the band as a part of the whole, one neither more important than the other.’

‘Well since you can’t sing and we want to be a rock band, you’ve been replaced by Chris.’

Wow, that was a shock but not as shocking as their tirade on all my personality faults. Of which there were many, seemingly. I’d been thrown out of my own band which was a situation I’d never been called on to cope with before. My background was as an actor working in film & TV and if there was a disagreement over form and style then there’d be sit-down to sort the matter out. I’d never been sacked before so it was all it new to PAGE 16

me. I’d never been sacked from my own project before either which was bleeding well unheard of.

It was a long walk back to my place right across the other side of the city which gave plenty of time for the anger to rise, not helped by being studently drunk. Back home I phoned Andy to ask what he thought about my being thrown out of the band but he said he knew nothing about it.

Such is life. We agreed The Snords wouldn’t use my material and vice versa so I could go back to an act with a lone guitarist for my future dates at The Old White Lion. Just to make sure I’d got the point there was a stream of abusive texts from former band members. Life goes on. Not that I’m a vindictive person at all but must admit to a degree of unsuppressed glee when word got back the new Al-less rock band had turned up to play at The Old White Lion and were asked by landlord Rod if I was ill.

‘No, we sacked him from the band. He’s crap.’

‘Oh that’s a shame because I booked a band with Al in it and since Al isn’t it in anymore you’re not the same band so I’m cancelling the dates.’

That is one version of events although I also heard another involving drunken female singers who upset the clientele. Who knows. Or, indeed, cares. But since art school life became hectic and took up a lot of time, the loss of The Gobbo Brothers wasn’t the worse thing to happen in the melee of life’s foibles. In fact, thoughts of forming a new set-up didn’t enter my head again until the autumn of 2003.

DREADHEAD The Students Union president at the art school, Paul, said he’d heard I’d been an actor and sometimes had a band so did my lot want to play there.

The Norwich art school SU never seemed to have bands on in the bar which was odd because the whole place must have been heaving with musical talent. I said yes with the tried and trusted poetry, comedy and music which still tickled me to death. I asked Seb Fosdal, former technician at Norwich Arts Centre, if he knew any guitarists who’d want to play it with me.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘me.’

Seb and I got together to talk it through and he came up with the idea of not just having a lone guitarist but a full band. I expressed the opinion that I’d been down that road before and it had ended badly, that I don’t sing and this fact tended to annoy musicians. I didn’t want a repeat, thanks all the same. But Seb persisted and said he’d gather some like-minded souls together and do a try-out, to see where it went. He gathered drummer Rob Greenland and bass player Will Summers while I got hold of Doc Normal to ask if he’d come in on keyboards so long as neither of us ever mentioned The Gobbo Brothers. Doc said he would like to do that as it was a darn shame it hadn’t worked out before. The only thing which made things hard and difficult for him was living out in the wilds of Halesworth, in Suffolk, and hauling his instrument in on the train for evening rehearsals. We solved this by the simple expedient of him staying over at my place so he could travel in daylight hours.

We named the band Dreadhead on account of my having a head full of dreads. Seb set up rehearsals at Access To Music in Norwich who charged PAGE 17

an insanely low hire fee for their big room. The small room was minute, more suited to techno-heads, in which one couldn’t swing a cat, if it was even possible to shoehorn a cat into the room in the first place. One night we were accidentally booked into that room and found it so intimate one had to be careful moving about.

Somewhere in throng Liam Wells was projecting his wibbly-wobbly digital images on the wall which helped set the mood for the music. I had the feeling if someone opened the door too quickly from the outside we’d all fall into the corridor in a tangle of arms, legs and instruments. We avoided it thereafter.

Knowing we would be playing to a student crowd I modified the material to alternative issues; actually, art school students turned out not to be the hot-bed of protest I’d assumed them to be. In another time perhaps.

Having been a press photographer over the years around the subculture of travellers and free festival, my grand plan was to theme our act around those events and anything else which would be an alternatives’ crowd pleaser. I modified some words from Tom Wolfe’s novel The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test into poetry form along with material by the punk band Crass played in a different idiom; po-faced poetry delivery with the band raging behind. The show would include not only Liam’s digital art projected onto a back screen but also short inserts from my 1980s films, narrated by Robin Fosdal. Thirty years before Robin had appeared as one of The Wombles band which, coincidentally, I’d edited their 1970s Wombling Merry Christmas promo for Top of The Pops. This caused comment in the ranks.

‘I can’t believe I’m working with a PAGE 18

Womble inna rock band,’ mused Rob. When I told Robin what our drummer had said, he responded, ‘I can’t believe you talked me into doing a voice over for a rock band.’

We were to be a true, full-on multimedia presentation and it probably would have been awesome too had the art school management, in a fit of the willies, not told the SU to cancel the show. President Paul was beside himself with apologies because he didn’t know why the management wouldn’t allow a student member of the Students Union to stage a multi-media show he’d been asked to perform.

I suspected foul play; the art school bosses had their favourite and I wasn’t one of them. Fine by me, I’d always been in with the outs.

It was surprising though that the management had so much pull over Student Union activities and it was of little wonder there were never any bands on in the bar.

SELLING THE DREAM The art school seemed obsessed with their name being associated with ‘top graduates’ rather than the entire rest of us, paid for by the government sanctioned student loan company. We felt we were there to make up the numbers. It really was like being back at junior school in a lot of ways, how some tutors doted on the alleged best people who were so obviously going to make a big name for themselves and, by default, so would the art school. It was cringe-making to watch them in action. In my first year assessment I was given a third, the lowest mark possible before a fail and told by my year tutor I’d have to attend a meeting to discuss my future at the art school. Instead of us ‘thirds’ being PAGE 19

seen one at a time we were all herded into a conference room together and harangued by the angry head of graphic design who told us we were a detriment to the school.

‘Detriment?’ I asked. ‘It was detriments like me who were employing people in the British film industry during the worst slump we’d seen in decades. I’m one of the detriments who had films shown at the Cannes Film Festival. I’m one of the detriments who are paying your wages. It says film director on my union card and no one’s ever called me a detriment, not if they wanted to keep their job.’

I could feel myself getting angry; there in front of us all was a class act bully who got his kicks shouting at young impressionable students just out of school. What an inordinate toss-pot. The art school held the outmoded view they had to be tough on students so they could cope with the rough and tumble of the big outside world once they graduated. Unfortunately their view of work place reality was somewhat marred by the fact that they hadn’t worked in the real world for years, if at all, and industrial relations had come on a bit since their day. Bullying in the workplace was and still is a sacking offence.

My year tutor mumbled something about. ‘... obviously this doesn’t apply to you because you were only just a third.’

‘So what am I doing here, then?’ To which there was no answer. ‘The director at Ridley Scott Associates who gave me a reference for this place certainly didn’t think I was third rate or he’d never have employed me.’

Yes, I was gratuitously name dropping because that’s the only language the art school management understood. Back in the art room I set to packing my bags. So much for encouraging mature students from industry to upgrade their skills; all the art school wanted was cannon fodder to fund them ‘selling the dream’ to their alleged brightest and best, for their own unspeakable ends. But before I got out the door a tutor from another department talked me out of leaving. Ever the cynic, it immediately occurred to me the one thing the art school didn’t want were industry professionals going back to Soho with grim tales of ‘detriments.’ So I guess stopping my band playing in the SU bar was their form of payback. Take that you blackguard, we’ll have no back chat here!

THUS, TO NORWICH ART CENTRE! Not to be thwarted President Paul remembered, in the nick of time, the art school Students Union and Norwich Arts Centre had an understanding whereby SU gigs could be performed there and to that end Paul and I trudged up the road to book a date.

We saw a guy who gave a good impression of a classic bean counter with no soul nor any understanding of how the music business worked.

He struck me as one of those real pushy wannabe grey-suited guys with no background or training in industry but had been given the top job in a small town provincial arthouse because he was the only one who had the key to the cash box and knew how to fill out a funding application. Totally soulless. I did cross my mind the chap might have been autistic. It didn’t take him long to decide ‘in this case’ he wouldn’t allow my show to go PAGE 20

ahead as an SU gig at SU rates but instead he pushed it as a commercial venture at full commercial dry-hire rates. That was the moment when Paul scarpa’d out the door because, obviously, if the booking wasn’t a student gig then I was on my own. Thanks a bunch dude.

I worked out the running order and timings with Norwich Art Centre (NAC) technician ‘Digital’ Steve with Dreadhead headlining plus two supports so we could finish before the venue’s midnight deadline. I’d been a band promoter in the 1990s and knew how fractious venues got when dealing with a dry hire promoters; always aim to finish early and keep Der Management sweet.

The plan was to put Ali Waller on as soon as the auditorium doors opened so he could play his stringed Indian instrument, which I mistakenly thought was called a Ferengi, instead of whatever turbid techno mood music the sound engineer happened to be listening to that week on his Walkman. We were expecting a hippie crowd and wanted to set the right tone. Following Ali were Matt Adey and Steve Collinson’s Electronica, then us.

There then followed a surreal argument with art school technician Liam Wells who decided he’d have to pull out of providing digital visuals for us because Aphex Twin were playing a local club the same night and not only was Liam going off to work for them but also we Dreadheads would lose our entire student audience because Liam was encouraging them to go with him. Having worked for Warp Records on the Chris Cunningham Aphex Twin Come To Daddy promo I called them up to half seriously ask if, as Richard James was coming as Aphex Twin to Norwich, how much of a hoot would it be if I took me kit off and danced live on stage with him, haha. Warp were bewildered; Aphex Twin wasn’t playing Norwich that night although some of their up-and-coming recent signings were.

I informed Liam he had slightly got his wires crossed, that Aphex wasn’t coming to town and therefore won’t effect our date. There then followed a pointless ‘oh yes they are, oh no they’re not’ conversation. It is considered bad form to gazump a booking to work for someone more famous; promoters have long memories about that sort of behaviour and since the hire rate is about the same for both acts it’s a pointless way to do business. No worries for us because Digital Steve took over where Liam Wells ran away to further his own digital imagery kudos.

Another disconcerting moment, borne out of the original Aphex Twin rumour, was whether we should shift our slot around in the running order because whoever the heck was playing that club would be starting their show at the exact moment Dreadhead were going on stage. In order to keep the student audience with us we reduced the student ticket price and swapped slots with Electronica, so in effect we were supporting them.

That was all happening on top of Seb’s musical arrangements, art school work and general rehearsals so it came as no surprise when Seb visited another annoyance on me. Apparently my stage attire was an utter disgrace and needed dragging into the 21st century. Light fell onto my clothes, never reflected off and stayed where it was. * PAGE 21

AL HAS A MAKE-OVER It was all well and good looking like a crusty scum at crusty scum festivals but for the more refined environs of the Art Centre I needed a make-over.

And sharpish.

In the 1990s my Little Lad had bought a tie-dye jacket for his dear ol’ Papa on the occasion of a birthday on the grounds it was so garish, I’d never have the guts to wear it. This was partially true and I rarely wore the jacket except at festivals. Deemed fit for stage use by Seb all I needed was something in the trouser department which necessitated a trip to a local head shop; they were flared cords and of such eye-watering hue I had to stop myself from looking down in case I got giddy and fell over. Horizontal rainbow stripes where each colour morphed into the next. Don’t look down!

DREADHEAD AT NORWICH ARTS CENTRE, NOVEMBER 2003 All was in place, all was rehearsed and all of us were calm and serene, sound checks completed and ready for the doors to open. This tranquil environment was marred only by the NAC management who had given the night duty manager, Mo, instructions not to let us overrun our allotted time. I have no idea why they did that because the management, Digital Steve, the PA guys and lighting technician all had a copy of our running order and we were planning to get out 45-minutes before ‘time’. I don’t like late nights either.

This was the plan: Ali Waller is on-stage as the doors open playing his stringed Indian instrument for 30-minutes; Seb, Rob, Will & Doc come on in the semi-dark but Ali doesn’t come off until everyone is settled so the PA guys can cross mix Ali’s sound to Dreadhead’s slow synth intro. There was a 6-minute instrumental to a film on the back screen after which, cued by a cymbal crash, I would make an entrance for my first vocal.

This what actually happened: Ali was on-stage as the doors opened playing his stringed Indian instrument for 30-minutes but then instead of letting Seb, Rob, Will & Doc come on in the semi-dark Mo was down front of stage gesticulating wildly at Ali to get him to come off. Ali ignored him, thinking Mo was so overwhelmed by his music the duty manager was engaged in some kind of whirly dervish dance. Unable to get Ali to ‘obey instructions’ Mo came back to the wings where we were waiting to go on.

‘He won’t come off,’ wailed Mo. ‘No he doesn’t come off until we go on. Its okay, don’t panic,’ I tried.

‘But you’ll over run.’

‘We haven’t even started yet. Go and see Steve, he’ll explain.’

Mo rattled off just as Seb, Rob, Will & Doc went on, settled and Doc started his slow synth which the PA cross mixed with Ali. All good so far. I was loitering in the wings with a torch to my watch counting off the time to my cue; belt and braces man, me, cymbal crash and clock watching. Which was where Mo found me, worrying that I was still waiting in the wings when Der Management obviously thought I should be elsewhere.

‘Why aren’t you on stage?’ asked Mo, a man who could see his P45 looming on his personal horizon.

‘Mo, listen man, this is a hiring. I’m in charge here. You’re not my stage PAGE 22

manager. Calm down.’

‘But the management told me to-.’

‘The art centre are not paying for this, I am.’

‘But what are you doing standing here?’ said Mo. ‘There’s a six minute instrumental before I go on now leave me-.’

Interrupted by the cymbal crash I stumbled on stage like a lump of annoyed jelly. Seb could see things were not well and leaned into my ear as I passed.

‘How many lead singers does it take to change a light bulb?’

What? Jokes at a time like this? Is the man mad?

‘None,’ said Seb, ‘you just hold your hand in the air and the whole world resolves around you.’

Right then, right there that was the funniest thing I’d ever heard and Seb calmed me right down. I went, laughing my head off, up to the mic.

Tracks: 1. Stoned Henge 2. Bright College Days 3. Muse of Fire 4. Trouble With Hippies 5. Phil Wally Russell 6. Missiles of Sound 7. Traveleresque 8. Youth of England 9. You Can Be Who? 10. Dissolution of The Mind / Acid Test / Cops & Robbers Game 11. Camden Town NAC unhelpfully closed the bar early so all the students had to traipse across St Benedicts Street, dodging traffic, to the Ten Bells Pub to re-fill their glasses. Not even I could get a drink, the promoter. The management also allowed a dozen people, not connected to us, into the venue for free as a staff perk. This came off our gate money. The staff then further allowed their friends into the venue for free although some of them were our friends too, fighting the staff to let them pay. Obviously the Art Centre wanted us to fail. Best way to deal with the competition, we guessed. Later, when the final invoice showed up we discovered they had charged us £150 PRS for playing our own songs and which we couldn’t recoup because none of us PAGE 23

were members of the Performing Rights Society. If the venue didn’t want us there, they should have said. Funny place, Norwich. Small town England personified.

I had planned for Dreadhead to tour the festivals that summer but the guys were all in other bands so it didn’t come off. Instead I spent the summer apple picking on a Norfolk farm and appeared in one MTV promo for the band Violent Delight, directed by Dom Hailstone at a London venue.

Dom had been my make-upFX artist on Aphex Twin Come To Daddy. That one film job paid for my keep throughout the long 2003 summer holiday otherwise I’d be fiscally doomed.

It came as a surprise to me that a three year BA(Hons) degree course wasn’t full time as there were huge gaps in the year; a month off at Christmas, a month off at Easter and three poverty-stricken months off in summer. No one at the art school could properly explain how they had the temerity to call it a full-time course when we were only taught for 28-weeks a year with 24-weeks with no income and not allowed to claim social benefits because we were on an alleged full time course. Someone didn’t think that scheme through at all.

I started to prep my dissertation early in January 2004 because I knew I’d be relying on first-hand, primary research which needed time and planning to gather. My grand plan was to also make a stage performance based on the diss’ and since Seb was already working on the musical arrangements for my graduate film it seemed best to keep the whole project with him.

I was told, erroneously as it turned out, that outside art school projects would go towards my degree.

The stage production Street of Experience followed the narrative of a bunch of city squatters who tried to get to Stonehenge for the 1985 summer solstice but were brutally turned back by the police in what became known as The Battle of the Beanfield. I wrote the lyrics from my diss’, Seb arranged the music but not all of the original guys from Dreadhead were available so we became a 4-piece.

The line-up: Drums - ROB GREENLAND Guitar - SEB FOSDAL Bass - NOEL TEMSETT Vocals - AL STOKES Seb also brought in a couple of backing singers to fill my voice, as it were.

I didn’t fancy going back to NAC with the new production as being charged double for a student hiring wasn’t something I was keen to repeat. Instead we took the production to The Garage Theatre, an off shoot of The Norwich Theatre Royal, which gave cheap hire rates to people living in my post code area. Allegedly. The Garage project was started by two mothers in my area who opened up a garage so local kids had something to do after school, music & arts, which didn’t involve them being tearaways and hooligans. Of course, once the council ‘worthy types’ got to hear of it they hijacked the project by applying for Lottery funding which meant the ‘worthy types’ could PAGE 24

use it to build a new purpose built theatre, although not in the post code area where the project started.

There were rumours of City Council shenanigans; the local people who’d started the project couldn’t then use the new city centre venue, built in their name but with hire rates way out of the locals’ price range. Same old small town England.

The theatre management found ways round the cheap half-price post code hire rate and had us students paying £12 an hour to a house electrician, there for health & safety reasons, who didn’t do any work for us and a volunteer who didn’t know how to use the computer in the control box, on top of the hire fee.

Good job we brought our own then, Jon Gatiss, who stage managed the whole show perched up on high in the gallery above.

Tracks: 1. Intro (instrumental) 2. Comic Strip Hero (which Seb insisted on calling Cosmic Trip Hero) 3. Spring Greens 4. Argyle Street 5. Sticks & Stones 6. You See it Right 7. Surrender, No Surrender 8. Open Fields 9. Twilight of Our Years 10.Beanfield It was slightly galling to discover no extra ‘points’ were forthcoming towards my degree for staging the show as part of my dissertation but by then I’d given up on the art school as anything but a litter of belly button fluff which passed by my life, a sort of static interference.

Again Dreadhead didn’t carry on into the festival season especially as Seb was miffed he never saw any of PAGE 25

the box office profits for all his hard work. I didn’t see any of the profits either as The Theatre Royal held everything back until our overheads were cleared at The Garage, which netted us the princely sum of about £200. I sent this off Seb with thanks but I gathered from elsewhere that he was still miffed with me that we didn’t make our fortunes. Rock’n’roll! He went off to organise an East Anglian music festival, to which I was not invited to play, which went bust. Lucky escape there, then.

Graduation from tart school meant getting back to work pronto so I could earn enough to pay off my debts. It wasn’t until early 2008 that thoughts of a band resurfaced and even then it was by complete chance. It was by Pete Davies, in fact.

oOo PAGE 26

LIST OF PHOTOGRAPHS Front cover : Al Stokes at Glastonbury Assembly Rooms, November 2010 Page 1 : Al Stokes profile picture, 2013 Page 2 : Al Stokes with Titanic model, May 1993 Page 3a : Nick Morgan, 1992 Page 3b : Al Stokes, 1992 Page 4 : Virtually Fat Freez, on-stage with Titanic show, 1992 Page 8 : Sinking Fast Theatre Co., final rehearsal at Glastonbury 1993 Page 10a : Al Stokes performing at a festival, 1994 Page 10b : Al Stokes, 2002 before 28 Days Later Page 10c : Al Stokes, 2002 during 28 Days Later Page 11 : Al Stokes, 2002 after 28 Days Later Page 12a : Carl of The Gobbo Brothers, rehearsing 2002 Page 12b : Andy Barber of The Gobbo Brothers, rehearsing 2002 Page 12c : Rick Dutton of The Gobbo Brothers, rehearsing 2002 Page 13a : Doc Normal of The Gobbo Brothers, rehearsing 2002 Page 13b : Al Stokes performing at Norwich Art Centre, 2002 Page 13c : Steve Collinson performing at Norwich Art Centre, 2002 Page 14 : The Gobbo Brothers performing at Norwich Art Centre, 2002 Page 15a : student Richard Dinnis, photographer at Old White Lion, 2002 Page 15b : Al Stokes performing at The Old White Lion, December 2002 Page 18a : Al Stokes rehearsing with Dreadhead, 2003 Page 18b : Seb Fosdal rehearsing with Dreadhead, 2003 Page 19a : Doc Normal rehearsing with Dreadhead, 2003 Page 19b : Will Summer rehearsing with Dreadhead, 2003 Page 19c : Rob Greenland rehearsing with Dreadhead, 2003 Page 23 : Al Stokes sound checking with Dreadhead, November 2003 Page 25a : Jon Gatiss, technical supervisor, Garage Theatre 2005 Page 25b : Al Stokes art school graduation, 2005

BLESSINGS BE UPON ALL HERE