Photographic History of The Trolley Men

PHOTOGRAPHIC HISTORY OF

THE TROLLEY MEN

AL STOKES

PHOTOGRAPIC HISTORY OF THE TROLLEY MEN Copyright Š Al Stokes 2014 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 AURTHOR AL STOKES was born into an era of steam trains, when there was a King on the throne & rationing, brought up in Greenford, Middlesex, 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’s in real money.

Currently he lives in leafy Norwich 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.

Anyone calls me a hippie, I’ll nut ‘em.”

Al Stokes, July 2014

www.thetrolleymen.co.uk

AN AGEING HIPPIE AND A PUNK MEET IN A PUB I hadn’t seen Pete since he was Here & Now’s drummer back in 1990, playing the Highbury Town & Country with Gong.

I was filming their gig that night and to absolutely no one’s surprise at all I didn’t get paid so I later wiped the tapes for re-use. What rock star lives those guys must have led where they thought everyone outside the band was at their beck and call, working for love to promote them but given no thanks or credit for their skill and labours. Alternative bands relied on the faithful doing them favours to be tossed aside when someone better came along; it happened to me and it happened to lots of others, musicians and film makers alike.

There were bands who didn’t behave like country squires tossing their favours to the serfs and one of them was the UK Subs; I’d made a live concert film of them, with Steve Harnet for Jungle Records in 1989 and found bandleader Charlie Harper a truly nice guy. Pete had been the Subs drummer from 1978-80, before joining Here & Now in the late 1980s, and returned to the Subs in 1991. Such were the strange and complicated connections between the alternative bands in those far away days. Pete had moved to Suffolk in 2005 and our paths crossed in 2007 at a screening of one of my old music films in Norwich. We went for a beer. We got talking. Round about the third pint Pete had decided I should reform my old band and rename it, fer gawd sake.

‘Dreadhead is too hippie and fluffy,’ said Pete, ‘you want a harder sounding name. What’s that trolley song you do?’

‘The Shopping Trolley Men?’ ‘Yeah, call yourselves The Trolley Men.’ Which was how come my band was brought back to life and re-named, three pints later in the Norwich, Coach

AL STOKES (vocals)

PETE DAVIES (drums)

& Horses pub. All I had to do was find the rest of the musicians to make up a full band.

Pete suggested Dean Watkin, the guitarist formerly known as Dino Ferrari in Here & Now, or Bernie Elliott also a former Here & Now guitarist from way back in the 1970s. Pete brought in Molly Malloy on sax which pleased me no end because I’d always wanted a wind section.

Why? Anything to fill behind my feeble vocal was a good thing. I couldn’t find a bass player anywhere but later came up with a strange compromise; I’d known bassist LJ Dellar, from the folk/rock outfit The Lost Garden Band, since the late 1980s and stumbled across him by chance in a Norwich bank queue. We got talking. LJ had since turned to guitar but said he had a widget which would turn his live guitar sound into bass. I believed him. Doc Normal happily returned to the fold on keyboards.

I had a grand plan since we were spread hither and thither around the country and overseas. I’d record my vocal pieces and send them around to everyone else on a CD so the other band members could work up their tracks, organically as it were, record them one after t’other and the best bits would be mixed together in studio, to go straight to the internet; no expensive touring, no studio time. This idea garnered a mixed response but generally along the theme of Dean’s email reaction.

‘You’re mad, Al. It’ll never work.’

Which was true up to a point. It could have worked but for the fact I’d missed a very important fact; all bands need a leader and leaderless, therefore, The Trolley Men were not a band. Logic innit. Dean had other, more pressing matters to attend and bowed out of the process leaving Bernie in sole charge of guitaring The Trolley Men. The act, loosely based on the lyrics of Flanders & Swan

MOLLY MALLOY (sax)

and John Betjimen, needed a ‘narrator’ to discreetly introduce the songs. I asked actor Bruce Alexander, with whom I had worked on a couple of TV dramas, if he would pre-record the introductions for us, to be played in live at gigs, which elicited a fabled comment from Littlejohn.

‘I can’t believe I’m in a rock band with Supt. Mullet from Touch of Frost.’

With the traditional reply from Bruce, ‘I can’t believe you talked me into recording for a rock band.’

Due to a happenstance of geography, we couldn’t get Bruce near a microphone to record his voice so we went back to Plan-A and threw ourselves on the mercy of Robin Fosdal. Because I couldn’t find anywhere suitable in the cultural desert which is Norwich to record, I decided to dry-hire a Norwich venue, The Brickmakers, and treat The Trolley Men like a gig with a live audience while we recorded the tracks. One had to be very careful not to use the words ‘trolley tracks’ which, of course, means something entirely else. To boost support for the performance we brought in a DVD projector in order to show my old films as support. That should bring the Alternatives flocking to our door, we thought.

Another misunderstanding was the band members had taken up the concept of ‘growing organically’ more literally than intended and decided it would a fine experiment not to rehearse before recording the gig. I never could get that skewed idea out of the heads. I checked with the venue that they didn’t have another band playing the same night in a different part of the pub to which they brightly responded there was no one else, thus perpetrating an inexactitude of the first order. A last minute addition to the band was actor Jon Crampton who, dressed as a monk, was to stand at a lectern at the back of stage apparently scribbling all night with the longest quill pen in the world on a piece of parchment onto which I had printed an elaborate ecclesiastical design.

‘Tonight’s show has been digitally recorded for prosperity by Father Igneous.’

BERNIE ELLIOTT (guitar)

At which point Jon was supposed to hold up the design to the general mirth of our audience. But it didn’t work out that way. Nor did LJ’s widget which meant, far from turning his guitar into bass, it kept being a guitar. I never did understand any of that.

Despite the techno-shenanigans everything was in place; I’d put Doc up at my place since his home was far-far away.

Pete was driving in from Suffolk and everyone else came locally from Norwich. A taxi was booked for Jon who had to cope with the joys of dragging the lectern around with him.

Robin Fosdal, coming from Chatham in Kent, was booked into the Premier Inn. The line-up: Drums – PETE DAVIES Guitar – BERNIE ELLIOTT Guitar & Vox – LJ DELLAR Sax – MOLLY MALLOY Keyboards – DOC NORMAL Lead Vox – AL STOKES Narrator – ROBIN FOSDAL Father Igneous – JON CRAMPTON Which was a lot of people to cram onto a small stage. One false move and we’d all end up in a heap. We were billed as “comedy & poetry in the idiom of free-style psychedelic jazz rock” which sounded rather pompous even to me and I always exchanged the world ‘idiom’ for ‘idiot’ but very time I tried it, graphic designer Martin Cook noticed the spelling mistake and changed it back. Drat!

ROBIN FOSDAL (the Narrator)

The pre-recorded line-up: Synth – MATT ADEY Vocals – BRUCE ALEXANDER JEREMY DUNN Didge – STEVE COLLINGSON Tracks: 1. Light Falls 2. The Youth of England 3. Grandma (Is The Bride of Satan) 4. Solstice Carol 5. Bloody Norwich 6. Madeira m’Dear 7. Forget Me Not 8. The Shopping Trolley Men 9. No More Nagasakis 10. Modest Stillness 11. The House of Misery & Squalor 12. Camden Town 13. The Acid Test 14. Glasters Hymn of Hate 15. Who Am I? 16. Email From Berlin 17. Actors!

18. Lights Out! Technical Crew: Sound Engineer – Steve Brodie Stills – Matt Flowerday, CD Cover Veronique Gulloit, gig

The call was very early, noon, at the venue because not only did we have a lot of instruments & cabling for the get in but also there was a good deal of staging to do. I’m an old geezer and not very fit. Noon only left us four hours for last minute surprises before the sound check. One of the surprises was the DVD projector didn’t work so we couldn’t run the squatters films. That was our support slot gone which also meant we couldn’t pull the running order back in case people turned up on time to see the show. I saw Steve Brodie swathed in cables and left him alone. Never meddle in the ways of wizards and sound engineers.

We were all very surprised at the low turnout for a weekend night spot but battled on in our own sweet way.

It was disappointing to play to less than a dozen people but I always take the view one should treat the performance we’re doing as a rehearsal for the next booking. And the next booking was for Glastonbury arts centre in December 2008. A nice surprise for the lads later, I thought.

Another surprise was old London friends whom I hadn’t seen of over twenty years. A large bulberous person, who I didn’t recognise at all, approached as if we were old chums.

I didn’t get the connection until Vero appeared from behind his shadow and I at once recognised Sparky, one of the skinniest people I knew, who had filled out a bit. With them was another old Harrow freak, Mark, whom I hadn’t seen since Stonehenge 1984. The vibes were with us and the chat convivial until I was hauled away to start the show.

We were missing some band members; Molly was late back from dinner but caught up with us on the second song and Doc was absent without leave, having fallen asleep in the afternoon sun and didn’t wake up until he heard the band playing. Tsk, tsk. Naughty band members.

We made it through to the end with only one casualty,

THE TROLLEY MEN

LJ DELLAR & AL STOKES

the fact of which I didn’t realise until the show was over. I got this version of events from Doc who was nearest to the action; it turned out Jon (as Father Ingenious) was a bit of a drinker and, called at noon, had steadily drunk his way through the day with nothing to do. Well, he was meant to be helping with the get in … never mind. By the time we got on stage Jon was hitting the wine in a big way. I have a feeling someone may have mentioned it, that the guy was off his head, but we’re all adults and I’m no one’s keeper.

From left to right the stage line up went like this: Jon crammed up in the left corner with his lectern, Robin down front of stage, Doc & LJ left of Pete, me centre stage and Bernie & Molly far right. There was no room to move. At some point Jon, stoned as a brick, decided he wanted to leave the stage either because he hadn’t quite realised how loud we were or he needed to relieve himself. We never found out which and against all the odds he managed to get himself past his lectern, Doc and Doc’s keyboard and Robin before disaster struck. Just as he was about to step down from the low stage Jon caught his foot in a loop of mic cable and vanished from sight. He went from upright through a 45-degree arc and flat out in one clean move.

If we’d rehearsed that as a gag we’ve never have got the timing right. LJ said he saw Jon go down but couldn’t do anything about it as he was in the middle of a guitar duo with Bernie and all I saw was a white blur on the edge of vision. Moments later the bar staff were picking something white up off the floor which may have been a thrown t-shirt.

As Robin’s last vox sailed across his microphone I turned to where Jon should have been to deliver the line, ‘Tonight’s show has been digitally recorded for prosperity by Father Igneous.’ But he wasn’t there. Where he was, was being doted on by two female bar staff in case he had hurt himself.

JON CRAMPTON (actor)

I announced to those there present during the get out we had been offered a gig in Glastonbury but the news got a lukewarm reception; Pete wanted out of the band immediately because the gig was a shambles and no one turned up. Most of the band said they wanted to carry on, to go to Glastonbury although what Jon’s thoughts were on the subject nobody knew. He was too far gone on red wine. Doc and I grabbed the taxi homeward bound and as we made it through my front door the phone was ringing off its cradle. It was Pete. Did I know where Jon lives?

‘Why?’ ‘Jon’s still at the venue, the taxi’s gone without him, he’s flat out drunk and he can’t remember where he lives.’

I asked Doc if he knew.

‘Somewhere out near Buxton,’ he said.

‘In Derbyshire?!’ I asked, astonished.

‘No, near Aylsham.’

Then Pete was back on the line.

‘We’ve been through his wallet looking for an address but all he’s got is several hundred pounds in cash. Its like he’s completely shut down and switched off. We can’t leave him adrift like this, dressed as a monk, he can’t even remember what he did with his clothes, he’ll get mugged.’

After several suggestions, all of which involved motor cars to bring him to my place, here or anywhere, Jon sobered up just enough for Pete to get his address and shove him into a taxi home. It was way past midnight before that minor rock’n’roll soap opera concluded, just about the time my London friends showed up to pitch their tents in my back garden.

NORMAL DOC DOC NORMAL (keyboards) (keyboards)

GRANT ‘SPARKY’ CONWAY & MARK BROOKER

THE TROLLEY MEN (August 15th, 2008)

THE LOBSTER POT THEORY OF LIFE There’s a convention in this leafy town which I call the Norwich Malaise; only 120-miles from the throbbing heart of London, Norwich people are proud of the fact their county town is slow paced and sleepy.

To get anything done, especially in the arts, is an uphill struggle with people who are at best half bright wannabes (innit) or worthies. Worthy types are to be avoided at all costs, those who have attained their hierarchical position purely because they know how to fill out a Lottery grant application form. They have nothing to do with talent just a lot of intractable petty fogging rules which would never apply elsewhere in the real world of art and music. They like the lower orders to know just how important they are which is how come it took four months to get the live Trolley Men album mixed. It happens in stages; wild enthusiasm, cautious optimism, obtuse misunderstandings, a search for the guilty and, finally, utter relief.

Many years before an Indian businessman back home in Southall warned me of ‘the lobster pot theory of life’; “We’re all trapped in a lobster pot and,” he told me, “the only way out is to form a pyramid, so we climb on top of each other to scramble out. Eventually it will dawn on those at the bottom of the heap they won’t escape so they collapse the pyramid. No one gets out.” And that’s the Norwich Malaise in a nutshell. If you show signs of success, they won’t help you even if you are paying me the going rate for the job.

Steve Brodie was scheduled to engineer the final mix of the album from the hot mix he’d made on site but couldn’t complete the work as he was offered a long term theatre contract elsewhere. I was slightly miffed he’d walked off the job without finishing the album but understood he had to go off to a long contract for better money. All that needed to be done was insert the 2-seconds silence at the front of each track and 4-seconds at the end1 plus added soundFX and additional vocals. No big deal really. I offered the jobs around to various studios but the answer was always the same.

‘Oh, I’m very busy. You’ll have to wait until I’ve got spare time.’

No I won’t, I thought, I’ll take my custom elsewhere. Next up was Future Studios in Norwich, just up the road from where I lived, who haughtily explained they only took on professional jobs. That was another aspect of the Norwich Malaise, always talk to potential clients as if they are scum and not worthy to enter your august premises which in the case of Future Studios was a suburban semi-detached on the edge of the most violent sink estates in Norwich.

Time was passing and the only choice left was to take the tracks down to London, into a top end studio with a professional reputation. By chance I was talking to another London émigré, Clive Davies, who had moved up to Norfolk decades before. We’d both been film editors in London and, in 1975, I worked on a promo for his band Valkyrie. During the course of the conversation I mentioned having trouble with the album.

‘You can do it here.’

‘Where?’ I asked, looking round in case a studio popped up from behind a potted plant.

‘I’ve got a studio in the basement.’

Utter relief. Clive mastered the CD on December 21st 2008 and we delivered a batch to Soundclash Records the following day. Old friends never let you down.

The guys didn’t fancy going all the way down to Glastonbury for a prestige performance so I managed to postpone it until 2009. Even that was over optimistic so the offer rolled over into 2010 along with an American tour if we wanted it.

THE TROLLEY MEN 2010 Venues were offering dates. Just a pity I didn’t have a band to take with me. In early 2009 Bernie suggested I should write a concept album instead of random songs which gave me time out during winter and spring to scribble new material.

One thing Light Falls had taught me was my voice wasn’t quite up to the demands of performing with a rock band, why I’d avoided such in the past in fact. Rock bands are loud and my voice wasn’t, I just didn’t have enough puff in my lungs to belt it out over the drums. Something needed to change and if not my vocal then find a quieter band.

Pete Davies had gone, Bernie Elliott had a vertigo condition so retired gracefully, Molly was nowhere to be found and LJ got a proper job so, effectively, Doc and I were a band with no members. We decided the best course of action was to bring in musicians as and when needed and become a recording band. No more live performances, everything straight to the internet. Or so we thought at the time. No loudness please. Work started on Back From The Beanfield; I’d been a press photographer & film maker around the alternative scene and still owned the neg rights. It was decided I’d make short films as a ‘narration’ inserted between the songs which we’d video in studio thus producing a DVD of the whole. It sounded outlandishly complicated and expensive

but I knew from experience, if everything is done in-house, we could make the thing work.

The working title for the project was Where’s Wally, named after Phil ‘Wally’ Hope who organised the first Stonehenge Festival, but it was later changed to Back From The Beanfield after being warned of the legal ramifications involving an artist who produced work under the same title.

I didn’t want to get sued.

During the early summer of 2009 I collated the photographs and formatted them, producing a series of short DV films.

Some needed narration to explain the story so I went back to Bruce Alexander to ask if he’d be prepared to record his voice. Bruce was still being Supt. Mullet in Touch of Frost and didn’t fancy the long trek to Norwich to record so I sent him a script and he recorded himself at home.

It was time to muster the troops; an ad went onto a musicians website for a bass player and yielded Matt Gamble. The plan was for his partner Rosie to come in too for small acting roles but that didn’t work out so well, not because she couldn’t act but because I couldn’t act, film and direct all at the same time. The results were cheesy and looked staged which, of course, they were. An experiment which didn’t work. Although Pete was busy with the UK Subs he put me in touch with drummer Billy Fleming who ran the Outpost Music Studio near Dickleburgh (Norfolk).

This seemed to solve two problems at once but proved to be problematic later.

Billy had been Lemmy’s drum roadie and could work his way around his kit like magic. I wanted to get into studio by August but Billy had recently installed a new system which was having teething problems, so the date was pushed back to September. Billy, in turn, introduced us to guitarist Paddy Stratton who would come is as part of the package.

I’d been at art school with Andy Merritt and he expressed an interest in providing what I called ‘swashes of psychedelic background’ behind Doc’s piano-style keyboards. Unfortunately Billy’s schedule was thrown out of wack by yet more teething problems with his desk. This date was pushed further back to February 2010 when we finally met up for a run through at Billy’s studio, to make sure we gelled as a team. I’d bought a DV camera for band purposes, intent on filming a ‘making of’ for the soon-ish to be uploaded The Trolley Men website, and asked Rosie to be our camera person for the duration.

Transport to Billy’s studio was okay for Andy and I in Matt’s car but for Doc it was like the retreat from Moscow.

Although geographically nearer for Doc with his keyboard on a bicycle, it looked positively hair raising. Matt offered to drop Andy & I at the studio then come and collect Doc in at his Rumburgh home but this was politely refused. He knew his own mind best. The February 6th rehearsal was the first time we’d all been in the same room together, although Doc was fashionably late. I started out by explaining what the concept was about, how I thought it should fit together but warned all those there present.

‘I’m not a musician and I’m not really a singer. I can’t musically tell you what to do, you’ll have to arrange that yourselves, think of it as performance art but if it isn’t working tell me.’

‘We’ll make it work,’ said Billy, confidently.

I was about to embark on a detailed description of how the film inserts worked in relation to the songs but Doc rolled up, looking like he’s just completed a marathon, and derailed my train of thought which was just as well. There is such a thing as too much information which bogs down the creative process. Cups of coffee and introductions over we plugged in and got on with it. As usual I was incredibly nervous about being in the presence of highly experienced rock musicians and was waiting for the first one to tap me on the shoulder, to be thrown out as a fool and a fraud. Thankfully that didn’t happen.

The first song to be birthed out into the unsuspecting world was Take Their Names which I’d intended to be a slow, wistful piece which was immediately flattened by the onslaught of hard rock. I let the guys play it around a few time, took a deep breath and plunged in. I found it actually impossible not to sing, thus my curse was broken. The main problem was no one could hear me so it was decided Billy would play with brushes thereafter to give my voice a chance. In three hours we’d got through the set and the results were amazing; Paddy’s guitar solos were awesome, Billy’s drums were right on the mark, I couldn’t hear Matt but that was more of a fold back problem and Andy’s synth was beautiful. The only one having problems seemed to be Doc and I may have accidentally caused that; I’m slightly deaf, tinnitus probably, where I can stand in a crowded room and can’t hear the person right in front of me but can hear everyone else as a low hum. My rule in rehearsal is that when in discussion everyone keeps their hands away from their instruments so I can hear what’s being said. Musicians are habitual fiddlers and in that department Doc was a champion.

‘Please, I can’t hear what’s being said,’ I said, but with rather more force than intended.

Doc instantly stopped fiddling with his keyboard and the stony silence which followed deafened everyone in the room.

‘I’m sorry but I’m slightly deaf and can’t hear if there’s extraneous noises in the room,’ which probably nailed the lid to the coffin.

A classic example of, when you’re up to your nose in it keep your mouth shut. I did but then so did Doc, for the rest of the session. He had been called out in front of everyone which is a very bad thing to do. Bad Al, very bad. My enforced cheeriness thereafter probably made a bad situation worse. I had insulted the man, in front of the band, and there was no redemption from that.

As we were packing up I mentioned the proffered gigs; Glastonbury Assembly Rooms in May, a pencil date in Nottingham and the long expected, all expenses paid trip to tour America. The reception to this was frosty. Billy had doubts about America, that it was easy to get stranded far from home and wasn’t mollified when explained the contract included a guaranteed return air ticket if things went wrong. At least we’d get home. I knew the US promoter personally and was sure he wouldn’t leave us dumped in some forlorn township in the Bible Belt. But Billy wouldn’t move on his opinion so I stored the idea of America away for some other time. He did warm to the idea of Glastonbury; he had a truck with a bed, Matt and Rosie said they could camp and for the rest of us there was my mate Gobbo who lived up on Windmill Hill offering his house. The contract was for a 50/50 split of the gate so, if not a flat fee, we could make our travelling expenses at least. It was a 600-mile round trip and the thought of not being able to put derv in the tanks for the trip home gave me a fit of the willies. And with that thought we wended our various ways home.

Back at Trolley Towers I found an email from Doc; he was quitting the band for personal reasons, stating he was the sole carer for his elderly father and was no longer available to work with us especially as we were planning to go to Glastonbury. It was a shame but I let it go at that even though I thought the real reason may have been my mishandling of him in rehearsal. I replied, apologising and told him our door was always open if he chose to come back. I looked at Rosie’s DV footage and she’d made the classic mistake of thinking of a movie camera in terms of stills photography; not holding the shot for more than a second before whipping off to someone else. My fault entirely as I hadn’t briefed her on the joys of holding a shot so we could see, for example, Paddy’s fingers during one of his amazing solos. Note to self: never assume people know what you know.

At the next rehearsal we regretted losing Doc but promoted Andy to sole synth player, backing us with his colourful swashes of psychedelic soundscapes. All those years we were at art school together and I never knew he could do that. The guys decided I should confirm Glastonbury and have a warm up gig at The Brickmakers in April. With Billy’s studio still not up to spec it was decided we would record and film it with two DV cameras. But after weeks of rehearsals The Brickmakers brought its own disasters.

MATT GAMBLE (bass)

BILLY FLEMING PADDY STRATTON (drums) (guitar)

AL STOKES (vocals)

DOC NORMAL (keyboard)

RETURN TO THE BRICKMAKERS, APRIL 2010 Despite assurances from the venue that no one else was playing in the bar that night, they’d brought in a well known local covers band which left us with about six people in our audience. At times, during quiet moments in our set, the band next door blasted us out. What we couldn’t understand, at the time, was our profound lack of audience especially as I’d done a publicity blitz in all the local media announcing the alternative traveleresque Beanfield theme of the show. Norwich had a big contingent of youth cults some of whom had lived as squatters in Argyle Street, were travellers or had been in the Beanfield when the coppers attacked. It was a Saturday night and it wasn’t raining, the weather being a big disincentive for Norwich gig crowds.

Tracks: 1 Muse of Fire 2 Take Their Names 3 Cosmic Trip Hero 4 Argyle Street 5 On A Slide 6 You See It Right 7 Twilight of 1982 8 Surrender, No Surrender 9 Long Lost Gobbo 10 Youth of England 11 The Trip 12 On The Bus 13 Open Fields 14 Phil Wally Hope 15 The Life That I Have 16 Back From The Beanfield

PADDY STRATTON THE BRICKMAKERS (2010)

AL AT THE BRICKMAKERS (2010)

The line-up: Drums – BILLY FLEMING Guitar – PADDY STRATTON Bass – MATT GAMBLE Synth – ANDY MERRITT Vocals – AL STOKES The track Back From The Beanfield ran for about ten minutes, an instrumental interpretation of what happened when the travellers were beaten up in the beanfield. Rosie was filming from the front of stage while the second camera was locked off on a tripod for my vocals. With nothing to do during Beanfield I took the camera off the tripod and went hand held for close ups of Billy and Andy, who always managed to hide behind the stacks; Andy had really caught the spirit of the piece and was going at it with a will. My slight mistake with Billy, in the gloom, was I lost all sense of spatial awareness and almost got clobbered by a cymbal. The results were pretty good.

Well done Rosie.

At least we filmed and recorded the show so it wasn’t a total wipe out, we got a result but not the one we were entirely hoping for. During the get-out, in a pall of gloom, Billy announced he was quitting the band due to the low turn out even though he had committed to playing Glastonbury with us. It was a terrible shock to us all since the Brickmakers was only a warm up / rehearsal for the later dates but Billy wasn’t to be swayed by logic and his earlier promises.

Paddy gave me a lift home and, as we were driving out, we noticed two unnerving things; the place was heaving with alternative people drinking and smoking outside and there was an A-frame advertising board in a dark corner pointing to the part of the pub where we’d been playing with the name of a wrong band, All Washed Up, which was obviously what the venue thought of us. No wonder we didn’t get an audience. It became clearer during the ensuing weeks when our growing core audience passed on the bad news.

‘We all went there to see the band but there was no sign of you in the main bar where this covers rock band were playing,’ said one fan who missed our show, ‘We asked the bar staff when The Trolley Men were coming on but they said they’d never heard of you. So we went home.’

And that was the general theme of the comments we received over the following weeks. Paddy was shocked the management should pull a dirty trick on the very people who were paying them for the dry hire of their venue. The Brickmakers were Lottery funded to promote local bands and we realised too late this only applied to the local youth bands they personally liked. The rest of us were dissuaded from ever coming back. The Norwich Malaise strikes again.

The following day I got down to editing the DV and shortly after received a phone call from Billy confirming he

had quit the band, Glastonbury notwithstanding, and to crown it all as he and Paddy had come in as a package this meant Paddy had quit the band too. I was stunned. And quite possibly shocked. Last time I saw Paddy, during the lift home, he never mentioned quitting The Trolley Men. Matt and Andy went through a similar state of angst ridden torpor when they heard the news too. No Billy & Paddy meant no Glastonbury, no Nottingham, no America and certainly no album because Billy had walked off with the recordings. Even if he did get round to mixing them, which I seriously doubted, it wouldn’t be the current band so he had rendered the whole enterprise worthless. Matt tried to talk Billy round but he wasn’t interested. I carried on editing the DV tapes in the hope we could salvage something from the wreck.

It wasn’t until Andy come over to check out the edit in progress that we decided I should contact Paddy. After all he never actually told me he was quitting, we only had Billy’s word for it. At that moment we didn’t think Billy’s word was worth much.

One afternoon I was watching an Ealing Film, The Blue Lamp, on C4. It had just got to the part where the police were chasing the murderer across the goods sidings at White City when the phone rang. It was Paddy wanting to know what was going on. As did I. Apparently Paddy hadn’t actually quit as such but Billy had persuaded him The Trolley Men were a lost cause, based on the audience no show at The Brickmakers, and since Billy had a lot of studio clients coming in he needed Paddy to assist him with paid work. I appraised Paddy of the package deal, that if it was one out it was both out, which seemed to annoy him because Billy hadn’t mention it and furthermore was arranging employment matters behind Paddy’s back. Also, I told Paddy, if he left that was the end of Glastonbury for us and all the others dates we had coming up. It would be the end of the band too. The stark question was, quit or stay? Paddy said he would have a think and let me know.

I caught up with The Blue Lamp on C4+1 and it just got to the part where the police were chasing the murderer across the goods sidings at White City when the phone rang. It was Paddy. He’d decided to stay with The Trolley Men which meant Glastonbury was safe. Utter relief. If he’d been in the room I might have kissed him. All we needed to do was find a replacement drummer and Paddy said he had someone in mind. I called Matt and Andy to let them know Paddy had snatched victory from the jaws of defeat and I could almost hears the sighs of relief down the line. The down side? Both phone calls with Paddy had lasted about the same length of time so I never got to see the end of The Blue Lamp.

*

GLASTONBURY, MAY 2010 Paddy brought the new drummer, Pea, into the band at very short notice. He didn’t have a set of drums but a wooden box which, when hit in certain ways, produced specific drums sounds. It was a mystery to me how it worked and decided there was probably a magic imp inside playing a tiny drum kit. Pea didn’t have time to rehearse with us, due to the late call, so Paddy gave him a CD of the tracks to learn. Considering he came to us sight unseen Pea did a masterful job. The box made a beautiful sound and meant I didn’t have to wreck my larynx trying to scream over the sound level of the usual drum trashing. Pea and his magic box improved everything.

I sent a pack of posters off to Glastonbury Assembly Rooms, to be put up around the town, but Rosie said she had a friend living nearby who would do a poster run for us. Every little helps where publicity is concerned. So that was all good. It was decided we would all pile into Paddy’s transit van for the journey down to Somerset but not by the scenic route which Paddy assured us would guzzle the derv faster. Never argue with the man at the wheel who is doing all the driving. I worked out a detailed plan for our accommodation; drive down Friday and stay over with fans Kelly and Paul in Westbury, Saturday morning drive to my long-lost friend Gobbo who lives on Windmill Hill, do the gig and stay over with him then drive back to Norwich Sunday morning. We decided to make it a leisurely trip rather than drive like mad Saturday morning, gig and drive back that night which would have been hard on Paddy as sole driver. Somewhere along the way my plans became skewed by a band member’s act of senseless kindness. Matt was employed by an engineering firm in Norwich who asked him to deliver a parcel of vital supplies to their Poole (Dorset) factory in return for a contribution towards our fuel. The first I knew of this was when, en-route, we diverted off course just before Stonehenge and headed for Sailsbury.

‘I think we’ve taken a wrong turn,’ I advised, cautiously.

‘We’re going to Poole first,’ said Paddy.

‘Why? What’s in Poole?’

‘Matt’s firm have asked him to deliver a package to their Poole factory,’ Paddy replied.

‘I wished he’s asked me first,’ I grumped.

‘That’s probably why he didn’t ask you, because you’d have said no,’ said Paddy, smiling.

‘Its rude being late with people who are opening their home to us,’ I whinged.

Which is true. Of course, had I known about the diversion to Poole I’d have arranged a later time with Kelly and Paul.

We drove on through the glorious landscape of Hampshire in the afternoon sun. Despite Paddy’s school marmly voiced sat-nav it took time trying find the drop off point for the parcel, somewhere deep in the far suburbs of Poole, and we set off for Westbury at about the same time we should have been with our hosts for the night. Someone put in a mobile call to Kelly to tell her we’d be late. It fact we were very late, almost eleven o’clock by the time we reached their cottage.

Because Paddy’s van didn’t lock we had to traipse all our kit into an outhouse so it was practically midnight before we settled in with our hosts. Kelly and Paul were a welcoming hippie couple with a many bed roomed home, several adorable cats and a vast garden with chickens. It was very late by the time we turned in and much later than planned when we left next day. At the insistence of the lads we sunned ourselves in the garden before traipsing all our kit out of an outhouse and into the van. Kelly had us sit down to a proper egg-related lunch before setting off for Glastonbury. Fortunately for us she invited us back that night in case we somehow missed my mate Gobbo.

It was starting to mildly annoy me that all my scheduled plans were being over thrown by Matt and I had a quiet word on that score, having been a line-manager on movies I knew how to transport people about and one small seemingly insignificant change could lead to a giant cock-up later. Matt seemed to treat me as if I were a

rank amateur and an irrelevance to his busy schedule. He was going his own way with Rosie in tow no matter what I had to say. I found it easier to nod and agree and ignore rather than get into a strop with him. That boy worried me; he’s steering our collective band plans to suit himself and he hadn’t realised we knew he was doing it. For a man who was planning to camp out with his girlfriend at Glastonbury he sure held some dogmatic views about how we were to spend our time.

One of the reasons I wanted to get to Gobbo in good time was because I hadn’t seen him for twenty years and we were looking forward to a catch-up. Playing Glastonbury was the only way I’d ever get to see him. That, and being a tourist in a town full of hippie freaks; more head shops than a person can comfortably conceive of.

Looking around town I couldn’t see any band posters. We were crossing the road when I asked Rosie about it.

‘There don’t seem to be many posters up,’ I mused.

‘Well my friend definitely put them up all around town,’ said Rosie.

‘Where does she live?’

‘Bristol.’

It was Paddy who grabbed me as I very nearly fainted under the speeding wheels of a passing milk float.

‘Bristol,’ I spluttered, ‘that’s over thirty miles away! What’s the point of putting up posters thirty miles from the gig?’

‘Well I think my friend was doing you a big favour. She didn’t have to do a poster run,’ said Rosie, as if I was an ungrateful cur.

I glanced at Paddy to see it he was hearing what I was hearing. He glanced back and smiled. Yes, he was hearing the I’m doing you a big favour number. Girlfriends out with the band, eh? She had made a dismissive comment earlier when we were loading the van, ‘boys with their toys,’ which I thought inappropriate but had let it go. From that point on I was wary of trouble ahead, of her stirring it with the chaps believing she was our boss doing us all a big favour by being there. Like postering Bristol. Never take a partner on the road for that way madness lies.

Paddy’s hoiting-toity voiced sat-nav brought us up the scenic route over Windmill Hill with sheer drops beside a narrow lane. I was just about to comment on what we’d do if something came the other way when something did, a car with apparently no reverse gear which forced us into a precarious position teetering on the edge of oblivion. See a transit, push it off and all day long, you’re a toff. So much for mocking Paddy’s sat-nav, it brought us to a stop right outside Gobbo’s house, right where he was playing with his son, Sunny. Gobbo’s first words after twenty-years?

‘What the feck is that?’ he said, pointing at my almost beard, laughing his head off.

We fair haired blokes are a tab short in the hairy department with the up-side of not having to shave everyday.

I let my fluff grow as, sprayed with ultra-violet ‘black light’ paint, it fairly glowed under the lights. I only did it once but now I had a beard of sorts I couldn’t bring myself to shave it off.

I gave the DV camera to Rosie, so she could film the big reunion for the later band movie but she was easily distracted and, instead, filmed the children’s playground opposite Gobbo’s house, the pavement and only got back on track when Matt was introduced to Gobbo. There abounded a degree to Matt-centric filming all weekend and the best course of action was to ignore it all. They wouldn’t be doing the editing. We came to the conclusion their band matters didn’t matter and we were only there for the promotion of Matt & Rosie. Matt had blotted his copy book with Paddy some weeks back when, having decided to stay with The Trolley Men after Billy quit, we had a meet to discuss the way forward and Matt had made the gaff of telling Paddy it was an honour and a privilege to work with him because it would look good on his CV. Anything which comes across as fawning and cheesy grovelling should be avoided at all costs as it is like the person is only there for the purposes of self kudos. Funny though; no one ever fawns at me. Hey-ho.

We got the kit stashed under lock & key in Gobbo’s abode before wandering off for a few hours, being tourists, going walkabout and found the best meat lunch which included blood pudding (yum) it has been my privilege to consume; going back there years later I asked for the same meal, hadn’t realised the place had turned vegan and silenced the café. I could even hear the clatter as a spoon hit the kitchen floor. We had planned to stroll round the Abbey with the DV camera but at five-quid a hit we decided it wasn’t that vital we visit a bunch of ruins. With the sun westering, it was time to wander back to Gobbo’s, collect our kit and ready ourselves for the get-in & sound check.

That was the moment which bored me sideways, always. Miles of cables, drum thumps which could be heard in the next street and the eternal tweaking of knobs. All I had to do was put up my complicated music stand and sing into a mic. Done. That’s when it came to light I’d inexplicably left a cable for my external drive at home so we couldn’t play in the ethnic movies which went with the songs. Drat! And darn it all to heck! Matt said he could

probably find the right lead in his big box of stuff but I warned him off in case he fried the electronic gubbins.

Deeply disappointed, I wandered off to the café bar for the evening meal; unfortunately all we were offered was vegan muck so we adjourned to a nearby chippie for proper life sustaining stodge and wandered back to the Assembly Rooms for the 8pm start.

Gobbo and his partner Esther showed up and I almost caused a domestic incident with one of my songs.

The line-up: Percussion – PAUL ‘PEA’ BURKETT Bass – MATT GAMBLE Synth – ANDY MERRITT Guitar – PADDY STRATTON Vocals – AL STOKES Tracks: 1. Muse of Fire 2. Take Their Names 3. Cosmic Trip Hero 4. Argyle Street 5. On A Slide 6. You See It Right 7. Twilight of 1982 8. Surrender, No Surrender 9. Long Lost Gobbo 10. Youth of England 11. The Trip (not played due to lack of cable connection) 12. On The Bus 13. Open Fields 14. Phil Wally Hope 15. Life That I Have 16. Back From The Beanfield

THE TROLLEY MEN (right) PAUL ‘PEA’ BURKETT (below) PEA & PADDY (left) AL STOKES GLASTONBURY ASSEMBLING ROOMS MAY 6TH 2010

The accidental ruction which I caused between Esther & Gobbo was due to the lyrics of ‘Long Lost Gobbo’.

Since none of his friends knew where he’d been for the last twenty years, I made up a list of hilarious possible adventures: Let me tell you about a hippie I once knew - A spiritual kind of guy With a taste for chemical amusements - A giggling little freak A bit of a slobbo - We used to call him - Gobbo And then one day he wandered away - No one knew where he’d gone There were rumours In saffron robes sitting on a Tibetan mountain top Omming-ing-ing-ing Gone to live in a tipi in a Welsh valley Cut off all his hair and became a pastry chef In prison 20-years later - and completely by chance There were rumours he had surfaced - Very strange Turns out he’s been working in a head shop - In Glastonbury Doesn’t surprise me in the least.

Back in the summer of 1981 Gobbo introduced me to the Stonehenge Peoples’ Free Festival The little scamp - That guy’s got a lot to answer for!

Is there a Gobbo in the house? (band answer: I’m Gobbo. no I’m Gobbo, I’m Gobbo in the style of ‘I’m Sparticus!’)

Of course, Gobbo had never been in prison to my knowledge but Esther thought I was reeling off his life story.

Gobbo & Esther vanished for a while. Apparently they were having ‘words’ outside. Oops. Thereafter the line ‘in prison’ was deleted from all future performances.

Post gig the faux pas was explained, big hugs all round and I was looking forward to the hospitality of my old friend and his partner up on Windmill Hill but it had been decided otherwise elsewhere, I had my suspects, that tired-out Paddy would drive us the thirty-five miles back to Westbury to stay over once more with Kelly & Paul.

Elated we’d managed a good show despite the minor glitches, I kept Paddy talking so he didn’t fall asleep at the wheel and accidentally run off the road. In all these years I still have no idea why we didn’t fall into bed half a mile from the venue that night instead of meandering away on a magical mystery tour via Shepton Mallet and

Frome to Westbury.

It was on that journey I almost had a nasty accident; on cold nights I’d gotten into the habit of wrapping my long dreads round my neck as a sort of organic scarf. What I hadn’t noticed was that I was sitting of the ends so when, at a T-junction, Paddy asked me to look out my side to see if there was any traffic was coming, I almost decapidated meself. A visit to the hair dresser was in order.

I never sleep properly on peoples’ floors in a sleeping bag, us lot in our late fifties had seen enough of that, but the cats herded in sleepy balls of fur and kept my body temperature up. Next day we bid our fond farewells and hit the road homeward bound via Salisbury Plain so Paddy and I could have a quick Omm as we passed by Stonehenge. The added bonus was Glastonbury Assembly Rooms had taken us on sight-unseen and were so happy with the result and, despite the meagre crowd, invited us back to play in November.

The reason Paddy was hammering it down the motorways was because he had a sound check at three-thirty that Sunday afternoon in a Suffolk pub. As we passed under a bridge over the M.5 near Heathrow we all read the graffiti; give peas a chance. We had given Pea a chance and it all worked out fine. We were blessed; a good band sound, gig offers, a live album to mix from the DV sound track and a DVD. What could possibly mar our day? Well not going home for one thing. Because Andy and I were reliant on Matt getting us back to Norwich in his car and he’d decided to stay to watch Paddy’s band, we were marooned. I didn’t even know where we were so I could call a taxi – in the wilds of Suffolk on a Sunday. The next disappointment was discovering Paddy’s drummer was the man who almost wrecked The Trolley Men, Billy Fleming, who was someone I could have done with avoiding. Turned out Billy had mixed the Beanfield track from the Brickmakers gig, even though he had flounced out of the band months before, and insisted on playing it to all his cronies in the pub. Not a bad mix except it was drum heavy but Andy and I felt it somehow odd Billy was talking up his part in a band he’d angrily quit. Strange bloke; I was almost asleep with Pea on a pub couch when Billy rolled up, having heard we’d been invited back to play Glastonbury later in the year, and gobbed off right in front of Pea. ‘Well, if you’re playing Glastonbury again I’ll come back for that one,’ assumed Billy.

I looked at Pea who was obviously astonished he was being sacked and replaced by someone who wasn’t even in the band. I waited until Billy found someone more important to talk to and reassured Pea. ‘Don’t worry. As far as I’m concerned you’re the official Trolley Men drummer and I’ll not have that bloke anywhere near us after he walked out last time. I’m not prepared to take the risk.’

That seemed to cheer Pea up no end as we shuffled through to listen to Paddy & Billy’s band.

Andy turned and shouted in my ear, ‘Why isn’t Paddy singing with us?’ he asked.

‘I have no idea. He could perform me off the stage,’ I replied, wondrously.

That he could. His voice was magic and made my singing voice sound like the town drunk on a Friday night.

Later I asked Paddy if he wanted to sing in The Trolley Men but he gave me an emphatic, no.

‘Why not?’ I asked.

‘Because it’s your band,’ said Paddy. Which seemed to put an end to the conversation.

I was very respectful of Paddy thereafter, petrified in case I said the wrong thing and he’d take a hike. Andy and I knew we were onto a good thing with Paddy because the Sunday Suffolk pub was heaving with grieving ageing hippie fans who were bereft he was quitting Billy’s band to wander thither who knew where. We knew where and we were keeping our mouths shut on that score in case we were lynched in the car park for evil guitarist snatching.

POST GIG TORPOR My son, then aged-37 and a dready-boy musician in another band, claimed in a moment of high spirits that The Trolley Men were an apocalypse of totalitarian corruption and playing Glastonbury had delivered us into an existentialist theatre of Hell. That’s what an expensive university education will do to a person. I never did figure out exactly what he had in mind but got a hint of it on our return to Norwich.

Most folk said I had it coming, what with all those ley lines converging and crossing Glastonbury Tor. I never should have tempted Fate. Or possibly even St. Jude. Taking important electronic equipment into a place heaving with magical spirituality was just plain asking for it, some said. Whatever it was, it fried my portable 1Tb hard drive which had all our Trolley Men files on it – films, tracks, scripts, photos, everything. The shock of the implications burst like a bereavement in my noggin. It was as if the last seven years worth of art work hadn’t existed. I very early cried.

No one could figure out how it had happened since the fire wire lead which connected the WD drive to the venue PC was accidentally left behind in Norwich. There wasn’t anything which could have been plugged into it unless someone had tried to do a good deed with an unsuitable cable and fried the internal gubbins. No one in the band nor at the venue admitted to doing this and with no suspects we were baffled. The IT specialists we gave it to were baffled. It couldn’t happen, they said. Their instruments read as if the drive isn’t there. The lesson learned? Always back up the back up on tour.

Although I had the DV we’d filmed at the Assembly Rooms all the insert films which I planned to cut away to had gone. This meant slogging through all the old master DV tapes, reconstructing the films and ploughing through a huge pile of CDs for band related material. New animation sequences had to be produced to go with the songs. This took considerable time to produce. So much time, in fact, we were starting to roll up to preparations for our return trip to Glastonbury. The venue manager had broadly hinted there would be festival band bookers in the audience at the November show so it was vitally important we were all on top form. Four of us were but there was a dissenter in the ranks; Matt the bass player had decided we wouldn’t attract a crowd because the booking was the day after fireworks night, Saturday 6th November 2010. It made no sense to me. Why cancel a gig because of some heathen celebration.

There was a convention in the band that emails were copied to all Trolley members so everyone was up to date with current events. That way I didn’t have to keep repeating messages hither and yon, possibly getting them wrong in the process and, so long as we all kept the thread going, it worked. Which was how come the following back and forth had a grandstand audience. The conversation started out well intentioned, became irritatingly fractious and ended with a sacking.

I responded to Matt’s query by explaining it was bad form to turn down an offered booking just because the

day before there’d been a free light show in the sky. Besides which our crowd probably weren’t into fireworks much and since we didn’t go on until after 9pm most family back garden illuminations would be over by then.

Matt’s response: we should cancel November 6th and book another more convenient date.

‘Too late. It is a convenient date. I’ve signed the contract.’

Matt’s response: no one will come to see us.

‘Well, that’s the risk venues take when they book bands to come and play.’

Matt’s response: it’s too far to go for hardly anyone in the audience.

‘You’ll have to ask Rosie about that, she was the person who postered the wrong town last time we played Glastonbury.’

Matt’s response: she was doing you a big favour and this is how you repay her.

‘A favour is no longer a favour the moment you tell someone you’re doing them a favour. It really isn’t doing anyone a favour to fly post a City 30-miles away from the venue. No one is going to drive an hour out of town to watch a band in Glastonbury, except for the Festival.’

There then followed several emails on the nature of favours and my bad attitude towards Rosie, Matt’s girlfriend, and how he had done the band a big favour by re-routing us 60-miles off course to deliver a package for his firm who never actually got round to paying us for the extra fuel. And so on and so forth. The recriminations flew like pissoirs in the night. In all there were eighteen emails which changed style enroute, suggesting a person other than Matt was writing them from his email address. Just before I started gibbering as a result of his chop logic I gave Matt an escape route.

‘If you don’t want to come to Glastonbury, that’s no big deal. If you’ve got better things you’d rather do with your valuable time just say the word, but I’m not cancelling a contract for one person.’

Matt’s response: its my sister’s wedding.

And that’s where the email stream ended. He wanted me to cancel the Glastonbury booking because he’d rather go to a wedding. Fair enough. A few hours later Paddy phoned, laughing his head off at what appeared to be a first draft comedy sketch but was actually death by email.

‘You realise this guy has sacked himself, don’t you?’ said Paddy.

‘I don’t get it. All he had to do was say he wanted time off to go to his sister’s wedding. We were never going to cancel a gig just for one person,’ I mused.

‘He wasn’t exactly doing the band any favours. We’re better off finding someone else,’ advised Paddy. *

GLASTONBURY, NOVEMBER 2010 We cast the net far and wide for a new bass player; Dave Anderson said he might be able to play Glastonbury so long as we took his recent ill-health into consideration.

I shuddered with deep joy at the thought of potentially having the man from Amon Duul and Hawkwind play with The Trolley Men. However Paddy brought me back down to Earth with the need to be practical and local. He brought in Pete Matthewes (right) to replace Matt and we rehearsed in Pea’s Thetford basement with the delights of his electronic drum kit and headphones; I’d never have to wreck my voice trying to sing over the top of the instruments ever again.

Hurrah! Hurrah for 21st century digital gubbins. Hurrah for Pea and his magical machines.

The performance was a sharpened telling of the 1985 traveller riot with the police, including the whole story of what the fighting was all about by showing my films; Stonehenge 1984 a midsummer night rock show and Street of Experience, the 1985 eviction of the biggest squat in Europe, followed by our Back From The Beanfield live performance. We were a whole lot tighter and a whole lot less chaotic. We brought in technicians to film the gig and Pea planned to bring his digital recording device to plug into the Assembly Rooms desk so we’d get a CD and DVD out of the show. A distributor, Voiceprint, came in to sell our product on-line so that was all good.

A few weeks before the off Matt Gamble got in touch, miffed at reading on the web he had been replaced by Pete on bass. We explained he’d constructively dismissed himself by his own emails when, in demanding we cancel the Glastonbury gig on some spurious excuse of clashing with fireworks night, all he wanted to do was swan off to a

(above) PETE MATTHEWES

wedding. The tail wagging the dog, sprung to mind. We got the distinct impression Matt thought he was running our band for his own convenience. Hey-ho.

The mood of The Trolley Men changed for the better with the coming of Pete and the news we’d be spending the whole weekend based at Gobbo’s house up Windmill Hill instead of driving all over the landscape like before.

We travelled down to Somerset in two vehicles, lest Paddy be nicked for allowing passengers in the back of his van, and arrived in groovy Glasters in a rain storm. Gobbo had taken Sunny to the City of Wells for the local fireworks display and they arrived back like sodden little pixies after it had been cancelled due to inclement weather. The curse of Matt saw to it the display was rescheduled for the night we were playing; we laughed at the prospect. Audiences either come or they don’t, there’s no logic to it. If we’re booked to play, we carry on even if there’s only a crusty with a dog on a string and his grandmother in the audience.

We give it the same energy. They give us the same fee.

It is disappointing if there’s not many people in but then again we were filming and recording the show plus the band bookers might show up. Yer never know.

Following on with my ‘let’s be tourists’ theme of life I dragooned the guys up Glastonbury Tor for photographs and a quick Omm. This proved to be personally harder than I thought. It had been 20-years since I’d last been up the Tor and my poor little body wasn’t what it was. It was of the verge of being cream crackered, in fact. If it hadn’t been for Pea, Andy and our stage crew I’d never made it to the top, helped by many caring hands of support all the way up. Amazingly it was even worse trying to get down. There was definitely something wrong with my body. I think the

batteries needed replacing. Once atop the Tor Andy was making beautiful photographs whilst I squirted off a few yards of DV across the Levels. Despite my cajoling, the guys were not having any hippie malarkey and became quite fractious when I suggested we have a group hug and Omm for the show that night. I suspect they thought it unmanly to be seen hugging in public even if we were on Glastonbury Tor. Pete & Paddy had the right idea; they stayed in bed.

Later, down in the town, I spotted a familiar shape sitting outside a High Street pub. A recognisable man of girth. I came up on his blind side, slapped my hand on his shoulder and said, ‘You owe me thirty quid.’ And former Norwich artist Paul Matten shot out of his chair like a ferret up a drain pipe. Back in the old days Paul had a habit of cadging money for brushes and paints then forgetting he had the debt. I’d written off the 30-quid years before but it was a good opening line just to see his reaction. Calming down, Paul hugged like the long lost friends we were. It had been 17-years since Paul left Norwich with no forwarding address and outside of all the bars in all the hippie towns, that was where we caught up. Found sitting outside The Crown.

‘What are you doing here?’ boomed Paul in his deepest baritone.

‘We’re playing the Assembly Rooms tonight. I’ll put you on the guest list.’

Unfortunately I was dragged off to yet another interminable sound check so couldn’t spend time chatting to my old friend. Paul did make an appearance but we were near the end of the night, during Paddy’s solo, so I remounted the stage and reprised a couple of verses just for Paul. It was the last time we saw each other; Paul died of a heart attack

four months later and, in retrospect, I’m glad we met up after all those years and made our peace.

Back on the timeline; as we were about to start the set I noticed Andy, whom Paddy had placed further down stage than usual, was faffing about with his cue sheets which contained all the song keys. I looked across and gave him the nod that we were about to start and he dropped his cue sheets all over the stage. It was almost funny until I looked in his eyes and could see The Fear; Andy had stage fright and he was too far away for me to do anything about it. I could see Andy walking towards me, less than a dozen feet in the real world but to Andy the longest walk of his life.

‘Are we starting with Muse of Fire?’ Andy asked timorously.

I thought about saying something harsh and witty like, no let’s start at the end and work our way to the top of the show, what do you fecking think? But that would have been cruel and unworthy. Never knowingly further distress a person with The Fear.

‘Yeah, That’s a good idea. I’ll lead you follow.’

Which I did and Andy caught up. Soon we were all in the thick of it and no one had time to think too much. Which is where The Fear comes from. Thinking.

I’d told the lighting guys not to use strobes, not if they didn’t want to see me in a jibbering ball of anguish, but someone forgot and the only way I could think to stop it was to stand on the front of the stage during a Paddy solo with my hands over my eyes mouthing the word ‘strobes’.

Afterwards people told me I looked groovy and spriritual while the stage crew asked why I was mouthing the word ‘strawberries, strawberries’ at them.

During the get out we were accosted by Lesley Saltman who decided we were a right on rock band and offered us the headline at the Green Gathering festival the following summer of 2011. Someone would be in touch nearer the time she said. Right. Yeah. Okay.

I was so exhausted post gig, I had to stop to catch my breath every few yards walking up Bove Town Road to Gobbo’s house. If Andy hadn’t lagged behind to help I’d probably still be there, groaning with the effort, all body motor traction gone. Gobbo & Sunny had stayed over with his partner which was just as well because Andy & I walked into a house full of squabbling recriminations. Apparently some major Somerset band were playing nearby and had soaked up our audience. I felt it wasn’t my fault because that was down to the venue who booked us. Besides, what the heck, we were booked to headline a festival as a result of playing so it wasn’t a total loss. We’d filmed and recorded it … but I could see the dying of the light in their eyes. Sometimes if its broke don’t try and fix it. It was a bad end to a good day and all I wanted to do right then was fall asleep for a week.

It was a young roadie who tried to lighten the mood.

‘Well look at it this way. You’ll do better next time.’

‘What next time? I’m fifty-nine years old and the way I feel right now, I’ll probably be dead soon.’

Which just about killed all conversation.

We did have moments of hilarity on the way home; despite the anti-hugging stance of the band Pete brought us all together right in the middle of the High Street for a group hug and an Omm; Paddy abstained on the grounds of our extreme silliness in a public place. Later both sat-navs went down on the A.37 near Pylle and insisted we turn left where there was no left turn to take. And later, driving past Stonehenge, Andy got a fit of the giggles sat between Paddy, chanting Hare Krishna, and I, Omming.

*

TUSSLES WITH THE TROLLEYS I did wonder if I had taken on the persona of Sisyphus, the poor sod whom the Gods had condemned to repeat the same meaningless task forever, pushing a rock up a mountain only to see it roll down again. With me I seemed to making the same film of The Trolley Men forever. The struggle of itself was enough to fill a man’s heart. It wasn’t doing me much good either. Complaining of short term memory loss, stabbing headaches and unusual fatigue my GP sent me off to hospital for tests which ran for over three years, throwing up all kinds of unpleasant old blokes’ ailments. For the time being I was given Cetirizine tablets for hay fever and told to avoid stress at all costs. Hah! The plan was I would edit the Glastonbury DV while Pete mixed the sound tracks for a live CD and as the sound track to the DVD. All good so far but there was trouble ahead; on a visit to Pete’s place down in far off Brandon I discovered he was having difficulties mixing the tracks. What he had decided to do was ‘flatten’ my vocal to take the live raunchiness out of it, the exact opposite of what was intended. I could feel my blood pressure rising but years of skilled professionalism stopped me from actually exploding with anger. Pete had had the tracks for six weeks and essentially hadn’t even edited the multi-tracks down to length.

‘So, really, you haven’t mixed anything?’ I asked, trying to keep the lid on my twanging emotions.

‘Well, the thing is I need to flatten your voice first before I mix the tracks,’ explained Pete.

‘But there’s no point in flattening my voice. We need that live sound for the video. If you turn it into a clean studio track then it’ll look like we were miming to playback. We may as well have not gone to Glastonbury at all and filmed everything in a studio,’ I tried.

‘From my experience live albums don’t sell. No one will buy it,’ insisted Pete.

‘But it’ll look hideous, watching a live gig with a clean studio sound,’ I tried again. ‘You’ve had six weeks, the picture edit is almost complete and the distributor is waiting to put the DVD out. When can you mix the live tracks?’

From what I gathered, it would be a cold day in hell before Pete would mix the tracks the way they were required for the DVD so I arranged for Steve Brodie, our engineer from 2008, to take over the mix from Pete.

This would also give Pete time to flatten his mix for the CD how he wanted. I tried to explain that the sound track album of a film of the same name is generally the stripped off sound track but Pete wanted to go his own way. Who was I to stand in his way? We came from different generations with different ideas of how to mix a live album. Except it would no longer be live … hey-ho. I did manage to get a flat mix – that is, all the tracks unmixed and all at their recorded level – from Pete as a back up in case things went pear shaped and flurry round the edges. I had a recording but not the one I was after.

The DV edit was completed and awaiting the final mix from Steve who was strangely silent. I don’t know for

sure what had transpired between Pete, Pea who held the master tracks and Steve but judging from his email I was obviously missing some vital information and no one was explaining anything. I gathered from the tone of Steve’s email that he had tried to ‘do us a favour but wasn’t prepared to be treated in this way.’ I never found out in what way things had transpired between all three but it didn’t take a genius to work it out. There had obviously been ructions on a grand scale.

It was early new year 2011 by the time the picture edit was completed and faced without a mixed track it was down to editing on the DV timeline to mix the tracks as best I could. Synchronising the live camera mic sound with Pete’s flat mix was a right mission and hardly ideal but it worked in its own peculiar way. At least it sounded like it had been shot at a live gig. Paddy wanted to come in to over dub some of his guitar, which was possible, but since he was busy with his own solo album there was never time to do the deed. Four months working on one music film was enough for anyone and it was pretty unhealthy, artistically and physically and could drive a person nuts. The stress was starting wear me down.

BUSY-BUSY-BUSY Several things were happening in late-2010, early-2011; BBC4 licensed a 90-second clip of Roy Harper playing on my Stonehenge ‘84 film for their Festivals Britannia documentary, transmitted on December 17th.

Both producer Tim Cummins and I had been researching a music documentary and I were disappointed when BBC4 rejected our History of Stonehenge Festival proposal as we felt Festivals Britannia was a watered down broad overview of the British festival scene but by then I had other things on my mind. I was due to start an MA creative writing course at the University of East Anglia and was also up to my ruddy elbows getting both The Trolley Men and Stonehenge 1984 DVDs mastered, the latter needing a major director’s cut edit. Voiceprint said they would release my band’s DVD, Back From The Beanfield but with strings attached; we had to include an interview with The Levellers on the spurious grounds that our guitarist, Paddy Stratton, had written songs for them eight years before.

The Levellers were a very hard band to track down and it was probably going to cost us a fortune to film a short interview with them. It took months for their tour manager to get back to us and the best she could offer was my camera crew paying to get into one of their gigs, not allowed to film any of their set but wait until the end when the band did a Q&A session with the audience where I could ‘interview’ them, if they had time. I could see that becoming a very expensive non event if they didn’t like the questions I might ask publicly in front of their devoted fans. Frankly, I couldn’t see what was in it for The Levellers as they had no connections to my band.

Eventually, with the clock ticking away, we Trolley Men decided to scrap the whole Levellers inclusion idea. This did not go down well with Voiceprint, who we thought might be trying to use us as a conduit to re-release The

Levellers’ back issue. Rob Ayling became rather fractious on that subject and decided he wanted nothing more to do with either The Trolley Men nor me.

Nik Turner later told me I’d probably had a lucky escape as Voiceprint had a dodgy reputation when it came to coughing up royalties. Fortunately for us a local distributor took up Voiceprint’s slack and signed us the next day, selling both the CD and DVD. The down side; they eventually went bust in the recession.

DON’T MENTION THE WAR On those long transit van journeys of yesteryear, I kept Paddy amused (and awake) with my merry stories of being a press photographer in various war zones during the 1970s. Paddy said I should write it all down one day or perform it, story telling at festivals. Well it was an idea.

In the quiet of the 2011 spring I began to write In Different Countries with a view to filming myself as a talking head, story telling my war experiences, with inserts of my old press photos with music by Andy Merritt. It worked all right but need a live audience to check it out. Meanwhile an MRI scan showed a small cerebral aneurysm which accounted for the blinding headaches and memory loss. The man from Addenbrooke’s Hospital told me to take brisk walks, eat prenty of greens, don’t smoke and avoid all stress. I anthropomorphised my aneurysm and named it Rupert. I found it easier to cope with the idea of the killer in my head if he had a name. A whole new life awaited. Meanwhile … I could smell bacon frying.

SAVING OUR BACON We Trolley Men, were booked to play the Green Gathering at Chepstow, Wales, in July 2011. I hadn’t played a festival since Glastonbury 1994 and decided back then I didn’t want to repeat the experience of a 500-mile round trip, freezing in a tent, intrusive music without end, no washing facilities, surrounded by 24-hour humourless party people with the soul of a poison mollusc, drunk, stoned & anti-social and all this for no money. No thanks.

I’d rather have angry wasps hammered up my fundament than have to endure playing at another festival without the option of a B&B. It was quite a mission for band booker Lesley Saltman to entice me out to play at the 2011 Green Gathering at what would be, for me, my last ever festival being as I was almost very nearly sixty. One last bash before I hit the Big Six-0. What actually transpired was the horror of dealing with a young, inexperienced guitarist and his Pushy Ambitious Mum who thought she ran my band. A nightmare of massive and overwhelming proportions. *

FOR THE LACK OF A GUITARIST Relationships in the band had became strained and, when we were offered headline dates at festivals some band members dropped out at the last minute because I’d sacked bass player Pete Matthewes. Sacked? More he became incomunicardo after the non-appearing album debacle. Friendship over professionalism is always a killer.

Paddy couldn’t make one of the dates so he put in a replacement guitarist for that one show but, and I don’t know why people admit to this because it doesn’t elicit empathy from me, he said he saw the Trolley Men as a great opportunity to help him get out of his depression caused by bi-polar disorder and maintain his remission from heroin and alcohol addiction. I mean, I’m sorry for his troubles an’ all that but don’t lay your happy horse manure on me ma’an as I don’t want to be worrying all the time if he’s going to drop off the wagon. Probably live on-stage in front of the paying thousands. Charging! Clear! Erg! Andy and I got decidedly worried when the replacement guitarist decided he’d take our tour travelling money, put all our kit in his car, drive it down to Wales while we took the train and met him down there so we wouldn’t need to hire a van. This translated out as “... I’m someone you don’t know with an admitted drug & alcohol problem who is going drive away on my own with your instruments and all the travel money while you lot pay £110 per head to take the train to Wales and hope to God I’m at the festival site when you get there.” When I declined his kind offer and found another temp stand-in guitarist to cover for Paddy, Pea announced two days before the gig he quit because he was best buddies in all the world with the guy who offered to drive off with all out kit and money. Except he dressed it up better than that. Running a band is like trying to herd ants! Charging!

Clear! Don’t bother, mate.

We advertised for a replacement of the replacement and The Young Guitarist1, credited on our DVD Back From The Beanfield as web manager, asked to be considered. The Young Guitarist was already on the band’s guest list for the festival as a reward for his work running our websites. Although The Young Guitarist offered his web services unpaid to gain experience but the band paid him a token 50-quid and agreed to give him a try-out as guitarist even though he was only nineteen and a festival virgin so far as playing went.

The line-up for the Green Gathering: Synth - ANDY MERRITT Guitar - THE YOUNG GUITARIST Vocals – AL STOKES The Young Guitarist, being geographically challenged in London, would have to make the long trek up to us for rehearsals. To help him make it to the try-out we suggested he take the train on an advance saver ticket

for which we would reimburse upon his arrival. The Young Guitarist had other ideas; he had recently passed his driving test, ran a vehicle and said he would drive himself up for the try-out. He said he didn’t like travelling on public transport because only weird people use the trains. I guess that must mean me too because I travel everywhere by train. We Trolley Men couldn’t afford to put petrol in his tank and we knew the train route was reliable and a whole lot cheaper. This was the start of what would become, at first, the intervention of a helpful Mum but later the source of a major irritation. The Pushy Ambitious Mum phoned to say how grateful she we was that I was giving her son a wonderful opportunity to headline at his first festival and she would make sure he made it to the rehearsals. What I thought The Pushy Ambitious Mum meant by ‘make sure he made it to the rehearsals’ was she would sub him the train fare to Thetford. What she actually meant was she would drive him in her own vehicle. We all know from long experience how distracting guests in the rehearsal room can be. We were not to be disappointed.

SUNDAY, JULY 3RD AT THE TRY-OUT The Young Guitarist and The Pushy Ambitious Mum arrived 90-minutes late after their 100-mile journey up the A11 from Essex rather than arriving early which is usual band etiquette. This delay gave Pea time to take stock of what he saw as a bad situation of Dave not making rehearsals, performing at a festival where he didn’t want to be talked at all day by a bunch of eco-nazis and said we ought to consider cancelling our appearance, a suggestion which came out of the blue. Andy and I didn’t want to cancel especially as promoter Lesley Saltman had put so much effort into making sure we played. Told her I’d do it as a two piece if we had to. Lesley said she’d personally cook meat2 herself if The Trolley Men would play in some form. Anyway, they were paying our travel expenses so it’d be no loss to us to perform.

Our eagerness to get on with the try-out was marred only by The Pushy Ambitious Mum’s blow-by-blow account of traffic hold-ups along the way. She’s nervous, I thought, ill at ease with strangers and strangers in a rock band to boot. Finally we got into the small rehearsal space, The Pushy Ambitious Mum having taken up her position as Queen Bee, and started the try-out. The Young Guitarist was hesitant – to be expected – and kept making silly mistakes. Give him space, I thought, let him find his feet. He was having trouble, he said, because we didn’t have a bass player present. True, but we all knew Dave was never going to make it across country from mid-Wales for a try-out. Jim Morrison didn’t have a bass player either. Give The Young Guitarist his due he did eventually get into his stride and produced the sounds I was looking for. One minor twitch was when The Young Guitarist made a mistake he would laugh nervously and look at his mum who would tell him where he went wrong. It was annoying because when I tried to explain to The Young Guitarist what I thought of his playing I

had to contradict The Pushy Ambitious Mum. There’s only one band leader in this room. Anyway, we gave him the job partly because he was already (almost, nearly) in the band as web manager and also to give the lad a chance to play at a festival. Everyone’s got to start somewhere and, remembering all the career breaks people gave me in the past, it was good to give something back.

Asking for The Young Guitarist’s vehicle registration number for the festival security was the first time I was informed The Pushy Ambitious Mum was his guest, driving him to the site with a chill out tent which would house the whole band. This had the advantage of us not having to bring loads of kit from Norwich but also the disadvantage of us all being cooped up together for three days. It also led to a continuous misunderstanding as to whether we were actually sleeping in it or what exactly The Pushy Ambitious Mum had meant by a ‘chill-out’ space. We had visions of sharing a tent with stoned smelly hippies zonked out all around us in what we thought we were meant to sleep.

Confusion reigned. Andy decided to take his own tent to be on the safe side. We thought (hah!) we could remedy the situation by making sure we didn’t let The Pushy Ambitious Mum into rehearsal. We needed to nurture The Young Guitarist in the ways of the band rather than prolong his dependency on matriarchal approval. This proved to be an impossibility as mother & son were joined at the hip.

ADVENTURES WITH THE PROMOTER Although the festival promoters were paying our travel expenses it became clear that if Pea had to bring his own drum kit we might not have enough cash flow to hire a van to do this. We needed to get confirmation there was a

full back-line on the stages. This took some time, a plethora of emails and long distance phone calls to confirm everything was in place.

‘Yes there would be a back-line including drums,’ Lesley insisted.

I wearied at the state of my phone bill.

Just to make life interesting there was a last minute change of Green Gathering management wherein Lesley Saltman left and Louise Thorpe took over as band booker. The first thing Louise wanted to do was cut our expenses and crew/guest list. It was simple. If they cut our travel expenses we couldn’t afford to go the festival but we could afford to cut our guest list. The Pushy Ambitious Mum stayed on as The Young Guitarist wanted her to drive him to the festival although I was at a loss to know why since he had a car of his own. Some of the people who had helped the band in our early days were in for a disappointment, though. So it goes. Meal passes were curtailed too; only the artistes would get free meals and not the crew as previously agreed by contract.

Guests do not get free meal passes.

THE SCHEDULE I emailed a rehearsal schedule around to the boys in the band and immediately hit a hitch. What we didn’t know when we gave The Young Guitarist his try-out was that he was booked up with his own London band.

He sent a rather terse response, ‘I’m too busy to rehearse.’

Wow. That put us in our place. Pea’s response was either sack him and find another guitarist who could be bothered to show up for rehearsals or cancel the show. I thought we should persevere, having spent so much time trying to make it work but I could see Pea’s point in that it was unlikely this young inexperienced guitarist could busk his performance at a festival on only one try out. Then I got a phone call from The Pushy Ambitious Mum asking if we could make weekday rehearsals. It kind of threw me, wondering why the call didn’t come from The Young Guitarist, but I said if he and Pea could work out some dates together then Andy and I would fit in with them. A long silence ensued. The Young Guitarist did nothing and Pea didn’t chase him up.

Oh merde! A phone call from Dave saying he had to go to another festival with his regular band, The Groundhogs, on the same weekend as the Green Gathering. That took the biscuit. Pea, quite reasonably, said he wasn’t prepared to play at a festival without a bass player even though I’d arranged for a replacement to meet us down on site. As a precaution Andy said he could take up the slack by programming the bass lines into his synth. Pea wasn’t to be moved. He insisted we’d come over as shoddy, unprofessional and sub-standard with newcomer The Young Guitarist and no bass player. Those words would come back to haunt me later.

I emailed The Young Guitarist and Andy saying if they were prepared to go on with the contract I’d pull the show back from psychedelic rock to a semi-acoustic folky sound. More laid back than the organisors were hoping

for3 but if everyone agreed, that’s what we’d do. The Young Guitarist said he could rehearse on Sunday 24th / Monday 25th July with less than a week to the show. It was going to be pretty gruelling for Andy as we were playing a twohander on Friday 22nd in Norwich. I wasn’t looking forward to rehearsing with only a day to recover.

I phoned The Young Guitarist to confirm this but ended up speaking to his mum instead saying she would make sure he was there. My heart sank slightly because the one thing I didn’t want was going to happen, The Pushy Ambitious Mum at rehearsal. And she wasn’t about to take no for an answer and have The Young Guitarist come up on the train for which we’d already agreed to pay. Told her I was concerned for her petrol costs which we couldn’t afford to pay as Andy and I were both potless.

‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘I have to make sure you get all the help you need so the show goes ahead.’

TRAVEL ARRANGEMENTS FROM NORWICH One of the things we in the Norwich Branch of The Trolley Men desperately needed was a driver for the hire car to take us to the festival as neither of us had a licence. That’s what the expenses were for. Andy advertised on Gumtree and almost immediately Simon Yeomans replied to the ad and suggested it would be cheaper to take his own car. This was an unexpected bonus and helped enormously. The Festival expenses worked like this; we would get a cheque from the promoter once we had completed our contractual obligations – no front money – and since I was just a poor boy4, a cheque wasn’t much help. Simon’s payment was a free crew pass into the festival, a guest pass for his girlfriend Beth, his on-site meals catered for and a tank full of petrol at the end.

A Norwich fan of the band loaned us the travel cash so long as he got the cheque to replace it. No problem said the promoter, they would make the cheque out to our fan, paid as soon as we came off stage on the last night. Hah!

JULY 24th / 25th AT THE REHEARSAL The rehearsal went pretty much as expected with The Young Guitarist deferring to matriarchal approval at all times. Boy, she had a lot to say. I let it go on because The Young Guitarist was doing what was required of him so there was nothing I needed to say except, ‘… if you hit a bum note or lose the thread just keep going.’ The Young Guitarist had a tendency to do a twee shrug shoulders grimace at his mum and stop playing rather than carry on regardless but I figured once he was on-stage he’d have too much to think about and mum wouldn’t come into it, lost in the crowd.

As we were rehearsing the following day, the plan was for The Young Guitarist to sleep on my sofa bed that night and The Pushy Ambitious Mum in her camper van parked-up outside. Of course The Pushy Ambitious Mum had other ideas about that. She decided they would both drive to Cambridge and stay over with her daughter.

This was a 120-mile round trip and I couldn’t see the point but, hey, if that’s what she wanted who was I to suggest otherwise and interfere with her crowded social schedule. Of course, next day when The Young Guitarist and The Pushy Ambitious Mum finally showed up late she was complaining about how far she’d had to drive.

Cambridge, she discovered, was nearer to London than Norwich. Andy had other things to do with his life so it was just me, The Young Guitarist and, against my better judgement, The Pushy Ambitious Mum. The main thing which worried me about The Pushy Ambitious Mum was all the driving she had volunteered to do when was she was in recovery of some undefined woman’s illness. She tired easily. I thought The Young Guitarist could have come up from London on the cheap return train or driven himself in his own car. But she kept volunteering or, more likely, The Young Guitarist was volunteering her. I was never easy in my mind about that but, really, it was their private family business.

I was almost very nearly sixty, had Rupert to contend with, walked with a stick5 and everything tired me out.

Having to deal with band business, the festival promoters and The Young Guitarist’s mum meant I was right on the edge of control. I’m not making excuses here but running a band is a full time job without other people’s extraneous non-band issues to deal with too. If you’re too ill to drive don’t do it and if you’re ill and can’t cope with stress then

don’t come, of all places, to a festival whether you’re a guest or band member. Or, in the words of some time honoured hippie wit of yesteryear, “Don’t lay your trip on me ma’an.” When it comes to it we can only take responsibility for ourselves and our own actions in such a way as they don’t impinge on others peoples’ personal space.

Rule 37(i) The Handbook of Unwritten Rules, states: a favour isn’t a favour if you tell someone you’re doing them a favour.

Rule 37(ii) The Handbook of Unwritten Rules, states: a favour isn’t a favour if later you moan about how much it cost.

Rule 37(iii) The Handbook of Unwritten Rules, states: favours are reciprocated by return favours, payment in kind, i.e., a free guest ticket and non financial remuneration for “invoiced goods and services” is not a favour at all.

The question of live sound effects for the In Different Countries monologue came up. I had a rake of soundFX I used on the film version of In Different Countries and wanted to use them at the festival. The Young Guitarist, of course, had different ideas. He said he could generate the soundFX on some gizmo which plugged into his amp. Since I hadn’t heard them I preferred the tried and tested method and said I’d give The Young Guitarist a CD of all the FX we’d need so he could load them up into his system. Unsurprisingly The Young Guitarist didn’t want to do that; one of his suggestions, as he’d found some old vinyl soundFX records, was to take a record player and cue in these scratchy discs because they would sound old fashioned like my war stories. I let that snide comment pass.

So I gave him a problem to solve. Who’s going to be running the record player when he’s playing guitar?

Because they, whoever they turned out to be, will have no idea when to cue in the soundFX. At which point The Pushy Ambitious Mum produced an external memory stick on which to download my soundFX. It wasn’t until I was clearing up after they’d driven off back to London I found they’d left the memory stick behind. Dealing with The Young Guitarist was like trying to nail fog to the wall. It was exhausting to get the guy to understand why his bright ideas didn’t sit well with an old pro’ who knew which corners to cut and which corner cutting would make things worse.

THURSDAY 28TH JULY The night before we sent off for the festival The Pushy Ambitious Mum emailed asking for guest passes for her daughter and grandson who were having domestic issues with her partner. That was rather presumptuous for a guest to assume they could have a guest. It was way too late to hassle the promoters anyway and I was shocked this woman thought I had nothing better to do than get her entire family into the festival for free. Worse, as it turned out, because I knew the partner in question and didn’t want to get dragged into a domestic dispute and put in the accidental position of taking sides.

FRIDAY 29TH JULY, TRAVEL DAY All set to go with Simon picking Andy and self up from Trolley Towers at noon. Went out for last minute supplies and checked my bank balance. Drat! And darn it all to heck, a cheque hadn’t cleared into my bank account. Oh flipping ‘eck.

On the phone to the bank; ‘Oh dear, terrible mistake, so sorry, we’ll get your money in your account by close of business.’

This was awful because I wouldn’t know until 5pm if I had any back-up cash if we needed more dough for petrol. Right in the middle of that little drama The Pushy Ambitious Mum phoned from somewhere down the M4.

Now what?

‘Do you have knives and forks in your house?’

After a thoughtful pause waiting for the punch line, I replied, ‘Yes. We’re quite civilised in Norfolk.’

‘Don’t forget to bring a knife and fork with you so you can eat,’ she continued.

Another thoughtful pause wondering why and then, ‘I don’t need them because the promoter has arranged free meals for the performers.’

‘But I’m doing the cooking for everyone,’ complained The Pushy Ambitious Mum querulously.

Noises off, Andy was knocking on my door.

‘Have to go,’ I said quickly, ‘Must dash, see you later.’

What a bizarre chain of thought led The Pushy Ambitious Mum to think she was cooking for the entire band I know not what of.

My first words to Andy as I opened the door, ‘I need a hug.’

Simon arrived dead on noon and we set off, escaping leafy Norfolk. We crossed the Severn Bridge into Wales at 7pm and, as arranged, Andy sent The Young Guitarist a text to have him meet us at the main gate. He replied, incongruously, that it is really easy to get in and he didn’t see the need to come and help us. This guy had completely missed the point as to why his presence was required at the gate; it wasn’t to help me get passed

security, it was to show us where we were to camp. It was a big site and we didn’t have a map, divining rods or a crystal ball. The Young Guitarist had an annoying habit of missing the point of why things are done in a certain way and the purpose of what he was being asked. The whole aim, to me, of someone joining a band as a volunteer is to learn custom and practice and not t’other way around, telling The Boss they don’t see why they should have to do something. And, if he had any doubt about this, there was always the matriarch to back up his misconceptions. A man doomed to learn nothing while his mother emotionally supported his general ignorance.

I’d noticed his lack of comprehension with the websites; I’d send a few information blurbs or photos to be posted and about a week later I’d get an email from The Young Guitarist asking for them to be re-sent because he’d lost the files or decided he was too busy to post the information on our sites, as directed. I’ve always read ‘too busy’ to mean ‘you are not important enough.’ Shocking rudeness of which I doubt the young realise the possible and ultimate consequences of their actions: ‘You’re fired,’ being one of them.

I was prepared to put up with this from The Young Guitarist since Paddy would be coming back as guitarist as soon as the festivals were over and there was a queue of techno heads round the block who wanted to take over as web manager when The Young Guitarist trudged off to university in September.

Rule 37(iv) The Handbook of Unwritten Rules, states: if you give an inexperienced person an even break you can’t possibly complain when they turn out to be obtuse.1 If you pay peanuts you get monkeys.

ON-SITE We breezed through the shenanigans of security checks, vehicle pass and the hateful artiste wrist bands. Hateful?

I don’t like being marked out in a festival crowd as someone to be given more rights than someone who has paid 100-quid to get in. I had three things to do on arrival; check in (done), get all our kit in the secure lock up and give our DVDs & CDs to the artiste merchandising stall. I hadn’t mentioned this to The Pushy Ambitious Mum, I was still uneasy about the cost of her mileage and had decided to give her a percentage from disc sales as a gesture. It wouldn’t pay for all her travel but I’d feel better for giving her some cash at the end of the weekend.

One of the guys in the box office said the management were relieved the legendary2 Trolley Men had arrived.

They were worried we wouldn’t be able to make it all the way from Norfolk.3 I found myself suffused in an eerie warm glow. Legendary. Wow. We made it up to the performers’ camping area with no sign of The Young Guitarist anywhere, the very thing I was trying to avoid. Andy got a text message from The Young Guitarist saying he could see us. A useless comment because in a sea of people we obviously couldn’t see him. It irritated me that all the guy had to do was come over and make himself known. This game of Les Buggeures Risibles might have gone on all night if Andy

hadn’t spotted The Young Guitarist in the melee.

We had arrived but the day wasn’t over for me yet, still things to do; check in with the site promoter to say we’d arrived, check out the site with the band, with The Pushy Ambitious Mum trailing ever after us, chat up the stage managers and find our floating double bass player. The Pushy Ambitious Mum had a lot to say on this score, that we could find the bassist next day as we weren’t playing until 7pm Saturday. And so the first knife thrust was made. The unwanted, unhelpful opinion of a guest.

I insisted on sorting things out straight off because if anything went wrong I didn’t want it to happen with only a few hours to go before we were due to play. Then I stopped. I couldn’t figure out why I was explaining band business to someone who wasn’t in the band. Of course, The Young Guitarist concurred with everything his mum had to say.

‘Yes, let’s leave it until tomorrow,’ he said.

Putting things off until tomorrow that you can’t be bothered to do today have a habit of not happening at all.

Then I remembered something I had in my wallet for safe keeping. The memory stick with all the soundFX on it. I gave it to The Young Guitarist who shrugged it off, smiling, ‘Its no use to me here. I haven’t got a computer to download it onto.’

So what was the point of my bringing it?

‘Its got my work files on it and it was important I get it back,’ said The Pushy Ambitious Mum gleefully. But obviously not important enough to remember to take back to London so The Young Guitarist could download my files. An old phrase of my mum’s popped into my head; dumb insolence. And it occurred to me that’s exactly what was going on right there in front of me, deliberate creative misunderstanding of what was being said to make it look as if I was being a silly bewildered little boy.

I located Andy the bassist, his face painted in lurid colours, in the Small World marquee and introduced him to Andy the synth. Andy the bass then introduced us to his mate Kirk the percussion as an added bonus. Andy the bass and Kirk the percussion said they’d busk along to Andy the synth and his key cue sheet. Fair enough.

These guys obviously knew their business. Back to The Pushy Ambitious Mum’s chill out tent for sleep, hopefully to catch up on the three straight days I’d hadn’t slept in the run up to the gig. Ever the optimist.

The music was supposed to end at midnight but didn’t stop until about 2am, followed by a cycle of baby crying/ baby not crying, dog barking/dog not barking and a very loud giggly conversation which seemed to be happening about an inch from the other side of the canvas tent. One hour’s sleep until I awoke freezing in the night and coughing me lungs up. I was not a well boy.

I remembered why I gave up playing festivals, the sheer utter buggeration of putting myself in an untenable position. No more sleep for me that night. I spent the hours of pre-dawn changing the running order for our

appearance on the Small World Stage later that evening. Having heard what other bands were doing, I didn’t want to bore the fundament off the audience with a half hour monologue about my war experiences before the psychedelic music kicked in. So I swapped both halves around, dropped some songs and added further up-beat material.

SATURDAY 30TH JULY 7am and up with the lark but down with a hacking cough, I lurched out of the tent in search of washing facilities and was soon disappointed. The ablutions consisted of a one cold water standpipe. And nothing else. I enquired of our fellow artistes where the hot water lived. There was none. Taking compassion on my poor weary soul a site caterer offered a meagre breakfast to the lost looking elderly gen’leman in their midst and I returned to camp bulging with something which resembled food. Funny lot, vegans. They have to take vitamin supplements to stay healthy.

Back at camp I found The Young Guitarist with a bowl of breakfast cereal. Andy was making arising noises from within. Sitting around with something which almost resembled tea, which The Pushy Ambitious Mum had brewed, I let the guys know we should find somewhere quiet and away from the camping area to rehearse. This did not go down well with The Pushy Ambitious Mum who had other ideas about cooking us a proper breakfast which involved bacon.

Now, I have a thing about bacon. Not because of religious observances6 but I don’t see the point of it. A thin streak of piss which tastes of salt. But I didn’t say that, of course, because that’s just plain rude. For the next few hours bacon ruled the conversation. There was a bacon obsession about the place coupled with whining remarks about having all day to rehearse and why do we have to do it now? Because I’m The Boss but I didn’t say that either and engaged in earnest tongue biting. Which, with 20/20 hindsight, was a big mistake on my part. Band etiquette; keep discipline at all times. Firm but fair. If guests get out of line, slap them down hard.

Paddy was the keeper of band discipline. I wasn’t as good at it as him and knew it. His way was a brief snappy comment which brooked no argument and always resulted in acquiescence. My way was laid back, to carefully explain the situation in such a way as the argumentative not only agreed with what was being said but also in such a way so as to make them think they’d thought of it. It usually worked. This time I was up against a more formidable foe. An over protective pushy Mum.

THE SAGA OF THE BACON So there we all were sitting around discussing the running order changes and why I’d made them. No problem there although band business was interjected with random talk of pork products, to wit: ‘So we’re just swapping the monologue4 around with the songs?’ asked Andy.

‘Yes, songs first and monologue after,’ I responded. ‘I’ve made a few changes as to the songs too, that’ll work here with this crowd, nothing we haven’t done before-.’

‘Do you think the bacon will have gone off?’ interrupted The Pushy Ambitious Mum. ‘What’s that, mum?’ asked The Young Guitarist dutifully.

‘The bacon’s been in the car since yesterday. Do you think it might have gone off?’ asked The Pushy Ambitious Mum. ‘’Well not if you haven’t broken the seal,’ suggested The Young Guitarist.

‘So we’ll replace Muse of Fire with We Happy Few because its longer and more in keeping with the festival,’ I said trying to restore some semblance to the original conversation.

‘So we won’t do the monologue at all?’ asked Andy gloomily.

‘It did cross my mind,’ I admitted.

At this Andy looked downcast like a kicked puppy and a bit angry as it was his big synth moment.

‘Just kidding,’ I said, trying to make it sound like a joke, ‘I wouldn’t do that to you. We’ll put Muse of Fire at the top of the show so you can lead in on the synth. About two minutes before I step up to the mic.’

Andy looked slightly happier but a bit unsure.

‘Well when I bought it yesterday it was frozen,’ continued The Pushy Ambitious Mum, not to be discouraged from the allure of pork.

‘If it was frozen then all that’s happened overnight is its defrosted,’ said The Young Guitarist.

‘Anyway its better if the monologue is at the end of the show so you can lead out with your big synth finish,’ I explained.

‘Al, do you think it will have gone off?’ trumpeted The Pushy Ambitious Mum. ‘What?’

‘Do you think my bacon has gone off?’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ I responded, completely bewildered.

‘How can you tell if the bacon’s gone off?’

I paused, thought of several possible answers, all of them hilariously sarcastic but instead plumped for, ‘Open the packet and if it smells of gangrene then its probably unfit to eat.’ Then shifted gears back to Andy, ‘So once you’re fit we’ll get out there and reh-.’

I turned to find an opened pack of hated bacon within an inch of my nose.

‘Does that smell off to you?’

‘I wouldn’t know, I don’t eat bacon. I’m a Muslim,’ I replied in what I hoped was an emphatic tone.

‘Let me smell it,’ asked The Young Guitarist helpfully.

‘So once you’re ready we’ll be off and-.’ I tried again.

‘You can’t expect the boys5 to rehearse without breakfast,’ interjected The Pushy Ambitious Mum yet again.

‘I’ve eaten, I know The Young Guitarist’s had his cereal and I’m sure I can find something for Andy along the way,’ I said, starting to lose patience with this hog centred conversation.

‘And have you told the bass player and drummer about this rehearsal?’6 asked The Pushy Ambitious Mum dismissively.

This intrusive attitude on the part of The Pushy Ambitious Mum7 was really starting to wind me up. Who the flipping heck did this woman, a guest of all people, think she was? My mum? My boss? Andy saw the look on my face, what was about to come out of my gob and quickly stepped in with, ‘Yes, everyone knows.’

I felt for Andy who had been forced to lie about the bassist and drummer in case this gave The Pushy Ambitious Mum leave to stop The Young Guitarist going off to rehearse. I could just imagine that conversation: if they can’t be bothered then why should my Young Guitarist? With an hour’s explanation about why the bassist and drummer didn’t need to rehearse which would surely make my brain burst. The Pushy Ambitious Mum was back on the subject of pork products again.

‘How many rashers do you want Young Guitarist?’

‘I’ll have three please Mum.’ ‘Andy?’

‘Two please.’

‘You sure, Andy? That doesn’t seem like much …’

‘Don’t make mine too crunchy,’ suggested The Young Guitarist.

‘I thought you liked your bacon crunchy.’

‘No, I‘m always telling you but you never listen,7’ was his bashful response.

‘Its crunchy now,’ The Pushy Ambitious Mum informed the world at large, ‘so I’ll give it to Andy. Do you like crunchy bacon, Andy?’

I lost the will to listen to this porcine chit-chat and retired into the tent to change into my stage clothes to get used to wearing them and loaded all my scripts and collapsible music stand, which had a habit of collapsing onstage, into my back pack. I live in fear of losing my scripts as, with short term memory loss, I won’t remember enough of it to perform properly. People have asked why I don’t learn the words? I do. I wrote them. But

sometimes Rupert lets me down.8 It’s the power of the performance, ‘Alness’ Pete Matthewes called it, which makes up for Rupert having ‘a little moment.’ In fact, I remember everything. The trick is to remember what’s important when I need it. So it goes. While I was gathering my stuff together I heard Simon and Beth, the drivers, hove up outside.

‘Where’s Al?’ asked Simon.

‘He’s gone in the tent for a bit of a lie-down. I think it has all got a bit too much for him,’ said The Pushy Ambitious Mum with what sounded rather like spiteful glee.

‘Oh,’ said Simon, slightly confused.

This was outrageous. Simon & Beth are employees, they’re not friends or guests but paid crew. This snide personal comment was completely out of order. Unbelievable, talking about The Boss in this manner, within earshot. A kind of mind games of the I’m in charge here and don’t you forget it variety. This woman obviously had serious social issues. So to prove to the hired help that I wasn’t a complete mental case, I emerged from the tent with a nonchalant smile on my face to ask, ‘Are we fit?’

‘You okay, Al?’ asked Simon full of concern.

‘Of course. Never better. Shall we find somewhere quiet to rehearse?’

‘I’m still cooking. Bacon, Simon?’

‘Thanks.’

‘Beth?’

‘Oh thank you.’

Oh God, was there no end to this bacon? Thinking on my feet, with The Pushy Ambitious Mum distracted by frying bacon for Simon & Beth, I seized the moment.

‘Okay chaps, grab your kit and let’s go.’

I was determined to get the Andy & The Young Guitarist away from this interminable bacon moment before I died of old age.

As we were walking away The Pushy Ambitious Mum called out, ‘Where are you going to be?’

‘Don’t know, mum.’

‘When you get where you’re going send me a text and I’ll come and join you.’

I groaned inwardly. The whole point of going somewhere else was to get The Young Guitarist away from his over opinionated mother. And she was bloody determined that wasn’t going to happen. I looked at Andy. Looking at me. Andy had heard of my fabled short fuse and knew I was on the verge of exploding. The main problem of losing control is everyone gets hit by the shrapnel, the righteous and unrighteous alike. I waggled my eyebrows at Andy who frowned. Then the penny dropped. He lagged back so I could have a few quiet words with The

Young Guitarist.

‘Can you do me a favour, please?’ I asked.

‘Yeah, sure,’ said The Young Guitarist.

‘Can you have a quiet word with your mum, remind her she’s a guest here and ask her to calm down a bit because she’s really starting to irritate me.’

‘I don’t think she’s irritating,’ came the curt response.

And that was it. What I had to say as Ubersturmbahnfuhrer of the band, with The Young Guitarist playing his first festival, had no meaning to him. A rank amateur who refused to take direction. A hanging offence when I were nowt but a lad.

‘She contradicts me all the time,’ I tried, ‘I find that extremely irritating.’

Sullen sulky silence ensued. It did cross my mind to fire him on the spot and have Andy and I carry on as a four piece with Andy the bass and Kirk the drums jamming along with us. Anything to get away from the bad vibes of the mother & son odd couple. It was suffocating. It struck me I was dealing with was a control freak mother who wouldn’t cut the apron strings and a child-like stroppy teenager who was quite happy with the apron strings as they were thank you all the same. Which was fine in the privacy of their own home but a flipping mind phuck to deal with at a festival. I had the ethereal feeling that one of us was completely barking mad and wasn’t sure which of us it applied to. I hoped it wasn’t me.

UNDER THE MIDDAY SUN By the time we found a quiet spot away from The World it was noon under the midday sun – mad dogs and Englishmen - which was why I wanted to do this rehearsal two hours earlier had not the saga of the bacon intervened. We got through the songs okay but when it came to the monologue The Young Guitarist became restive. That old refusing to take direction thing again.

‘I know this piece so I don’t need to rehearse it,’ he said.

My frayed thread of patience snapped.

‘Well I wrote it and even I need to rehearse. Think yourself lucky you’re not in a band like Here & Now. I’ve seen Keef Tha’ Missile punch someone for coming out with stuff like that. You don’t decide how good you are, I do.’

The Young Guitarist sulked and Andy looked like he’d rather be anywhere else than in that field, right then. It had to be done. Just a shame Paddy wasn’t there to do it for me. But before we got started The Young Guitarist, who didn’t take criticism at all, had to get his own back. It came in the form of distraction. Saying one thing but meaning something completely else.

‘The sun’s too hot, I didn’t bring a hat so we’ll have to move into the shade or I’ll collapse. I’m prone to heat stroke.’

I always thought everyone is prone to heat stroke if they stray into the midday sun without a hat and don’t take on enough fluids, but what do I know. Coming from The Young Guitarist it sounded like a technique he’d picked up from his mum. When faced with something they didn’t want to do – yes, you actually have to work when you play at a festival – some impossible to disprove illness would rear its fevered head. Almost as soon as we arrived on-site The Young Guitarist was complaining he’d had to put the chill out tent up on his own. The Pushy Ambitious Mum said she couldn’t help because of her illness. I was curious about that and suggested it may have been easier for her if she’d brought her husband – an ex-Met copper, fit and now a classic car enthusiast – to take the load off. I would have happily given him a guest pass just so he could be there for her9. She really balked at that suggestion.

‘I didn’t want him here. I need my independence to prove I can do things for myself.’

That’s when I twigged, right there in that field with The Young Guitarist and Andy under the midday sun. That’s what this was all about for her. Nothing to do with over protecting The Young Guitarist, certainly nothing to do with her argumentative attitude toward me – I could have been any male authority figure in any situation and it would have been the same – merely her being an ungracious guest at a festival. It was to do with her proving she could cope without having her protective ex-copper husband to look out for her.

Which is all very fine and noble but, sorry to sound harsh, what the feck has that got to do with me? Or my band, in the here & now of that festival right there and then? Sorry, I

must be suffering from compassion fatigue. I think Rupert was acting up and needed my full attention; all I had for him was a bottle of baby Aspirin.

What I’m getting at here, despite Rupert’s rude interruption, is The Young Guitarist may have seen how The Pushy Ambitious Mum’s illness manipulation works and he was using it on me to get out of rehearsing. My advice is don’t get yourself in a situation where you can’t cope with the action. I know. I’ve been there myself, suddenly confronted with an ‘oh shit’ moment, out of my comfort zone. Two ways out of it; pull yourself together and get on with it, you never know you might just learn something and enjoy it at the same time or make an excuse and run away. Terribly fast.

And that’s when I remembered the cannabis. I don’t use drugs at all and so far as I’m aware Andy isn’t a big fan either. The first thing The Pushy Ambitious Mum and The Young Guitarist did when we arrived on-site was roll a big fat joint which they had to smoke between them because I’m an abstainer and Andy only took a couple puffs to be sociable. Maybe that was it. Mother & son stressed out on skunk unable to deal with reality.

Even with my walking stick the long hobble to find a tree to shade under became a mission of bacon saga proportions. Under those yonder nodding boughs the ground was strewn with nettles which I viciously stamped into submission. Get rid of that anger. We got through the monologue with only a few hitches and went our separate ways. By the time I got back to the artiste camping area I was intercepted by one of the management.

There had been a complaint. Someone near where we were based had noticed the illicit odour of frying bacon.

‘Is that a problem?’ I asked.

‘Yes, this is a vegan only site.’

‘Ah, right, I’ll have words,’ I replied optimistically.

That was a shot across the bows. Keep your guests in order it said. I didn’t need reminding as it was in our contract. I took the coward’s way out and decided not to mention it unless bacon preparation reared its ugly snout again.

EXTRA! EXTRA! By the time I got back to the tent The Pushy Ambitious Mum was holding forth with The Young Guitarist and Andy and Simon and Beth. A pall of gloom descended as I arrived, I was obviously not their sort of right-on person and I was intruding. The Young Guitarist was sitting in a lawn chair in the tent entrance and refused to move when I attempted go inside. This was punishment for making him rehearse, I knew. I took my big bag of clothes and sleeping bag, with nothing more on my mind than putting them in the lock up, when The Pushy Ambitious Mum offered to stash them in her van. I had a momentary twinge of paranoia, wondering what new mischief was afoot but knew I would look a prize twit if I turned her down. What could possibly go wrong? What indeed.

I stuck around for a while. Simon had looked me up on internet movie data base and asked about the movies I’d been in. I trotted out the usual amusing stories of filming in strange places. Warmth was creeping back into the strange group, laughter overtook gloom and it was going swimmingly well until The Pushy Ambitious Mum had to ask the wrong question.

‘So how long have you been a film extra, Al?’ Oh that old chestnut. It must be the recession which has led us to became a nation of low expectations. Years ago when I said I was an actor people just accepted it. Only doin’ me job. These days all actors are deemed to be film extras. I tried to explain.

‘I’ve never been a film extra. As a matter of fact I’ve never met an extra in the UK. It’s an American expression.

At the BBC they are known as supporting artistes, at ITV they are walk-ons and on feature films they are background artistes. I was a contract actor.’

‘But don’t you have to speak to be an actor?’ asked The Pushy Ambitious Mum, stirring gently with the big wooden spoon of derision.

‘An urban myth. Arnold ‘I’ll be back’ Schwarzeneggar only had a few lines in the whole of Terminator but that didn’t stop him getting star billing. I speak in movies except for the few creature films I’ve appeared in when I didn’t. The only real difference between a 75-quid a day supporting artiste and a contract actor is the end credit and a couple of grand a day.’

And that just about killed the conversation. If you don’t like the answer you shouldn’t ask the question. Beth suggested actors and musicians shouldn’t get paid at all because what we do is a vocation. We’ve chosen to do it so we don’t deserve to earn a living from it.

‘I think you’ll find anyone who does a job which is somehow deemed destined or called upon, something demanding a special commitment is vocational. Like teachers and nurses. But teachers and nurses get paid too so why not musicians and actors? How is that different?’ I tried.

‘Because you’ve chosen to do it. You should get a proper job and do your acting part time,’ Beth explained.

‘I think that’ll cause havoc with the filming schedules. How would that work? Universal Pictures will have to wait until I get off work from shelf stacking at Tescos before I can appear in The Mummy?’

‘But you’re very unlikely to appear in a big film like The Mummy so that doesn’t apply,’ laughed The Pushy Ambitious Mum. ‘Um, actually I did appear in The Mummy, 1997, at Shepperton Film Studios for Universal Pictures. I was a Mummy Priest covered from head to toe in latex, it took four hours every morning to get into make up, filming ten hours a day, then more hours getting out of make up. It was hard physical manual labour.’

The Pushy Ambitious Mum made a sneering sound, a sort of reverse plumbers sharp in-take of breath. Obviously

she deemed actors, ballet dancers and musicians beneath contempt. All the ballet dancers I’ve ever met are built like brick outhouses and are athletes. Anyone calls me a luvvie, they get punched.

Beth continued.

‘Its not fair all these bands like Marillion and record companies making millions. They should be made to give it to the poor and stop prosecuting people who down load music from the net.’

Oh that old chestnut, squared.

‘By down loading from the net I take it you mean copyright theft?’

‘Music should be free, it doesn’t belong to anybody.

‘My music belongs to me. Anyone steals from me they get busted. My music, your car, Andy’s synth, the Crown Jewels, what difference does it make? Theft is theft.’

‘You can’t own an idea,’ Beth insisted.

‘Actually … never mind. This money you’re going to take off Marillion? How is that going to work? You just roll up and ram raid them, take off with a bag marked swag stuffed full of tenners? You can get fifteen years for robbery.’

‘That’s exactly what makes copyright so wrong.’

‘If I didn’t own my music, the record company wouldn’t pay royalties, I couldn’t afford to pay rent or eat and I certainly couldn’t afford to do the odd freebie like playing here at the Green Gathering, which means I couldn’t afford to pay Simon to drive us and you wouldn’t be on the guest list.’

The Pushy Ambitious Mum had heard quite enough of that sort of running dog lacky of capitalist talk and, dismissing me from her reality, she retreated into her van, slammed the door shut behind her. I made my excuses and left.

(above) AL STOKES IN THE FILM CRADLE OF FEAR FOR PRAGMATIC PICTURES LONDON, 1999

Enough of this bullocks. I could be out there enjoying myself.

I took my back pack and escaped to find the beer tent which turned out to be a cider tent. The local stuff you could stand a spoon up in. I slowly drank a half, alone, until joined by a couple fans from Birmingham. Long humorous Brummy chats about how much Birmingham had changed since I’d lived in Mosley Village briefly back in 1984. The cider flowed. Looked at my watch and decided the cider should stop flowing with only an hour to go before our show. I don’t like performing whilst under the influence.

As we parted ways I noticed Andy, The Young Guitarist and the entourage coming down towards the stage area, instruments lashed to hand trolleys. How appropriate. We three waited outside the backstage area with Andy the bass and Kirk the drums until the stage crew, like a well oiled machine, led us to our jump off point.

The rough uneven ground was proving problematic for The Young Guitarist man-handing his stacked trolley.

‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.

‘There’s no one to help me,’ came the grumpy response.

‘Sorry but it’s the maid’s day off.’

Humour wasn’t going to do the trick it turned out. I was about to do the band hug/bonding thing when one of the crew rolled up with a message.

‘Al, can you go to the bar please?’

Now what. It turned out to a huge pot of coffee and five mugs which were handed round the band while we waited for Australian comedian Mal Webb to finish his set. I thought about words of encouragement for the tense Trolleys but sometimes it has the reverse effect. Looking at Andy and The Young Guitarist’s nervous faces I decided this wasn’t a good idea. Don’t let them have time to think too much. Never say ‘good luck’ to someone about to go on-stage as history tells us it brings bad luck. ‘Break a leg’ didn’t seem right either in case it ended up being mine. I plumped for, ‘Let’s knock ‘em dead!’

But before we got as far as the stage Simon the driver approached.

‘I need money for food,’ he demanded.

‘We’re about to go on stage. See me after.’

‘No, now. You promised you’d feed me.’

‘Can’t it wait?’

‘No.’ There was a certain edgy insistence about Simon’s demeanour which suggested I might not live long enough to get onto the stage.

‘If you wait until after I’ll give you my meal ticket,’ I explained, trying to get him off my back.

‘But you need it. What are you going to eat?’

‘I’ve eaten,’ I lied.

Oh god, was there no end to this? Fumbling for my wallet, concentration destroyed, I couldn’t believe this guy was hassling for money on the edge of the stage and didn’t trust me enough to wait until after the show to get his food. I mean, where would I go? He had the car keys. I gave him a tenner and he went about his mealful occasions. This whole encounter was watched under The Pushy Ambitious Mum’s beady gaze. No, she wouldn’t wind the guy up, surely. That must rate as the worst bad vibe moment I’d ever had before stepping out onto a live stage.

PERFORMANCE ON THE SMALL WORLD STAGE We got through it. That’s all I can say. When I built up the lyrics I turned, nodding to The Young Guitarist to take over with a raunchy guitar solo but he just frowned at me and kept on playing the same old plunkerty-plunk which to my ears – unhindered by stage fold back – sounded lack-lustre and uninventive. Shame he couldn’t have bothered to listen to my advice earlier instead of merely going through the motions on-stage. We were not in to Mr. Stratton’s singing guitar that was for darn sure. Andy the bass and Kirk the drums rallied magnificently, I thought.

We got off the stage to sparse applause and some little kids wanting an autograph. Never ignore the power of little kids who will one day grow up into album buying adults. By the time I got out of the stage area The Pushy Ambitious Mum was leading my band away like the Pied Piper of Essex. It was a mission to catch up with them, hobbling on the walking stick, exhausted from performing and fumbling for pills.

ADVENTURES WITH THE CATERING CREW I finally caught up to The Young Guitarist and Andy with the proffered delights of the crew catering tent in mind. I had three meal tickets. There were three of us. The Pushy Ambitious Mum, however, tagged along too and didn’t get the subtle hints. This post performance hour is special to me and I don’t like to be interrupted by extraneous wafflings. I could have really done without The Pushy Ambitious Mum in my ear’ole at that moment, deciding what she’s going to have off the menu board and what The Young Guitarist should have. Banal conversations of the uninvited.

As we moved up in the food queue I asked a serving person, ‘What meat have you got?’

‘We don’t have meat. This is a vegan festival. Meat’s not allowed.’

‘Erm, I think you’ll find it is. It’s in my contract.’

‘I can’t serve you.’

‘Why not?’

‘We’ve run out of food.’

‘You’ve what ..?’

‘You’ll have to come back when we’ve cooked some more.’

‘When will that be?’

‘When we’ve cooked some more.’

‘Good god.’

‘Well that’s all right,’ said The Pushy Ambitious Mum, ‘I’ll cook us all bacon and sausages.’

In fact, that wasn’t all right because not only was some dim waitress deciding we couldn’t eat – notwithstanding as per our contract – but The Pushy Ambitious Mum had just announced to the vegan festival10 caterer that she was going to piss in their face and cook meat anyway.

I left the band, sheep-like, to wander off with The Pushy Ambitious Mum and stuck it out in the crew catering tent where I eventually got fed a huge plate of some kind of cold vegan stew which reminded me somewhat in appearance of vomit. It was peaceful eating on my own. Peaceful yet somehow shunned. On my way back to camp, to change out of my stage gear, I was intercepted by a management person who apologised for my lack of contractual meat but had other things to say about the behaviour of a band’s guest. The catering staff were miffed because a person not entitled to a free meal had complained and, disconcertingly, announced the cooking of meat at a non-meat festival. Three guesses who that was. We were allowed to stay on site to play the following day if I apologised to the catering staff. Yes, that was pretty humiliating. I didn’t go back to eat there again because I’d rather pay for my cold vegan vomit elsewhere than have to go through all that again. On my way back to the camping area I met up with fans who said they’d wait while I got changed so we could all go out of the razz together. This did not, in fact, happen.

When I got back to the artiste camping area there was no sign of anyone Trolley related and, most disconcertingly, no sign of my bags with all my kit in them which included my normal clothes, a warm coat and wallet. Ah! Of course, if the guys had gone walkabout they’d have locked my kit in the secure storage lock up. They hadn’t. This gave the management a momentary fit of the willies because they thought someone had broken into the lock up and nicked my kit. There was nothing I could do except sit for several freezing hours of darkness outside the chill out tent waiting for the guys to return, to tell me where my kit was stashed so I could warm up. All thoughts of ‘razzing’ with the fans vanished with the fast approaching frost. I was not a happy bunny.

Shivering whilst taking a piss at the gentlemen’s ablutions, evil smelling urine saturated bales of hay11, I was joined in the gloom by a member of Zen Elephant. We discussed the relative joys of playing at festivals. He, young and full of vim and vigour. Me, old and at my last ever festival with any luck. Wandering back to our respective tents we came to a gentleman’s agreement that we would swap slots the following day so they could headline

and we could play earlier, skedaddling home before the witching hour, subject to management approval.

Eventually the walkabout Trolley tribe wandered back and found me freezing my bits off, seething with barely suppressed anger. It turned out The Pushy Ambitious Mum had decided to lock my kit inside her van where I couldn’t get to it instead of the secure lock-up12 where I could because I “hadn’t bothered to come back to tell her where I was.” Where I was, was where I was meant to be, eating a vegan vomit supper in the back-stage catering marquee. It is generally considered bad manners for a guest to decide where the band leader should be at any given time on a festival site. It goes beyond the dizzy heights of bad manners for a guest to decide what becomes of a band leader’s kit when he’s away where he’s meant to be. In short, guests should keep their chuffing snouts out of a band leader’s fecking business, not to mention his domestic arrangements regarding warm clothing and wallet. At which point my renown short fuse let rip.

STABBED IN THE FACE There had been a running gag in my various bands over the years that if anyone seriously steps out of line I’d stab them in the face13. Since this course of action is so severe, the prison sentence alone carries its own deterrence, I have never actually stabbed anyone in the face. That said, the expression ‘consider yourself stabbed in the face,’ tends to convey the magnitude of the misdemeanour without the messy necessity of actually stabbing anyone.

Since The Pushy Ambitious Mum was so self-centred, had no social skills whatsoever and had no understanding of how her appalling behaviour had impinged itself upon my evening’s plans, I announced to the world in general ‘someone’s going to get stabbed in the fecking face.’

Andy stepped back from the unbridled onslaught of wrath, seeming to expect an actual blade. I even scared myself. The Pushy Ambitious Mum was so shocked she didn’t speak to me for the whole of the rest of the festival which was fine by me. The Young Guitarist gasped but said nothing. Fortunately Andy and I went off for a brief walkabout, to calm down and decide what to do, whether to sack The Young Guitarist pronto and carry on without him or stick it out for the sake of the contract. Whatever happened I had to find some place else to crash or violence might have been done. Just one more snide comment and I think I might have lamped him one.

Wicked innit? The band leader had to crash with Brummie fans14 because a guest had bullied him off the band’s camp site. I still have a faint unfocused feeling that had happened the wrong way around.

SUNDAY 31ST JULY I managed to avoid The Pushy Ambitious Mum and The Young Guitarist all day which cheered me up no end, even Rupert had backed off to a dull roar, but I had to go back to the artiste’s area to fix things with the

management with regard to Zen Elephant swapping sets with us. What I actually found was, intriguingly, Simon our driver discussing the Trolley Men’s options. One can only guess who had decided to put Simon in charge as our unofficial tour manager. I was agog, listening to his plans for my band and stayed silent until he noticed me standing right behind him.

‘Oh, there you are,’ he said rather surprised to see me.

‘Yes. Here I am.’

I let the stony silence hang between us to re-enforce the ‘my band and I’m in charge’ moment. Gauche perhaps but usually effective. Later I tried to have a few private words on that score, away from prying ears but he wasn’t having it.

‘Can I have a few words?’

‘What d’you want?’

‘Well, can we step away from everyone first?’

‘No. Say what you’ve got to say here,’ said in an assertive manner which grabbed everyone’s attention.

‘Never mind,’ I said, giving up.

One of life’s little business lessons I learned from bitter experience is if you are going to break someone’s balls for a minor infraction of the rules, don’t humiliate the person in front of their co-workers. It saps their confidence and can lead to dissent in the ranks. Just on the off chance that I might employ Simon again, I wanted to point out that it isn’t the driver’s job to decide with the management what time and on which stage the band are going to play without first consulting the fecking band leader. I found the guy pretty abrupt and suspected he may have anger issues. This was not something I wished to explore considering whose car we were travelling in and who was holding the keys. Next time (hah!) it will be a hired Winnebago and I will hold the keys.

The management wouldn’t let me swap with Zen Elephant which meant we were forced to stay on-site until we played at 11pm. No early doors for us. They wanted to know where I’d be in case of further changes, but since I didn’t own a mobile phone15 I agreed to stay within earshot of the stage managers so I could hear their radio traffic. There was no way I was going back into The Pushy Ambitious Mum’s unfriendly arms from where she thought she ran my business. During the course of the day the management changed our slot three times.

This proved problematic with Andy the bass and Kirk the drums because I couldn’t find them to explain all the stage changes so we had to go on as a three piece. Frankly, I no longer cared where we played and almost lost the will to live. I had to hold it together or Rupert would never forgive me.

I bunked off round the site and variously hitched up with a bloke who’d read my “Stonehenge” book and came over to say he liked it, and an elderly woman who had had the good sense to stay in a B&B over night16. Dog tired I basked lizard-like soaking up the sun’s heat and catching up on my sleep but was very nearly run down

by Kinsky playing his mobile piano. I was so impressed by his performance that I asked him if he’d do a stage interruption by riding his piano down front while we were playing. Musical anarchy. In order to achieve maximum chaos I decided not to tell the rest of the band about our evil plan. Unfortunately our stage was changed yet again and I couldn’t find Kinsky to let him know. I don’t know whose performance he interrupted but it wasn’t ours. Later I drank cider with the Brummie Fans – gawd bless ‘em every one. Oh yes, and I had one brief encounter with The Pushy Ambitious Mum and son which was so surreal I later wondered later if I had imagined it. Like an elderly couple incapable of being out of each other’s sight, they wandered into a restaurant where I was taking afternoon tiffin17. The best tasting vegan plate of vomit I saw all weekend. The Pushy Ambitious Mum immediately turned her back on me and The Young Guitarist managed a subdued ‘hi’ as she sat him down as far from me as she could get, glowering her gimlet gaze. Amazing, this guy was going to be on-stage in six hours time and he wasn’t even allowed to speak to his Boss. Rock‘n’roll!

THE LAST LIVE PERFORMANCE OF THE TROLLEY MEN We played in a White Dome with a stage manager plying me with whisky to keep out the cold. As we all know spirits tend to chill the blood but what the hey. I just wanted it to be over. My last live rock show ever and I couldn’t wait for it to end. The Young Guitarist hauled up with The Pushy Ambitious Mum in tow, him complaining

that I was in his way somehow when we were setting up on stage and her seeing me as a disgusting turd she’d picked up on her shoe. Andy just got on with business. My plan was for the car to be parked back stage so we’d come off, be handed a cheque and drive away into the inky night back to leafy Norwich. Of course it didn’t work out that way because someone changed my getaway plans.

We played through the set on auto-pilot. If the audience thought we were crap they were not alone. The Young Guitarist played like a man sleep walking through a skunk fuelled dream. He gave nothing to the performance and he may as well not have been there.

At the end of the show neither the cheque nor the car were waiting at the side of the stage as arranged. I spent another hour trying to track down the person with our fee but was told they had gone home which is the same as being ripped off as makes no odds.

The Pushy Ambitious Mum, ungracious to the last, pointedly hugged everyone in the band but me and at our parting grumped that no one was going to help her pack all her stuff away for her. She had The Young Guitarist to help her but I gather the band were expected to strike her tent and load up her van. Good luck with that one.

When it came to light we hadn’t sold any Trolley discs The Pushy Ambitious Mum let out an audible moan, that she wasn’t getting any of our music payments. Hey, but neither were we.

AFTERMATH OF THE 2011 GREEN GATHERING On the way home Andy got a text message from the management asking where we wanted the cheque sent.

Andy had to wake me up from a deep sleep to ask.

‘To my address, the one that’s on the contract,’ I mumbled before dozing off again.

We arrived back at Trolley Towers at dawn and shovelled my stuff back into the house. Before Simon drove away to drop Andy off he gave me the benefit of his wisdom.

‘You probably won’t get your expenses back because the Green Gathering didn’t make enough money.’

‘No worries. Its not my money. It was our producer’s money which paid for the trip.’

He seemed a little disappointed that I wasn’t going to suffer financially for being rude to his new best friend.

It took five months and the threat of the Small Claims Court to get half our fee out of the Green Gathering. The Young Guitarist wrote on Facebook that the Green Gathering was crap and what a nasty person I was for being rude to his mum. I received an email from The Pushy Ambitious Mum telling me to Cease and Desist18, in a screed so long and without punctuation I skip read it, but which stated ‘… you are a spoiled brat who throws a tantrum when you don’t get your own way.’

Always a dilly to lay on your son’s first festival band leader. No one from the band responded to The Young Guitarist’s Facebook tirade on the grounds that none of us wanted to give oxygen to an ungrateful young musician

who had a hand biting habit. Hopefully music school moulded him into better ways.

I felt for the Green Gathering. They were expecting five thousand people and barely got a thousand through the gate if they were lucky. I suspect the ticket price, the cost of fuel and too many festivals that year put most people off. There were too many bands for what was supposed to be an environmental event and it seemed the organisors couldn’t decide if they wanted a music festival or a green forum to discuss climate change and in the end they got neither. One security guy told me it was more like a private office party for the greenies than a public event. I wish them well for their future Gatherings but then again, I won’t be playing there after being informed by the band booker that we didn’t pull enough people to make money for them. I’m still trying to work out if that’s an insult or not. We didn’t ask to play there and, besides, they still owed us half our expenses. This didn’t arrive at Trolley Towers until early 2012. Various members of other bands have developed a quizzical injoke since we played the Green Gathering: ‘If you are nineteen years old, headlining at your first festival and are offered a guest ticket, who would you take?’

So far no one has answered ‘my mother.’

I have a horrible feeling that there but for the grace of (deity of your choice) go all of us, aged nineteen.

Employ a teenager now while they still know everything!

ARE YOU READY FOR A NEW DIRECTION After the Green Gathering everything Trolley related became a bog of eternal stink; Andy quit to concentrate on his art, Pea wasn’t coming back because I’d been rude to his best friend, Paddy was busy elsewhere and I was in the grip of serious health issues.

When a project becomes so busted it can’t be fixed and all the fun has gone out of it, the best course of action is to walk away from the wreck thankful all your arms and legs are intact. I went back to writing; a year-long scribble to put my memoirs on paper as advised by Paddy two years before. All performance ideas were put away into the bottom of the broom cupboard where they belonged. In late-2012 a local promoter coaxed me out to perform musical comedy stand up but his gigs were sparsely peopled and always in freezing cold warehouse galleries with the acoustics of a noisy bathroom.

A chum who had had a stroke brought on by a cerebral aneurysm said the best course of action when dealing with business people is to tell everyone what’s going on inside your head, not to garner sympathy because there will be none but in the hope those around you will understand your need to avoid stress. So in 2012 me and Rupert came out and it had the most extraordinary effect; people were queuing up to record a new project Matt Adey an I were putting together, “The Winter Islands,” an analogy of me & Rupert told as a man involved in an

air-crash with some words written by poet Mark Slaughter.

So much for avoiding stress; Richard Peat, a back office worker at Norwich School of Art, offered to come in as vocalist but caused so much stress amongst the other contributors we had to replace him. Things you should never say in a recording studio; when DV camera operator Ian Laxton came near Richard Peat, the vocalist told him, ‘Don’t film me, I don’t want my name connected to Al’s on the internet because he has a reputation as an anarchist and I might get the sack if my employers find out I’m working for him.’

Everyone in the studio control room did a sort of mental step back in amazement followed forthwith by a sharp intake of breath. Wow. That’s a very uncool thing to say right in front of the bloke who’s paying your session fees. Later, by telephone, I asked Richard what the problem was and he was adamant his involvement with the project, even though he had obtained clearance from his line manager, whom I knew, would get him sacked from the Art School if they found out. Richard claimed there was a blanket ban on any fraternisation with me and my band but he didn’t know why or who at the Art School had put out this edict.

‘But that’s insane. They can’t sack you for working on an album in your own time. I’m a graduate of Norwich Art School. They gave me a 2:1. How can they possibly believe they can stop people working for me? It’s like they’re operating a black list.’

‘Oh you must never tell anyone I told you,’ squirmed Richard. ‘The new Principal is sacking a lot of staff for the flimsiest of reasons.’

‘Too late. You’ve told me, you said it in front a studio full of people and what’s more you said it on camera.

What did you think was going to happen?’

‘Oh but you must never let anyone at the Art School know.’

‘Look at this way. If they sack you for working for me and you’ve got permission from them to do that then after you’ve won your unfair dismissal claim with damages, I’ll have them in court straight after for defamation.

Black lists are illegal. No employer is that nuts, not even the Art School. They won’t sack you. The publicity alone will cripple them.’

But Richard wouldn’t be placated. So I gently let him go and replaced him with the velvet tones of Jon Crampton, the mad monk who once fell off a Trolley Men stage four years before. It was a first; no one as I’ve known, after decades in the business, has got himself dunted off a project for bad mouthing the producer in front of so many witnesses. One thing we can say about Richard Peat, he didn’t go mithering behind my back to stick the knife in. Me? An anarchist? I’m a running dog lackey of the capitalist media. Boy, did he get the wrong guy.

The project, “The Winter Islands,” was meant to be finished by February 2013 but due to the unavailability of some artists it had to be put on hold until early-2014. The record company are very understanding people, thank gawd. Especially now I’ve retired. As it turrned out the project had to be abandoned after Richard Peat put the

poison in The Trolley Men were a gas for a while but once a project has out-lasted its time to be then move on, do something else.

AND THE BEAT GOES ON ... AND ON There were other things to fill my life, 2012-13; illness was one, working as a reseracher / feature writer for a local (Norwich) history website was another and generally busy writing the screenplay for the film proposal, Sandcastles of The Night. In late 2013 LJ suggested I get the Trolley Men back together (shades of the Blues Brothers, here) on a mission from some bod.

After several failed attempts to get a load of musicians together in the same the all new Trolley Men try-out came to pass in July 2014 with Tom Riches on guitar, LJ on bass, self vocals and Matt Adey fiddling about with his computer soundscapes. We were, still are, lacking a drummer - aren’t these software packages wonderful, soon we won’t even need songwriters, won’t that be a relief - and if there’s anyone out there who knows how to thump tubs please get in touch.

While Tom set about back engineering my music from a simple vocal track I set-to putting ‘making of’ films together on youtube.

We planned and booked a dry hire filming session at a local venue which, it turned out, was run by university students who had other ideas of how we should go about our lawful occafions. To quote LJ: “I was told that the feed we were given from the desk was the mixed front-of-house feed (what was going to the main pa speakers).

Instead we got the engineers monitoring feed. So whenever the sound engineer pressed the pfl (pre fade listen) button on any source, we got just that source, isolated and nothing else,” which effectively burgered up the Trolley Men live sound recording. There didn’t seem to be any coherent venue management, no contract for the hire and strange extra personnel payments without an invoice. The box office staff who were charging us 3% on ticket sales decided, without consultation, to stop selling advance tickets for the show. The Waterfront box office claimed “... you owe us a lot of money ...” when, in fact, we’d paid for the dry hire in advance. This explanation was rudely ejected by the venue box ofice manager “... well you didn’t pay me,” suggesting we were trying to defruad them. The venue receipt dated October 13th was hastily hand written on a scrap of paper, sans letterhead and VAT number, which didn’t seem to impress anyone. I’d never come across such rude and willful dumb insolence in one dry hire venue after 50-years in professional business. Incompetence or deliberate obstruction none of us could work out. No one apoloigised for anything; a technical manager eventually phoned after several days emailing around for an answer to a technical question.

“I’m very busy, what do you want?” was all I got out of him. His client skills were non-existant.

When informed that, funnily enough, as producer I was very busy too the gentleman became somewhat fractious. You’d think he was talking to some naughty student with ideas above his station. I refrained from reminding the gentlemen concerned that I was paying his wages although that didn’t stop him from trying to impress me he’d been doing his job for ten years. Big deal. Gosh. Lawks! That put me in me place roight enough guv.’ (Expletive deleted).

At least that session gave us Trolley Men the honor and privilage of playing on the same stage as PsiGong with Mike Howlett that night. We are not worthy to touch the hem of his socks. What The Norwich Six - who actually managed to buy tickets - thought of it we shall discover in the fullness of time.

New projects abound; Matty and I are in prep’ on a soundscape and story telling monlogue about a tramp’s century old long walk from Norwich to Glastonbury and what happened when he stopped off at Stonehenge along the way while LJ and Tom fiddle about on their computers remixing the rehearsal tracks for Dread Hope.

LJ DELLAR (bass)

TOM RICHES (guitar)

LIST OF PHOTOGRAPHS Front cover : The Trolley Men at The Brickmakers in Norwich, August 15th 2008 page 04 : Pete Davies, at The Brickmakers in Norwich, August 15th 2008 Page 04 : Al Stokes at The Brickmakers in Norwich, August 15th 2008 Page 05 : Molly Malloy, sax player at The Brickmakers in Norwich, August 15th 2008 Page 06 : Bernie Elliott at The Brickmakers in Norwich, August 15th 2008 Page 07 : Robin Fosdal at The Brickmakers in Norwich, August 15th 2008 Page 08 : Bruce Alexander, profile picture Page 09 : The Band plus LJ & Al at The Brickmakers in Norwich, August 15th 2008 Page 10 : Jon Crampton at The Brickmakers in Norwich, August 15th 2008 Page 11 : Doc Normal at The Brickmakers in Norwich, August 15th 2008 Page 12 : Grant ‘Sparky’ Conway & Mark Brooker at Trolley Towers, Norwich, 2008 Page 12 : Matt Adey, profile picture Page 13 : The Trolley Men, August 2008 Page 13 : Robin Fosdal at The Brickmakers in Norwich, August 15th 2008 Page 13 : Bernie Elliott & Molly Malloy at The Brickmakers in Norwich, August 15th 2008 Page 15 : Andy Merritt, profile picture, 2010 Page 16 : Paddy Stratton profile picture, 2010 Page 19 : The Trolley Men line up 2010 Page 20 : Paddy Stratton at The Brickmakers in Norwich, 2010 Page 20 : Al Stokes, at The Brickmakers in Norwich, 2010 Page 23 : Paul ‘Pea’ Burkett, drums, Glastonbury Assembly Rooms May 2010 Page 24 : Matt Gamble, Glastonbury Assembly Rooms May 2010 Page 26 : Chris ‘Gobbo’ Roberts, Glastonbury May 2010 Page 28 : Al Stokes at Glastonbury Assembly Rooms May 2010 Page 28 : Paddy Stratton & Pea, Glastonbury Assembly Rooms May 2010 Page 28 : Pea, Glastonbury Assembly Rooms May 2010 Page 29 : Al, Paddy & Pea, Paddy Stratton, Glastonbury Assembly Rooms May 2010 Page 30 : Band line up, in a Glastonbury park, May 2010 Page 33 : Band line up, on stage Glastonbury Assembly Rooms, May 2010 Page 36 : Pete Matthewes, bass, on stage Glastonbury Assembly Rooms, May 2010 Page 37 : Pea & Al lurky about on Glastonbury Tor, November 2010

Page Page Page Page Page Page Page Page Page Page Page Page Page Page Page Page Page Page Page Page Page

38 39 40 41 42 43 44 51 53 54 64 67 73 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85

: : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : :

A bunch of Trolley Men carry on up the Tor, November 2010 Paddy & Andy, on stage Glastonbury Assembly Rooms, November 2010 Pete Matthewes, on stage Glastonbury Assembly Rooms, May 2010 Pea, on stage Glastonbury Assembly Rooms, May 2010 Paddy, on stage Glastonbury Assembly Rooms, May 2010 Al, on stage Glastonbury Assembly Rooms, May 2010 Band line ip, on stage Glastonbury Assembly Rooms, May 2010 The Young Guitarist & Andy at the Thetford try-out, 2011 Al playing St, Gregory’s art centra Norwich July 2011 The Young Guitarist & Andy at the Trolley Towers rehearsal, 2011 The Young Guitarist & Andy at the Green Gathering rehearsal, 2011 Al filming Cradle of Fear, 1999 Dome Stage at the Green Gathering, July 2011 LJ & Tom, at the Trolley Men try-out, July 2014 Al at The Waterfront (Norwich), November 2014 Tom, Al & Keith at The Waterfront (Norwich), November 2014 Keith & LJ at The Waterfront (Norwich), November 2014 Tom & Al at The Waterfront (Norwich), November 2014 Tom at The Waterfront (Norwich), November 2014 LJ at The Waterfront (Norwich), November 2014 Al Stokes conemplating in monochrome. with grateful thanks to the photographers: MATT FLOWERDAY, GRANT CONWAY, FARREN HART, IAN LAXTON PAUL WOODWRIGHT, BILLY WHIZZ and all the folk who did more good than harm to The Trolley Men. Blessing be upon all here © 2014 oOo