Pete Heyward Remembers
Picture the scene. The Roxy club was full of a group of visiting French punks on a midweek boys night out in the west end to what was at that time the UK punk HQ. There was probably twenty or so crowded round the front of the stage swelling the small group of die hard Roxy regulars. They were jumping up on stage occasionally, gobbing incessantly and being generally bloody annoying. Unorfadox had been privileged with an audition night at the Roxy Club for a chance to headline our own gig and had brought along some friends from Bromley who, although they were not the actual Bromley Contingent were a small contingent scrap loving Bromley boot boys up for fun and they were soon deployed across the front of the stage to keep anyone from banging into us whilst we were playing. Then the gobbing got worse. It was relentless, indiscriminate and French and seemed to ignite our protectors to go on the offensive kicking out and pushing anyone back onto the dance floor with a wild abandoned. It was just starting to bother me when suddenly my hand was knocked away from the neck and whilst shouting across at the culprit, I landed a warm fresh grolly straight in my mouth! That was it. I put down my guitar turned off my amp and climbed a spiral staircase at the back of the stage that took me to an upstairs bar. There, I proceeded to buy a drink and sat down to talk to a charming young lady with a tampon hanging from each ear who wanted to know what I was doing there. "I'm in the band and got pissed off so I came up here for a while" I said. I think it went right over her head and I could hear in the distance the second to last number was being played downstairs so thought I'd go back and finish the show, which I eventually did to great applause. Apart from the time when we all got offstage after the first song to clap ourselves when nobody turned up to see us at a pub in North London or the gig we did in front of fifty or so children at the Young Vic hosted by comedian and writer Denese Coffee on a Saturday morning, the events at the Roxy were one of the clearest memories I had of that time, especially those earrings and you don't forget a night when you got a flying ball of French phlegm in your moosh.
Fast forward to the present day and after surviving the day as a driving instructor nowerdays I had fallen asleep after work whilst listening to the radio. I woke up about four in the morning and started listening to the Big George "through the night" talk show on BBC London radio. After a while he mentioned that although he was a musician he hated the concept of tribute bands. This prompted me to rush off a short text asking why and reminding him of the hard working and dedicated nature of the individuals in the tribute band world as for the last fifteen years I had played the part of David Gilmour in the 1970's Pink Floyd tribute band Pink Fraud triumphantly laid to rest in 2009 with it's reputation for authenticity and accuracy intact. I am now putting together a tribute to the Verve and I was genuinely annoyed at his comments so although feeling really tired and needing to go to bed by then I waited to see if he would read it out. What happened next was truly amazing to me. He did read it out and whilst being very nice the Bootleg Beatles who he had seen recently, he went on to make a comment about seeing some good ones in the past but that as an old punk just felt uncomfortable with the concept and loved the unpredictable nature of original music played live. He then started to recount a story from his past about being in the Roxy club one night back in the seventies and seeing a band who's guitarist suddenly through down his guitar and walked offstage returning later to great applause and that this, he said, illustrated his feelings on the spirit of original music. I was gob smacked! Again! This was me I thought, he was talking about me and the night of frog phlegm and tampons! It had to be. The facts were right, the time place were right and I just couldn't believe he had said it! I had to call in an at least tell his producer that, whilst responding to a one in a million text about an unrelated topic, George had recounted a random story from his past that involved the person who sent in the text. How weird is that! He agreed and asked me if I would go on air to talk to him. I was very tired by this time and reluctant to do it but I was put straight through to air immediately and we talked for about twenty minutes in the end although I had a terrible echo on the phone line. We focused mainly around the coincidence and then moved on to other band related topics. One of which was that we had both shared the experience of being in touch with the Board Teenagers website through a renewed interest in the 1970's punk story and of meeting Dizzy and his bulldogs as a result.
I still can't get my head around what astral alignment or cosmic happening resulted with Big George making that statement after that text. As he said "perhaps nothing has happened in between then and now and we're all stone dead". Speaking of stone dead, another memory just flashed through my transom. Upstairs at Ronnie Scotts. A small dressing room door on the side of the stage opens. Dense smoke billows out across stage and completely obscures the amps and drums. Is it the second set? People ask are they coming back on? No... It's just nine of my psycho hippy mates from Bromley known graciously as the Tibetan monks who had crammed themselves into our dressing room during the break to have a spliff, each! They emerged like a bunch of old soldiers coming out of the mists of the Somme in oversized army greatcoats and staring wildly into nowhere. Happy Daze.
Pete Heyward
2011
©Detour Records