Posts by pwsadmin
Out of the Camp Ch. 8 – Listen
By the time I auditioned for the group, ‘Listen’, I was living in a bedsit with Mary, close to Ealing Common, West London. She was still a student Nurse at Hammersmith Hospital and I was still installing TV aerials. In those days there was no freeway surrounding the capital and the M25 was still a…
Read MoreOut of the Camp Ch. 7 – Rubber Duck
I hadn’t of course forgotten about music while running all over London risking my neck climbing on roofs. I’d been showing up in rehearsal rooms, pubs, apartments, whatever, to audition for all kinds of groups and bands, had been rejected by most and had walked out of a couple of places without opening my mouth.…
Read MoreOut of the Camp Ch.6 – The Roofs of the Rich
Having left Victoria Wine to go to Germany at the start of what I thought was going to be a career in music with Rare Amber, first touring in Europe and then the USA, and who knows what after that. But quite often life gets in the way and there’s little time to dwell on…
Read MoreOut of the Camp Ch. 5 – Rare Amber
While I was doing all of this I was answering ‘wanted ads’ in the ‘Melody Maker’ and also placing ads offering my ‘services’. The Melody Maker (‘MM’) was the musicians’ ‘bible’ in those days for keeping up with the music scene, reviewing new record releases and live performances, reporting on upcoming tours by recording artists…
Read MoreOut of the Camp Ch. 4 – Brondesbury Park
Returning to the London Academy of Modelling for a moment, I forgot to attach a copy of my ‘Composite’ earlier. I’m sure that these days this is all done online but back then aspiring models of both stripes – we only had two in those unenlightened days! – had to traipse around the West End…
Read MoreOut of the Camp Ch. 3 – Press Pass
At around the same time, I spent an hour with Gene Pitney and his wife, Lynn and baby son, Todd at their rented mews house in Victoria, somewhere behind Buckingham Palace. Allocating one hour was apparently standard practice back then for such arrangements. To say I felt out-of-my-depth meeting one-on-one with an American superstar would…
Read MoreOut of the Camp Ch. 2 – Navigating London
Then I got mobile. In the few months that I’d lived there, my geographical knowledge of London had been restricted to the immediate areas around tube stations that I was using, namely, Lancaster Gate where I lived, Holburn where I worked, and so on. I’d wanted to get out and about because I hated being…
Read MoreOut of the Camp Ch. 1 – The Leaving
Ch. 1 The Leaving I arrived in London in May 1967, one month after my 21st birthday. In those days Government Departments located in London had difficulty in recruiting young people from the provinces owing to the high cost of living and earlier had set up the London Hostels Association which made relocation more affordable.…
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