My Music Trek - 2 The 1960s
Above: Rehearsal at Honiley Village Hall.
Up and Running: We practice hard, and place some ads: "Good beat group available for all kinds of bookings. Versatile and above all musical", and print some cards: "The Beat Group for All Occasions" and start gigging in November 1966. Our first gig is a dance at Stratford-upon-Avon Rugby Club and our Dads ferry us and our meagre equipment to and from the venue. At our very first outing we manage to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. My amplifier expires after the first couple of songs – we grossly underestimate the volume required at a real gig – and I have to plug in to Geoff’s Vox AC30, the sound of bass and lead guitars through the same small amp not sounding good. The spring on Laurie’s snare drum breaks so the snare sound fails but he manages to do a running repair with string. But by the end of the evening with the audience liquored up and determined to enjoy themselves, we finish triumphantly on the Beatles’ sing-along "Yellow Submarine" which we’d never played before and hadn’t a clue how the chords went. A successful gig. The fuse had been lit...
Not being able to afford a real amplifier, such as a Vox AC15 or AC30, Selmer, etc., I send off for a mail-order 'Linear 30 watt' one and couple it with a raw chipboard speaker cabinet and two 'Baker' 12" speakers (cheap and not very good) from a shop in Coventry selling DIY electrical components. I cover the 2x12” speaker cabinet with kitchen ‘Fablon’ material. (Pictured left) The amp fails to arrive so I write a letter to the Bristol Police complaining of possible fraud. They say they’ve had similar complaints but eventually the amp arrives. I assume now the poor guy making these wasn't running a scam, he was probably just inundated with orders for his very economical 'chassis only' amplifier. Meanwhile Geoff buys a proper Hofner bass and Ned buys (or rather his parents buy) an impressive Vox ‘pro’ PA system. We attract another newspaper write up "Grammar Old Boys in Trane" in which our musical ambitions are revealed, (War-time BBC Mr Cholmondeley-Warner newsreader voice needed here) “Early rock and roll interests tempered, the group now feature the very popular soul music to which lead singer ‘Ned’ Foyle’s voice is more than adequately suited”.
Nerdy gear note: In the top picture, on the right you can see my mail-order 'Linear 30' amplifier, and home-made speaker cab. Next to the amp you can see a Dallas Treble Booster, which I acquired in the deal when I bought my Hofner Galaxie and little combo amp. Years later, not having a use for it, I threw it away. It's now considered a classic piece of 60s kit, made famous by users such as Queen's Brian May, Rory Galagher, Tony Iommi and Mark Bolan, and would now have been worth around £2,000... I did however hold on to my Marshall fuzz box which I also had at this time. I sold that a few years ago to a collector in France for £1,000.
Spring 1967 and we play our largest gig so far at the Chesford Grange Hotel where we’re the support act on a double bill. Our fee: a princely £12.50 for two one-hour sets, £2.50 each. We come a poor second to the other band "From The Sun" and Ned and I lose our voices from not having a loud enough PA. It was as they say, a learning experience. The lead guitarist of the main band kindly points out to me after the gig that I need to use thinner strings in place of the ‘steel hawser’ tape wound variety I was using. I didn’t know that it was the judicious bending of light gauge strings that was enabling Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck et al to get those sweet bluesy sounds I liked. Not only was there a paucity of guitar tutorial books, there was no such thing as guitar magazines, and wide access to the internet and YouTube were still forty or so years away, so we all lived in our own bubble of knowledge and didn’t know how others got their sounds.
Then came the warm summer of 1967. I was 19 and spent languorous days sunbathing in the back garden while the transistor radio blared out The Kinks’ "Sunny Afternoon". Like the smell of fresh madeleines triggering lost memories for Proust, my thoughts often go back to those warm halcyon days every time I hear that record today. But the garden idyll was soon to be shattered...
Reality Bites: Earlier that year Geoff Timms had bought an old Bedford van (every group had to have a van) which was supposed to ferry us to and from gigs but it was a bit of a ‘banger’ and at least once we arrived late at a booking after pushing the lifeless jalopy uphill. By today’s standards it would not have been allowed on the road. The MOT test regime had been introduced in the early 60s, and Lord knows how Geoff managed to get the old van a 'pass'.
I’d finished school now and some non-band friends ask me to join them on a short camping holiday in Cornwall. On the spur of the moment I decide to go. The band had been thinking of approaching a girl we knew who we’d thought might make a good lead singer in the band and whilst I'm away, Ned and Geoff decide to drive over to see her and discuss it. I would have joined them, but had opted (luckily, as it turned out), to join my schoolfriends on the West Country trip. Ned and Geoff set off towards Hampton In Arden on 10th August 1967 and just outside Balsall Common their van crashed head-on into a lorry and both were killed outright. Ned was 18 and Geoff 19.
I was only 19 and the tragedy was of course a massive shock to us all. It was my first experience of a bereavement of someone very close to me, and even almost 60 years later, I frequently recall the episode. Their families were naturally devastated, and their funerals were almost unbearable for those close to Ned and Geoff. There were hundreds of floral tributes from all the many venues we'd played at.
See bottom of page for some notes on Ned and Geoff.
The Beat Goes On: We reform the band in the autumn, bringing in Bill Fielding from Coventry on bass, but things aren’t the same and the line-up folds a year later in mid-1968. There's a highlight in the last months however, when we play support to the Jeff Beck Group in Rugby on 30th December 1967. Jeff Beck is my favourite guitarist and I can't believe our luck.
I've read somewhere that some Japanese guys have put together a book supposedly chronicling every single gig of Jeff Beck’s career together with all known aspects of each booking – so here’s a tiny portion of the jigsaw to put in place! Their line-up on this night was Jeff Beck, Ronnie Wood on bass, Rod Stewart on vocals and (bizarrely) Graham Edge from the Moody Blues on drums – their regular drummer was Mickey Waller but he was touring in Japan with the Walker Brothers. They were using 'pickup' drummers to fill the gap on these gigs and I assume Graham Edge was handy, living in Birmingham, not a long way from Rugby. Some of my memories of that night: the Jeff Beck Group’s dressing room packed full with girls and admirers and our dressing room having only four visitors; Ronnie Wood’s BO (they’d all been confined in a Transit van from London to Rugby that evening); the moment when the curtain went back at the start of our performance and the audience thinking for a nanosecond they were seeing the Moody Blues (we’d pooled equipment and Laurie was sitting behind Graham Edge’s drum kit with its distinctive ‘Moody Blues’ psychedelic logo). I still have a souvenir from that show - a bent screw driver discarded by JB's roadies!
In November 1968 I win a prize in a competition run in "Beat Instrumental" magazine – the first magazine in the UK to cater for aspiring pop/rock musicians. Laurie and I travel to London for the presentation at the Baldwin showrooms where Hank Marvin, lead guitarist of the Shadows, presents me with a brand new "Burns Vibra Slim" guitar, retailing at the time for the princely sum of 99 guineas (£103.95)! We have an interesting chat with the magazine’s staff and learn some inside information on just how much drugs Pink Floyd are doing. Laurie and I get Hank’s autograph on the only things we have with us, the records we’d bought that morning: my John Fahey album and Laurie’s Ten Years After Album.. (The Shadows weren’t at all cool in 1968).
Nigel left the band - and home - abruptly, ending up in Cornwall. More about Nigel below. The Trane comes to a halt after playing 55 gigs.
The 'swinging 60s' were all but over.
Left: Me, Nigel, Laurie, Bill, Autumn 1967.
Break for a Career: After some carefree teenage years and the immense joy of making music with a band of pals, reality had crashed in with a vengeance. I’m really not sure if the following half-century contained any happier times. I’d lost two of my best friends, another had banished himself to Cornwall picking potatoes, and now I had to ‘choose a career’. Parents in those days, because of their own tough experiences - spending their youth living through, and recovering from, WW2, and obliged to abandon any aspirations and ambitions, were anxious their offspring got a ‘proper’ job and a career in pop music was a simply ludicrous notion.
Whilst taking my ease in that warm summer of ’67 I fall to talking to a neighbour over the fence at the bottom of the garden. He's a partner in a Coventry firm of Chartered Accountants and wondered if I’d considered it as a career. Was he mad?! The image of a Chartered Accountant in those days was, well, the image of a Chartered Accountant. Monty Python’s Flying Circus had only recently featured a sketch in which an inadequate Chartered Accountant wanted to become a lion tamer. Hilarious. But our neighbour explains I could go straight to college for nine months first and, as playing in a band is the most important thing to me at present, that seems a way of postponing the start of real life for at least a little while. So I sign four-year articles and go to college, Lanchester Polytechnic in Coventry, now Coventry University.
Laurie (drummer) and I are the only members of The Trane left, and in 1968 he changes career to train as a teacher, whilst I pass my college exams with distinction. I seem to have a flair for this accountancy stuff, but it’s more likely the fear of failure I’ve had all my life that makes me work hard to succeed at it. I start work in the office, or rather clients’ offices, resplendent in the first suit I’d ever worn. The next four years sees me ploughing on with ‘real life’ and I don’t remember playing the guitar much. Looking back now I think I must have been ‘comfortably numb’. In 1971 I marry my wife Jane and we’re making a home. Laurie is married to Angela, a friend of Jane's, and his first teaching post takes him away to live in Halifax.
Nigel Maltby - Guitar, 1966-1968) Nigel (pictured left, top in 1966) was another school pal and was in our first band ‘Trane. He was crazy about the Kinks and he and I went to see them live in c.1964 at the Coventry Hippodrome. I remember Nigel standing on the red plush seat, shouting and waving and really letting himself go as the Kinks worked their magic. In those halcyon days Nigel and I became very close friends and confided a lot in each other, although Nigel kept his counsel on some personal matters. His home life was not as happy as it could have been. His Mum had remarried a wealthy Coventry business man and the relationship between Nigel and his two brothers and their stepfather was strained. At the same time as I started college in 1967 to train as a Chartered Accountant, Nigel's stepfather arranged for him to be articled in a solicitor's in Coventry. We used to meet for lunch and he would tell me how crushingly dull it was: he'd been put in a tiny office and told to read piles of legal books. He left work, the band, and home, abruptly in 1968. He travelled to Cornwall and lived out of his Morris Minor car, at one time picking potatoes to earn a little money. His parents employed a private detective to find where he was. I then lost touch with Nigel for a few years.
Nigel had innate flair, talent, and a bias for action plus an impetuous side that was amusing, but sometimes reckless and even scary; he'd be the one that would immediately step forward if there was something dangerous or daring on offer. For example, one summer's day, I think in 1966, Nigel suddenly suggested we hitchhike to Wales to drop in on some friends who were holidaying with their parents in a cottage they owned on the coast. No preparation. No haversack of food or extra clothing. Just one packet of biscuits! We started out from Kenilworth in the summer clothes we stood up in and carrying one packet of biscuits. We thought we'd be there by sunset, easily. These were the days when most drivers would stop for young hitchhikers without fear of either party being assaulted or even murdered. But there wasn't the network of motorways that we now have; just A and B roads. Our progress was a lot slower than we'd envisaged and although we'd had a number of different lifts taking us in the right direction, by the time the sun began to set we were miles away from our destination without food or shelter. I remember at one point after night had fallen we were so cold that we lay spread-eagled in the middle of the road trying to absorb from the tarmac what little was left of the heat of the day!
I always liked Nigel and I often wish we were still in touch as lifelong friends, sharing a smile or two at old times. We met again very briefly in the 1970s and the 1980s and he came around to my house in 1996, but things just weren’t the same. We didn’t meet again for another 17 years when I got in touch in February 2013 and we had a lunch and a couple of nice nattering and guitar sessions together. I think a lot of water had gone under a lot of bridges in different ways for both of us and finding common ground wasn’t as easy as I thought it was going to be. But I miss our friendship.
We briefly re-united on 6th May 2017 when we played a gig at a Kenilworth Grammar School re-union, which we'd all attended in the 60s. But I haven't heard from Nigel since. I have the impression from our sporadic contact over the decades that he is suspicious of relationships, even that of old friends, and perceives ulterior motives where there are none.
May 2017 photo opposite L to R: Richard Maynard, Laurie French, Nigel Maltby, myself. Three parts of the original 'Trane band there, 50 years on!
In Memorium - Ned & Geoff (John Foyle and Geoffrey Timms) Vocals and bass, 1965-1967)
I was almost nineteen when Ned and Geoff were killed on the 10th of August 1967. Losing two close friends so abruptly like that was something I found almost impossible to handle. It was as if my teens had finished abruptly and I'd grown up into the real, harsh world.
Ned was one of two children, his sister was a classical pianist who spent some time with the Birmingham Philharmonic Orchestra. His parents spoiled John, or Ned as he was known. He was diagnosed with rheumatic fever when he was very young and his parents had been told at one point he wasn't going to pull through so they regarded every day with him after that as a bonus. He wasn't sickly though: he was six feet tall, always active, usually laughing and playing practical jokes. Although his parents tended to indulge him it didn't stop him being a thoroughly pleasant and caring guy. His parents always held a kind of open house and when Ned's friends appeared we were always welcome to join the meal table at a moment's notice or stop overnight and in the morning tuck in to one of Mrs Foyle's enormous fry-ups.
Ned used to like having a car to get about in whereas the rest of us had to hitch hike around or prevail upon parents to transport us to where we needed to go, and whilst I knew Ned he must have had about three cars in succession. He would buy 'bangers' with a bit of life left in them, when he could gather together the small amounts of money needed, and when one failed he'd simply abandon it and buy another. I remember one black jalopy necessitated the carrying of large cans of oil in the boot. Ned had to stop frequently to top up the level because the vehicle consumed more oil than petrol.
Geoff Timms lived a street away from Ned and they shared an interest in cheap modes of transport, spending hours helping each other with the makeshift mechanics required to get their vehicles actually mobile. I remember spending one energetic afternoon blowing down the fuel line of Geoff's Bedford van and then helping apply one of the coats of gloss paint needed to conceal the rust. This was the van that failed them on that fateful evening of the accident.
The death of Ned and Geoff was front page local news and needless to say their respective parents were simply inconsolable, not to say Ned's girlfriend, Sue Jeffs. The large front lawn at Geoff's parents' house was carpeted with an enormous quantity of floral tributes that came from a myriad of well wishers including club secretaries, booking agents as well as friends and family. I remember the service was very difficult for us all. I only saw Ned's parents once afterwards, when I briefly lent a hand at their house with Ned's belongings. I heard sometime later that Geoff's mother had had a breakdown: she kept thinking she saw Geoff in crowds or bus queues.
1965 photo L to R: Geoff, Laurie, Ned, Myself, Nigel.
Ned and Geoff.wavThis is a musical tribute to Ned and Geoff that I composed a while ago. A guitar instrumental, I improvised it in just one or two takes so as to better capture how I feel whenever I call them to mind. Which is very often.