Seize the Day Read Online Free Page B

which feature Geoff’s voice. I feel proud to have known and worked with him and I hope the future brings belated recognition. In 2013 Reading University erected the first of their Red Plaques to Geoff in a ceremony that I hosted; two of the recipients of his great songs, John Leyton and Mike Berry, performed afterwards, so perhaps that recognition is beginning to come about.
    But back to Neil ffrench Blake’s outfit. At the time I remember being slightly peeved at having to interview non-music people, such as the local bin men’s leader during a strike, the organiser of the local cycling club, or a spokesman for the Thatcham Walkers … we wanted to play records! However, I now confess to being retrospectively grateful for the horizon-broadening opportunity. One of the most bizarre of those interviews was with the Duke of Wellington, the interview taking place while we had a putting competition. Had it not been for my stature, non-Gallic countenance and the fact that I didn’t stuff baguettes down my trousers whenever I marched on Russia, I’d have felt decidedly Napoleonic going head to head with Wellington. I would return for a further encounter at Stratfield Saye, the Wellington digs since 1815, almost 200 years after they moved in, for the BBC. I must have been damned impressive in 1976 to get that re-booking.
    Being on the radio didn’t mean that I stopped doing gigs with my guitar in various pubs and clubs, or that I stopped writing songs and poems. My first book of poems was stolen, presumably by mistake, when a miscreant entered the house I was sharing post-college. Unless the break-in was the work of a literary madman, I’m certain that my verses weren’t his main target. I was pretty peeved, though. Still am, I suppose; no one likes losing creative stuff. If some of those gems within, like ‘Autolycus’ Satchel’, ‘Trinitrotoluene Triolet’ and ‘The Last Journey of the Fuscous Gnomes’, ever turned up I’d probably be horrified at how ghastly they were. Luckily most of my diaries have survived, so I can vaguely see what I was up to. I recorded in mydiary that for compering the first International Drag-Racing Show at Crystal Palace I trousered the princely sum of £25. I continued to play cricket for Tim Rice’s Heartaches, for whom I’d turned out since the team’s inception in 1973. I’d known Tim since 1968, when he and Andrew Lloyd Webber had been given a breathtaking advance of £200 each, in the hope that their writing bore fruit. I remember sitting with them in the Lloyd Webbers’ flat in west London as
Jesus Christ Superstar
came together, working on the PR for
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
and singing on the demos for one of their musicals that never came to fruition,
Richard the Lionheart.
Tim even sang backing vocals on my first ever single, which you can read all about in Chapter 8 . I also turned out for the 210 cricket and football teams, for which NffB kept wicket and goal respectively and always in shades. Hey, we were in showbiz … that’s what you did. NffB was a hard taskmaster, once making me turn out for a match when I had chickenpox and a temperature of over 100.
    Not only did I get flannelled up for cricket matches, but I also put in some hard batting and bowling practice at the Alf Gover indoor cricket school at Wandsworth. Alf, the one-time England and Surrey fast bowler, was still around then, having begun his career in the late ’20s, and was on hand to give invaluable advice to anyone who wished he could bowl as Gover himself had in the ’30s. His bowling action was once described as ‘a little disjointed and exciting; rather as if he were exchanging insults at extreme range with the conductor of an omnibus that had the legs of him by half a mile per hour’. Be that as it may, I was happy to be gleaning any words of wisdom from the man who’d taken four wickets in four balls against Worcestershire in 1935. My best for 210 was six wickets against