The River Bar was the coolest hang out in town. My eyes were well and truly opened when my mate Graham Scott and I went down there one summer lunchtime. This was where all of the town’s 'heads' gathered. The place where, in the words of the Sounds magazine lonely hearts ads, freaky guys met up with groovy chicks. For a 16-year-old this was the world I’d been looking for. The smell, the incredible aroma that was new to me, but I would come to adore. The smell of patchouli oil, Afghan coats, dope and greasy denim. Aaaah!
The River Bar was attached to a once-swanky hotel, and in an attempt to keep up, or perhaps keep going, they used to run discos on a Thursday and Friday, but on Saturdays, the news was that Saturdays would feature live rock music. Live music, here and just a bus ride away. Wow, this was going to be something, right?
We went along, whoever was on, we went along. Be it Graham Parker and The Rumour who were great, or be it Budgie. Who weren’t. I remember giving up on Budgie and going outside, hanging around the river bank, popping back in to get another drink, but never entertaining the idea of going somewhere else. Hanging in there, but keeping Budgie at a suitable distance. Although we could still hear them, so it wasn’t entirely successful. Incidentally, nowadays Budgie’s frontman and singer, we’ll call him The Head Budgie, Burke Shelley looks like Charles Hawtrey.
So, hanging around and being regular faces brought benefits. Graham got a job as a humper. “What’s that?” I asked. He explained that he had to be there on a Saturday lunchtime, and when the band’s gear arrived he assisted with carrying it into the venue. He was doing other stuff now too. There were several points of entry into the hall, so doors had to be manned. A table was placed there in an attempt to prevent free entry. For this, he got free admission, a hot meal and a few quid.
We saw Curved Air there in the company of an audience who numbered less than 20 – which was rather more than the post-Wings Denny Laine got at the leisure centre up the road (The Mull of Kintyre sideman's foray into a bagpipes'n'moptop-free outfit being pretty much responsible for the venue's first foray into music promotion being their last.)
My chance came when someone dropped out and Graham asked if I wanted to do some humping that weekend. For Thin Lizzy. Now, this wasn’t much of a deal at the time, because Thin Lizzy had had their hit with Whisky In The Jar a few years previously and with nothing to follow, they weren’t much of a draw. But this, although we didn’t know it at the time, was the tour that laid the foundations for them getting big again, and properly this time.
We hung around, we humped the gear in. We dealt with questions from the promoter like “What is it you do exactly?”. We buggered off for a bit. On return Graham was summoned and ordered to deliver another crate of beer to the Lizzy dressing room, from which he reckoned he returned high on the aroma of herbal smokes. Easy to believe when later, having deserted my post, I stood 3 feet from Phil Lynott as he played bass with one hand, sought desperately to remain upright, while examining a bottle of beer as if it were a work of fine art and all to establish whether there might be a mouthful left in it.
I say I deserted my post. Well, earlier I sat at my designated double swing doors with table set across them. Doors swung open. Five large gentlemen stood there.
“You can’t come in this way,” I squeaked.
“We’re with the band sonny,” said the biggest, in a deep, gravelly baritone. He loomed over me like a thundercloud.
“You’d better come in then,” I said. Helpfully moving the table out of the way, ushering them through, making my own way towards the stage, and thus resigning from my first and last rock-related position.
In those days, you see, the broadest point of my frame was my haircut, not that this ever-expanding tumble of golden curls got cut very often. The rest of me was about 6 inches across at my widest and if I were to lean in a corner I would occasionally be snatched up by a passing char who had mistaken me for a mop. And I wasn’t about to die for rock ‘n’ roll.
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