Bring It On Home by Mark Blake

Author:Mark Blake
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2018-11-26T16:00:00+00:00

One evening in late 1974, the White Hart’s regulars arrived at Horselunges for one of Peter and Gloria’s parties. Among them was Dave Northover, a local insurance broker and weekend rugby player. Northover had met Zeppelin’s manager during a wild night in the pub. “At the time, my knowledge of Led Zeppelin went as far as the theme tune to Top of the Pops,” he admits.

Northover and his then wife, Carol, arrived at the manor to see their local postman and doctor drinking side by side with rock stars and their minders. The smell of pot and amyl nitrate filled the air, and several guests were already disappearing into Peter’s study, “where they were doing whatever they were doing.”

At one point during the night, Carol wandered onto the grounds looking for her husband and saw him through the study’s open window. In a repeat of Grant’s earlier mishap with Gene Vincent, she climbed through, fell, and landed on sixties pop star Adam Faith’s leg—the same one he’d nearly lost in a car accident a year before. There was no lasting damage, but driving home, Northover marveled at the world he’d just entered: “That party was my first inkling of what was to come.”

One week later, Grant asked if Northover wanted to go on tour with Led Zeppelin. “My work as an insurance broker was ending; I was thirty and looking for something different. I asked him, ‘What would I have to do?’ and he replied, ‘Just don’t take any shit from anyone, and you’ll be fine.”

The next time Northover saw Grant was at the Ambassador Hotel in Chicago. “It was the beginning of the tour, and there was a meeting with Peter and Richard Cole,” he says. “I noticed a few scantily clad ladies around, and one of them—I think she was one of the Plaster Casters—led me into another room, knelt down, and undid my trousers.”

Unfortunately, despite his new friend’s best efforts, he couldn’t rise to the occasion. “She smiled and said, ‘Oh, you must have taken too much speed,’ zipped my trousers back up, and walked out.” Northover reemerged, looking embarrassed, to see Grant and Cole grinning knowingly. “I later found out it had all been prearranged for the new boy.”

Northover made his Zeppelin debut in January 1975, escorting John Paul Jones to the stage in front of seventeen thousand people at the Minneapolis Metropolitan Sports Center. From here on, his jobs included guarding the lighting tower and stage monitors and ensuring Grant’s hotel suite fridge was stocked with his favorite tipple, Blue Nun white wine. “Peter always had a bottle of it in his pocket. You never knew if he was going to drink it or hit you with it.”

Prior to the tour, Northover had mentioned he was a qualified physicist (he’d worked as a junior scientist at the Harwell Atomic Energy Research Establishment). When this information was relayed to the band, he’d somehow become a “pharmacist.” “I think they liked the idea of having someone around who knew about chemicals.

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