Margrave Of The Marshes by Ravenscroft Sheila

Author:Ravenscroft, Sheila [Ravenscroft, Sheila]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Random House UK
Published: 2012-05-31T04:00:00+00:00

Dick Dale in Islington

The Four Brothers at John’s fiftieth-birthday bash in our garden

PJ Harvey in Cardiff

The Misunderstood in Hollywood

Van Morrison in Finsbury Park

Roy Orbison in Ipswich

Pink Floyd in Hyde Park

The Undertones in Huddersfield

The Fall in – well, The Fall just about anywhere.

Then there were the Faces in Sunderland, where they played on the evening that Sunderland qualified to be in the FA Cup Final. That was the first time John met them, and he always said they were the perfect band to play that night: they came on and started booting footballs into the audience. It has even been claimed by keen-eyed observers that John could be seen dancing at the side of the stage in Sunderland. As John has already written in these pages, he was never the world’s most willing dancer. What seems to have slipped through the cracks in his memory, though, is that he invented his own dance – a kind of energetic, springy, shuffling walk on the spot. We christened it the Westbourne Grove Walk because the first sighting of it occurred one day when he returned from Westbourne Grove and began performing it while he was telling me what he had been doing while he was out.

Those moves always resurfaced on special occasions. In his diary entry for 24 July 1976, John writes about compèring a huge outdoor gig in Cardiff headlined by Status Quo: ‘Went onto the stage and introduced Quo. As it got dark, I stood behind the stage and did my Westbourne Grove Walk.’ Fashions come and go, governments fall, wars are waged, and still the Walk endures. Anyone at Fabric not caught up in their own dancing when John DJed there in 2002 would have glimpsed for themselves the Westbourne Grove Walk when he broke into a few energetic steps in the DJ booth, his little legs going back and forth. He used to dance pretty hard in that booth.

Also near the top of John’s ever-expanding list of life-changing concerts was the Rolling Stones in San Bernardino. He was something of a KMEN celebrity by that point, and so was entrusted with the noble task of loitering around the stage while the Stones played, fielding the numerous and eager young women who’d made their way round the side and were preparing to launch themselves at Mick Jagger. During the show, a lad battled his way on to the platform, seized a policeman’s handgun from its owner/operator’s holster, and fired several shots into the woodwork only a yard or two from Jagger’s nimbly prancing feet. The general din was so great that the band played on, unaware that whole generations of innocent woodworms were dying particularly unpleasant deaths as they romped and stomped the night away.

But the show that really altered John’s perception of what music could achieve took place at the Whiskey A Go-Go in Hollywood, where Van Morrison’s Them were supported by Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band. John’s admiration for Beefheart’s masterpiece, the 1969 album Trout Mask Replica,

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