I really don’t know what possessed us to hold our own pukka 8:00 p.m. to 12:00 p.m. session. There was no way we were ready to play at a private party, which was how most groups in Rhodesia got their
first paying session...but to hold our own session...? Groups only held their own session after they had started attracting a following and had accumulated a repertoire which would sustain a four hour session. We had done neither. We hadn't played anywhere other than the Talent Show so we didn't have a following and our entire repertoire consisted of only four
songs, three if you excluded, “Little Brown Jug”. How did four teenagers of
seemingly average intelligence, imagine they could play for four hours with a
repertoire of four songs? That equates to one song per hour. I guess the
ludicrously optimistic theatrical saying, “It’ll be all right on the night”, prevailed.
So with heads firmly entrenched in the sand, or in the clouds; wherever our
heads were they weren't in the real world, we went ahead and booked the Roman
Catholic Church Hall, a large hall on Rhodesvillle Avenue in a suburb of
Salisbury called Highlands... a name, I'm guessing, some home-sick Scot came up with.
I know we called ourselves “The Vampires” because I
kept an ad from The Rhodesian Herald advertising the historic event “8:00 p.m. –
12:00 p.m. Saturday the 6th June 1961... The Vampires ‘Rhodesia’s newest rock n’ roll
sensation’ (why we used such OTT tag-lines I’ll never know) will be playing at the Roman Catholic Church Hall...etcetera, etcetera... blah, blah, blah... entrance fee 1/6 d".
As with the line in movie Field Of Dreams 'build it and they will come' we booked it
and come they did. Okay, not in the hundreds but certainly in their tens. When Saturday came round at least forty teenagers turned up at the Catholic Hall and
handed over their 1/6d's eager to see and hear Rhodesia's Newest Rock 'n Roll Sensation.
At 8 p.m. precisely Rhodesia's Newest Rock 'n Roll Sensation started what
today would be called an ‘acoustic set’. The term ‘acoustic set’ had yet to be
coined in 1961 but was factually correct. It was only a matter of weeks since the Teen Talent Contest and we hadn't added anything electrical in the way of instruments.
By 8.15 p.m. we had exhausted our repertoire – and
yes, we did play “Little Brown Jug”. We had to. It accounted for twenty-five per cent of our material.
We still had another three and
three quarter hours left to fill. What
were we going to do? We fell back to that old chestnut of repeating the numbers
but saying someone – for arguments sake, Mandy – had requested it. We didn't know if there was a Mandy in the
hall and if we didn't know then we felt pretty confident the audience wouldn't
know either.
By 8.30 murmurings of discontent was
beginning to surface.
But by 8:58 p.m. after we had announced, in all
probability for the sixth time, that there had been yet another special request
for Little Brown Jug, surprise, surprise, people started demanding their money
back. What were we to do? We had exhausted the 'special request' ploy. If we announced yet another request we’d be lynched. We had two choices. Either we
took the money and instruments and made a run for it or we bit the bullet and handed back all those 1/6d's entrance fees.
But before we could decide, a guy appeared and turned the
situation around. The guy was Tony Hulley, the rhythm guitarist with The
Diamonds. The Diamonds along with 'The Cyclones' were Salisbury's top bands at the time.
Fortunately for us The Diamonds
weren't playing that particular Saturday night and Tony, who lived nearby
decided he'd check out ‘Rhodesia’s newest rock ‘n roll sensation’.
It must have become immediately obvious to Tony that Rhodesia’s newest rock 'n roll sensation were at best sensationally bad.
However, being a
kindly soul and on hearing the grumblings from the aggrieved punters, Tony
snucked off home and returned with his ‘electric’ guitar, a mic and ‘amplifier’
and for the next three odd hours played and sang number after number... not one ‘special’ request, neither. Thanks to Tony Hully, a real diamond geezer, we managed to keep our grubby hands on the
entrance fees.
Maybe there's something's in that theatrical adage after all, 'It'll be all right on the night'. It certainly turned out to be true in our case.
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