Hank B Marvin
Billy Bain, a musician friend of ours was a dead ringer for Hank B Marvin and like Hank B Marvin, played lead guitar... for a Rhodesian band called the “Indigos”.
Back in the day Salisbury beat groups used to hang out at Barry’s Music Shop and swapped anecdotes and stories. Billy told us a story which I believe
deserves a mention. It highlights the kind of danger rock musos could find themselves in, in
Africa circa 1964.
The Indigos had been booked to play a gig at a hotel at the lakeside resort of
Kariba which is about 350 miles North West of Salisbury.
Lake Kariba, at a hundred and twenty miles long and twenty
miles wide, is more of an inland sea than a lake and was created in
the late nineteen fifties when a hydro electrical damn was built across the
Zambezi River. Incidentally, my eldest
brother Neil worked as a customs officer at Kariba for about a year.
Neil in Customs uniform
Anyway, The Indigos were nearing the end of their journey. Billy, who was to co-star in this incident, was fast asleep in the back of the van when they sped round the corner and came to a screeching halt. Slap bang in the middle of the dirt road some fifty yards up ahead, sat Billy’s co-star in this saga, a bull elephant ...and by all accounts a large and extremely grouchy bull elephant.
The Indigo driving the van sounded the horn but the
elephant didn’t budge, he just stared back at them with beady-eyed contempt. The driver beeped
the horn again. The elephant stood its ground and glared defiantly back at them.
All the while Billy remained asleep. Like Hank
B Marvin, Billy wore horn-rimmed glasses...with thick lenses. However, he had taken
them off and placed them on the seat beside him whilst he slept. An important factor in what
follows.
A few minutes passed but the elephant was
going nowhere, he just sat glaring at them.
Finally, in an attempt to break the impasse, the Indigo
driver, hand on horn, edged the van forward a few yards. The bull elephant rose
to its feet and started to back off.
Embolden by his success, the Indigo driver edged the van forward a few more yards. But instead of sending the Elephant into flight it had the exact opposite effect... with its huge ears flapping like albatross wings,
it charged.
The Indigo driver threw the van into reverse and floored the
accelerator. The back wheels spun ineffectively. In
his attempt to circumnavigate the beast they had inadvertently
driven into soft sand. The engine was screaming the wheels were spinning but the van was going nowhere... not so the enraged elephant
bearing down on them trumpeting loudly.
"Uh-oh!"
Total panic ensued. Billy, woken by his fellow Indigos as they abandoned the van screaming “Elephant!!!”, searched frantically for his glasses to no avail. So he slide open the side door and legged it.
Billy recounted seeing a grey mass growing bigger and bigger.
Without his glasses he had
run in the wrong direction. According to the other band members, it was like a kid with a pea shooter
taking on a Sherman tank. The two charged towards each other, one the size of a
barn door the other the size of a cat-flap... but just when it looked like Billy was about to be referred to in the past tense... the raging bull elephant suddenly
veered off and disappeared into the surrounding bush.
Why had this huge
creature taken evasive action? No one
will ever know. There have been many theories - the elephant had been
taken aback by Billy’s ‘cojones’. Another, it heard the plaintive call of its
mate. But whatever the reason, Billy Bain, Rhodesia’s answer to Hank B. Marvin, had
faced off a raging bull elephant and the
Indigoes were able to continue onto Kariba and perform at the Kariba Hotel that
night ...the show must go on and go on it did.
No comments:
Post a Comment