It was at the Kings Club that we met Tony Watts, noticed at first because of his height and then when he sat on a fire extinguisher and set it off. He was a fan of the band and regularly came to see us with his own portable mini tape recorder, a technological wonder in those days. It would not be long before he was our engineer and kind of ‘road manager’, also living at our house. He was (and still is) a bit of a wizard in the field of electronics. The clumsiest person we knew, he was nicknamed “Hudd” after a T.V. show starring Roy Hudd. (Hard to explain why unless you’d seen the show). One instance to describe how he earned his name was during a gig on a large stage when one of the amps played up with a loud buzz. Tony ran on from the front to fix it, but on the way caught his belt loop in Mickey Drewer’s tremolo arm while he was soloing. The sound we got from that was probably a little ahead of its time!
Myself and Tony in the Roller
More and more gigs coming in, The “Bosco Hall” at Benfleet was another regular, I remember we played at a wedding there
and the bride’s father kept giving me Whisky-
We also ran our own gig every Sunday at a hall in Ongar. There was a kind of gallery jutting out of the end wall half way up, with stairs each side. We would end up playing up there and barricading the stairs, as we attracted a number of bikers who occasionally felt they needed to beat us up. This is reminiscent of another gig we ran ourselves, The Gun Inn at Pitsea. It was a weekly bash, and I do mean bash. A very rough pub with a concrete floor, the clientele were mainly a cross between Teds and Rockers, fortunately they loved us and acted as bouncers with anyone who caused trouble. One thing we would always remember about them is that they wore wellington boots with the tops rolled down, and on a special night they would dress up in their suits but still wear the wellies, bizarre.
At the Fortune of War:
Me, Chris Pyrah, Hugh & Mick D.
Tony
At the Gun Inn