Rock and Roll, riots in Italy, Mojo and other things

During this period Lotty and I had bought ourselves a 42 foot Gaff rigged wooden cutter called Mjojo, which at that time we moored at West Mersea in Essex. She is a beautiful wooden vessel made by an English Architect on the beach on Lamu in the Indian Ocean, and he had lived on her with his wife and daughters for some years wandering the world on her. We bought her in Spain and Lotty sailed her back to England with Rod (the guy who had built her).

Also by now Lotty had qualified as a teacher, and found herself work in Gosport, so we took Mjojo to a mooring in the middle of Portsmouth harbour and began the next section of our lives together. I rather think we were married by this time.

I started to work as a free lance lighting roadie, going out with a variety of bands on tours in Britain and Europe as well as working more festivals and similar events. I toured with a number of bands, mostly hellish to spend time with, as I seemed to get landed with heavy metal bands a lot.. Humble Pie, Ozzie Osbourne and similar idiots.... But on one splendid tour I was with Traffic, and got on really well with Stevie Winwood, who turned out not only to be a superb musician, but a really nice guy too, and with a shared love of that eccentric Spanish Architect, Gaudi, so while we were in Barcelona he and I spent hours together wandering around Goudi's various buildings there.

By and large in my experience most Heavy Metal bands are made up of men who can hardly be described as musicians of any sort, and who were mainly in the business for the sex, drugs and groupies side of it all.

Groupies were a strange phenomena, mostly young girls, and I mean young. Who for some inexplicable reason wanted to have sex with the guys in the bands – not with us dirty old roadies though. Wherever we went, there they were, queuing up to be laid... Sad.

Most of the guitarists in such bands couldn’t even tune their guitars and needed guitar roadies to do it for them, and in the case of Osbourne, well, he was simply one truly stupid man. Someone had given him a synthesizer for the tour I went on with him, which of course he had absolutely no idea how to play, so his roadie had to stick papers onto the various keys he needed, all numbered so he knew which one to press and in what order.

Touring with such bands was a dreary business, as they couldn't improvise anything, the only thing that changed from one gig to the next was the start... “Hello Barcelona” or “Hello Rome”... other than that every gig was absolutely the same, the same music, same solos, same dance moves and so on... very boring.

Touring itself had its pleasant side to it, the chief being the cohesion of the roadies, we tended to become something like a small army unit, a very tight group of people, we knew we could depend on each other absolutely in all circumstances. This was pleasing to experience. The tours themselves tended to become something of a foggy experience, after being on the road for a couple of weeks with gigs almost every night tended to make us confused as to which country we were in, let alone which city. So in motorway cafes we generally ordered our food, and then simply held out a handful of mixed European currency and told the guy to take what he needed in his country’s money.

Going across borders tended to be tedious too. We traveled in relatively large convoys of huge trucks and various crew buses and cars (Almost never with the group themselves, they generally flew from gig to gig). At every border we were of course stopped and taken apart by the Customs who were determined to find drugs on us, which they never did, for three reasons: 

• We all knew we would be searched thoroughly at the borders, 

• We actually hardly used drugs on the road, we were working to hard for that, 

• Any drugs there were with us (for the group's use) were always in the TIR sealed trucks, so the border Customs couldn’t open them...

On the Traffic tour we experienced something totally Kafkaesque on the border between France and Spain. For once the band were traveling with us in cars. The bongo drummer with Traffic, a really nice, friendly and fine musician from Ghana had a visa for one visit to France, but when he got to the Spanish border control it turned out that his visa for Spain wasn't valid for some reason or other, so he was not allowed into Spain.

When he tried to go back into France so it could all be sorted out, the French immigration control refused him entry into France as his French visa was only good for one visit... So he was stuck between the two countries, literally. There were a pair of parallel lines painted on the road which indicated the actual border between France and Spain, and he was stood there... We roadies had gone through first, and only heard about this problem about 30 minutes later, so we rushed back to the boarder to see what we could do to help.. After a lot of discussion, they allowed us to at least give him a chair so he could sit down... And there the poor man sat, shoulders slumped in no-man's land.

All this while the tour management were busy with frantic phone calls all over the place,and after a lot of fuss and bother, it was agreed that he would be allowed back into France and to an airport, and be allowed to take off in any plane and sort of fly back and forth across Europe until his Spanish visa was sorted out.

So he spent the night flying back and forth to Rome....

Finally it was all sorted, and he was able to get on a flight to join us in Barcelona... and all was well. But for God's sake!

Later on this same tour, we were in Italy, a country that I am rather fond of, but as place for us to work it was really scary at that time. The Mafia controlled all pop concerts in Italy back then – and perhaps still do for all I know, and there were a large number of young people, who described themselves as Maoists (Not sure why), who felt that all such concerts should be free.. Certain lack of understanding of economics there I felt, but.

Anyway, this manifested itself in a sort of per-arranged and orchestrated riot at all pop concerts in Italy at that time. So we would turn up at the venue, and the Italian Riot Police would already be there with their riot gear, armoured cars, water cannon and so on, and would be busy setting up huge fences around the venue. In due time the “Maoists” would start to gather, with their face masks, helmets and banners....

Mostly the riots took place outside the venue, as the cops managed to keep the kids away more or less. But in Naples it really got out of hand, and as the concert was moving nicely along, suddenly tear gas grenades started bursting in the hall, and as one, the entire audience whipped out gas masks, put them on and sat back to enjoy the rest of the concert. We on the other hand were not so well prepared, and had to carry on with streaming eyes and noses as the place filled up with tear gas.

Not easy.

After a bit there were a couple of huge explosions outside, shortly followed by a number of rioters rushing onto the stage, closely followed by riot cops armed with short rifles, who proceeded to beat the hell out of the kids with their rifle butts, right beside poor Stevie Winwood who was attempting to sing....

The unconscious kids were dragged off by the cops and we simply carried on..... Had no choice really.

We later discovered that the explosions were two car bombs the rioters let off outside....

There are loads more stories I can tell about our Rock and Roll tours and festivals, which I shall do once I have brought this story up to the present.. So hold your breath, only another 40 some years of life to describe before that.

This was a strange period in our lives, I would have to leave Lotty for months on end as I went off to rehearse for the next tour,and then go on the tour, or work for a week or so at a time on a festival somewhere.... While she poor duck was stuck on our boat in the middle of the harbour and had to work in a school she disliked. But somehow we both survived this period and remained together.

After about a year of this I decided that I had had enough of long hours, hotels and endless driving from gig to gig, and stopped.... As this corresponded with the end of Lotty's contract with the school we decided to set out on our planned world trip on Mjojo....

Read on next time......