Tony's Life and Times

Before we arrived in Angola we had been told all manner of horror stories about Luanda as I mentioned in my last post about Angola.   About how it was the most expensive city in the world, how dangerous it was to venture alone onto its crime ridden streets and how chaotic it was. The result of this was that the first time we went into the city (safely tucked up in our school bus, with uniformed guard) we were all terrified to set foot out of the bus. It duly arrived at the "South African Super Market", which we were being shown, as a good place to shop, This is a smallish supermarket, surrounded by a high cement wall with armed guards at the entrance to the parking lot, as well as at the entrance to the supermarket itself.  By the way, these armed guards were armed with AK47s, which I later discovered was totally normal in Angola at that time.  Every shop had its uniformed and AK47 toting guard sitting outside it.  Taking all our courage in our hands, we c...

As I said ages ago, this blog consists of random memories as they occur to me, so here is another such relatively pointless memory from my Roundhouse days - All about the most unlikely chapter of Hells Angels you could possibly imagine. There was a small group of rather weedy young men who hung around the Roundhouse in those days, trying to get work from us as security for our Rock concerts (which we never gave them by the way) who felt that they were the epitome of what the Hells Angels stood for. They wished to set up a proper London Chapter of the Angels for themselves.   But as they possessed only a small moped and a Mini Moke ( a sort of jeep version of the famous Mini car) we all felt that this was an unlikely dream. They used to film themselves on that moped pobling along the road with a small video camera on the back of the Moke and obviously were living in a total fantasy world. However, one day they astounded us all by coming into the Roundhous...

During my time at the Roundhouse we held large rock concerts every Sunday, which over the years featured just about all the bands, musicians and others who were busy with Rock and Roll in that period.   Generally these guys turned up in time to perform their sets, and then went away again, and that was that.   However, one group actually moved in and set up home in the car park at the back of the Roundhouse and became our House Band for some months. This was a large group of musicians and their hangers-on (wives, children and lovers) called Stoneground, who were part of what was known as the Hog Farmers.   This was a sort of ad hoc commune based in California on a real hog farm owned and run by a most unlikely clown called Wavy Gravy, who deserves an entire book all about who he was and what he did and still does. In passing I should mention that it was Wavy Gravy and the Hog Farmers who set up and ran the Woodstock Festivals, so if you happen to s...

After our French Period, we set about creating yet another new life in Angola. A country that until about 3 months before our arrival in Luanda (its capital) had been involved in a three way civil war that had been raging for some 30 years. This was basically a war against the Portuguese colonists in the beginning, and then later became yet another of Africa's proxy wars between the USA and the USSR. The USA used the South Africans as their tool for this, and the Russians used Cubans as theirs. This was all about diamonds, oil, uranium and several other valuable resources that Angola has in huge quantities. The rather wonderful Angolan flag - I have a large one of these as a souvenir of our time there What it meant in practice was that three armies  - the third being a bunch who owed no allegiance to either the USA or the USSR, but simply wanted to rule the country for their own benefit (money you know) rampaged around the country, killing and destroying anything tha...

Like everyone else, at various times in my life I have had jobs that only lasted a short while.   Obviously most of these were holiday jobs whilst I was a student of sorts.   Most of these were totally unremarkable, dull and only useful for the money they gave me, which enabled me to go hitch-hiking around Europe, as we all did in those days. However, one or two of these temporary jobs do stand out in my mind owing to the effects they had on my world view, or in one case, the shocks it gave me about how I related to people who were effectively in my power. The first of these jobs that seem to have stuck in my mind was as the driver/sales person with a soft ice van around Crawley New Town. This was one of those vans you see driving around housing estates with an annoying set of electronic chimes (in my case, it was Greensleeves) that will happily sell you soft ice-cream.   This job I had when I was about 18 I think, and the thing about it that h...

At the Roundhouse we didn't only have rock concerts, we also had a fair number of classical concerts as well.   Which of course meant we had to work with the Conductors of the orchestras who were playing in those concerts. Of those Conductors there are two who stand out in my memory, for very different reasons.  The first is Pierre Boulez, a Conductor and composer of great renown, the other is a man whose name I am afraid I have forgotten, for reasons that will become apparent as I write about him in this post. Boulez was at that time (about 1973-1974)  the resident Conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and the BBC decided in its wisdom that they would broadcast a whole series of modern music concerts live from the Roundhouse - Not sure why they made the decision to use the Roundhouse rather than one of the many "real" concert halls in London, but they did so decide. Now we at the Roundhouse at this time had not had much experience with Conductors...

After we had been forced to realise that we were not going to be able to get our Field Centre off the ground through lack of funding, we were left wondering what on earth to do with ourselves and the 20 hectares of forest, hillside and land we owned in Fontenoy, and could see no obvious way to make any sort of a living with it all. Then one fine day, a friend of Nathanial's who was visiting at the time was wandering around in our forest with me and he casually remarked that it would make an amazing Paintball field.   Well I had never heard of Paintball, so I asked him what he meant.  He explained in a few succinct words what Paintball actually was. To begin with we were far from interested, as the idea of a bunch of wannabee Rambos rushing around our land, shooting at each other didn't really appeal one bit.   But he insisted that it was actually in no real way a sort of glorification of machismo  or of violence, but was actually great fun, and not...

When we got to Fontenoy, obviously apart from Roger, Laura and Oscar Bowman, we knew absolutely no one, and to be honest we had moments of wondering what on earth we were doing, coming to a small community in a country we really only knew from holidays (and in my case, a rather large number of relatives clustered in Paris and around Lyons).  We did more or less speak French, and had gone to a lot of trouble to try and find out about banking, bureaucrats and other "official" things.  But simply living, making friends and becoming part of the community, well that was quite a different set of problems.  A short video to give you an idea what Fontenoy looks like After we had been there for a few months, I became aware of the existence in the village of what in France are called "Associations", which are groups of people who have got together, formed a club of sorts in order to pursue some common aim.  These Associations have a legal existence and are all prop...