1st April 2005. Today is an anniversary.

1st April 1965 – 40 years ago today – I first stepped onto a stage with Episode Six as a professional musician, having decided to drop out of Hornsey Art College.

In Frankfurt, one flight up from the street, it was at a club that could hold about 150 people – The Tanz-Café Acadia, Grosse Friedberger Strasse (I believe it is now a shoe store). We were booked for the month of April.

Andy Ross – vocals; Sheila Carter – keyboards; Harvey Shield – drums; Tony Lander – lead guitar and Graham Dimmock – rhythm guitar (we all sang), were my fellow adventurers. I was playing a Fender Precision through homemade speaker cabinets, don’t remember what my amp was, probably a dodgy bargain job from the Edgware Road.

We started at 7:00pm and played for 45 minutes, broke for 15 minutes, and then back on for the next 45 minutes, and so on until 3:00am. On the weekends we started at 4:00pm. The pay was paltry. It was tough, grueling work and we played until our fingers were bleeding and our throats hoarse. We played all the latest hits, some rock’n’roll, and lots of blues, especially during the last set on a slow weeknight.

Living in one room was cramped (although Sheila had her own bedroom – all quite proper!) but we were professionals now! What a buzz. Just like The Beatles!

My appendix, showing a total disregard for my feelings, decided to explode without warning one night at the end of our third week and nearly killed me. (I had peritonitis, which can be fatal.) They were summarily removed at the Krankenhaus der Barmherzigen Brüder, a hospital staffed entirely by monolingual monks who spoke hardly a word, let alone in English. For the last week of the gig, the band carried on without me, Graham switching to bass. The club owner was so tight he took away a sixth of the money because I wasn’t there. Can you believe that?

In order to save my life, and being virtually penniless, I had to borrow money from a wheelchair-bound fan called Erhardt (I think), a regular at the club who always sat at the front and with whom we had become friendly over the weeks. He was a banker but despite that had been good enough to lend me the money anyway, for which I am eternally grateful. Over the following six months or so I paid him back in installments, but with great difficulty because upon my return to England, Episode Six were in a shambles; we had no singer because Andy Ross (real name Andy Tait) had decided to leave and become a truck driver, and I was recuperating slowly and couldn’t work anyway. A summer of lean times.

Whilst the others had driven home a week earlier, I had flown back on a plane (how else?) – a luxury afforded me by Helmut Gordon, our manager at the time and the man who had once managed The Who (or, with his eastern European accent, “Zee Ooo,”) when they were The High Numbers and then briefly after they’d changed their name. He procured for us our Pye recording contract, which led to Put Yourself In My Place. He also engaged a PR person, a sexy blonde called Gloria Bristow. We owe him.

Within a few months we had regrouped, recruited Ian Gillan, left Helmut Gordon, took on Gloria Bristow as a manager and, very gradually, the diary started to fill up again.

Maybe it’s all been one great big April Fool’s joke. 😉

P.S. Maybe it is the mere fact that it was so long ago or maybe it’s because my mind has been compartmentalized to such an absurd degree that the divisions between each compartment have become alarmingly thin (not unlike a few hotels I’ve had the misfortune to stay in over the years) or maybe it’s simply the fact that I have an unconscious need to point out that memory, at least mine, is patently human and vulnerable to the passing of time, but I had to correct something.

It was some alarm that I reread the preceding piece a few days ago, and apart from a few German spelling mistakes, pointed out by a good friend, there was a glaring error in the account. I am foolish enough (or is it misplaced pride?) to be able to announce that the glaring error was noticed by me. Oh, the horror!

What am I going on about? You may well ask. For those who are reading the article for the first time, nothing will be amiss. For those who are rereading it, I will elucidate: Episode Six completed a few separate stints at German clubs in the sixties, the Tanz-Café Acadia being the first. The recollection regarding the Hungarian meal actually took place later, in Munich, not in Frankfurt. That’s it. You will no doubt be relieved to know that I have extracted it. The rest of the account is stunningly accurate.

I know it’s a lot of wordage about nothing much but at least I can sleep easier now.

Good luck, RG