EVERYONE

A Brief History of the Band

I had this idea of putting a band of my own together. I stopped off at Kettering in Northants to see Principal Edwards who'd got a farm there. I stayed over a couple of days, got pissed with Les their lights man in the pub, came back and started racing motorbikes around the farmyard. And I came a terrible purler - ripped all up one elbow and was out of it for four months. About August we rehearsed the new band, Everyone. Unfortunately I was terribly naive. I could play, but I didn't know anything about bands. I thought all you needed was to get together a good bunch of people and the rest of it would happen. By then I'd met Dave Richards, bass player, who I got on terrifically well with. John Pearson was on drums.

John Porter was a guy I'd met in Newcastle that I liked so I got him in as another guitarist. He recommended Bob Sergeant to play organ and sing. Which was probably the worst of several bad moves. Bob was a terrific singer, he came out of his own band Junco Partners and had a big bluesy voice and played very bluesy organ which wasn't at all what I needed. Anyway we put a band together and recorded an album which was frankly a bit schizoid, a bit of a mess because there was Bob's stuff and my stuff and it didn't really meet in the middle.

Then we had a horrendous experience... we'd driven back to London after a gig at Southampton University and were sitting in John Pearson's flat. We'd left one of our two roadies, Andy Rochford, in Southampton - he'd stayed there with a girl, and Paul the other roadie, had driven the van back to London. The phone rang and Andy and the girl wanted to come back to London and he asked Paul to go back and get them. So Paul drove down and picked them up, and on the way back, on the A33 at Basingstoke, they had the most horrendous accident. Paul was killed outright, Andy and the girl were badly hurt and the van, with all the equipment in it, was wrecked. So suddenly everything that kept the band on the road was smeared across the A33. Paul was nineteen and had roadied for me in the latter stages of the Liverpool Scene and had stuck through all my being smashed up in the Summer, so I felt very guilty. It wasn't my fault, but his loyalty had cost him his life. It's still a very difficult thing to think about. There were still some obligation gigs I had to do, which I did as an acoustic three-piece with Dave Richards and John Pearson playing tablas. Come December 1970 that was it, I didn't want to do anything.

Discography