The Prog Rock Years

Tony Simons, lead guitar 1977-80, recalls:

The 20th Century Music Group met a number of times per week, like any club or society. We had a communal bread and cheese lunch on Wednesdays and a business meeting on Friday evenings, when we arranged times for the different rehearsals and shared news about forthcoming invitations to perform. The group had more than enough musicians to form several ensembles, or bands:

• One subset of our members formed an acoustic-only Folk Group, which got invited round to schools in the Cambridge area.
• Another subset formed The Rock Band, which was the all-electric heavy mob for big evening concerts.
• The whole group combined to perform the Folk Passion, which, in terms of style, fitted somewhere between the two.

1978: The Gainsborough, Kent/Sussex and Suffolk Tours

From the following Autumn we had to re-invent ourselves. One of the problems had been the rather tweedy corduroy image of The Rock Band and the tinny-sounding guitars and inadequate amplification. It was all right sounding like the early Shadows (as in Cliff Richard) for the folk-rock fusion of the Folk Passion, but for out-and-out rock band concerts, I wanted to sound like David Gilmour from Pink Floyd. New member and lead vocalist Mark Allchorn set about constructing a whole new PA system from MDF using speakers and electrical parts from Cambridge Audio. Old group hand Barry Jones built various pre-amp overdrivers, so finally I could get the lead guitar sustain I wanted. The trouble was, this made the guitar louder than anything else, so Barry also built a box of resistors to soak up the power between the amp and the speaker cab. This was known affectionately as the "bird-box". So, I'd play along at 8 ohms during the verses, then hit the overdrive footswitch and simultaneously click over to 32 ohms for the lead guitar solos. Barry was in seventh heaven: "Oh, man, nail 'em to the back wall."

To smarten up the image of the band, we decided to go for a uniform of red T-shirts and blue jeans on stage. This band performed live at Gainsborough, giving a memorable and sold-out concert. Later, we decided that everyone wearing the same thing was boring, so somehow I acquired a blue Japanese-style yakuta (kimono) to wear on stage, like all the other prog-rockers of the day. The band had a style that wandered between Pink Floyd, Steely Dan and Wishbone Ash, with piano-led numbers sung by Paddy "Elton" Searle-Barnes, who was Peter's brother. We covered a number of songs by Adrian Snell, Larry Norman and Graham Kendrick, but increasingly wrote our own material. I shared guitar lead lines with Sam Gibbs, who wrote some wonderfully laid-back original songs, such as Real Revolution and a joyful number Brand New Day, that we simply called Sam's Song. I wrote the Floyd-like prog rock number Loser (Alright Jack) in six-four time, for which Dave Hobson played the bass-line with gusto on his Gibson Grabber and I punched out the chords and soared along at 32 ohms, with loads of semi-controlled feedback.

Around this time, Barry Jones, who was like a legend in the rest of the group, having played bass, drums, guitar and who had the coolest vocabulary of any hippy you ever heard (such as: "Oh, man, boogie on down, it's all right now, yeah!"), had to give up drumming because his hips had started to melt. This was in response to a new drug treatment for a blood deficiency, which had originally been mis-diagnosed as a food allergy! Stephen Wicks fell into the saddle and, through the aid of his brother Jon, arranged a whole week of concerts for us in Great Yarmouth and Lowestoft. This proved to be the most successful concert tour of my career with the group, with some 20 gigs in eight days. We would do mornings or lunchtimes in schools, afternoons at the Swallow's Nest open-air theatre and evenings in various village halls. I remember Dave Hobson and Mark Allchorn crashing out, starving, and so challenging each other to a hot-dog eating contest, which Mark won 13-11.

1979: The School of Pythagoras Concert

During 1978-1979, I spent the year abroad in France. I missed the band terribly, and penned a lonely tune Falling Cadences that later went into our repertoire. Fortunately, folks wrote to me, especially Mary Adams and Audrey Peck. They had lots of news: Barry's condition seemed to get worse. He had to hobble around on crutches and went every week to the Addenbrooks Hospital, where he was one of their 12 famous unsolved cases. His blood seemed to have no platelets (white cells) and they operated to remove his spleen, but this didn't improve things much. However, Dave Hobson and Paddy S-B had penned another hit tune Masquerade, which we loved and continued to play for many years.

As luck would have it, my 21^st birthday fell during the French school holidays, so I came back to organise a massive party in the two-week break. We put this on at the School of Pythagoras, a historic building in the grounds of St John's College, Cambridge. The whole band came along and together, we had one huge time, with over 100 guests. I got to perform solo live to my party guests, which was nice. The following day, Mary Adams had bought us tickets to see Mike Oldfield at the Royal Festival Hall, during his Exposed tour, where he played Tubular Bells and Incantations live with a full orchestra and band. Our seats were front-row stalls, not ten feet from Mr Oldfield himself. I was completely amazed, watching the master at work. Mary and I were apprehended by the stewards for dancing in the front row, to Oldfield's disco number Guilty. Ahem! In the Royal Festival Hall!

Thanks to Mario Petrucci for this photo (right), showing Mark Allchorn recovered from his ordeal (see below) in time to play the Selwyn Diamond for Mario's 21st birthday bash.

The same year, tragedy struck while I was away. A number of the 20th Century group, including Mark Allchorn, Steve Wicks, Audrey and Mary were cycling back to Cambridge from Girton, when they were hit by an out-of-control sports car, being driven by a couple of very drunk joy-riding students. Steve and Mark were both badly injured. Steve's head and chest were crushed and Mark's leg was completely wrecked from the knee down. Audrey held Steve's head in her arms by the roadside, but he slowly lost consciousness and died. Mark spent the next 6 months in traction at Addenbrooks; and recovered remarkably, with bones growing back into smashed places the doctors never expected to heal.

I returned from France just in time for Steve's funeral. We went back to Lowestoft, a place of fond memories where we had had one of our most successful tours; the Wicks family was again very generous in their welcome and we all participated in a beautiful church service to commemorate Steve's life with joy and thanksgiving. Jon, Steve's brother, worked up a song idea called He is the One. This eventually became the B-side of our 1980 single, Stand Up and Be Counted.