Spitfires 1963

I soon formed another band with my school friend Stu­art Vin­cent who lived in Big­gin Hill…the town that hosted a famous WW2 fighter base dur­ing the “Bat­tle of Britain”. We called the band the “Spit­fires” after the famous fighter plane that helped save our necks. We played at the Big­gin Hill Youth Club…and I remem­ber every­one watch­ing out for the infa­mous rocker (what we called bik­ers back then) “Pansy Pot­ter” who used to like throw­ing peo­ple through win­dows (mostly the “Nightin­gale Cafe) for no appar­ent reason.

We also played “West Wick­ham” near my home­town of Hayes near Brom­ley. David Jones used to sing and play this mother of pearl alto sax with a group called the “Konrads”…he later changed his name to David Bowie; he had tremen­dous tal­ent even back then. I became good friends with George Under­wood who also played with David for a while, and he would some­times sit in with us. He went on to paint some of the most mem­o­rable album cov­ers of the 1960’s includ­ing T-Rex, David Bowie, Ziggy Star­dust, Pro­col Harum, and Marc Bolan.

Peter Framp­ton was also on our local scene as a young gui­tarist play­ing with a band called the “Truebeats”.

It was basi­cally South London.

We all went off in our dif­fer­ent direc­tions as pro­fes­sional musi­cians. Me in 1964.