Years of George Formby emulation on ukulele, guitar making and playing later (in 1965), he sells his first half-decent acoustic guitar (a crude 12-string) to Peter Frampton, who is at the time a 15-year-old kid at the same school...
1966 sees him playing keyboards in a Tamla Motown-styled band whilst on tour in Cornwall where he meets guitarist Noel Redding and some months later in a pub in the West End of London's Charing Cross Road is sat drinking with him. Noel tells him:-"I've just been for an audition to play bass with some long-haired 'coon' who plays guitar with his teeth that Chas Chandler has brought over from the States and I've got the gig. You've got to hear this guy play; be down at Chiselhurst Caves next weekend ~ we'll get you in"...After "The Experience" witnessed at less than three feet from the feet of "The Master" (Jimi Hendrix), he is converted back from keyboards to Fender Stratocaster and Marshall stack and embarks on a period of that direction.
1967 through 1971 sees him first training, then practicing as a lettering artist, eventually running a silk-screen print sign production plant (not entirely unlike Adolf Hitler).
Bowie's "Starman"...A period of the almost inevitable soft drugs and shoulder-rubbing with locals David Bowie and Arthur Brown (Fire!) in the early 70's Beckenham days led to his first demo recording. Bowie (by then with Angela) listens to the results of the first sessions and tells him that he is very talented and asks what he intends to do with that talent? He replies :~
"I don't see myself as a star but would like perhaps to work in Childrens' TV.If I made any money from music I would put it into antigravity research".Bowie replies that he should not be afraid of success but rather aim for the very top-most shining stardom and a week later calls him to say he's written a song for and about him.His prescence is requested and Bowie sits at the piano and plays and sings to him:~"There's a Starman, waiting in the skies; he'd like to come and meet us but he thinks he'd blow our minds ~ he told me:Let the Children boogie;Let the Children boogie"...
1972 he is in "late hippy" mode and suffering from a broken heart / relationship. He goes for a lone holiday in SW England and spends a night alone at the centre of Stonehenge and the voice from his childhood repeats the message in his head:~
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"You
will be the man who makes toys for the children who ride
in spaceships".
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He leaves a large flat stone he has previously brought home from a Cornish beach on top of an earth-work nearby to Stonehenge. Some years later he returns to retrieve it only to find a foot-trampled pathway around it and obviously, from the extant "hippy detritus", it has been used as a ceremonial altar for some considerable time. He takes it home with him again and it remains with him through several house moves and eventually he cements it into his front doorstep, where it (probably) remains to this day. |
1973 sees him in the throws of (maybe and hopefully) signing with Decca Records by the man who has previously (famously) turned down the Beatles (Dick Rowe:- "Go back to Liverpool Mr. Epstein; four-man guitar groups don't make it anymore..."), who thinks he's finally found something to save his face around the music business. Wrong. Around this time Steve's been performing many experiments with fly-wheels, coils and magnets attempting to design a "gravity drive engine", and in a stoned frenzy of frustration with the procrastinations of the record company, he demands money for antigravity research and gets booted off and out...
