Simpler Times.

Since I haven’t anything to write about at the moment (I’m tired of complaining to the gods about the summer we haven’t had yet), I thought I’d post a picture of my then wife’s first rock band.

  

They couldn’t think of a name when they first started, so I suggested Marley’s Ghost. They liked it and adopted it and that was pretty brilliant of me wasn’t it? Anna did vocals and keyboards (plural? Actually it was just a small Korg) and the two lads played lead and bass guitar. I don’t remember what they used for percussion – maybe the same Korg or maybe they didn’t bother. Times were simpler then.

The picture was made using double exposure or combined negatives or some such bit of trickery. (There was no such thing as photoshop then because times were simpler.)

The bassist was the one I wrote about on this blog once, the one to whom Anna remarked ‘it should be a B flat there,’ and he replied ‘there’s no B flat on this guitar,’ and she countered ‘does it have an A sharp?’ to which he answered ‘yes,’ and she said ‘OK, use that instead.’ Brilliant.

He was also the one I found sitting with his back to next door’s fence when I went out on one occasion, and it didn’t take many seconds of regarding his excessively glum expression to realise that he had a crush on the leader of the band. I suppose that made him a sort of stalker, but it wasn’t a problem. I had no sense that he was any sort of a threat and the leader of the band was quite unconcerned, so I left him to it and carried on regardless. I suppose that was wrong of me; I suppose I should have offered sympathetic words of comfort, since unrequited crushes can be terrible afflictions. Ask any teenager (or even me.)