Early Helen and the Horns Gigs

The Spandau/Duran/BoyGeorge 80s largely passed me by on an alien track, as I belonged to a group of further-out bands and musicians who played the Universities and small-scale weird venues about Britain (and especially in Scotland).

The first gig Helen and the Horns did was the basement bar at Imperial College, where a mob of drunken mining students did a rowdy conga in front of us. They only went past us once, though, because as each drunken mining student passed me I booted him smartly up the bum while carrying on playing, and as the frontrunner approached for a second time I could see him computing that it wasn't a good idea to pass by me again!
We did an interview for the college radio that someone later sent to me (I was rather rude and arrogant), and were allowed to help ourselves from a shopping trolley packed with a massive quantity of Country and Western LPs.

We played a street party at a pub in West London with a dreadful P.A. system, all sunshine, excited children and hippy food.

We played for for Richard 'Stranger than Steve' Strange, in a basement in Mayfair, an after-hours sortuva gig. Yvette the Conqueror, a well-known transexual, appeared singing a Boystown track over a backing tape, dressed in figure-hugging flesh coloured lycra. A straight-looking man in a pale blue bri-nylon shirt sliced his chest to pieces with a razor blade to music. When it was our turn I realised we weren't quite burlesque enough for Richard and he stood with his back to us throughout our short set, talking loudly to a member of the audience.
I walked home to Kilburn that night with my guitar, past the prostitutes in Park Lane who smiled and nodded (I wasn't competition, not a person with a guitar), past the drunks in Maida Vale and on the Kilburn High Road, arriving back home at my bedsit in Willesden exhausted but buzzing with the idea of the different worlds music brings you into.