After a night of drinking in The Stockton Arms when I was 17 or 18, which happened, in my case, 3 or 4 times per week, we would often walk about a mile to Oxbridge chippy for food to soak up the beer. We were a raggle taggle group of hair and denim who the elderly locals eyed with suspicion and though we were harmless, to them we looked like youth gone wild.
One day, pushed on by several pints of Stones Best Bitter, we arrived at about 11pm in the chippy and as tradition had it, called out our order as we entered. ‘Put a sausage in for me, George!’ we’d call out or similar. The post pub crowd was good business and reliable even though it was still a couple of miles for me to walk home.
It so happened that a rather desirable girl worked there. A chip shop princess she was not, though she had the lank, greasy hair of all such workers. Naturally, being rather shy, I was an observer of the more forward of our number, one of which, a mouthy type, decided he would try his luck. At the same time, the radio was on and being a Friday night, that meant Tommy Vance’s rock show was playing and on came Rainbow Rising. Hoping to impress the lank-haired maiden, he proceeded to imitate, rather well, Cozy Powell’s drum intro to that track by expansively drumming it out on the fryer counter top, complete with Keith Moon like gurning and flailing arms.
Unfortunately, he hit the top of the fryer so hard that the vibration dislodged a lot of the glass windows behind which the fried items resided and they fell to the floor and smashed. I still don’t know how this happened as they must have jumped out of the ridge they sat in.
Anyway, what do you do when you’re 17, drunk and hear smashing? You cheer, obviously, which on reflection was a little unsympathetic. This drove George mad, these disrespectful hairy fuckers and he threw the radio against the wall, screaming, at which point we all shut up except for the drumming lad who piped up, apologetically, ‘sorry George…it was Cozy Powell.’ It didn’t help. We were fortunate not to be barred (probably because we bought so much, all the time.)
See? This is how destructive heavy rock beats can be, so freaking out in public is potentially dangerous! Oh, and she wasn’t impressed. She’d be about 70 now.
