Day 2698
Saturday May 30th 2026
Winchester
Once again I get in the shade in The Square. It’s 25 degrees and too hot to be not in the shade, especially as there is no forgiving breeze. I’m not the only one putting on a performance. There are four blokes dressed in 17th century garb. Civil war ere? Anyway, they’re milling about, swords at the ready. After a few minutes, I ask one of them if they’re about to do a “turn” (if it gets any hotter, it’ll be me doing a turn, a funny one) and if they are, I’ll stop playing. ‘Oh no, we’re just standing about, listening to you!’ Shame I don’t know any 17th century stuff. It’s quite funny though, a bloke playing pop songs from the 1960s while these blokes are walking about with cavalier hats and all that Cromwell gear, or whatever it is.
Coinage is slow. In fact it’s so slow, I’m thinking about ending the set once I get to the hour mark…but it picks up a bit when a fiver lands in the trough. One man (who doesn’t donate) is wearing a guitar T-shirt. He pays me some compliments then asks if I know Embryonic Journey (Because of my bad hearing, I initially thought he’d said Embryonic Girlie!) by Jefferson Airplane. He said it would be a good fingerstyle thing for me to do. I said I hadn’t but would look it up when I got home, which I did and it’s really good but whether I want to play it out here is another thing.
This is funny. At precisely four o’clock, which was ten minutes before I stopped (it was the usual two hour set), the arse from The Hambledon suddenly leaps out of the shop’s front door, aims his camera at me, takes a photo then darts back in. Haha! He must have been timing me! I bet he took a photo when I started…or maybe he fancies me!
Anyway, after I pack up, I retire for a few minutes just inside the cathedral grounds entrance and a Scottish man comes up to compliment me ‘We really appreciate you playing just now’ he says. I thank him but say not everyone does, and tell him about the Hambledon arse. ‘Ah, you’d think people would be more appreciative. I mean, we’ve been through Covid, the sun’s shining, everyone’s having a nice time, they’ve got some nice music, makes them forget about the awful state the world’s in…’ Yeah, you’d think so but there’s always someone. isn’t there?
He’s a nice bloke and asks how long I’ve been playing, which naturally leads me to remember back…and back, back to 1986/87 (the same time I was with Lesley Jones) and the Polydor deal. I mean, this is 40 years ago! ‘…we had our last single get on the Radio 1 A-list. Simon Bates’s show. And the A-list, that’s 12-15 plays a week. I mean, that’s a guaranteed hit but it wasn’t to be. Someone at the company forgot to get the singles to the shops, like the HMV and Our Price and whatever else was around then. I mean, there were no streams or Spotify or anything back then, just records, you know. Or vinyl as they call them now. Anyway, what happened was when people heard it on the radio and went to buy it, they couldn’t because it wasn’t in the shops so they probably went and bought something else.
And that was the end of that. You get three chances with a record deal, or you did back then. Three singles and if none of them do anything, you’re out. Dropped from the label and that’s what happened to us. And after two years, the A & R team had completely changed. This woman called Carol Wilson was the head but when she moved to Warner Brothers, she took most of the department with her, so the people in charge of us at the end, didn’t know us, and had no interest, really, so that didn’t help. We were in effect signed to a different company than the one we were signed to two years before.’
I mean, I started with ‘Well, I’ve been doing this busking for almost 16 years now. I started because I got sacked from the group I was in because my hearing was getting bad, standing next to crash cymbals, loud foldback speakers, musicians trying to out do each other in volume…’ – the Hard Luck Story, basically. But then that prompts me to go back further…and further!
Coinage was OK but not quite as good as yesterday, at £33.90.