I was playing a rare old Del Rey guitar with Paul Coaker on bass (a
Gibson EB 0, I believe). We were renting a large house in Fleet,
Hampshire with John Bland, famous in the area as the DJ who fronted
the Plastik Rock Disco and who then became our drummer, and Carole
and Keith Lewis. Keith with Neil Soames ran Cosmic Amoeba Lites, one
of those amazing light shows using coloured oils heated between
glass slides. This house became known as Planet Oa or The Planet. |
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Paul, John and myself rehearsed and jammed solid for three months
and finally started gigging with the new band Ebling Mis in early
1973. Loose and raw, it sometimes tripped out and sometimes tripped
up, but never played safe. We did an assortment of gigs, from pubs
such as The Crown in Alton, Hampshire (where Keith remembers us
being kicked out for playing too loud!) to the larger free festivals
in the summer of 1973 - including University of Surrey Free Festival,
Windsor 73 (the |
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band that opened the festival and appeared on an Open University
film clip!) and Trentishoe Whole Earth Fayre where we were first on
again. An amusing trip was had by one and all, as I recall.
In July we played a gig in Guildford for the College of Art, where
we supported a band called Phoenix featuring one, Roy St John -
by this time he was based in London. He later moved back to St
Louis, USA but has since returned to England. |
