The bands I played in were often terrific even if the music they played was cover music, so with Simon K and the Meantimers, chart bands would regularly ask that we didn’t open for them, because the excitement we’d create, with our singer Kenny Simon, stomping up and down the front of the stage singing in his own unique style, with occasional references to Sam Cooke, James Brown, Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett and Bobby Blue Bland, and our pounding rhythm section led by Chinese George on his Gibson es 335, an Oriental Jimi Hendrix, had the audience going to a point that the chart band would subsequently go down like a lead balloon.

When I joined the Harlem Shuffle, who had a big following in the Hatfield area, they had a drummer with one leg, who, with his artificial leg hit the bass drum with an incredible wallop.

One of the many things I didn’t like about playing in bands was the constant insidious back-biting, so for example, two or three members of the Harlem Shuffle plotted and schemed until they got the aforementioned drummer out, he was a perfectly good drummer too - poor fellow was heart-broken, devastated, playing with them was a huge thing in his life. Rod Argent and Mick Taylor would often show up at their gigs. Alan Shacklock, 16, was our lead guitarist, went on to form Babe Ruth and is now a production in Nashville, TN. Of course, when the gig was great, when we were really working the audience, that was the part that made it worthwhile, but what came before and after was mostly a drag.

As you might have seen, I later was a director of Corgi books, then Penguin, then a co-founder of Bloomsbury, then founder of Bloomsbury in New York. That suited me much better in the sense that I didn’t have to listen to the nonsense I was subjected to sitting in a Transit or Bedford van on our way to and from a gig, or over a disgusting meal in some cafe. I never liked being told what to do, or taking orders from someone for whom I had no respect.

Here’s my story. I’m from Belfast, grew up in the next street to Van Morrison, never spoke a word to him that I recall. I moved to London two weeks short of my 18th birthday. I lived in Liverpool in the early 60s and saw really fabulous R 'n B bands there, this was just after the Beatles broke into national consciousness. One of my favorites was The Clayton Squares, and I loved hearing their sax players and after hearing them and Coltrane's Giant Steps, I had to have a tenor sax.

In those days, many semi-pro musicians worked as sales reps during the day. a) you got a free company car to lug your gear around in, b) you could start and stop work whenever suited you, sometimes I started at 11 am and finished at 1pm, then drove, say, to Kilburn from SE London to get into a van and drive to a gig. c) musicians, in general, are their own men, can think for themselves and are not intimidated by many, plus they tend to be articulate and feigning indifference, could get on well with the most nasty store managers.

I was based in Ilkeston, Derbyshire for a couple of months and the firm paid my digs in an old fashioned traveler’s pub/hotel, I used the money to buy a new, made in Czechoslovakia tenor sax in a pawn shop there. It was pretty well unplayable. I bought a book, Teach Yourself Tenor Sax in 24 hours, from a bookshop in Nottingham, and would sit on a tree stump in Sherwood Forest, near the village of Blidworth, trying and failing to get much of a musical sound out of it.

Within a month or so, I was transferred to London, where I found a terrific teacher, Jack Bonser, who led the house band at the Dorchester Hotel in Park Lane. With his guidance, I bought a brand new Selmer Mark VI tenor sax from Bill Lewington’s shop on Shaftsbury Avenue, and started applying for auditions in the Melody Maker. At every one of five or so auditions, I was in and out within about 10-15 minutes, when they heard how awful I was. So, I put my own ad in the Melody Maker and auditioned musicians in a church hall in Shepherd’s Bush. In my first band, circa 1966,I had Davy O’List, who was 16, he went out and bought a brand new Fender Telecaster for the occasion, he later played in The Attack, PP Arnold and the Nice, The Nice, before they kicked him out and formed Emerson, Lake and Palmer. This was a pattern, he was later a founder member of Roxy Music, Joan and the Jetts, but always got the elbow, just before they became famous. In that first band I had a singer called Richard Henry Dejohnette, who was a clerk in the US Airforce at Ruislip. He had seven brothers, the family came from New Orleans, but lived in LA. He was essentially a drummer, but he one of the best live singers I’ve ever heard, bar none. We rehearsed in the front room of the organist’s house in South Ealing, (he played the ubiquitous Farfisa), and while we learned about 20 or more songs, enough for a gig with some repetition, I learned to play the tenor sax parts. A constant of my music career was that no one every said to me, “You’re crap.”

Even though I was. Despite my awareness of my limitations, the idea of practice rarely entered my head, and in any case, living in smalls flats or bedsits, practicing the saxophone wasn't something the neighbors tended to appreciate. I did try practicing in my company car in a lover's lane near the windmill on Wimbledon Common, me in the driver's seat, the saxophone balanced in the front passenger seat, with the car heater in winter going full blast. It was a long way short of Sonny Rollin's practicing on Brooklyn Bridge, but so was my playing.

That band was called the Richard Henry Experience. I succeeded in getting them a gig at the Cafe des Artistes in the Earl’s Court Road. Tuesdays were a dead night and the owner said he would pay the seven of us 15 pounds to play between 10pm and 2am and that if we attracted an audience, he’d pay us more.

The organist, in who’s house we'd practiced, had a vision of us in shiny navy blue suits with red silk lining, doing co-ordinating dance steps on stage a la Shadows, but every one else were horrified, so he left before our first gig. Secondly, the other sax player got cold feet about appearing on stage, and bottled out. But a session organist, who had a Hammond B3, kept it in the club, asked to sit in with us and along with a local bongo player, really filled out our sound.

Within a month, there was a line outside in the street on Tuesday nights. Playing there was dangerous. One night, the guitar player swung round and his strings touched the strings of the bass player’s P bass, which immediately glowed red hot! He stood there horrified, hands in the air, not knowing what to do next. A number of guitar players in those days died on stage in similar circumstances, caused by one or more of the guitar amps not being earthed properly.

I asked the owner for more money and he told me somewhat impolitely to get lost, so I did, and thereafter the place was again empty on Tuesday nights - another constant, owners, in general, would prefer to do no business than pay musicians decently. One night we played the London Cavern on the Bayswater for a share of the gate. I went home with nine pence.

We had a residency on Sunday nights on Tagg's Island, near Hampton Court. The place looked like a Mississippi Riverboat and had been the cause of the bankruptcy of Fred Karno, The "impressario" who ran the place, a gentleman you wouldn't think of introducing your maiden aunt to, employed a group of bouncers, smart suited, big and threatening, each of whom earned considerably more than we did. He, just as had our original organist, wanted us to buy us white suites, with black zig zags and call us The Zig Zag band. He had as little idea of our thinking as the organ player.

Richard Henry subsequently left to join TimeBox, was arrested for going AWOL from the US Air Force and the last I heard from him was from a military prison in New Jersey where he was serving two years for absenting himself. He passed the time, in tropical kit in his winter cell counting the tiles on the walls.