Within 6 months I was touring with the likes of Judas Priest & The Bay City Rollers. But it was while touring across Uganda, with a very early line up of Atomic Kitten in 1976, that life started to get very interesting. There were obviously very lonely moments . I was only a session musician and a naive one at that. I wasn't really in the close circle of main band members. But I had a friend in a piccolo player by the name of Trevor.
Trevor and I were inseperable for many years. Often sharing lodgings , confectionery , sometimes even women. But this all came to an abrupt end one day when I unexpectedly entered my dressing room to discover Trevor stroking my beloved instrument. This bizarre event lit a fuse within me and without question I wrestled him to the ground. It was only a brief fracas but enough to the end the friendship. That was until 47 years later when I bumped into him at an Opium convention in Macclesfield.
This chance meeting helped us to patch up our differences and catch up on the lost years. I must have had well over a dozen , half written christmas cards in my study from those stolen years . But one by one I completed them and sent them to him by recorded delivery . He found this a little strange as the majority of them landed on his doormat between april & may of that year. But he never questioned it and threw them unopened onto his well established compost heap along with various final demands from a homeopathic foot stall company. This continued right up until his disappearance 3 years ago , whilst on holiday completing a lifetime's ambition to visit a Moldovian salt mine/brothel .What a sweet sweet man.