The Elephant Fayre 1986

The Elephant Fayre 1986

In the middle of the week ending 25th July 1986, three separate elements conspired to my attendance and performance with two different bands at what was to be the last ever Elephant Fayre on the beautiful Port Eliot Estate in South-East Cornwall, just outside the village of St. Germans, and on the St. Germans or Tiddy River, as it curves towards Millbrook Lake and the open sea.

Firstly, a girl called Sue Bailey was at the time lodging with my partner Nina and I, who had co-opted herself into playing drums in my punk rock 'n' roll band The Black Devils. Sue had a drum kit, but struggled, to say the least, to find her way round it. Sue had a couple of years previously been (mis)managing my friends' cowpunk band Boothill Foot Tappers, by running them into the ground trying to live a rock 'n' roll lifestyle on their money. I ruined my own career doing exactly the same, but at least it was my career, not someone else's. [I only managed my dear friend Arthur's band The Lucky Saddles for a few months in 1981, and I didn't get them very far in life, but at least the accounting was above board.] Sue's barely rudimentary drumming made little odds as I had myself co-opted Nina into playing bass for the band. Nonetheless, this was slightly different as, although not a bass player, she loved soul music and her rhythm and timing was cool. [For musicians reading, most of the songs were in A, so I explained to her that if she lost her place on the neck, just to play the second fattest string open against A, the fattest under E, and the one the other side of the A over D. If all else failed she was to play the second fattest (A) string over everything, as it would harmonise with the other two chords and the rhythm would thunder relentlessly on. At least it would have done if Sue could drum.] However, Sue came from a musical family: her dad was 'Big' Pete Bailey, who had played congas for The Graham Bond Organisation and Pete Brown and His Battered Ornaments (as a poet and musician one of my favourite teenage bands), and her brother-in-law is Lew Stonebridge, the keys player in The Blues Band. 

Through her dad, who lived just outside Camelford in Cornwall and was friends and muso colleagues with Rick Worthy, the festival organiser, Sue obtained us two slots on both the Saturday and the Sunday, to perform a gypsy jazz set with Auntie & The Men From Uncle, who the following year would become The Helen Moore Trio, after I met said amazing chanteuse, and a punk R 'n' R set With The Black Devils, who the following year went back to being Auntie & The Men From Uncle. Since he restarted The Port Eliot Festival on the same site about 20 years later, and my move to the West Country, Rick Worthy is now a friend and fellow guitarist, but I didn't know him then — strangely, it was him that told me a couple of years' back of Pete Bailey's demise. 

The second component to my going to Cornwall that weekend is that I was doing a bit of low-to-medium level dope dealing, moving a kilo or two here and there onwards and outwards, including doing a bit of work with two lovely Somerset fellas with 'convoy' connections, and we had a bit of business going down which, as luck would have it, we could conduct at The Elephant Fayre. Now, if you read the online historic recall of the festival, lots of people, including Rick Worthy, evidence the local St. German's village being vandalised by members of the so-called Peace Convoy, whilst at the same time acknowledging that it was the year following the famously brutal police v. hippies Battle of the Beanfield, and that identities were blurred. All I can tell you is that my friends, a soft-spoken curly haired slim guy called Pearl, and his hippy chick girlfriend Biff, from Frome, and Pearl's partner Ian, were all mild mannered people; further they were on the site all weekend, much of which we hung out together, and they certainly did no damage. Quite the opposite, they volunteered as litter pickers on the Monday, and Pearl told me it was the best job he ever had — they found rolls of money, ounces of cocaine, and all sorts in the mud. [It is true that Pearl once drove a car straight through a police road block in Wiltshire, but the car was full of dope, no-one was hurt, and it was an act of self-preservation, and not attempted injury to others.]

Thirdly, I was also working a bit with a Scotsman called John Mac', and he had a friend with a nice old yellow medium-size bus, about ten seats and a couple of bunks, who was going to the festival and had no-one in the bus but himself. Happy days. On the Friday afternoon, Nina, Sue and I loaded up our gear onto his bus, and off we set, arriving at the site around dusk, stopping only once for fuel and snacks, and again just outside the area, for the driver, whose name eludes me, to secrete his own hash stash in a hidden compartment just inside the fuel tank. On pulling up at the gate and attendant hut, Nina elected to get out and sort the passes out, whereupon she caught her foot in a cattle grid, and I had to take over. The first time I attended Port Eliot Literary Festival — at which I read poetry last year — about twenty years later, I think when my mates Alabama 3 were playing, I drove down the track to the estate with my girlfriend. As we drove down the track, the memory came back to me and I related it to my girlfriend Lesley. Sure enough when we pulled up at the entrance hut to sort out our passes that time, there was the very cattle grid, large as life, and I made sure not to twist my ankle in it. Back to 1986, we duly found our way to the camping spot for performers in the big marquee we were to play in, had a wander round, and got our heads down. All was well, and I was looking forward to Colin Delaney arriving in the jolly old green Mercedes in the morning, with our genius trumpeter Will Algar. During the early hours, it rained. Very heavily. This is crucial to the story.

Saturday morning the sun was shining, the ground was drying out, and I had a wander round. It was a while since I'd been to a full-on festival, and the atmosphere was fantastic, with loads of smashing food stalls etc., not to mention things that have sadly gone out of fashion, like tents with signs saying: 'Hot Knives - 50p' — you don't see any of them at Port Eliot Literary Festival — rather they have oyster bars and artisan gin. Thatcher was in full flow in 1986, sending the country out of the traps and on its way to the dogs. Within a short time, there was Colin and Will in the green Merc' weaving their way through the rutted and partly dried mud towards me. Colin was always what he called 'on the night shift', so he'd done a bit of mini cabbing to get some funds, picked Will up and driven through the night. Great, they'd made it, so I showed them where we were plotted up, and where we were to perform later, and set off circulating again. This time, it wasn't long before I came across Pearl, Biff and Ian, so into their tent, quick bit of business, and that was mine and Nina's indoor money for the weekend sorted out. 

After parting company, by which time it was around lunchtime, I was meandering back to our bus and tent, when who should I run into but my old mucker and top double bass player, Lloyd Gordon, who was hanging there with Simon Le Bon's brother — I think there'd been a bit of country house debauchery taking place recently, and who can blame them, I say? Anyway, Lloyd is a great player in any genre, and we didn't have bass in the jazz band, so I was delighted when, on asking if he'd got his double bass with him, he said yes. Good plan really, if you're a good player and got a ticket or pass to a festival, you're bound to be able to 'stage bomb' a couple of places. [Lloyd was also incidentally the bassist in Boothill Foot Tappers.] I told him where and when we were playing, he asked if I'd got chord charts for the standards we'd be playing, I confirmed I had, and arranged to see him at the marquee for the first set at 2pm. 

Now, remember the aforementioned precipitation in the early hours. Lloyd, who is a lovely fella but nothing if not a trifle unreliable at times, was there bang on time, I introduced him to Colin and Will, and off we went. Hot Club come to Cornwall — I think we even inveigled someone faintly competent (unlike Sue) chap to play some swing drums with us. We were going down great, the marquee was full, must have been a couple of hundred people, and I was in my element. Colin was no great crooner, like Bobby Valentino, but he could sing and took the vocals on a couple of tunes, and the audience loved it. About three numbers away from the interval, I realised that the rest of the lunchtime cans of Stella were bursting my bladder, and that no way could I wait ten minutes. As soon as that number ended, I stood up, lent my beloved Gibson ES120t against my beloved Ampeg Reverbrocket (both of which I am still using) and ran for the side exit/stage door/flap of the marquee to relieve myself, with Colin shouting after me: 'Auntie! Where the fuck are you going?' As I glanced round the tent flap to shout that I was just taking an unavoidable leak and wouldn't be a minute, a large section of the marquee roof, maybe two metres by one, collapsed from the weight of the rain that had formed a well in it. Whereupon, at least a couple of gallons of water flooded down, drenching the chair on which I'd been sat not a minute before, talking into a microphone and playing an electric guitar through a vintage valve amp with dodgy circuitry (since addressed). Someone wiped it down with a cloth, and we proceeded. Atheists take note. At the end of the second set, I shook hands with Lloyd and gave him a hug, telling him he'd been great and what a pleasure it was — both entirely true. Lloyd responded: 'Oh, that's good, I'm glad it was ok. Only I forgot I'd said I'd play with you, and about an hour before the show, someone gave me two tabs of acid. It was just as I was coming up that I remembered. I couldn't see the chord charts at all — they were just dancing in front of my eyes.' There you are, told you he was a good player.

In the interval between our jazz and rock 'n' roll sets, I went wandering again, meeting first Buster Bloodvessel from Bad Manners, who were on and whom I hadn't seen since 1980, and my old mucker from when he lived on my manor, Wimbledon, in 1975, the great jazz guitarist Jim Mullen. Jim was there to play a quartet gig with fellow Scotsman Bobby Wellins, the renowned saxophonist — I watched their set half spaced out and awestruck, but with one eye on my watch knowing there was still another gig to do that evening. The second set went down well too; it didn't matter about Sue's drumming — the people running that stage were family friends of hers and had spread the word that we were a special attraction sourced from London, and luckily they believed the hype.

Come the Sunday, the same thing on repeat, but minus the near-death experience. On the Monday we bade farewell to Pearl and crew, who as I said stayed to pick litter or mine gold, as the case may be, our driver swapped a chunk of his remaining hash with some other convoy types for a couple of gallons of scrumpy for the passengers to neck en route home to ease the comedown, as you do at festivals, and by nightfall we were home in East Twickenham. And dry!