I first heard John Dummer drumming with his eponymous Blues Band in about 1969, when one of the first albums I owned was a Blue Horizon sampler, which featured one of their tracks. I first met John, en passant, when he was drumming for the great UK doowop band Darts, for whom my dear friend Hammy Howell (RIP) was the pianist, around '75-'76. Our paths were not to cross again until 1981, when John was running a band called True Life Confessions with his wife Helen April, and featuring two members of my band The Men From Uncle - Robin Bibi on lead guitar, and Pete 'Manic Esso' Haynes on drums (co-opted as a result of John signing me), as well as a certain Harri Kakoulli, once the first Squeeze bassist, and a beautiful French girl called Annie, a refugee from a band Robin had recently been in a la France.
By the time John & Helen came to check my band playing live - I'm not sure but I believe this was at a gig in the jolly old Clarendon basement bar, where we had an alternating headline residency with legendary Acton punks and urban gorillas The Satellites, who featured founder, and soon to be again Black Devil Danny Heatley on drums and sometime Man From Uncle Rob 'Sneak' Deacon on guitar - Halfway To Venezuela had received the Single Of The Week in Sounds, reached No. 3 in the Oi Oi charts, and started down the road to revered obscurity from which I am still trying to rescue it today.
Anyway, the next morning the jolly old eau de cologne rang at my lodgings in Turnham Green, and there was Mr Dummer sounding most enamoured with my previous evening's performance, expressing interest in managing me and inviting me over to his & Helen's abode in Rudloe Road, Clapham South (just around the Jack Horner on the South Circular from Arkwright Plaza, Segsy's later home and studio where (Over) Halfway To Venezuela 1999 was mixed and, incidentally but irrelevantly where I came the closest I've ever come to being mugged at knife point in a lift) for a conflab. A couple of days later I duly pitched up there, as arranged, and John suggested we adjourn to The Windmill on Clapham Common. I was delighted at the suggestion, and further delighted when we got there and it appeared John was footing the bill for the drinks. However Darts were a hard gigging, hard living band. Whilst aware that this had driven my dear pal Hammy to the mental illness that was to plague him for the rest of his days, I was unaware till then that it had also driven John to teetotalism. (Funny really, that's two out of three managers I've written about now who are teetotal - one would've thought managing me would've driven 'em to drink!) So there we are in the pub - I'm having a fine old time on the Ram & Special at John's expense while he's having soft drinks, thinking this is alright...back at John's gaff a couple of hours on and he whips out a contract, bless him. John is an ex-record plugger and always had an eye for the main chance but, after being shafted by various people including Virgin and Arista Records and much to John's chagrin, I chose to take it home for perusal, being at least two, if not the full three sheets to the wind and not fully focussed. Thinking back now, I don't recall ever signing it!
The other amusing episode from my sojourn in John's managerial stable was when he suggested we went up to the TOTP studios on recording day one week. John said he knew all the doormen etc. and could blag us in, then we could hang out in the bar and chinwag with the likes of John Peel. Sensing the chance of more alcohol at John's expense, I gaily accepted. Well there we are in Wood Lane, John's convinced the commissionaire he still works there, and we make our way up to the bar, finding out en route that the only band actually playing live that day are Motorhead and that all the others were being shown on video. To make matters worse, the (other) Auntie employee on the door of the bar wasn't having it as John wasn't on the list. Thinking on my feet and using my extensive guest list blagging experience, I said: Check and see if I'm on there - Phil Taylor. Obviously he was, and luckily he must've still been in the toilets of a Ladbroke Grove hostelry sniffing amphetamine with Lemmy at the time, so we were in! Except we weren't, because there was no-one of import with whom to hang out - it was a good laugh, though.
We did quite a bit of work with True Life Confessions, swapping songs with each other, rehearsing and laying down some strange demos, a couple of which I still have on cassette, at Helen April's mother's house In New Cross Gate, on the corner of Pepy's Road and the one way system. It's a bloody long and awkward journey there from West London where I lived, and the reason I mention this is because some eight years later, my great friend Helen Moore with whom I was privileged to work in the Helen Moore Trio for some fifteen years, and her partner Allan bought a house in Erlanger Road, the very next street and there I was making the same nightmare commute to rehearsals all over again, and still intermittently am. My destiny appears to be to spend my life rehearsing on the New Cross Gate one way system! Last strange, but absolutely true life confession before I close this episode: two and a half years ago my dear sparring and guitarring partner Colin Delaney from the aforementioned HM Trio passed away and I was on my way by new-fangled and potentially incendiary bendy bus from Paddington Station to New Cross to stay with Helen before journeying to Kent for the funeral the following day. Fella gets on the bus, straps of his bag entangle with mine, he apologises...I'm looking at this fella thinking: I know you, trying to place him. Then the old penny drops and I realise it's Harri Kakoulli, a right coincidence as I live in Plymouth and he lives in Cyprus, where he makes some wonderful world music - check his website.
John is not only teetotal like David Scott, he also lives in France, but in the South West, where he's written a satire on his life there, aside from recently reconvening his eponymous blues band in the UK after all this time. Is there a demographic trait in Pus managers here?
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