Echoes of the Studio

 

Barbara Allen

 

Françoise (video)

 

Guitar and Girl

 

Hollow

"I was 17 and still playing the tiny Guyatone.

I also had a Burns Jazz solid guitar but stuck

with the Antoria guitar on this occasion."

— Steve Howe, All My Yesterdays 

(Omnibus Press, 2020, page 24)

Steve ought to fast forward back and recall that the 

Antoria was to become his first solid electric guitar; 

prior to which it had been mine for years. I loaned

it to Yoss when I was saxophonist in his band, before

he had in his possession a Gibson Les Paul Special.

Eventually, Steve acquired this guitar from me.

I am holding it in the picture of us together at 

the top of the page. He is holding his first guitar.

"Then there was Yosel [sic], who played a Gibson 

Les Paul Special, a great rock guitar if ever there 

was one. I used to watch him play at a youth club 

in Islington and would hang out at his place in 

Holloway, trying to pick anything up from him

that I could. He gave me a bit of an insight into

being a rock guitarist, for sure."

— Steve Howe, All My Yesterdays 

(Omnibus Press, 2020, page 24)

Absent is the fact that I played tenor saxophone 

alongside Yoss, when Steve stood at the front of the

stage and to one side, as we performed at full

blast before a jiving young audience at the scout

hall on Holloway Road (it was not a youth club).

The scout hall was loaned for Saturday night hops.

I had been Steve's best chum since junior school, 

and still was at the time he watched us perform.

Steve passes over mention of me as his friend 

with whom together we discovered Bill Haley,

Little Richard, Duane Eddy, The Shadows, etc. 

"We once entered a disused cinema and played

various games amid the dust and dead pigeons.

It got kind of scary and I eventually escaped

through a door that led nowhere, unless you 

could scale 10-feet walls topped with broken 

glass. As this was the only way out, that's what

I did. I just went at it, commando style, and

straddled the walls with my hands and feet,

then leaped down the other side to freedom."

— Steve Howe, All My Yesterdays 

(Omnibus Press, 2020, page 12)

In the context of how his account appears in the

autobiography one imagines he is still at junior

school. He follows the paragraph with the words:

"By the time I was 10 years old." But he was at

least three or so years older than that. I ought

to know because I was present during that eerie

incident at the Marlborough Theatre, as were a 

group of others whom I identify by name, along

with Steve, of course, in a concise guide on the

malign supernatural that was published in 1997. 

Roy (not present at the Marlborough Theatre incident), 

Michael, Dennis, and Steve (all of whom were present), 

in Widdenham Road outside where Steve lived. I was 

taking the photograph. This is how old Steve looked at

the time he entered the haunted Marlborough Theatre

The Marlborough Theatre as it appeared at the

time Steve Howe and a group of others, myself

included, entered the building to explore. Steve

was terrified by the experience, and took a very

long time to recover from it. Though he mentions

being there, he makes no mention of anyone else

who accompanied him (in his new autobiography).

________________________________________________________________________________

My old pal Yoss died two and a half months ago. He had been seriously ill for a significant amount of time, and his eldest son, Jonny, kept me updated until he finally gave up the ghost on 19 April 2020. I had known him as long as I had known Steve, and we managed to keep in touch for most of that time. I have painted Yoss, oil on canvas, twice; the first time depicting his early years, the second time very shortly after his death, depicting his late years. I also wrote and dedicated a eulogy in verse for Yoss.

Below is a picture of Yoss — sometimes called Yossel — and me during a rehearsal in the 1960s.

Below is an early picture I took of Steve at Loraine Mansions with my box camera in the 1950s.

Yet, despite that fact, I am not mentioned once in his autobiography.

Varinia

Varinia is an invented name (by novelist Howard Fast) for the wife of Spartacus (1960) in which film Jean Simmons was cast in the rôle. Her screen portrayal was my inspiration for Varinia on canvas. By a curious coincidence, Jean Simmons lived just up the road from my parents before she entered a career in acting. Her last home in Santa Monica, California, is just around the corner from my cousin, once removed. Jean died on the poet Byron's birthday, someone I am connected to by blood, and, moreover, she is interred at Highgate Cemetery West, which I have written about extensively, and spoken about many with regard to supernatural occurrences on radio. Notwithstanding an expressionistic approach, I have returned to my Pre-Raphaelite roots for this portrait of beautiful Varinia, as depicted by Jean Simmons. The more abstract I ventured, the more classical my oil painting seemingly became. It was completed on 8 May 2020, and can be seen at my private gallery.

Engaged

It sometimes happens that a man and a woman meet and instantly recognise the other half of themselves behind the eyes of each other. Such a meeting occurred between Sarah and I. From the first moment we met and gazed upon each other, our spirits rushed together joyfully, ignoring convention and custom, driven by an inner knowing ― too overwhelming to be denied. It is more than coincidence that, out of the whole world, Sarah and I should be drawn together at the appointed time. Through each other we found wholeness. For I did not know how empty was my life until it was filled.

Exactly thirty-three years ago, on Passion Sunday, April 1987, whilst staying at her parents’ rambling Wiltshire home, I asked Sarah to marry me. She accepted and the following week, on her birthday, I presented her with a solitaire engagement ring. We had spent the entire day at Avebury where ancient stones stand tall. Four months later we were married in Trowbridge, Wiltshire, at 11.15am. 

Sarah arrived in a vintage 1930s Roche-Talbot. On this thirty-third anniversary of our engagement, which also falls on Passion Sunday, we recall that special day of promising ourselves to each other.

Sarah made a beautiful bride. On the last evening together as single people we had walked in the moonlight at twilight in a wooded area close to her parents’ house. Bats suddenly filled the darkening sky, some swooping to touch us as we stopped to look at them. It was somehow fitting, symbolic of a last brush with a world we had both encountered from completely different perspectives.