Fast Forward To The Past: 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).

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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.