He was a mod (as much as any 12 year-old can truly be a mod) and we became fast friends, bonding over virtually everything, especially his Jam records. This soon led to us picking up albums by the Small Faces, Who and Kinks as well as plenty of dubious mod revival bands and going to see bands that the local mods and scooterists put on each week. One such band, The New Heights featured a certain Micheal Poulson on harmonica and vocals.

At the age of 15 my friend Derek told me he needed a drummer for the group he was putting together. I told him I could play and a rehearsal was arranged for the following week. I'd never touched a drumstick in my life. That weekend, I scored a mid-'60s Premier kit for £100 and, using the movie The Kids Are Alright as my guide, learnt how to set up and play. Miraculously I was able to hold down a beat and I was in. We told Chris he could be in the band if he played organ and the following week he duly turned up dragging a vintage Lowrie behind him. We did mostly cover versions of Jam, Who, Small Faces, Beatles and Hollies tunes and played three or four gigs.

A succession of similar combos followed, each retaining a couple of members from the previous and only lasting a couple of years. In 1986 I encountered Mike "Pulse" Poulson on the train to London to see The Prisoners, a band we'd both become utterly enamoured with and who would ultimately steer us further down the holy path. He played the guitar and sang and before too long we'd got a couple of short-lived bands going. We continued travelling down to London to follow various post-Prisoners bands like The Prime Movers, The Mighty Caesars and the early James Taylor Quartet. One night at the Falcon in Camden we caught support act The Aardvarks who blew us away with their set of authentic Move and Creation covers. They became good friends and I ended up standing in several times over the next ten years when their drummer Ian was laid up.

Meanwhile, our love of British '60s bands had intensified to the point where we were buying reissues of wild and obscure (we thought) bands like John's Children, Blossom Toes, Tomorrow and The Easybeats. Our journey into the world of psychedelia and freakbeat had begun and we devoured everything we could find that bore the Bam Caruso, Edsel or See For Miles stamps of approval. At the end of 1989 we found ourselves cast adrift from our last band and decided to put together something a little more serious to pursue these new candy-coloured ambitions...

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