17/01/2023
Got a lovely story for you:
About 3 months ago, we signed up a couple to clean their pool twice a week. They are from Brixton in London but have this holiday home in Lanzarote. Their previous cleaner had moved on to Gran Canaria and they got referred to us. Anyway, everything has gone well since we got the contract, and last Friday they came over for their winter break for a month. Well, today we met them for the first time. Lin is a lovely lady, 76 years old and Ali, her husband is 77. You would never have guessed his age. He looked like an old rocker with long white hair and John Lennon glasses. We had a fantastic chat. We were talking for ages and he got round to telling us how when he was young, he used to be in a band that he formed with a few of his mates from college. They were only amateur but used to get a few gigs on the college circuit but because of the following they had, it progressed to small clubs. They played a mixture of genres but a lot of their stuff was copies of the old Muddy Waters and Shadows numbers. This was around 1962/3. The year after, they lost their guitarist in a car crash when the driver went round a corner too quick , crashed and all the amps ended up crushing him. During the next month or 2 they advertised for another guitarist to join their group and held auditions in their mam’s house on a Saturday morning. At the time, that was where they practiced in his bedroom. Anyway, there was a knock on the door and this young scruffy kid turned up for an audition. They let him in but said he was a bit odd. He turned up with an old battered guitar. He was a bit younger than Ali, but he recognized him as the odd lad who did part time weekends in the local music shop. Anyway, the audition wasn’t really a success, the young lad played his heart out on this old acoustic guitar but Ali said he wasn’t really that good and he was a bit strange. They decided he wasn’t a good fit for the band and consequently said thanks but no thanks. He never told me who they eventually got to replace the original guitarist but they saw the strange lad on a number of occasions thereafter as in those days many of the young kids hung around the music shops at weekends listening to the new albums in the listening booths. The end of the story was when the odd lad changed his name a couple of years later. To…..David Bowie!!
