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Well, life goes on, and we were still in existence the next day of course, minus our beloved brass instruments, which we had strived so hard to learn, and which Keith had taken from us when we left the Manifold Hotel the night before.
But there was a lot of rebuilding to do mentally. We are good at that now, in our late twenties, but at the time it was kind of hard. It is a fact that we did not touch the guitar for a month or two, but to have lessons on Wednesday, and that we had become apathetic towards music in general. We had so much wanted to be part of a band, and now we were thrown out for nothing more than that me and my sister would not wear a mans tie with our uniform. Subsequently rumors went around Longnor that we had refused to wear uniforms at all, but I have photos to prove that we wore them with pride and alacrity. And we found that we had been branded as 'insubordinate', 'lawless', and other totally unfair adjectives went winging their way among the local community.
Even worse, the band, not having the mechanism to chuck us out because they are a charity, and the uniforms we still owned being tokens of membership, decided to take us to the small claims court in Macclesfield to repossess them and bypass their own constitution.
The Judge was not very pleased.
"What are these schoolchildren doing before me?" he demanded with a frosty stare at the motley collection of adults who had come all the way from remote Hollinsclough to weed us from their ranks.
The band solicitor leapt up.
"Don't even start to go into it, sir, it is a can of worms, " he stuttered foolishly...
The upshot of the case was that we had to give the band back their uniforms, but they were asked to pay all the costs. Daddy was defense for us, and the judge told him he thought it would be better for us if we had nothing to do with the band as they were obviously not suitably minded towards us.
"Do you really want your children to play with these people?" he asked.
I forgot to mention that at this time Metia and myself were working in London every Friday for our father's genealogy business, going to the General Record Office, situated then at the bottom of Kingsway, and spending the day researching entries before the return journey from Euston Station to Stoke on Trent, where Daddy picked us up in the Volvo.
Between our working day at the GRO and the home journey on the train, we had usually four hours in which to amuse ourselves exploring London. We would walk down the Embankment and watch the patrol boats on the Thames, and wander past St James's palace, or stand outside the gates and railings of Downing Street watching members of Margaret Thatcher's government coming and going in their large black cars. We had dinner at a small café down Kingsway, in Holborn; Peruginos, where the waiters were always arguing loudly in Italian. And so one day we discovered the South American musicians in Covent Garden.
Coming in through the large doorway off Neal Street, a smell of josh sticks and coffee blended with the sound of conversation in a hundred different tongues and glasses clattering at the tables of an outdoor café called Ponti's. Above all this, and very new to our ears, the soaring notes of a pair of quenas played in harmony, while a charango, guitar and bombas surpassed themselves in exciting rhythm.
Metia and I went and sat down on the nearest bench with an ice cream. It was very crowded, people kept falling off the ends of the benches, and a lot who were not so bothered about the dirt from all the pigeons flying under the roof were seated on the floor. We shall never forget that first taste of South America in London. Under the hazy late afternoon sunshine filtering through the dusty glass roof, Chan Chan danced and sang in their colored ponchos, their white teeth glittering as they grinned and yelled at the listening crowd. There were seven of them but Pedro, Moses, El Gato, and Jorge Rodriguez are strongest in my memory.
To Metia and me they presented a fascinating sight. All of the men had long black hair in thick plaits or ponytails, and they were a wonderful orange colour. We had never heard men singing so well, and the songs they played were catchy and infectious. That day we spent the whole of our four hours listening to them before we had to dash for the train home. And you can guess where we stopped after work on the following week.
It didn't take many weeks for the musicians to begin to recognize us, and after we had been listening to them for about a month, one of them decided to come and introduce himself to us. He was Jorge Rodriguez, who then became my first boyfriend. A very token sort of a boyfriend, mind, because we hardly saw anything of each other in the two years we were supposed to be 'together'.
Jorge was quite shy; Chan Chan were new to England at that time, and he didn't have much English. Metia and I wanted to know all about the fascinating musical instruments, and he got the other members of the band to come over and show us the panpipes, the charango, a little guitar made out of an armadillo shell, with ten strings, and the lovely wooden quenas. We learned that if you could play the panpipes in South America, you would be admitted to heaven. All this was tremendously new and amazing to us, and we bought cassettes Chan Chan had for sale and began to play them all the time at home. This germinated an idea in our parents’ minds...
One day Daddy took us into Manchester to a shop he had just discovered, called Shared Earth, on Piccadilly. We were thrilled to see they were selling all sizes of panpipes! We got a large and two small sets. And Metia had a quena. She and Fergus got to grips with the new instruments almost straight away, trying to play some of the tunes from our Chan Chan tape. Now when we went to London we asked our new friends for guidance and help with this new style of music. They loved it, as girls do not usually play instruments over there, except for a sort of one-note whistle, and they found the notion of English girls wanting to learn their traditional songs highly entertaining. But they were happy to teach us all they could, or all we could take in.
So we came back every week and sat talking and playing music with the Andean musicians until the day that they disappeared.
This happened quite suddenly. Metia and I had by this time met several different groups who used to share the Covent Garden pitch. There was Chan Chan, and then there was Amaru III, a band set up by founder of and ex-member of one of the best known South American bands in the country, Apu. He taught Fergus how to play the panpipes one day. Then there was a group from Bolivia. And some Ecuadorians who played as Zanja Huayra...
One day, coming through the outer arches into Covent Garden we noticed a new sound; silence. There were no musicians. We looked for them in vain, but our friends were nowhere to be found. Metia and I were surprised and dismayed, as we very much looked on Chan Chan and the other groups as part of the scenery by now. We hated disruptions like this. I was worried about Jorge. Eventually we found one of the Ecuadorians, Luis Polo, in the market across the street, on a stall selling ponchos. He told us there had been an argument with the lady who rented the pitch to the musicians, some romantic interest there too perhaps, and now she had sent them all away out of revenge.
At home we discussed our loss with the boys. If we wanted South American music, we would have to make it ourselves! By this time we had half formed the idea of creating an English South American band ourselves anyway, to take over the empty space made in our hearts by the loss of our brass instruments. So it only took the purchase of my charango from Tumi in Camden Town a couple of weeks later to cement the beginning of our own group.
We called it Los Angeles, and the five of us founded and named our new group on St Valentine's Day 1991. Our first performance in public was in Longnor market place, to a handful of old people sitting on a bench in front of the town hall. One of them gave us eleven pence and told us not to spend it all on chips! Los Angeles was born, and this was only the very beginning of many new adventures for the five of us.
©2002 StoriesByEmail.com
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