Los Angeles Mountain Band
Los Angeles was destined to be very successful, and we had literally years of fun out of it; as we have a concert coming up next Wednesday, we can truly say that it has not died yet despite our all being diversified and working and living in different places...
Shortly after we started the band we met a local home-educated family, who lived not for from us over the hills, the Mills. Mat Mills was a filmmaker, and taught his subject locally, and his wife Mona was some kind of a professional interviewer. They had two girls, Jennie and Bessie, who were a bit older than Fergus, but younger than Felix.
One night we drove over to see them with Ma. We stopped for a meal and Mat showed us a short film he had made of his children swimming under water, which we thought was cool; not because he'd made a film, but because Jennie and Bessie were so good at swimming under water! We tended to be a bit obtuse like that.
We talked things over with the Mill girls about the band, and they wanted to join us, Jennie playing the French Horn, and Bessie the recorder. These instruments were not really in keeping with the general set-up, but Metia wrote parts for them to play, and as we were very much in our infancy as a musical ensemble we didn't mind the roughness of the sound we all made together.
Every other week then we would drive over to the Mills, and they would come to us and we'd have a band practice. It was always fun going over to see Mona and Mat, as we found them to be most interesting people. Mona was teaching the children how to weave on an Inca Loom, which Mat had made. She was very much into all kinds of arts and crafts; there were some nude pictures on the sitting room wall that Mat had drawn of her, and the first time we visited, she was sitting in front of the fire at her spinning wheel.
Mat was a quiet man, who kept himself out of the way except when he was showing us his films, and who was always doing all kinds of domestic chores like baking bread and cooking meals, which we found amazing, as Daddy never did any such things at home! Mat would run round after Mona a lot too, bringing her a glass of wine when she was exhausted, and filling the bath for her.
One particularly memorable event at their house was a Healing Weekend that they held and at which we were asked to perform to the guests/campers. We had made lots of friendship bracelets to sell, as we were quite crafty ourselves, and we reckoned that these were just the right market to buy them. We filled a black velvet board with colored bracelets and labeled them exciting but sometimes inappropriate names like "Fiesta" and "Tiger", and charged £1 each for the large ones, and 50p for the small ones. They sold so well that our money was stolen from the tin halfway through the afternoon!
The Healing Weekend was held in and around the house, but the main attractions were in the barn, where they had set up a healthy café, and in the field behind the house, where the big tent, the pool and the sauna were situated. It was a memorable event. We witnessed all kinds of occurrences. The sauna was in a small chicken shed, which had unfortunately been situated downstream of the loos, but the guests didn't seem to mind this, and there were lively comings and goings and much raucous laughter as they heated themselves up and then dived into the pool to cool off.
We played several times during the day, mostly inside the barn while the guests were taking lunch. The food was of a singular variety, or varieties, and quite a few people were made rather ill by all the experimentation. Although Mona gave us a £5 note and told us to go and get ourselves something to eat, we didn't fancy the idea, and I loaded all the other kids with the same misgivings as we had into the Land Rover, (which I was driving at the time, having just passed my test), and took them into Leek to buy a ration of chips!
This was only the beginning of many concerts and events for the band. Our first real public performance took place in Leek at the Medieval Day held in the town centre. It was a hot day in July, and we played all over the town; in the park where the jousting was going on, in the main street up and down, milking the crowds with a hat, on the stage in front of the crowds, and in the bank where the money was being counted out, and where Fergus borrowed a local bobby's helmet and Mat took his picture.
Pretty soon we had to leave the Mills behind. Considering that we ourselves were chucked out of a band, we felt this to be somewhat ironic, and felt rather ashamed of ourselves for announcing to them that we wanted to go it alone. But there were big problems; they didn't learn the music fast enough, they argued all the time with us and each other (Fergus was a bone of contention between them as they were vying for his attention!) and talked politics at us all the time. We were Conservative and they were Labour...
It was then that Los Angeles really took off in a big way for us, and we played hundreds of gigs up and down the country, as far afield as Livingston and Holyhead. We made appearances on Shropshire Radio, Stoke Radio, Carlton TV, ITV Central, in Tony Francis's Heart of the Country, and even once on the Newsreel.
In 1995 we won the prize for City of Stoke on Trent Best Buskers, beating off stiff competition from 40 other local bands, and also that summer we played for the BBC Live'95 in Birmingham where we came semi-finalists in the top twenty acoustic bands out of thousands of applicants! We enjoyed an all expenses paid holiday staying in the Ibis Hotel and eating in their Eat to the Beat tent with the BBC staff. It was fabulous, but we were all rather ill on the train home.
That summer we met a boy who was the son of a local millionaire, Tod Crackney, the then chairman of the International Board of Architects and personal friend of Prince Charles. This lad was an only child, and his mother was anxious that he should come and 'play' with us, as there were no other 'suitable candidates' in the district. So we went out to 'Crackney Villa' to meet him one day with our mother in our old Volvo estate.
I remember that Tod Crackney was designing a £4,000,000 back door for Andrew Lloyd Webber at the time we first went over to see them, which we thought was somewhat expensive to say the least, and the family lived in a fascinating house on the moors with loads of street lamps outside, a huge conservatory, a Japanese fish pond, and an underground swimming pool lit with neon lamps and with the walls line with stone effigies of Indian gods.
There were two routes by which you could access the pool; one through a door disguised as part of the stone wall, and the other through a flume which started in the apex of the roof and went all the way round the house until you landed in the deep end of the pool, which was not very deep really. It was all great fun, and we and Tone used to visit each other nearly every day through the spring. Metia and I would drive the boys over, and Tone's Mum brought him to see us. We spent hours just messing about together, talking, playing music and shooting tin cans with his rifles, swimming, or playing records on the huge stereo system.
Other interesting things about their house were the organ room, lined with bookcases full of volumes called 'Charles', 'The True Charles' and 'The Real Charles'. There was a pulpit collection, and the lethal armory, which Tone kept in his bedroom. For a boy of fourteen, he had an amazingly advanced collection of weaponry from all ages and cultures. He had a Mauser rifle which could hit a target at a range of four miles, so he told us, and all manner of swords, axes, machine guns and other such things.
There was a wonderful violin there, a Strad copy, which I was allowed to take home and play. I fell in love with it, which was a pity, because they kindly asked me to have it, but I refused, and when I found out that it was worth about £15k, I felt I had to return it. They had picked it up in a junk shop. It was old and dark, with a very sweet tone, and a mahogany case.
In the summer, the Crackneys gave us a 21' 6 berth caravan. This sparked off the idea of doing a busking tour. Wales would be a nice place to visit, we decided, and we had soon painted our acquisition bright yellow, decorated it with the Fire Serpent, the Los Angeles Logo, loaded it with enough food to last a week, and shoved all our instruments into it as well. Then we begged the loan of our parents' Volvo Estate to tow it with.
The car was not the most reliable of vehicles, but Felix looked it over, did the necessary repairs to make sure that it wouldn't be overset by the intended journey, and one morning very early, when the sky in the east was still faintly pink, we set off into the unknown. Felix drove, I sat next to him as navigator, Metia and Tone, who came with us were in the back seat, and Max and Fergus sat in the boot with some of the instruments, pretending to be on real seats, and hoping the police wouldn't notice them!
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