PLUM BUSBY - LIVE!
Friday 27 November
Doors: 8pm Show 8.30pm
Tickets: £10 Available from http://www.wegottickets.com/location/1003
PLUM BUSBY
AN ECLECTIC MIX OF COUNTRY, FOLK, BLUES,
JAZZ, CALYPSO, MUSIC HALL AND IDIOCY.
My name is Huw Thomas, and my memory fades
so if the details of this journey are only approximations of the truth please
refrain from unleashing your lawyers. It’s pointless: I am penniless, have no
assets and will only cry.
I started auditioning to form the band Plum
Busby in 1976. Tracy Coleman, then 18, and so full of piss and vinegar that men
trembled when she danced and wept when she sang, auditioned with 60 other
hopefuls. A year later in 1977 I auditioned Stuart Hall and Mandy Carlton. In
reality Stuart auditioned me, challenging me to a Guitar duel in the lunch
break, foolishly I agreed and found myself playing Sweet Georgia Brown at
breakneck speed in a toilet. It was a race. I lost. I had, however found
another member for my pension fund, sorry, band. Mandy Carlton was a different
matter. Pretty. Eccentric, and a brilliant harmoniser with an uncanny ability
to dream up unlikely vocal accompaniments. I saw her initially as a taming
influence on the exotic wildness of Tracy Coleman, How wrong can you be? Two
years later Steve Boy Rose ran past me. Like roadrunner. Energy and talent
bursting from him, a pianist and later a Bass player, he absorbed musical
styles like a sponge. I had assembled the basic ingredients of Plum Busby but
had yet to start cooking with them.
30 years later, one afternoon in September
when there was no snooker on the Telly and the dog had been fed, I
absent-mindedly put my plan in to action. Tracy I found on the South Bank
running a ridiculously pretentious art gallery, Stuart I found pretending to be
a principal lecturer in Jazz at Middlesex University, now challenging his
students to guitar duels, and writing impossibly difficult pieces for them to
play. Mandy’s distinctive voice I tracked down to the bowels of Channel 4 where
she was announcing in tones of succulent warmth the programs being aired, "nice
work if you can get it” I snarled at her, "you know where your duty lies”
"I have children to feed,” she pleaded.
"That is no excuse” I said. How wrong can
you be? Steve Boy Rose, no longer a boy, I had been in contact with throughout
the thirty years I had had to abandon my attempts to bend him to my will as he
was now better than me at chess and table tennis, and showed a remarkable
degree of independent thought. He, like Stuart, played composed, arranged, and
taught music but I mainly wanted him in the band because he was not quite as
good looking as I was. My original intention was that I would sing all the
songs and the others would make me sound good. How wrong can you be? Tracey is
a wonderful singer with an incredibly eclectic knowledge of songs. Mandy has a
truly unusual and superbly attuned voice. Stuart is a genius on any instrument.
Steve… has a big new piano. So my role is now just to stay alive for as long as
I can, just to annoy them all.
After them we gained two new members of the
band, neither of whom were my students. One, Megan Waterhouse, is our new Bass
player, she is the progeny of one of the Band, (I will leave you to guess
which) so I suppose in a way I did audition her. She is doing a sort of
internship with us. She learnt to play Bass in half an hour, and is implausibly
beautiful. Winston Clifford is the most sensitive and skilled drummer I have
ever heard, we are lucky indeed to be able to pay him, he is also implausibly
beautiful.
We hope you enjoy the strange little family
that is Plum Busby.
PLUM BUSBY