The band doesn’t meet anymore, I don’t know what’s going on with any of them.
I do still see Chris now and then.
I’m working in Westbourne Park/Ladbrooke Grove with Hammer & Tongs, Gavin Piggott, all that lot.
Chris meets them all because I invite him to accompany me to one of the parties in West London that was on that my workmates invited me to.
I haven’t heard from Carl Brian, at all, since 1991.
Out of the blue, Carl phones me one evening, says some producers want to meet me, want to hear me play keyboards.
He’s making it sound like an audition; I think he may have even used that word.
So he picks me up from Canalot in his car and we drive down to Soho to Bobby and Steve’s studios.
All the way down, Carl is leaning out of the car window hollering at women.
(He was driving, prolly was his best friend’s ride tho).
I’m embarrassed.
We arrive at the studios and I’m left alone in a room somewhere for about half an hour; wait here Carl says.
Carl comes back with Bobby and Steve and they ask me to play something.
I think I play my bossa nova, the only thing I can remember (I need sheet music usually).
It’s quite good.
But they’re snickering, all of them, the whole way through.
One of them is full out laughing.
They tell me to stop and leave the room.
I can’t figure out what’s happening but it feels horrible.
For me, writing this now, this is a gauge on how famous I was already in 1995.
I felt like a freak on display.
Could something else have happened that evening I’m unaware of?
I never heard from Carl again.
I’m angry and offended by this event and tell Chris Ludwick about it.
In retrospect, I think Carl might have been looking for drugs money and using me for that purpose.
He was erratic and intense and the way he was shouting at women in the street from the car was unhinged.
I wonder if Bobby and Steve told him to get lost, so he decided to try something else.
He said, I have to go and visit a friend, will you come with me and then I’ll take you home, he said, and I agreed, so he drove up to South Tottenham somewhere and left me in the car while he went into a flat for about half an hour, or more, as if I was a an object he didn’t think much of that he’d forgotten to take in with him.
