Ahhhhh John.
I grew up with Solid Air and saw John in London in the 1970's - Brilliant!
He did a few numbers with Melanie Harrald too, which was fun.
It was an intimate event with only a few hundred peeps. John was sat on the stage on a bar stool, with another bar stool sat next to him and used as a table top for the, frequently replenished, mugs of bitter.
I was in the front row and someone kept roilling joints and passing them along the row. Each time when the joint reached the middle of the row, it was passed up onto the stage to John and then passed back down to continue along the row. Good fun!
At one point during the set, he was trying to tune his guitar in and it was taking a bit of a while (he was a wee bit pissed/stoned by then) and there was a drunken Glaswegian at the back of the theatre screaming out at the top of his voice:
"Will ye HURRY UP, John!?
C'moaaaan, man, HURRY UP!
Joooooooohn! HURRY UP, will ye!?"
On and on and on and on he went - the audience was begging to titter (I guess you had to be there), anyway, he was getting louder and louder and more and more insistent:
"For fuck's John, wud ye get a fucking MOVE ON!?"
Finally, John stopped what he was doing, slumped down on his bar stool for a moment, then leapt off the stool, waving his guitar in the air by the neck and
thundered at this bloke in the loudest, deepest, gutteral Scots I've ever heard:
"FOR FUCK SAKE. CAN YE NO SEE I"M FUCKING TRYING!!!?".
The whole theatre collapsed in laughter, the Glaswegian shut up, the guitar was duely tuned and the gig continued.
Priceless.
I won't be fancy,
But I will be free,
You know I love you
And you can really talk to me,
And we can go down easy,
Oh my darling we can go down easy,
Oh my lover we can go down easy.
A great bloke.
Woof
