Patterns in the Chaos

Introduction

I’ve heard it said that an average reading rate is three words per second. Three things per second is easy for me to remember because I happen to know that an aeroplane turns very nicely at three degrees per second. At that rate it takes just two minutes to do a complete twizzle – that is, one orbit. And two minutes - I am told - is exactly how long this ‘blurb’ should last. Any longer and I’m in trouble. So I won’t waste any more time but get down to it…

The Lord Mayor and Lady Mayoress were at an Indian restaurant, the one that we frequent a mile or so from where we live. It was a special presentation and the restaurant owner had invited along Mandy and I, and my friend Karl, to meet with the Lord Mayor:
‘We are not worthy!’ Karl said with a gentle stoop of mock bowing and we all laughed – the Lord Mayor too.
We chatted in the aisle between the tables while to one side, the Lady Mayoress was firmly ensconced at a table and engrossed in conversation with the woman seated opposite. Meanwhile her husband was on an invisible elastic lanyard, prodigiously navigating the chairs and tables to say hello, shake hands and then be catapulted back to our scrum position between the tables. All the time, cameras flashed and the restaurant owner strutted past beaming with pride.
‘How do you like the job?’ I asked, unable to avert my gaze completely off his broad chest, bedecked with shiny dangling things. ‘Oh it’s great fun’ he said with a faint swagger and big impish smile as if being the Lord Mayor was a schoolboy prank.

Yes I can see how being the Lord Mayor is fun. There are many jobs that can only ever really be described as ‘fun.’ I can understand his response because I remember that being with a famous group was hard work - pressured - gruelling - but I never think of that; I just think about what immense, incredible fun it all was. What a gift it is to play with a great rock ‘n’ roll group - or to be Lord Mayor for that matter.

So I think it only right that I explain how I came to be in bands, and a famous one at that, and that means going right back to the year zero and the rickety dark streets of post war Birmingham, where we all came from, wide eyed with wonder at the world we found ourselves in. A world full of giants. Of Churchill and Stalin. Of Chaplin, Brando, Elvis and then – the Beatles.
Yes, Einstein may have unlocked the secret to the atom but the Beatles unlocked the door to all our unspoken and undreamed aspirations. The Beatles changed our world and now we can look back and see it in a different light, but then… we were caught up in a tide of history that swept all before it. The fab four distilled a potion so strong everybody wanted a slug of it. It was a tonic of joy and cheek, the most essential ingredients of good music.

No, I never made a career decision to be a musician; I don’t think many of us did. In my case the decisions were always in the negative - Not to work anymore in the factory fettering bicycle frames with a file from eight thirty to five, or in the scrap metal yard with a spanner and a pair of pliers, ripping apart discarded motor-bikes and other mechanical implements. Music was always an escape from all that but never a strategy worth banking on or planning for. The bottom line was, I never thought I was good enough to be ‘anyone’ in music or anything else, and this vortex of mental hare Kari would have become a self-fulfilling prophecy were it not for the intervention of a benevolent time and fortune and, of course the great pattern-maker, my secret benefactor.

And I guess in putting together this book I have been trying to squeeze out of the twists and turns of my journey any and every bit of fun that I could find lurking there. For fun, laughter and the joy of being there are the things that ricochet through life and never lose their healing power from being remembered again.

But I have to admit that in all of this I did very little planning or scheming. I did not so much aim myself as find myself being drawn up in a giant vacuum cleaner to be set down in places I did not ask to be - often didn’t even want to be. Nevertheless, there I was. Sometimes it seemed that I was just totally in the wrong place and the wrong time, but I never was. I can see that now and so I called my book ‘Patterns in the Chaos’ - The chaos is all mine and the patterns are all God’s.
 

Patterns is as accurate as my memory and scribbled diaries will permit. Apart from the fun of doing it, I have written it because honour is due to the great people I have known, some of whom happened also to be famous.

Dave,  May 2010