And so to the Red Lion pub, to witness a performance of Ellie Dee my friend Mick's band. It is a hot, sweaty affair in pub with low beams and horse-related nick-nacks stuck on the wall. The first set starts slowly. The band play mainly 8Os covers with great verve. Slowly the small performance area, little larger than an inglenook, fills up with drunker and drunker blokes and women in less and less clothing. It's a recipe for confrontation – a rock band going full tilt in a medieval dungeon equipped with axes, maces and the like and lots of booze-filled blokes feeling sexually-challenged. There is no actually fighting, merely “eye balling”. We escape intact at about one in the morning.
I help Mick and the band to shift their gear out through the pub's only small door – not easy, as the place is heaving. We stand outside in the cool night, our ears ringing. Around us is a typical English market town on a Saturday night. Black and white, Tudor cottages, weaving drunks, shaven-headed psychos and people vomiting their kebabs into the gutter. It's like Shakespeare's England. For hundreds of years there have been blokes playing lutes – and drunks. And now it's us.
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