some real crackers.’)
The group’s girl-friendly setlists that year veer from The Beatles’ ‘Help’ and ‘I Feel Fine’ to Little Richard’s ‘Lucille’ and Lonnie Donegan’s ‘Jack o’ Diamonds’ to Rufus Thomas’s ‘Walkin’ the Dog’, with an encore of blueser Sonny Boy Williamson’s ‘Bye Bye Bird’. But as Tim Staffell put it: ‘The songs were dredged from all sorts of areas. Because of the nature of the material we approached, we were almost schoolboy cabaret.’
The Chase Bridge rehearsals and occasional gigs continued, but minus John Sanger, who’d taken up a place at Manchester University. ‘I had no grand plans to be a musician,’ he said (though he re-joined 1984 years later). The group continued on as a five-piece, with Tim and Brian having weekly rehearsal competitions to see who could hit the highest note. ‘Their ambition was to see who could sing higher than John Lennon,’ recalls Garnham.
Brian was chaperoned to school halls and youth clubs in his dad’s Javelin, while the older ‘Jag’ transported as much of the group’s equipment as he could cram into his Isetta bubble car. ‘My dad used to take my drums in the car,’ remembers Richard Thompson. But on one occasion, the band came close to losing a vital piece of equipment. ‘Before one gig we arranged to meet Brian on Putney Bridge,’ says Thompson. ‘We picked him up, drove to the venu and when we got there Brian realised he’d left his guitar, the actual Red Special, on the bridge. We got back there an hour later and, incredibly, there it was, propped up against the bridge where he’d left it. Brian could be a little scatterbrained.’ For a few gigs, Garnham and Dilloway even swapped instruments, with ‘Jag’ playing Dave’s homemade bass. ‘But it was a bit of a plank,’ says Garnham, ‘not of the quality of Brian’s Red Special.’
The ‘schoolboy cabaret’ also faced stiff local competition. ‘There was another popular band in the area called Fire,’ remembers John Garnham (Fire’s guitarist Dave Lambert would later join The Strawbs). ‘We all kept up with what these groups were doing, especially a group called The Others.’ In October 1964 – just as 1984 made their live debut – The Others, a band comprised of five Hampton Grammar pupils, three from the same year as May and Dilloway, released a single, ‘Oh Yeah!’, a song recorded by Bo Diddley. ‘That made them mini-heroes at school,’ recalls Dave, and Garnham adds that ‘they used to do early Stones stuff, things like “Route 66” … they had a bit of attitude.’
‘The Others were big at the time,’ remembered Brian May. ‘They were rebels who weren’t interested in the academic side. And they were very influential to me. I felt very jealous of all those people that were doing it at school, being in semi-professional groups, because all the pressure on me was to keep on with the studies. Myparents thought you should stay at home and do your homework … and then go out when you were about twenty years old. I was a bit sheltered really.’
The Others gave the impression of being anything but sheltered. A surviving promotional photograph shows five youths with Brian Jones-style fringes and skinny ties, displaying the same surly demeanour visible on the cover of the first Rolling Stones LP. ‘Oh Yeah!’ was cocky English pop; a schoolboy Yardbirds, with lots of wailing harmonica and faux menace. While The Others would never crack the charts (re-emerging briefly as The Sands three years later), their tougher sound was the antithesis of 1984.
While The Others seemed to have cornered some of the ‘raw sex and anger’ that May so admired in The Yardbirds, Brian himself was still the shrinking violet. ‘He was never an extrovert onstage,’ says Garnham. ‘Brian was a super-brain, a goody two-shoes at school. But he was still a quiet person when he was in the early groups. It always struck me as peculiar that once Queen got
The group’s girl-friendly setlists that year veer from The Beatles’ ‘Help’ and ‘I Feel Fine’ to Little Richard’s ‘Lucille’ and Lonnie Donegan’s ‘Jack o’ Diamonds’ to Rufus Thomas’s ‘Walkin’ the Dog’, with an encore of blueser Sonny Boy Williamson’s ‘Bye Bye Bird’. But as Tim Staffell put it: ‘The songs were dredged from all sorts of areas. Because of the nature of the material we approached, we were almost schoolboy cabaret.’
The Chase Bridge rehearsals and occasional gigs continued, but minus John Sanger, who’d taken up a place at Manchester University. ‘I had no grand plans to be a musician,’ he said (though he re-joined 1984 years later). The group continued on as a five-piece, with Tim and Brian having weekly rehearsal competitions to see who could hit the highest note. ‘Their ambition was to see who could sing higher than John Lennon,’ recalls Garnham.
Brian was chaperoned to school halls and youth clubs in his dad’s Javelin, while the older ‘Jag’ transported as much of the group’s equipment as he could cram into his Isetta bubble car. ‘My dad used to take my drums in the car,’ remembers Richard Thompson. But on one occasion, the band came close to losing a vital piece of equipment. ‘Before one gig we arranged to meet Brian on Putney Bridge,’ says Thompson. ‘We picked him up, drove to the venu and when we got there Brian realised he’d left his guitar, the actual Red Special, on the bridge. We got back there an hour later and, incredibly, there it was, propped up against the bridge where he’d left it. Brian could be a little scatterbrained.’ For a few gigs, Garnham and Dilloway even swapped instruments, with ‘Jag’ playing Dave’s homemade bass. ‘But it was a bit of a plank,’ says Garnham, ‘not of the quality of Brian’s Red Special.’
The ‘schoolboy cabaret’ also faced stiff local competition. ‘There was another popular band in the area called Fire,’ remembers John Garnham (Fire’s guitarist Dave Lambert would later join The Strawbs). ‘We all kept up with what these groups were doing, especially a group called The Others.’ In October 1964 – just as 1984 made their live debut – The Others, a band comprised of five Hampton Grammar pupils, three from the same year as May and Dilloway, released a single, ‘Oh Yeah!’, a song recorded by Bo Diddley. ‘That made them mini-heroes at school,’ recalls Dave, and Garnham adds that ‘they used to do early Stones stuff, things like “Route 66” … they had a bit of attitude.’
‘The Others were big at the time,’ remembered Brian May. ‘They were rebels who weren’t interested in the academic side. And they were very influential to me. I felt very jealous of all those people that were doing it at school, being in semi-professional groups, because all the pressure on me was to keep on with the studies. Myparents thought you should stay at home and do your homework … and then go out when you were about twenty years old. I was a bit sheltered really.’
The Others gave the impression of being anything but sheltered. A surviving promotional photograph shows five youths with Brian Jones-style fringes and skinny ties, displaying the same surly demeanour visible on the cover of the first Rolling Stones LP. ‘Oh Yeah!’ was cocky English pop; a schoolboy Yardbirds, with lots of wailing harmonica and faux menace. While The Others would never crack the charts (re-emerging briefly as The Sands three years later), their tougher sound was the antithesis of 1984.
While The Others seemed to have cornered some of the ‘raw sex and anger’ that May so admired in The Yardbirds, Brian himself was still the shrinking violet. ‘He was never an extrovert onstage,’ says Garnham. ‘Brian was a super-brain, a goody two-shoes at school. But he was still a quiet person when he was in the early groups. It always struck me as peculiar that once Queen got
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