Selling carpets, kissing girls in the back row and going to Hell

By Bev Bevan on Jul 10, 08 10:53 AM

During my fifth and final year at Moseley Grammar School I was consumed with rock'n'roll music.

Instead of studying for my upcoming GCE exams, most of my time was spent compiling endless setlists for the group's next show, thinking of which cool new records to buy that we could copy and perform on stage and practise signing my autograph over and over again.

For when I became a pop star, of course!

I would take photos of Rick Nelson to my barber in Sparkhill and say: "I want my hair just like that." Our local Italian hairdresser, brought up on a lifetime's diet of short back and sides, never did capture that look.

A big influence were the TV shows Six Five Special and Oh Boy, plus Cliff Richard and the Shadows' TV series - Cliff with his pink jacket and black shirt with the collar tuned up and the Shads, with their neat dance steps and super cool attitude.

British radio was rubbish, except for the occasional decent track on Two Way Family Favourites. Best was Radio Luxembourg, but the reception was so poor you did well to listen through a whole record.

Our lead singer Ronnie Smith was always coming up with new names for our little beat combo.

From Rocking Ronnie and the Renegades we became, for just one gig, Troy Satan and the Hellcats and eventually ended up as The Senators.

Not that we really knew what senators were, but they were American, so they just HAD to be cool.

In those days all the groups had to be dressed in some form of uniform or other. Ours was blue blazer, white shirt, red tie, grey trousers and black winkle-picker shoes with large brass buckles. Oh, and not forgetting the red cardboard handkerchief protruding from the blazer pocket.

Very smart - yet I wouldn't have been caught dead in a school uniform!

We didn't have transport, of course, so whatever gigs we managed to get had to be on a bus route. Many a time, stood forlornly at a bus stop with my heap of drums and accessories, was I told by the bus conductor: "You're not bringing that lot on my bus, sonny!"

One of our more regular bookings was down a dimly-lit sidestreet in the Soho area of Birmingham city centre, which rejoiced under the name of the Las Vegas coffee bar.

We'd play until 2 in the morning. The place was packed with a collection of the most unsavoury characters imaginable, but they never bothered us, plus they paid good money and the place had a cracking Wurlitzer jukebox!

The late hours hardly helped with our grammar school educations and GCE grades. I ended up with just two passes, in English literature and Art. My best friend Jasper Carrott achieved the same dizzy total, his successes being in Maths and Art, which he joked would make him ideal for a job painting computers ...

But that's not what he did. He joined me at the Beehive departmental store in Birmingham as a Trainee Buyer - a grand title, but in truth it meant general dogsbody.

Anyone who has seen that old TV comedy series Are You Being Served will have a pretty good idea what the Beehive was like. After several weeks of experiencing life in every department in the store, Jasper ended up in Hardware and me in Carpets.

Like school, though, I had no interest in a career in retail. I was far more interested in buying the latest Everly Brothers single or catching the latest Elvis movie at my local cinema.

There was no shortage of young ladies to share the back row of the Rialto or Robin Hood picture houses - not now I was drummer in an up and coming beat group!