We paid for several posters to be printed and Steve and Robin travelled to London with the intention of putting the posters up all around the capital. They had only been in London five minutes and were starting to stick their first posters up when they were ‘spoken to’ by the local constabulary and advised to desist!
When the day arrived, all the band members travelled South with our roadies in our good old Ford Transit Van. The journey was going quite well until we reached the Services at Grantham. Having stopped there and filled up with petrol, we got back on the road and had only travelled about 2 miles further when the engine exploded.
There we were, 100 miles away from London on our way to a gig, which we hoped would net us some important contacts, anticipating the arrival of several big fishes in the music industry, stuck by the side of the road with a broken van containing all our gear, going nowhere.
We didn’t have any vehicle recovery facilities and were not members of the RAC or AA etc but we had to get to London. Steve and one of the roadies, walked back to Grantham services to try and sort something out (although precisely what they had in mind, I have no idea) and the rest of us stayed with the van, guarding the equipment.
After a while, a large lorry laden with bales of straw pulled up in front of us and Steve got out, together with our roadie and told us that they had managed to secure some transport for us, and this was it!
We didn’t really care what it was carrying. At least we could complete our journey to London. We transferred the gear from our Transit van into the hay lorry and we climbed in the back.