This is infinity performing on Jersey, the rest of the story will follow shortly!Out Of The Ashes
It was a bright sunny morning and I was driving along a twisty country road in the South of France. I had just got off a private jet from Heathrow after flying by Concorde from New York. I was driving my new red Ferrari heading for Nice where I had just bought a luxury apartment in a building that resembled a pyramid overlooking the Côte d’Azure.
The Flies were now riding high in the charts with release on their greatest hits L.P. (that had gone straight in a number one) things could not have been better. We had just returned from sell-out tour of the States finishing at Madison Square Gardens, supported by The Who (whom we had supported on three occasions in the UK).
All of a sudden an alarm on the dash of the Ferrari began to sound quite loudly. I was trying to find out what the alarm was and was just about to pull over to the side of the road when some where in the distance a voice was calling to me. Slowly the voice became nearer and clearer, it was my Mum! “ Are you getting up today, your alarm’s been going off for ages”
Slowly it dawned on me it had all had been a dream.
I was now wide-awake and in Kilburn, North-west London. I didn’t even own a car let alone a Ferrari.
I lay there for while wondering what kind of day this would be. I really didn’t want to give up the music business but what should be my next course of action. I believe in fate and ‘what will be will be’.
It was around 11 am and I was just about to get up when my mother, again, called up the stairs “ there’s someone on the phone for you”. After the break-up of the Flies I had moved back to Kilburn and lived, for a short while, with my parents whilst I sorted my future out. I ran down the stairs picked up the phone and heard a familiar voice it was John DaCosta. “ Hi Ian how you doing?” “Okay I said”, John, continued, “ are you playing at the moment? Only if you’re not, how do fancy joining me, Brain Gill, Phil Chesterton and Stu Calver in a new group?
Stu Calver had been a member of the Flies as had Brain Gill but not at the same time.
Phil Chesterton had deputised for Robin Hunt on the now legendary ‘IN-SECT LP’and was good friend so I said YES right away.
I was ‘between jobs’ and really didn’t know what I was going to do. This seemed like an answer to my prayers, and for someone that doesn’t believe in God not a bad result!
Infinity is born
A meeting was arranged and as we all new each other it didn’t take long before rehearsals were in progress and a repertoire put together. The name Infinity was chosen and so back on the road again we went. This was now early 1969.
With the break-up of the Flies Robin Hunt and Peter Dunton went on to form a band called Bulldog Breed which had moderate success and I was, in a few years time, to work with Robin again.
John and myself had always been in the Flies, Stu Calver had been in the Flies and also ‘Johnny Tempest and the Nomads’ (later to change their name to ‘Cymbeline’) Brian Gill was also in ‘Johnny Tempest and the Nomads’ and had left to join ‘The Flies’ when Stu had left to join Johnny Tempest. Phil was the drummer for ‘Johnny Tempest and the Nomads’ as all of us had been in these two popular groups in London it didn’t take long to get some bookings and after a short while we were signed up to NEMS agency. A booking agency originally set up by Brian Epstein (the Beatles Manager). There were quite a few big names on their books Pink Floyd, T-Rex, Deep Purple, Pretty Things, Fairport Convention, Harmony Grass and Episode Six with Sheila Carter to name but a few. We were being ‘handled’ by John Lyons (Lon to his friends); he had played rhythm guitar with Tony Rivers in ‘Tony Rivers and the Castaways’, a fantastic harmony group from Essex, they had recently changed their name to Harmony Grass and now ‘Lon’ was their booking agent!
With the signing to ‘Nems’ we were getting bigger and better gigs. Our first gig as ‘Infinity’ was Seale School in Hertford on the 13th March 1969. On the 4th January I had bought myself a rare Fender six bass from Sound City Music shop, 124 Shaftsbury Ave. in London’s West End for the sum of £145 including a genuine Fender case, No. 95670 made in the USA on 06/03/63a (the date can be confirmed by removing the neck and the date is stamped on the end of the neck where it meets the body). The sound on this guitar was really great the only thing was I couldn’t get used to six strings so in the end I decided to just use four strings and spread them evenly across the neck. This worked fine.
We had four further gigs in March ’69 followed by ten in April and 13 in May. In April we had got back to playing at the ‘Café-des-Artistes’ in Chelsea, which had been a regular haunt of the ‘Flies’.
It was on the 2nd June 1969 we ventured west down to Devon to perform for a week at the Narracott Grand Hotel in Woolacombe.
The weather was really hot and we only had to play 2 x 45 mins a night so we spent the rest of the time polishing up our act and sunbathing. In our new act it was decided to include a couple of ‘comedy numbers’. The first one was Bernard Cribbins’ ‘Hole in the Road’ and also ‘The Monster Mash’ by Bobby “Boris” Pickett And the Crypt Kickers. I took lead vocals on ‘Hole in the road’ and John the lead on ‘Monster Mash’ dressed up as a professor with white coat and a rubber ‘bald head’, whilst I dressed up as the Monster, complete with a rubber mask, which was very hot and uncomfortable under the stage lights for ‘Monster’ and as a workman for ‘Hole in the road’, with shovel, road sign and a flashing warning light. These two songs went down really well with the audience and after a few nervous attempts became well established in our repertoire. We had also been working on a song by the ‘Jim Webb’ called ‘McArthur Park’ this was a very complicated song with intricate harmonies and a very difficult musical arrangement but thanks to Brian Gill’s magical arrangement we managed a very fine performance and performed the entire song including the very final note (as sung by Stu) which is a bout 2 octaves above middle “C”. Stu managed this note night after night.
We left Woolacombe on the 8th June; performed in Frome, Somerset on the 11th, back to Essex on the 13th to play at the Ivy Lodge, Woodford, and Guys Hospital on the 14th (playing not as patients!) and then up to Sheffield on the 15th to play at the Arbourthorne Hotel.
After travelling back down to London we had a couple of days off and it was during this break that we had a ‘phone call from ‘Lon’ about playing for a week in Jersey. Apparently a band called ‘Chris Lamb and The Universals’ were due to play at Les Arches Hotel on Jersey for the summer but had had an accident on the way to the airport and wouldn’t be able to make it for a week. We had a bit of a lull in bookings so we agreed to leave as soon as possible. We got all our equipment loaded on the van, had flights booked with BEA (now British Airways) from Southampton and off we set.
The Fun begins.
We drove down to Southampton airport and checked in all our equipment (including all the comedy stuff) and luggage with Air Freight. We had too much weighty equipment for all of it to go on the plane in one go so some of it went on a later flight.
We had a couple of hours waiting for the flight and during this wait was the first time in my life I was to have ‘a migraine’, I didn’t know at the time what it was all I knew was that my eyes had gone funny, making it hard to see with flashing lights and blind spots. Once on board the aircraft I remained quite and the headache started, but seemed to lift shortly after arrival on Jersey.
The hotel’s entertainments manager, in his TR6 sports car, met us at the airport. All five of us somehow managed to clime aboard and off we set for Les Arches Hotel at Archirondel Bay not far from St. Helier. The equipment was being collected by the hotel’s own van and followed later. The hotel was to be our home for the next three weeks. We were only supposed to play for a week but we went down so well that Renzo Martin, the hotel’s manager, asked us if we wanted to continue playing all season (16 weeks!).
We had to find a place on our own to stay as the hotel was fully booked and after looking around some estate agents in St. Helier (the islands Capital) we eventually rented a bungalow in the middle of the island, very peaceful and at the rear of the bungalow was a field that we used to spend some time in playing ‘American Baseball’.
We also had to have some ‘wheels’ so we bought an old 1960 ‘Wartburg’ estate car for £60. It served our purpose well. It got us around the island, to the hotel, and to some of the more popular beaches, where we spent lots of time soaking up the sunshine. When we eventually came back to the mainland we had the most amazing tans.
It was while we were living in the bungalow that the first ever ‘Moon’ landing was took place.
We had an old television so we stayed up most of the night watching Neil Armstrong take his now infamous ‘first step’ on the moon. What an amazing experience!
Since arriving on the island we, as a band, were getting quite a reputation and it wasn’t long before the local paper ran an article on us entitled ‘Best Band On The Island?’
It was a very good article and after it’s appearance the hotel was packed every night.
The old ‘Wartburg’ car had to be abandoned at the airport when we left; we had tried to sell it but with no luck so after unloading the car at the freight terminal it was driven to the nearest car park and just left.
Although we had flown out from Southampton airport we could only get a flight back to London Heathrow, again with B.E.A. The cost of shipping all our equipment back to the mainland was £39 16s 6d for 606 Kgs. We had 32 pieces of equipment. Dave Taylor, an old friend of the group, met us at the airport with our transit van and after clearing customs we headed for home. The date we flew home was 6th September 1969.
I was still staying at my parents house, in fact all the band were staying at their parents houses
Back on the mainland
We weren’t back on the mainland for long when we started gigging again, in fact ‘Nems’ had booked us to play at the Ilford Jewish Youth Club on the 7th September then we had ten days off, for a break, before we started again. Our first ‘gig’ on the 19th September was on the River Thames for Lloyds Bank, (their annual dance) it was on one of the big riverboats, complete with restaurant and dance floor, and we had some fun with electrics as the power was DC converted to AC and the Hammond organ that John was using was a full tone flat so we had retune our guitars to compensate which made our harmonies a bit strange to say the least! On the 20th we were off to Southampton to play at a college dance. After that it was a number off gigs in and around London until on the 13th October we had a recording audition for Decca, which we failed. On the 15th October we had a BBC audition which we again failed. Not put off by the recent failures we continued gigging locally until on the 25th October we started our first of many trips ‘up north’ to play at The Scunthorpe Baths. We were supporting the famous ‘Searchers’, a Liverpool group having had a number of hit records in the sixties. In those days we didn’t stay overnight very often but drove back through the night, it made it a long day but we enjoyed it, it was all part of the experience of being in the music industry.
We had a number of gigs, all over the place, during November and the early part of December but it was on the 13th we played a ‘one night stand’ at the University of Caen in Normandy, France and what a night it was. We went down really well, I think we were a better ‘live act’ than a studio band.
It was on the 18th that we decided to try our hand at recording again so we spent the whole day in a recording studio in Denmark Street putting down demos of ‘Pattern People’ by the ‘Fifth Dimension’ and an original song called ‘Strange Girl’ with Stu taking the lead vocal. These didn’t do much for us so we then booked a day in Essex-Music studios to record ‘Taxman’ by the Beatles and ‘I’ve got you under my skin’ by Cole Porter. Our only other recordings were to be in Tangerine Studios on the 6th May 1970 in Holloway, London to put down two original tracks for a possible album, they were ‘Time Keeper’ and ‘Space Shanty’ and at E.M.I. Studios on the 3rd March 1970 at Abbey Road, London using the famous No.1 studio that ‘The Beatles’ had used on many of their famous tracks. This session was to be for one day and was organised by some rich American who wanted to record an album using a pop group (us), a jazz group (Kenny Clare Jazz band) and the London Philharmonic Orchestra. The event was called ‘If Music Be The Food of Love’ and Stu Calver was chosen to sing the lead vocal. It was an amazing day and we actually got paid for doing it!
Sadly it was shortly after the recording at Tangerine studios that the band decided to break-up but in-between the E.M.I. recording and the Tangerine session we did got back to Denmark one last time for two weeks at ‘The Revolution Club’ in Copenhagen (formally known as ‘The Star Club’).
I was now at a loss again as to what to do.
Some year later I did manage to get a CD and vinyl LP released of all the Infinity tracks that had been recorded:
It was a bright sunny morning and I was driving along a twisty country road in the South of France. I had just got off a private jet from Heathrow after flying by Concorde from New York. I was driving my new red Ferrari heading for Nice where I had just bought a luxury apartment in a building that resembled a pyramid overlooking the Côte d’Azure.
The Flies were now riding high in the charts with release on their greatest hits L.P. (that had gone straight in a number one) things could not have been better. We had just returned from sell-out tour of the States finishing at Madison Square Gardens, supported by The Who (whom we had supported on three occasions in the UK).
All of a sudden an alarm on the dash of the Ferrari began to sound quite loudly. I was trying to find out what the alarm was and was just about to pull over to the side of the road when some where in the distance a voice was calling to me. Slowly the voice became nearer and clearer, it was my Mum! “ Are you getting up today, your alarm’s been going off for ages”
Slowly it dawned on me it had all had been a dream.
I was now wide-awake and in Kilburn, North-west London. I didn’t even own a car let alone a Ferrari.
I lay there for while wondering what kind of day this would be. I really didn’t want to give up the music business but what should be my next course of action. I believe in fate and ‘what will be will be’.
It was around 11 am and I was just about to get up when my mother, again, called up the stairs “ there’s someone on the phone for you”. After the break-up of the Flies I had moved back to Kilburn and lived, for a short while, with my parents whilst I sorted my future out. I ran down the stairs picked up the phone and heard a familiar voice it was John DaCosta. “ Hi Ian how you doing?” “Okay I said”, John, continued, “ are you playing at the moment? Only if you’re not, how do fancy joining me, Brain Gill, Phil Chesterton and Stu Calver in a new group?
Stu Calver had been a member of the Flies as had Brain Gill but not at the same time.
Phil Chesterton had deputised for Robin Hunt on the now legendary ‘IN-SECT LP’and was good friend so I said YES right away.
I was ‘between jobs’ and really didn’t know what I was going to do. This seemed like an answer to my prayers, and for someone that doesn’t believe in God not a bad result!
Infinity is born
A meeting was arranged and as we all new each other it didn’t take long before rehearsals were in progress and a repertoire put together. The name Infinity was chosen and so back on the road again we went. This was now early 1969.
With the break-up of the Flies Robin Hunt and Peter Dunton went on to form a band called Bulldog Breed which had moderate success and I was, in a few years time, to work with Robin again.
John and myself had always been in the Flies, Stu Calver had been in the Flies and also ‘Johnny Tempest and the Nomads’ (later to change their name to ‘Cymbeline’) Brian Gill was also in ‘Johnny Tempest and the Nomads’ and had left to join ‘The Flies’ when Stu had left to join Johnny Tempest. Phil was the drummer for ‘Johnny Tempest and the Nomads’ as all of us had been in these two popular groups in London it didn’t take long to get some bookings and after a short while we were signed up to NEMS agency. A booking agency originally set up by Brian Epstein (the Beatles Manager). There were quite a few big names on their books Pink Floyd, T-Rex, Deep Purple, Pretty Things, Fairport Convention, Harmony Grass and Episode Six with Sheila Carter to name but a few. We were being ‘handled’ by John Lyons (Lon to his friends); he had played rhythm guitar with Tony Rivers in ‘Tony Rivers and the Castaways’, a fantastic harmony group from Essex, they had recently changed their name to Harmony Grass and now ‘Lon’ was their booking agent!
With the signing to ‘Nems’ we were getting bigger and better gigs. Our first gig as ‘Infinity’ was Seale School in Hertford on the 13th March 1969. On the 4th January I had bought myself a rare Fender six bass from Sound City Music shop, 124 Shaftsbury Ave. in London’s West End for the sum of £145 including a genuine Fender case, No. 95670 made in the USA on 06/03/63a (the date can be confirmed by removing the neck and the date is stamped on the end of the neck where it meets the body). The sound on this guitar was really great the only thing was I couldn’t get used to six strings so in the end I decided to just use four strings and spread them evenly across the neck. This worked fine.
We had four further gigs in March ’69 followed by ten in April and 13 in May. In April we had got back to playing at the ‘Café-des-Artistes’ in Chelsea, which had been a regular haunt of the ‘Flies’.
It was on the 2nd June 1969 we ventured west down to Devon to perform for a week at the Narracott Grand Hotel in Woolacombe.
The weather was really hot and we only had to play 2 x 45 mins a night so we spent the rest of the time polishing up our act and sunbathing. In our new act it was decided to include a couple of ‘comedy numbers’. The first one was Bernard Cribbins’ ‘Hole in the Road’ and also ‘The Monster Mash’ by Bobby “Boris” Pickett And the Crypt Kickers. I took lead vocals on ‘Hole in the road’ and John the lead on ‘Monster Mash’ dressed up as a professor with white coat and a rubber ‘bald head’, whilst I dressed up as the Monster, complete with a rubber mask, which was very hot and uncomfortable under the stage lights for ‘Monster’ and as a workman for ‘Hole in the road’, with shovel, road sign and a flashing warning light. These two songs went down really well with the audience and after a few nervous attempts became well established in our repertoire. We had also been working on a song by the ‘Jim Webb’ called ‘McArthur Park’ this was a very complicated song with intricate harmonies and a very difficult musical arrangement but thanks to Brian Gill’s magical arrangement we managed a very fine performance and performed the entire song including the very final note (as sung by Stu) which is a bout 2 octaves above middle “C”. Stu managed this note night after night.
We left Woolacombe on the 8th June; performed in Frome, Somerset on the 11th, back to Essex on the 13th to play at the Ivy Lodge, Woodford, and Guys Hospital on the 14th (playing not as patients!) and then up to Sheffield on the 15th to play at the Arbourthorne Hotel.
After travelling back down to London we had a couple of days off and it was during this break that we had a ‘phone call from ‘Lon’ about playing for a week in Jersey. Apparently a band called ‘Chris Lamb and The Universals’ were due to play at Les Arches Hotel on Jersey for the summer but had had an accident on the way to the airport and wouldn’t be able to make it for a week. We had a bit of a lull in bookings so we agreed to leave as soon as possible. We got all our equipment loaded on the van, had flights booked with BEA (now British Airways) from Southampton and off we set.
The Fun begins.
We drove down to Southampton airport and checked in all our equipment (including all the comedy stuff) and luggage with Air Freight. We had too much weighty equipment for all of it to go on the plane in one go so some of it went on a later flight.
We had a couple of hours waiting for the flight and during this wait was the first time in my life I was to have ‘a migraine’, I didn’t know at the time what it was all I knew was that my eyes had gone funny, making it hard to see with flashing lights and blind spots. Once on board the aircraft I remained quite and the headache started, but seemed to lift shortly after arrival on Jersey.
The hotel’s entertainments manager, in his TR6 sports car, met us at the airport. All five of us somehow managed to clime aboard and off we set for Les Arches Hotel at Archirondel Bay not far from St. Helier. The equipment was being collected by the hotel’s own van and followed later. The hotel was to be our home for the next three weeks. We were only supposed to play for a week but we went down so well that Renzo Martin, the hotel’s manager, asked us if we wanted to continue playing all season (16 weeks!).
We had to find a place on our own to stay as the hotel was fully booked and after looking around some estate agents in St. Helier (the islands Capital) we eventually rented a bungalow in the middle of the island, very peaceful and at the rear of the bungalow was a field that we used to spend some time in playing ‘American Baseball’.
We also had to have some ‘wheels’ so we bought an old 1960 ‘Wartburg’ estate car for £60. It served our purpose well. It got us around the island, to the hotel, and to some of the more popular beaches, where we spent lots of time soaking up the sunshine. When we eventually came back to the mainland we had the most amazing tans.
It was while we were living in the bungalow that the first ever ‘Moon’ landing was took place.
We had an old television so we stayed up most of the night watching Neil Armstrong take his now infamous ‘first step’ on the moon. What an amazing experience!
Since arriving on the island we, as a band, were getting quite a reputation and it wasn’t long before the local paper ran an article on us entitled ‘Best Band On The Island?’
It was a very good article and after it’s appearance the hotel was packed every night.
The old ‘Wartburg’ car had to be abandoned at the airport when we left; we had tried to sell it but with no luck so after unloading the car at the freight terminal it was driven to the nearest car park and just left.
Although we had flown out from Southampton airport we could only get a flight back to London Heathrow, again with B.E.A. The cost of shipping all our equipment back to the mainland was £39 16s 6d for 606 Kgs. We had 32 pieces of equipment. Dave Taylor, an old friend of the group, met us at the airport with our transit van and after clearing customs we headed for home. The date we flew home was 6th September 1969.
I was still staying at my parents house, in fact all the band were staying at their parents houses
Back on the mainland
We weren’t back on the mainland for long when we started gigging again, in fact ‘Nems’ had booked us to play at the Ilford Jewish Youth Club on the 7th September then we had ten days off, for a break, before we started again. Our first ‘gig’ on the 19th September was on the River Thames for Lloyds Bank, (their annual dance) it was on one of the big riverboats, complete with restaurant and dance floor, and we had some fun with electrics as the power was DC converted to AC and the Hammond organ that John was using was a full tone flat so we had retune our guitars to compensate which made our harmonies a bit strange to say the least! On the 20th we were off to Southampton to play at a college dance. After that it was a number off gigs in and around London until on the 13th October we had a recording audition for Decca, which we failed. On the 15th October we had a BBC audition which we again failed. Not put off by the recent failures we continued gigging locally until on the 25th October we started our first of many trips ‘up north’ to play at The Scunthorpe Baths. We were supporting the famous ‘Searchers’, a Liverpool group having had a number of hit records in the sixties. In those days we didn’t stay overnight very often but drove back through the night, it made it a long day but we enjoyed it, it was all part of the experience of being in the music industry.
We had a number of gigs, all over the place, during November and the early part of December but it was on the 13th we played a ‘one night stand’ at the University of Caen in Normandy, France and what a night it was. We went down really well, I think we were a better ‘live act’ than a studio band.
It was on the 18th that we decided to try our hand at recording again so we spent the whole day in a recording studio in Denmark Street putting down demos of ‘Pattern People’ by the ‘Fifth Dimension’ and an original song called ‘Strange Girl’ with Stu taking the lead vocal. These didn’t do much for us so we then booked a day in Essex-Music studios to record ‘Taxman’ by the Beatles and ‘I’ve got you under my skin’ by Cole Porter. Our only other recordings were to be in Tangerine Studios on the 6th May 1970 in Holloway, London to put down two original tracks for a possible album, they were ‘Time Keeper’ and ‘Space Shanty’ and at E.M.I. Studios on the 3rd March 1970 at Abbey Road, London using the famous No.1 studio that ‘The Beatles’ had used on many of their famous tracks. This session was to be for one day and was organised by some rich American who wanted to record an album using a pop group (us), a jazz group (Kenny Clare Jazz band) and the London Philharmonic Orchestra. The event was called ‘If Music Be The Food of Love’ and Stu Calver was chosen to sing the lead vocal. It was an amazing day and we actually got paid for doing it!
Sadly it was shortly after the recording at Tangerine studios that the band decided to break-up but in-between the E.M.I. recording and the Tangerine session we did got back to Denmark one last time for two weeks at ‘The Revolution Club’ in Copenhagen (formally known as ‘The Star Club’).
I was now at a loss again as to what to do.
Some year later I did manage to get a CD and vinyl LP released of all the Infinity tracks that had been recorded:
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