We got our original name – The Strand – from ‘Do the Strand,’ the first track on the second Roxy Music album. In the lyrics Bryan Ferry was telling people to ‘Do the Strandski’ – the idea being that this was the dance that all the cool kids would want to do, so that worked OK. And going up to the Rainbow in Finsbury Park to see Roxy Music on the For Your Pleasure tour in the spring of 1973 was a reall big deal for me and Cookie.
Another big gig for us around that time – well, a couple of month later – was on our old Christopher Wren turf at the White City stadium. That place was usually a greyhound-racing track, which had no appeal to me whatsoever (although, thinking back, I suppose there would’ve been some fat wallets there), but every now and then they’d put a big gig on. I remember this one as being headlined by Humble Pie, but Cookie assures me it was The Kinks. Apparently Ray Davies’s wife had left him and he had a bit of a tantrum onstage and retired from music at the end.
It bothers me a bit that I have no fucking recollection of this whatsoever – or of Sly and the Family Stone, who were on the same bill. Maybe I was pissed. Blackouts seem to have been a feature for me at those White City stadium shows, as Cookie also insists we were there for David Cassidy the next year, when a little girl got crushed to death at the front. What the fuck we’d have been doing at a David Cassidy show I have no idea, so maybe he could be taking the piss with that one. But maybe there was a local event we felt duty-bound to sneak in for nothing.
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