Catching Up With An Old Friend from Stradivarius.

A view of Grenoble

A couple of years ago I went to Grenoble to meet up with an old friend. My friend Alain had been living there for the past 20 years and in all that time I had seen him twice, once at a party organised by Christian, the drummer of Stradivarius in his house, and once at a very drunken night at my son, Sam’s when he lived outside Charols, the village in which Alain grew up.

We became friends back then in the early eighties when I was invited to join Stradivarius, a rock band that decided to become a dance band as a way of earning money and therefore continuing to exist. Christian, the drummer, was very much the leader of the band, the one who took the trouble of getting each musician a cassette with the latest tunes we were to play, keeping a list of the dates we had and keeping the accounts and providing and keeping the truck and PA system. Zu-Zu, the bassist and ballad singer actually loved the music we were playing and took it very seriously wanting us to play everything note for note like the original version. Bappy, the rythmn guitarist was a weird guy and soon to be replaced by Fred, an excellent guitarist and soon to be owner of his own music store in Valence, recently burnt to the ground. Claudette, who put fear into the hearts of all the wives, was the very pretty accordianist and sometime second keyboard player, whose role, along with Zu-zu was to make the ‘Musette’ section work. Then there was Alain, the long, frizzy haired lead guitarist, the only other dope smoker in the band and the other person besides me who really only liked the rock material.

The beautiful Claudette with Christian on drums and myself on keys.

The job of a dance band was to make people dance and were mainly employed in the 80’s at village festivals which usually lasted for three days at which the band would play every night, usually outdoors in the village square. You would play ‘Musette’, quick steps, waltzes, sambas, tangos, etc. for the old people during the aperitif session, usually from 7 till 730 pm. During this part, Alain and myself would do the bare minimum. Then you would be provided with a good meal, 4 courses minimum, with wine etc. at 8 which you could make last till 10 when you took to the stage for a 4 hour marathon which started with more middle-of-the-road material, mainly French, and by midnight moving to more rock tunes. You had to play the latest hits and these we rehearsed during our sound check at around 6. I sang the English hits, stuff by the likes of Culture Club, David Bowie and many more.

In the winter we would average about one gig a week but in the summer it was more like 4 and we were well paid, about £60 equivalent per gig per band member with a similar amount going into the band fund for keeping the truck and PA together. When you think I was on £70 a week with Hawkwind just a couple of years earlier you can see how well it was paid. And Alain and I always had a good laugh and me and my wife saw him and his wife, the very beautiful Veronica from Marseille, socially, unlike the others.

Alain left before I did to be replaced by the artistic vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Gerard, who as a single man, finally became an ideal partner for Claudette : she, I knew, had sadly died of a brain tumour a few years later. Alain left to become a clown, doing street theatre at the bigger town festivals. He was determined not to have to work at anything except his artistic endeavours, unlike the rest of us who all had a day job of some sort.

So there you have the background to this friendship which has continued over the years by occasional emails and nothing more. Yet, from the moment we met up this time, the friendship was rekindled, easily, as we parked Winnie in the alley that ran alongside the building that contained the theatre above which Alain lived. He straightaway had us up to his flat, a loft conversion of basically two big rooms, one a kitchen/diner with his sculpture lit in one corner and a toilet and shower in another. The other was Alain’s private space, his bed, his wardrobe and an armchair where he sat when he watched his TV, with a desk with his Apple Mac alongside the TV.

Alan starring in his improvised comedy routine.

Over the first couple of days we spent a lot of time catching up with each other's lives. I discovered that he had been married for two years to a dishy black girl from Burkino Faso, a connection as my son Nat's wife Magali’s sister’s partner is also from there. She was not around having disappeared to Spain. We talked about the women we had had over the years and our travels.He had been twice to Brazil and once to Bali, each time funded by cash windfalls he had made from his art. There were similarities between us as we had both lived on the edge with a certain amount of carelessness and both of us had lost our latest partners, both black.