Roy Weard
A Musical History
Updated March 15, 2008->
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The Early Stuff
Roy Wood \ Sheila Harrigan
Stranger Than Yesterday:
From Top, Roy, Paul(drums}Paul Docherty (bass)Alan Grey (gtr,vox)
Roy-Grope
Grope - clockwise from top left; Al Haines, Unknown Bassist, Roy, Paul, JB
Last Grope Line up: Unknown Drummer, John Lyons, Roy, Al Haines
New Photo Archive!
Alan and VCS3
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Click here for the Dogwatch Picture Gallery
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Click Here for the Last Post Picture Gallery
My early forays into the music scene were in the mid sixties. In an attempt to gain the attention of a girl I had my first ever 'big thing' for I learned to play the guitar. This led to my making a series of appearances at folk clubs and places like that. At the time this was 'the' scene with musicians like Roy Harper, Al Stewart, John Martyn and many others travelling around and playing in the back rooms of pubs for £15.00 a night. Although I never made it to the stage of actually getting paid for any of this I did manage to play a lot of venues and gain the attention of the girl. She was called Sheila Harrigan and even wound up singing with me (see pictures in The Early Stuff)
Towards the end of the sixties someone played me 'Freak Out' by Frank Zappa. I had been pretty unimpressed by most of the rock bands until then but this was different. I was immediately taken by the complexity and humour of that album and I starting trying to get a band together. The first few attempts were semi-folk outfits of varying degrees of proficiency but the first real band was 'Stranger Than Yesterday' so named after a chance remark at a rehearsal by Alan Grey, guitarist. Details of the line up are sketchy after all these years and only one photo of that band exists. The line up at that time was Alan Grey - guitar, vocals/Paul Mortimer - drums/ Paul Docherty - bass and Roy Wood - guitar, vocals. One of the highlights of the band's career was supporting the Pink Floyd at the 'Fishmonger's Arms' in Wood Green where the, then, bass player , Paul Docherty, set fire to his bass by pouring petrol over it. The petrol ran down his arm setting that alight and he dropped the guitar into the audience where it set fire to someone's fur coat. I always thought this coat belonged to the wife of Phil May, singer from the Pretty Things but she has since denied it so I don't know now. Maybe someone else who was there knows and can tell me.
GROPE
Line up changes went on for a while and finally we arrive at a whole new band called 'Grope'. In many ways this was a proto punk band and we went out of our way to try to shock. The poster was a 'dirty picture' that someone had of a large breast being squeezed with just the word 'Grope' scrawled across it. Al Haines, the band's singer used to wear Marks and Spencer polythene bags for T-Shirts and came direct from the building site he worked at to gigs - usually covered in cement dust. This band did paid gigs for the first time! The initial band went through several line up changes but settled down to a nucleus of Al Haines : vocals / Roy Wood : guitar, vocals / Johnny Lyons : bass guitar and a drummer called Paul whose second name I completely forget. This was also the band where I met John Brown who drove the van for this and many other of my bands for very little remuneration.
Born Free - WOODEN LION
When 'Grope' split Johnny Lyons and I decided to start a new band and, after looking at various names decided on Wooden Lion. The Legendary Wooden Lion was born. At the time we were a five piece and the line up was : John Phillips : vocals / Roy Wood : lead & slide guitar, vocals / Johnny Lyons : bass guitar / Gareth Kiddier : 12 string acoustic & electric guitar / Wal Mansfield : drums. This band played many gigs in the East London area. A shift in the line up brought in Alan Essex on Synthesizers and John Phillips, John Lyons and Gareth Kiddier left over a protracted period. This led us to Tony and Terry Morley on guitar and bass and this was the really fruitful period of the band's existence. We played many of the free festivals, including the famous Windsor Free Festival in 1974 and Watchfield Free Festival in 1975. Recently our old roadie of the time, Tom Barratt, sent us a clipping from the Stratford Express which I had not seen for years. You can see this as a Adobe Acrobat document here with the text as a Word file here. In some way we pre-empted the punk concept of adopting silly names. The backstage pass for Watchfield shows the band names as The Captain(Roy), The Cardinal Biggles(Alan) The Mad Molecule (Tony), Wal Blimey Yeah with only Terry keeping his original name. We also did a regular spot at the Greyhound in the Fulham Palace Rd.. I had been a friend of Lemmy's for some time and he had been along to see the band play a few times. When Hawkwind lost its first synthesizer player he tried to get Alan to join. Alan played with Hawkwind at the Watchfield festival and at the Sundown, Edmonton, but, in the end did not join the band. The line up shifted around a bit after that with the mainstay being Alan and I.
This takes us up to 1976. The band had come to something of an impasse with a couple of members leaving and no real success on the cards. I wound up going out on tour with the Rolling Stones to deal with the merchandising and that became a regular job - if travelling around Europe with a rock band selling t-shirts could be construed as a regular job. After two years of this I found myself in Scandinavia doing the merchandise for band who I shall not name. This, incidentally, was where I shaved off the beard - in a tour bus - in a blizzard! I stood at the side of the stage and thought 'my band was better than this' so I came back to the UK and started looking into a new band. I made a start with a band called Flashpoint which only did a couple of gigs and then I got the offer to join Dogwatch. This was a whole new world and it was the point where I decided I had to change my stage name to Roy Weard.
DOGWATCHing
Dogwatch had been playing around the East End of London for a year or so and I had been to see many of their gigs. Their singer, Paul Balance, left to form a new band (the Warm Jets with two ex Cockney Rebel members). I took his place and, over the next two years, we forged a strong unit. We played many of the medium sized venues with regular spots at the famous Bridge House in Canning Town and The Ruskin Arms as well as many other venues. The line up of Dogwatch at this time was Roger Glynn, : guitars, vocals / John Trelawney : violin, trumpet, flugelhorn, Euphonium, vocals / Lynda Shepherd : keyboards / Nick Sack : drums / Pete Murdoch : Bass, vocals and Roy Weard : vocals. This line up did well and its following began to grow. Pete Murdoch had been running a small PA company and did a lot of pub and club shows with Dire Straits. They began to achieve some success at the time so he quit the band to go on tour with them and we took on Tony Morley (from Wooden Lion) to replace him on bass. Dogwatch bought the PA from Pete Murdoch and I began to go out with it to do shows for other bands as sound engineer. Tony and I took up from where we left off and our song writing partnership added a lot of material to Dogwatch. After my name change Tony became known as Mr. Juan D'Erful.
After a successful showcase at the Music Machine in Camden we were signed to Bridge House Records and made a live album 'Penfriend'. Shortly after this we were almost signed on to Polydor Records but the shake up when they were bought out by Phonogram left us out on a limb. Nick Sack and Lynda Shepherd left and were replaced by John Mortimer on drums and Linda Kelsey on keyboards. Roger Glynn also left the band later and was replaced by Dave Lear on guitar. This line up made the single 'Cutouts' (a Weard and Juan D'Erful composition). We carried on from there until Linda left the band. We were at this point down to a five piece and there were growing disagreements about who we should enlist to bring the band up to a six piece again. In the end we split up. This was something of a traumatic event for me because Dogwatch had been a large part of my life for a long time. Both my son and my daughter, born during th eDogwatch era, bore their middle names as a result of John Trelawney, my daughter has the middle name of Xanthe and my son is Timothy Trelawney Wood.
BIG NEWS FOR DOGWATCH FANS!
I was talking to Terry Murphy from the Bridge House a couple of weeks ago and he mentioned teh possibility of releasing the Dogwatch album on CD. I have given him some of the studio tracks we recorded in that time and I believe it is now being put together. I will paste more news when it becomes available.
ROY WEARD & THE LAST POST
I decided at that point I would just carry on working as a sound engineer but one of the bands I had been working with, The Last Post, asked me to do some songs with them. This led to a few gigs at a small pub in Woodford and, inevitably, to my joining the band. The Last Post were loud and very upfront. In some ways they were closer to Wooden Lion than any of the other bands I had been involved with since the seventies. The original line up was Steve Bensusan : guitar, vocals / Ronnie Raymond : bass, vocals / Dave Owen : guitar, flute / Mel Evans, drums / Paul Watson : Keyboards / Roy Weard : vocals. We started off by recording an album at the famous Elephant Studios in Metropolitan Wharf, Wapping. We released this album, called Fallout, ourselves and sold it around the venues we played in. The band generated a strong following and soon moved into playing most of the larger East End venues alongside Iron Maiden and Marillion who were gigging at this level at the time. Our fans even hired a coach and came to Wales with us when we did some shows there. Mel left the band to finish his degree in politics shortly after we finished the album and Paul Margolis joined on drums. Paul and Dave all left over the second year of the band's existence. John Mortimer joined on drums and, you guessed it, Tony Morley joined on keyboards and guitars. Record deals loomed and we had already recorded a single, 'Triangle', for Parasol Records. Larger record companies were showing an interest but Steve and Ronnie both wanted a more 'straight up' rock band. In the end they told me they 'did not want to be in a comedy band' and left. Shades of 200 Motels or what?
SOUND ENGINEERING & WEARD and JUAN D'ERFUL
By this time I was working more and more as a sound engineer (you can see some of the people I worked with here) and, after a chance meeting with Manfred Mann, wound up taking a job on the Somewhere in Africa tour as backline roadie and actor (I played the robot and can be seen in the film, 'Budapest', of the gig in that city made during the 'Somewhere in Europe' tour) After that I worked solidly with many different bands as an engineer or production manager. Tony and I began work on a project called The Golden Cage. All of the songs were written and we started recording but my touring activities were beginning to take more and more time and it soon became impossible to find the time to finish it. We had written a large body of songs and Tony recorded a couple of these with other bands. Some of these demos have surfaced and are currently on a home blown CD called the Weard and Juan D'Erful Songbook. John Trelawney played trumpet and violin on a couple of these tracks. Shortly after this we made another attempt at getting a new band on the road. There were a number of rehearsals with a band called 'The Unexpected' . This featured Steve Bensusan on guitar and vocals, John Mortimer on drums, Peter Victor on bass and Tony on keyboards and guitar. I was doing the vocals and playing a few saxophone riffs. This was beginning to sound quite good but a long Chappo tour loomed and, by the time I got back, everyone had other projects on hand. Gradually the sound engineering became a full time project and, although I continued to write, I got less and less time to do anything with it.
I moved to Hamburg in 1991 and lost contact with all of them.
THE LEGENDARY WOODEN LION roars tonight.
So now we fast forward a bit. I moved from Hamburg back to the UK and settled in Brighton. At some point in 2000 Tony called me up out of the blue to ask me to be the sound engineer at a gig he was doing in Maidstone prison. John Mortimer played drums on that gig which also featured Steve Simpson from Chappo's band and Glen Tilbrook among others. Then a year or so later I got a surprise email from Alan Essex. We met up again and found we still enjoyed the same music. I had been given an EMS Synthi by the late Boz Burrell when I did some work for him so I passed it to Alan on an extended loan. I think it was at this point he decided we should look for the other band members. Somehow he got back in touch with Terry Morley and The Legendary Wooden Lion began to rise from the ashes. We got in touch with Tony 'Mr. Juan D'Erful' Morley and all got together at his place one afternoon. John Brown our roadie from back then made an appearance and 'Big' Steve Wollington has been turning vinyl and old cassette tape into CDs.
We started rehearsals for the new band with the intention that we would feature music from all three of the acts that Tony and I were involved in over our 33 year partnership. There were several rehearsals over a period of a year but it was fairly difficult to get at stable unit together. We all wanted John Mortimer to be the drummer but his personal circumstances made that more and more impossible. We auditioned several drummers over the following six months but none of them were what we were looking for. All of this began to grind to a halt and, at the start of 2006, when we had still not found a suitable drummer we stopped for a while.
One of the people I had been in touch with about joining the band was Last Post guitarist, Steve Bensusan. At the time he was not available but interested and he called me up again in mid-2006 to ask what progress we had made. I told him about the drummer situation and, a few weeks later he called back to say he had a drummer and bassist who would be up for it. We met up in the Trafalgar Pub in Greenwich and decided to set up rehearsals. Alan was still involved so we booked a studio and set to work on songs from both Dogwatch and the Last Post. As always, of course, I am itching to write new stuff.
This has now turned into a functioning new band and we are gigging.
The current line up for That Legendary Wooden Lion is:
Roy 'Captain' Weard : Vocals & guitar
Alan Essex (aka The Cardinal Biggles) : synthesisers and guitar
Steve Bensusan : guitar, vocals
Chris Cottage : bass
Chris Mott : drums
From here on the story continues. See The Captain's Blog for the ongoing story.
Where are they now?
People from the past still pop up sometimes, having found me through this website. It is always good to hear from them.
John Trelawney, lives up the coast a little in Seaford and still plays.
Nick Sack, the first Dogwatch drummer, was down here in Brighton with an exhibition of his photographs. You can browse his site here.
Roger Glynn and Linda Kelsey both found me through the website and have been in touch too.
Dave Ryder, One of the Last Post Crew, works as an I.T. consultant.
Peter Victor, Last Post sound engineer, is News Editor on the Independant on Sunday
Thirty odd years on from the Watchfield Free Festival would be a good place to start again
Watch this space! .
Free Festivals : Lots of info and pictures from various free festival from the 70's and 80's
Watchfield Festival : The Watchfield page itself - comments from the other acts and us.
Real Music Club - some of the best bands I have ever seen in Brighton.
The Bridge House - The original historic venue in the East End of London
The Bridge House 2 - the Bridge House ethos rises from the ashes