KNOTS

Knots was an ill-fated band that played one gig sometime around 1974 or 1975. I remember very little about this band, except that it had my brother Nigel playing bass, something he'd never done before and has never done since, to my knowledge. It might have had Andy Macgill on keyboard, and I would guess that the drummer was probably Andy Drake, who later played in the New Metronome All Stars.

Our one gig was at the Allerton pub in Alwoodley, for a party organised by some boy who had been in my first A-level physics group at Roundhay School, called "Alan Brosnan" or something like that, who advertised us as a "...top clubland band.... I'd convinced him how good we were, and we were embarrassingly awful.

The worst thing was that we didn't have any decent equipment, apart from a pair of big Marshall column PA speakers. I lashed up a little valve amp, and a four channel mixer and played everything - vocals, guitar, bass, keyboards, through that one little amp, which I would guess was about 30 watts. It was fine when we were rehearsing, but in the noisy party, when we turned it up high, it distorted like mad. The bass was causing it to swing so violently that it was modulating the whole of the signal. It must have sounded dire.

Needless to say, we didn't get any repeat bookings on the back of that gig, and none of the band had any enthusiasm for carrying it on.

Richard