Mr L

Mr L's mouth looked like the half-open fly of a sleeping drunk on a park bench, as he sidled up and talked to you from one side of it in the pub. He made everything he said sound like a confidence for your ears only, which was imparted in a slurred, South London accent made all the thicker for being percolated through pints of warm beer.

If you shifted to one side, trying to put a little distance between your face and his mouth, he would shift with you, utterly oblivious of stealing your space and utterly unconcerned as to it's value to you. I once tried a little experiment with him.

Most people would give up trying to move away after about three shifts, and simply hold their breath as he told them (for the tenth time) about the night he had drinks backstage with John Lee Hooker in the Hammersmith Palais in the early 1970s. My god, could he talk. This particular night, I kept shifting and he kept taking up the resulting space. They were very small - almost unnoticeable - shifts of about 15 inches, but within about 10 minutes, we had both traversed the entire length of the bar from one side to the other - a distance of around 25 feet.

By day, Mr L was a carpenter who specialised in making sash windows, but by night he was the lead guitarist in what was possibly the worst local band of the time. People would come for miles to hear this band simply because they were so awful, and their most loyal follower was Mr L's Dutch wife, who would gyrate athletically and generally throw herself around for the entire set. Like most bad bands, these sets would go on for twice as long as any good one, and their material was inexhaustible because the only stuff they played were covers from rock and roll hits of the previous 50 years. Mrs L never seemed to run out of energy.

During the course of each number, every member of the band would get the opportunity to perform a solo on his preferred instrument. I say 'preferred' because the instruments played were not necessarily ones which they had been trained to play, they were simply the ones which they actually 'preferred' to try to play. For this reason, there were two saxophonists, one of which was an architect, and the other an antique-dealer. Far from playing in concert, if either of them actually hit the right note during the course of a tune, it was only by accident.

Mr L would always hit the right notes, but not always in the right order. Whenever he arrived at the appointed time for his solo, he would launch off into the guitar solo for a completely different tune in a completely different key, and never showed any sign of being aware of his mistake. The rest of the band seemed unconcerned as well. Mind you, they were very good solos - just performed either four minutes early, or four minutes late, depending on the running order of the evening.

None of us ever worked out if Mr L had a problem with drink or a problem with money, but either way, despite having a well-paid and busy working life, his wife controlled the purse-strings. This meant that - at around 5 o'clock almost every evening - he would sidle into someone's workshop (he had a rota of many friends for this purpose, so as not to place too much of a burden of boredom on each of them) in order to borrow £5 to get himself a pint or two in the local pub. Half an hour later, you would find yourself in the same pub, trying to get away from the fumes of your fiver which came from the corner of his mouth as he recalled the time when he had drinks backstage with John Lee Hooker in the early 1970s...

So many friends and acquaintances were tapped in this way, that when he sold his house and moved back to Rotterdam, he left owing a bar-bill of several hundred pounds.

A couple of years ago, I heard that Mr L had died of cancer in Holland, but thankfully I had stopped lending him fivers long before he upped sticks and moved back. I sort of miss him, but I sure as hell do not miss his music.