From Robyn on Patreon in 2024
ewind your memory far enough, and it seems like fiction. I've chronicled my early teens in my forthcoming memoir, 1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left, and looking through the book now, it reads as if I made the whole story up. But no, it happened: I actually went to that strange boarding school and lived among all those exaggerated people.

My school friend Martz [Martin Mayer] was one of the more straightforward inmates of G House, Winchester College. He was and is a kindly fellow, sandy-haired and of medium height; a moderate in many ways and a firm believer in the rational order of things. But not so firm a believer that he can't laugh at it all. Martz anchored me sometimes and helped me fly at others. We both loved the Beatles and, being innately musical, it was he who first showed me how to play their songs on the guitar. It was an amazing feeling to be able to sing "Hey, Bungalow Bill, what did you kill, Bungalow Bill?" in the sweaty depths of a fetid locker room while we were supposed to be upstairs studying Wentworth's History of Adverbs or some such dreary tome.

Playing guitar with Martz - well, it was only a short time before we began to write our own songs. In the summer of 1970, towards the end of our school days, we birthed our firstborn song, appropriately entitled "Baby".

It was written on a balmy evening, and the outside world was already eating into the arcane glasshouse of Winchester College. Soon, we would be free, for what it was worth. When we finished the song, we played it over and over: it was simple and easy to sing and sounded already like an old song that had been around for years. Perhaps it had. We both enjoyed the composing process, so the following evening, I started one called "1 - 2 - 3 - 4: It Must Be Fun Living in Basingstoke", but Martz couldn't make it scan, so we abandoned it.

In the glam and funky denim era of early 1970s London, he and I played together as an acoustic duo called Bandage & Little Queasy. We were also in a band known variously as The Symptoms, The Plums, or Patchwork Quilt, depending on which band member booked the gig. Our joint musical activity petered out mid-decade when Martz settled wisely into a legal career, and I headed up to Cambridge to recruit what eventually became the Soft Boys.

He and I recorded a collection of our songs in early 1974 in a tiny studio in High Holborn, London. He was on guitar and bass, while I played guitar and occasional harmonica. This was my first time in a recording studio.
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Lyrics are from the first known full performance in August 2021. When the 1974 demo was released in 2024 the words to that are almost the same, except the 2021 live version has an extra verse!