This is the last of my old blogs re-posted, I hope you enjoyed them.
Another funny story from those Rockfield days with “Lunch with the President” was the night Gus and I really fancied a drink, but all the pubs and off licenses were closed.
At Rockfield there were two studios, the ‘Quadrangle’ and ‘the coachouse’. We moved between the two as different artists came and went. On this occasion ‘Big Country’ was in the coachouse and we were in the Quadrangle. Each studio area was quite separate having its own residential section and kitchen. So we wanted a little drink, and it was soon decided that ‘Big Country’ being signed to a major label was the richer band between us, and therefore the obvious target for thievery. We (not including Gus of course) dressed in black and made our way over to the ‘Big Country’ area of Rockfield. We were giggling like little kids at this covert operation and that how we all looked like weekend versions SAS soldiers. This seemed to break up the tracking and seemed like a good idea at the time.
When we reached the kitchen we found next to nothing there, not big boozers then, big country that is! ‘I’ve got something’ squealed my bass player, it turned out to be a half full giant bottle of brandy, luckily Gus’s tipple, then we all scuttled back to our studio.
Silly adventure you may think, but it broke things up a bit and was funny at the time.
Gus was pleased we had found Brandy and tucked in right away, followed by me and David our engineer. In quite a short time we got quite pissed. David was worse of all, standing on his chair and saying “I want to be a tree” over and over again. We all went to bed. The next day we all had horrible hangovers and in fact Dave was too sick to work. As Gus and I were holding our heads, comparing how many times we had to sit on the toilet through the night, the chef pop her head around the door and said “Has anyone seen my old cooking Brandy?” We laughed nervously and Gus gave me one of those looks, then we cancelled the days session.
Gus Dudgeon was my mentor and set me off on the road to being a producer, I owe him my career.
Sadly, Gus and his wife Sheila died in a nasty car crash at Christmas 2002 and I miss them both very much.
