You have to have an image. And a cool image at that.

I would love to take all the credit for the original image portrayed by the original line-up of The Sumerian Kynges, but as I am trying to be honest here, I cannot and will not.

Rob is to blame.

Now, I use the word ‘blame’ here not in a derogatory way. Because I personally believe that it was a good look. A cool look.

A cool image.

I think, again in all honesty, that it was simply ahead of its time.

The girls of Southcross Road School, class of 63, were simply not ready for Glam Rock.

Glam Rock and cheese.

It wasn’t a great combination.

We had to get changed into our stage clothes in the boys’ toilets. This wasn’t a big deal at the time, or later. Bands on the way up always have to get changed in the gents’ at gigs, until they are big enough to play bigger gigs. Gigs that come with changing rooms. And with changing rooms come groupies and champagne and riders on contracts and all the fun of the fair. And we knew this. Deep in our rock ’n’ roll hearts we knew it. That first performance, we were ‘paying our dues’. That’s what musicians did on the way up. And we knew it.

And so we got changed in the bog.

I recall, oh so well, what a struggle it was to get my lipstick on. Rob kept nudging my arm and going on and on about a ‘pop-cheese fusion’ and how we were ‘breaking through preconceived boundaries and crossing textual horizons’. That we were in a ‘get-some-cheese’ situation.

Neil was having some doubt about his outfit. His mother, who was very big on the local ballroom dancing scene, had run it up on her sewing machine and there were a lot of sequins involved. More sequins than the rest of us put together. So that would be at least five sequins!

Neil was having some doubts about the twinkliness of these sequins. He’d always thought of himself as going on stage as a kind of Roy Orbison lookalike – black shirt and trews and big on the big black sunspecs.

‘It’s pink,’ said Neil. ‘It’s all in pink.’

And it was.

Mine was all in green. And, according to Captain Lynch, green was a colour much favoured by the Sumerian Kynge Georgius.

Gold would have made more sense, but my mum didn’t have any gold fabric. ‘Gold is for toffs,’ she informed me. But she did have plenty of green. Because my father had recently taken employment with a company that manufactured billiard tables and was always coming home with a duffle bag stuffed with green baize offcuts.

And billiard balls.

And walking with a strange stiff-legged gait caused by the introduction of billiard cues into his trousers.

Regarding trousers, the flared trouser was only then on the point of becoming fashionable and I like to think that in our way, upon that night, which was the twenty-seventh of June in the year of nineteen sixty-three, that we, The Sumerian Kynges, helped the flared trouser to enter the fashion consciousness of the nation.

And indeed helped the mullet haircut, which we also pioneered, to gain worldwide prominence and acceptance in the days to come.

Mind you, if I’d known then what I know now, I would never have gone on stage that night. Because (and I know, just know, that you are way ahead of me here) that performance, that night, played its part in hastening the oblivion that would eventually lead to me almost saving Mankind.

Shall I tell you how it happened?

No?

I’ll tell you anyway.

The school hall smelled of plimsolls.

In the days of which I write, all school halls smelled of plimsolls. Plimsolls and the armpits of the young. Not that I have a preoccupation with armpits, or with the smells thereof. Don’t get me wrong – I mentioned mine in an earlier chapter because they were smelly. I mention armpits again now only because the school hall smelled of them.

Nothing sinister. Nothing weird. Please don’t get me wrong.

The school hall also smelled of teenage girls. And that is a smell most men of the heterosexual persuasion… warm to, as it were.

The Sumerian Kynges were warming to that smell. Which wasn’t easy as we were waiting to go on stage in the school kitchen. We had glammed ourselves up in the boys’ bog and now we stood, shuffling nervously (but looking cool), scuffing our winged heels (I would describe those but I don’t have time) and cradling our instruments.

And warming to the smell of teenage girls.

Whilst having our nostrils assailed by the stench of rotten cabbage. Why all school kitchens always smelled of rotten cabbage is anyone’s guess. Our school cook, Mrs Simian, never even served us cabbage, rotten or otherwise.

But I digress.

Well, no I do not. I am setting the scene.

I set this scene because it is important to do so. I really do want you to know just what this was like. It is a long time ago now, but the memory remains fresh, whilst many others have long ago grown rotten.

Like cabbage.

The school kitchen was painted in cream gloss paint, which made the walls look like slabbed butter. The utensils were huge. And this is not due to the fact that we are smaller when young, so everything seems big. These were big utensils, seemingly borrowed – or stolen – from a giant’s castle. The utensils were huge and the pots, great aluminium jobbies in which the foodstuffs boiled and gurgled over flaming gas, were of similarly gargantuan proportions. You could have got a whole sheep into any one of those great aluminium jobbies. Or a pig. Or a horse. If you sawed the hoofs off.

And then there were the school plates. Thick white china. And you never saw one get chipped, or cracked, or broken. Even when you dropped them – accidentally, of course. As I so regularly did. Just to see, as it were. Just to see.

The plates rose in giddy stacks, in racks to the left of the butlers’ sinks. Fine old stoneware butlers’ sinks, where Mrs Simian and her harridan horde of dinner ladies (whom I, for one, felt absolutely certain constituted a coven of witches, if ever there was one) lathered up and dug in deep.

The forks were shabby, though.

But then forks always are. It takes great care and attention and dedication, too, to clean scrupulously between the tines. And I have to confess that I have, on numerous occasions over the years, had to send my fork back to the kitchen because it had been insufficiently lathered-up.

So yes, from the kitchen, the grim cream-glossed school kitchen.

Into the brightly lit hall.

That smelled of plimsolls and also of young women.

And no more mention of armpits.

The end-of-term school dance was a major event. The major event in the minds of many. These minds belonging in part, if not all, to fifth-year boys who were leaving school that month.

It would be the last opportunity to pull at school.

At a school dance where it was free admission. Unlike dances and discos to come. Naturally there were other major events – sports days, open evenings, exams. But curiously, I for one never had the faintest interest in any of these.

Into the brightly lit hall.

Brightly lit and brightly décored, too. Every year a theme was chosen by a committee formed of prefects. And therefore, in my humble opinion, hardly a representative committee. This sleek elite would sit about in their common room; oh yes, they had a common room, although only a small one, which doubled as the band room. But they would sit about on the Cameo Mason Celebrated Percussion Safe and choose the theme.

This year the theme was Space Travel.

Last year the theme had been Space Travel. As it had been the year before. I was informed that this year the prefects had actually chosen Women of the Orinoco Basin as the theme.

But it had ended up as Space Travel. As it always did.