The days of the Denims were numbered as the mid-sixties moved the pop world further and further away from rock 'n' roll. Gigs were hard to find, and the various eccentricities of the individuals in the band which had before seemed so much fun now served as fuel for infighting. All but Mike wanted to update the material just a bit, but his point blank refusal to do anythng but a straight rock 'n' roll set meant that meetings to discuss changes of even the most minor kind had to be held without his knowledge. Inevitably, he found out about them and it was usually Dave Dutton who took the brunt of his fury. He usually got his way in the end - it wasn't worth the total destruction of their long friendship for Dave to argue with him to any serious degree. In the meantime, some of the musicians began to go absurdly astray.

One in particular who is remembered with affection is David Watkins, then known as "Daisy" or the "Rockin' Wok". He wasn't very attractive, physically, as a teenager in fact he was rather fat, and with all the other handsome musicians around for the girls to choose, Daisy found himself left on the shelf night after night. Eventually, perhaps out of despair or hope, he began a pen-pal relationship with an American girl, which seemed to take his spirits up a little. He must have expected never to meet this young lady, because he wasn't corresponding under his own name - he just didn't have the confidence. In-stead, he used the name of a top pop star of the time- Hank Marvin. He even sent a picture of the hand- some, bespectacled guitarist to keep her interest high. Whether it was his writing style, or the picture which clinched it, he one day received a letter from the girl, saying that she was coming over to England to see him and who knows what else? The day the letter arrived, Dave and Mike saw him climbing onto a bus as if in a dream.

They called out to him to ask him where he was going, but he didn't seem to hear, so lost was he in the enormity of his news. He paid his fare but then forgot to get off at his stop in Canton. Eventually the bus come to the end of its journey miles away, in Blackwood, and the bus conductor tapped him on the shoulder. "Are we in Canton already?" asked Dave. When he discovered his mistake, he decided to walk home, rather than catch a returning bus. He set off. Two days later he arrived back in Canton, still in his dreamworld, and unaware that his mother had called the police and that Dave and Mike had been out in the van scouring the streets for him. It's a mystery to this day where he actually went and probably one that's best left unsolved. The great day of the girl's arrival dawned. Daisy made himself as presentable as he could, with Dave and Mike's help, and armed with a few witty lines from them, he went to pick her up at London Airport. Imagine the poor girl's thoughts as she clambered down off a plane from New York after an exhausting six-hour flight to be greeted not, as she had been expecting, by the dishy (probably millionaire) Hank plus limousine waiting to whisk her off to some luxurious London apartment, but the fat, spotty Daisy Watkins complete with garishly painted van to cart her off to a suburb of Cardiff.

Her first words to Daisy were "I can't believe it Hank - you've changed so!" to which Daisy replied, "I've got a confession to make, actually - I'm not Hank Marvin but I 'm the next best thing!" Before she could turn around to climb back on the plane, Daisy launched himself into a sales speil about his wonderful band the Denims, who, he assured her, would be hitting the big time any day. In the event, the girl went back to Cardiff with him and became something of a fixture on the Denims' scene until she and Daisy married, returned to the States together and lived happily ever after - or something like that. Last heard of a few years ago, Daisy had left his home in the US with a bag of laundry to take to the local Washeteria where he had met a young girl and promptly disappeared, this time for good. With internal problems like those of Daisy's, holding the Denims together through thick and thin became more and more difficult. In the end it was Johnny Blain, the original entrepreneur who had launched the Ely Race course Youth club, who managed the event which was to spell the end for the boys as a unit. Johnny had moved on and up from his youthclub promoting days into the Victoria Ballroom, where he organised regular audition nights for rising stars.

On this fateful night he booked the Denims to back a young girl singer called Patti Flynn. Dave Edmunds, who was shortly to hit the fame button with Love Sculpture and "Sabre Dance", had also passed the audition and was scheduled to appear on the same bill. The gig, however, was a disaster. Patti Flynn was horrified to discover that a nasty rock 'n' roll band were to back her decidedly cabaret-style set and the boys them- selves realised how pitifully inadequate their equipment was for the Victoria Ballroom.. More had been promised to them, but it didn't materialise. They got drunk, and the set was a shambles. Patti ran from the stage in tears after three false starts to a song they hadn't even learned. That night, the boys staggered home and resolved never to work again in anything but a pure rock 'n' roll situation - it just wasn't worth it to their pride to be reduced to a cabaret backing band for the sake of a few pence.

In fact, they never played together again. The next few years passed fairly uneventfully for Michael, who tried without too much success to organise another rock 'n' roll outfit - but it was hard to persuade other young musicians that they would be doing anything other than wasting their time playing music that no one outside the Welsh valleys wanted to hear. Both he and Dave were trying without spectacular suc-cess to settle down a little and impress their future wives and in-laws that they weren't the total wastrels that was the generally held belief. One day they even went as far as to organise a grand barbeque, to which both girlfriends and parents were confidently invited. You can't change quite that quickly, however, and although the great day began with undoubtedly good intentions, it also began with two bottles apiece of the favourite VP wine. This was unfortunate, because if they hadn't been quite so sozzled by lunchtime, they would have noticed as they built the fire ever higher that it was actually pouring with rain.

This would have been their chance to call everyone and bow gracefully out. These boys weren't to be so easily deterred, however. Fire-lighting time came and went, along with about four boxes of matches and several singed fingers. "Mike, the fire doesn't seem to want to light," came Dave's voice through the wind and the wine. "I've got a great idea," came the reply from the enthusiastically drunk Mike. "Let's throw a couple of gallons of petrol on it - that's bound to work." "Great idea!" Together, they lurched to the van and siphoned out several gallons of petrol- and then some more for luck, which was all duly hurled firewards. Con-gratulating themselves on their genius, they approached the fire, Mike holding a burning match Minutes later, they dazedly scraped themselves off the wall where the huge explosion had thrown them and stood, a sorry, singed sight, gazing at their fire-building efforts which were now completely ruined - the few remaining twigs which had not been thrown upwards by the explosion were already burning themselves out in the drizzle. Dave looked at Mike, his beautiful blond hair and eyebrows blackened and singed by the flames, and said, "What's gone wrong?". It was at this point that the families arrived on the scene, and it was Dave again who almost saved the day with some kind of polite explanation which seemed to satisfy the disapproving mob and an offer to go and collect some more wood to start again.

The last thing Dave remembers, he was sitting on a large log which Mike was drunkenly sawing, saying, "We're going to be here all night," and Mike was replying tetchily, "Well, jump up and down a bit then to see if it will break while I saw," when suddenly he was grabbed by several pairs of arms, and hauled off the log. Appar-ently, or so he was told afterwards, he was sitting on a fallen tree which was actually hanging out over a cliff-edge. Dave believes that this was the last time either of their prospevtive in-laws tried to take them seriously. Notwithstanding all his escapades, however, Mike fin-ally captured his bride and took her up the aisle of St David's Church in Ely where so much of his childhood had been spent aping rock 'n' roll stars. On this day, October 7th 1967, when both Mike and Carole were nine-teen years old, they left their respective families to get up a home for themselves in what must rate as the most unusual accommodations for newly-weds ever conceived of. Discovered by Mike, it was the top floor of a formerly grand office block now condemned for demolition, right in the centre of Cardiff. It was in Westgate Street and if you go down there today you'll find little evidence of its former glory. Its a fairly short street, backing onto the Welsh Rugby Football Ground. Its highlights are Cardiff Fire Station and a beautiful new office building for the Department of Health & Social Secrutiy.

It's the sort of street where Saturday shoppers may return to find their cars either towed away by enthusiastic traffic cops or flattened by one of the many buses careering towards the nearby bus station. In 1967 it was one of the last few remaining streets in the centre of Cardiff to have avoided the ambitious attention of the town planners, although it no longer held the grandeur of its thirties beginnings, when the office block inhabited by the Barratt couple would have been the focal point of Cardiff white -collar respectability, with influential lawyers and accountants entertaining mayors and businessmen alike. Mike and Carole did the best they could with the top floor, protecting themselves from their slightly squalid surrounding with the help of an ever-increasing number of bolts on the front door. Westgate Street was known in those days as a favourite haunt for prostitutes and other unsavoury characters, who converged on a club in the road called Les Croupiers - "Les" as in Les Dawson, as Mike said it. He always expressed strong disapproval of the club and was more than a little wary of its clientele.

The setting was straight out of an Orson Welles film. Visitors to the Barratts over the next few years would wend their way down the noisy street, avoiding the more unsalubrious characters, and bang loudly on the large double doors of the block, invariably knocking bits of plaster and paint down as they did so. A few shouts through the letter box and a long pause would bring either Mike or Carole down through the shadows to lead them up the creaking stairs, or, on the rare occasions where it was in use, into the clanging, juddering lift. The first floor was used during the day by Johnny Blain, who had given up all ideas for the time being of becoming Cardiffs answer to Harvey Goldsmith and used one empty room with a small gas ring on the floor as a highly dubious model agency where young girls would be persuaded through glamorous advertising to come and peel off their clothing for the sake of some higher art. Strange sounds emanated from the second floor, where an Ely drummer from the old days called Ken Collier who ran a small coin-selling business together with Billy Rowland, a guitarist who may rightly lay claim to have taught every South Wales rocker musician the other two chords. On the third floor was the Barratt flat, safely locked against prying eyes. This must have been the beginning of a lonely period for young Carole, who rarely accompanied her husband to the pub as her more equality-minded contemporaries might have insisted upon.

Mike was very possessive about Carole. But on some occasions Mike would give Carole a "night out", when he drove Paul round the local social clubs to drum up work for the band. When they'd arrive outside a club Mike would ostentatiously turn on Radio Luxembourg, roll up the windows and lock the car, leaving Carole inside while he and Paul world go in to bend the ear of the social secretary, and perhaps oil his throat with a couple of drinks while persuading him to book the band. A great night out. It wasn't until 1968 that Michael eventually got another band together, playing his favourite music around the working men's clubs around Cardiff. Malcolm Clint, a founder member of this new outfit imaginatively titled The Rebels, remembers the first time he saw Mike, in '68 in an upstairs room of a pub called The Vic which was round the corner from the Victoria Ballroom in Canton. Malcolm, slightly older than Mike, had been trying with out much success to put a rock and roll band together for years, and he'd encountered Mike briefly a few years earlier when he played a few gigs with the Denims. Mike was standing in the middle of the empty pub room, playing a guitar and singing into the guts of a tape recorder microphone which was taped to a birdcage stand. With him was another guitarist, Alan Langford, who was an Australian friend of Michael's without too much feel for rock ‘n' roll. The drummer was called Brian "Slapbeat" Williams and Malcolm managed to pull in Stephen Pryor on bass.

Malcolm was allowed to join the outfit mainly, he believes, because he had a good microphone, a speaker and a van which completed the picture. Alan Langford soon bowed out and was replaced by Mike Bibby, an out and out rock 'n' roller who used to play guitar with a screwdriver sticking out of his top pocket in case anything went wrong. Mike was a fabulous acrobat, but not so hot on musicianship. His lie-on-your- back-and- wave-your-legs-in-the-air approach to playing guitar solos often marred his ability to change chords! In spite of this drawback, the Rebels went down well where ever they played and enjoyed a good year of the high life. Mike got himself a steady "day job" working for one of the many upholsterers in Bridgend. He started living his social life in an alcoholic haze again - when the band didn't have a gig on a Friday or Saturday night, he'd drive his car over to Brian Williams's house, park it up and go out on the town. Later that night, in a legless condition, the boys would drive him back to his flat in Westgate street, reminding him to pick his car up from Brian's house the next day. Minutes after our hero arrived home, the police would get a frantic call, "Someone's stolen my car!" Apparently he would go in, get undressed, and then, as was his habit in that shady area, he'd look out of his window to check that his car was still there. Of course, invariably on a Saturday night, it wasn't, but Mike's brain was in too addled a condition to remember exactly where it was.

Apparently the first time the police knocked on Brian's door he took it in good spirits, as did Mike when the inevitable ragging began the next time they met. But the fourth or fifth time - he ceased to see the joke. Mike Barratt wasn't a bad guitarist, but it hampered his movement. For several months after the formation of the Rebels, the musicians tried without too much success to get him to abandon the guitar and behave as a proper front man. When he eventually did this, the set improved enormously as those famous legs began to swing and sway through countless Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Ri-chard numbers. When he invested in a second hand P A system, his voice started coming through loud and clear too and the band started picking up a lot of work around Cardiff.

Who knows how long the Rebels would have continued playing the same songs at the same gigs if Paul Barrett hadn't come along, early in 1969. When the rock ‘n' roll boom had played out its last echo during the mid-sixties Paul had gone through one dead end job after another, from nightwatchman to landscape gardener until finally he invested a small part of his famous record collection in a second hand rock 'n' roll record shop called The House of Wax. Here he was happy, working all day long with his favourite music and actually earning a respectable living out of it at the same time. He organised the occasional one-off gig to keep the wolf from the attic window and to keep his name well to the forefront of the Cardiff rock 'n' roll scene. It was Malcolm who approached Paul to come and see Mike Barratt at work, but Paul was dubious at first and took some persuading. For the man who had managed the Backbeats for so many years, Mike Barratt was just a kid who had got up on stage with them and hero- worshipped the likes of Rockin' Louie. He felt it was hardly worth considering investing his time in one so young, who had imitated, rather than instigated, the Cardiff rock 'n' roll era. A fifties rock ‘n' roller is some-thing of a snob - he knows he was there when it all happened, and he's pretty proud of that fact. To him it's not so much a means of living, more a way of life.

Paul went go see the Rebels, in the end. It was at the Social Club of the Public Works Department in Grange town. What he saw was a young, fresh, good-looking (if only he'd grow his hair a bit longer to cover up his ears) and undoubtedly dedicated rock 'n' roll singer. He didn't think so much of the backing band - the bass player and the drummer had taken to wearing black polo-neck sweaters, and the bass player sat throughout the set on a stool, so that together they looked like a poor version of the Pedd-lars. It was all right for the social clubs and the working men's clubs but Paul knew that if Mike was ever to break that mould, they'd have to be replaced. He saw Mike after the gig that same night, and offered to manage him -with a few conditioqs. First: change your name. Second: change the band, and last, Paul wanted Mike to wear proper rock 'n' roll clothes for the new show they would put together between them. Mike agreed, and Shakin' Stevens and the Sunsets were born. It was January 1969.nThe new name was Mike's idea. As a young kid playing on the streeets of Ely, he'd become involved with a local character called Stephen V anderwalker. Only a little older than Mike, he wasn't destined for much in life-during their early teens Steve, Mike and Dave Dutton had been on a couple of camping trips together, but in later years Steven was to become the local road-sweeper. Steve had one major fantasy - that he could become a famous rock 'n' roll star.

He'd pick up his road-sweeping broom and point it at the local kids, saying, "I'm a rock 'n' roll star, my name's Shakin' Stevens and this is my band"- gesturing towards his dustbin- "The Sunsets!" He would then frantically strum his broom, yelling the lyrics of some well known rock 'n' roll ditty as he disappeared down the street. This caught the young Barratt's imagin-ation, so that when Paul suggested he think of a name for himself and the new band, he didn't hesitate. "I want it to be Shakin' Stevens and the Sunsets," he said, perhaps hoping to fulfil Stephen V anderwalker' s dream for him. It was just right, of course the very name suggested a front man, and Shaky, as he henceforth insisted he be called at all times, wanted there to be no mistaking the front man of this outfit. In later years it was discovered that an easy way to goad him was to call him Mike. On one very high-spirited occasion the following year - after their very first Radio One interview, one of the Sunsets broke that cardinal rule and almost caused hysteria. Shaky punched the side of the van - leaving a sizeable dent - and screamed, "Don't you ever call me that again! My name's Shakin' Stevens - only my family call me Mike-geddit!!" Everyone got the message, loud and clear.

In the early days Shaky had some nice characteristics. He could be very charming, and had a winning smile. He wanted instant success, but was very naive about how to get it. He was also naive about anything outside his own frame of reference - that is to say, his home life, and his show. Politics didn't interest him at all, which was a pity, for the two most solid memebers of the Sunsets were actively left-wing - Paul Barrett was and still is a card carrying communist - and much of the conversation centred around the state of the world. The group appeared at a number of Communist Party benefits over the years, although Shaky may have been unaware of the significance of this - if it helped his career and if there could be a guaranteed large audience to play to, he'd do it. In later years, conversations which centred around politics rather than his own favourite subject - Shakin' Stevens- actually annoyed him. He would sit in the centre of some heated discussion about starving children in Ethiopia and start to look down at his hands. Then he would sigh, long, loud and heavy. After one or two of these, Paul, ever the diplomatic manager, would say briskly, "Well, enough of this - Shaky, let's go over the numbers that we're doing in tomorrow night's show." Immediately Shaky would look up and smile, his charm regained.

The relationship between Paul and Shaky was a good one, despite the age difference and the enormous intel-lectual gap. They could communicate. Paul did his best to help the undoubtedly talented although unbelievably nerve-ridden boy relax on stage. He taught him how to stand - when he first saw him, Shaky stood nervously. He moved enough to please the amateur-oriented social club audiences, but Paul wanted more from him - he knew Shaky could provide it. The main problem was to keep him away from the demon drink, which he turned to in an effort to calm his pre-show nerves. Malcolm Clint recalls that Shaky had to drink to go on stage even when it was only a rehersal, although as one of the many people who had faith in Shaky's talent, he could never understand why. Then there was the show itself. Paul was no expert, but he had enough experience from his Backbeats days to know that a show needs a beginning, a middle and an end. He was also astute enough to know that if they were going to be playing in some non-rock and roll oriented venues-like colleges - they were going to need some kind of gimmick to get people looking at the stage before the star arrived. He dressed the band simply, but for 1969, spectacularly. All wore black skin-tight trousers, white shirts, black ties and black shoes. On top came startling red semi-drap~ jackets with black silk cuffs and lapels.

For Shaky there was a pale blue drape, also with black silk cuffs and lapels. It was a change from his previous stage outfit - a suit so thin that when the light shone you could almost see through it. Paul reckoned it might have been the sort of suit Bobby Vee would have worn in 1961 if he had slept in it for a few days! The new suit did a lot for Shaky's new persona and stage confidence, although Paul had to go one step further in the early days, which attracted some strange press comment. He actually went on stage for the first fifteen minutes. The main purpose was to introduce the band, but there were times when Shaky's nerves were so bad that Paul had to mime into a dead microphone for the first few numbers, until Shaky felt he could manage on his own. Of course, when pressed, Paul admits to having enjoyed those few minutes up on stage, for whatever reason. "I guess I wanted Shaky to achieve something I really wanted for myself, but knew nevertheless that I couldn't do - I was a rotten singer, and I knew it." So Shaky was Paul's alter-ego.

The show was imaginative. Before anyone arrived on-stage, there was a conversation point for the audience in the shape of a huge clock, set above the drum kit. Then the band - with Paul - arrived, and the guitarist Stephen Percy would start to playa Jimmy Hendrix number like "Hey Joe". Hardly before a few recognisable chords had reached the ears of a wondering audience - don't forget these guys were all in bright red drapes - Paul would shout "Hold it, man -let's take the clock back to when it was real good!" Whereupon Stephen would launch into "What Do You Want If You Don't Want Money" and Paul would again stop him, crying, "No, no! I mean really back - back to the dawn of rock 'n' roll - 1957 -"The Train Kept A Rollin"! and immediately the band would storm into the famous Johnny Burnette number, with Shaky leaping onstage to begin the vocals, and the show. Sometime during the long hot summer of '69 Paul received an excited phone call from an old friend, Russ Allsop. "Swallow your principles and get hold of a copy of Melody Maker this week," Russ told him. Apparently he had spotted an advertisement in the back pages famous as the hiding place for unemployed musicians from a pub in London's Southhall, called the Northcote Arms. The pub was managed by a rock ‘n' roll fanatic called Harry Holland, who organised weekly rock 'n' roll nights in his back room, and who now wanted to cast his net as wide as possible through the revered columns of the MM, for provincial rock 'n' roll bands. Paul wasted no time in ringing him, and together they set a date for a gig, over the following month.

The actual date for the band's first foray into the London scene was July 31st co-incidentally the same date as the Rolling Stones were scheduled to play live in Hyde Park, one of the few memorable "free" concerts in Hyde Park which were held through that love and peace era. Paul has never been a man to waste an opportunity, and now saw a way to get the band up to London free - and perhaps even make a few extra pence to cover their expenses. The band trans-port at the time was two private cars - their equipment would have fit comfortably into a couple of carrier bags, but for this momentous London gig, Paul decided to hire a coach. "What the hell do we suddenly need a coach for?" the band demanded to know, but Paul smiled and said, "Wait and see:". The next edition of the local newspaper carried an advertisement which read something along the lines of "Fancy seeing the Rolling Stones at their forth-coming Hyde Park gig? Just purchase a ticket from us and we will take you there in the comfort of our luxury coach." Soon, the coach was filled, and so Shakin' Stevens and the Sunsets made it up to London at a small profit.

As they dropped their cargo of Welsh hippies off at Hyde Park, Paul noticed Steve Winwood from Traffic, complete with large dog and afghan coat. Handing him a leaflet for the rock 'n' roll gig in Southhall that night, Paul remarked, "I think you need this more than I do." Steve didn't seem too impressed - he walked away, dropping the leaflet on the pavement as he went. And so, together with just a few rocker friends whom he assumed would make up the majority of their audience that night, Shakin' Stevens and the Sunset continued to Southall. When they arrived, a shock was in store for all of them. They had all been aware of the presence of an underground rock 'n' roll movement, which had continued throughout the trials of the sixties - armchair rockers and people who played rock 'n' roll in the privacy of their living room when the neighbours weren't around to find out, but none of them could have dreamt the reception which would be waiting for them at the Northcote Arms - teds, grils in big skirts, guys in leather jackets and quiffed hair. The little room at the back of the pub was packed. Shakin' Stevens and the Sunsets were a big hit.

Their drape suits were unique among rock 'n' roll bands and much appreciated by the hardened rockers - and they blew a storm. After the gig they were approached by a London rocker called Trevor Hawkins, or Trevor "The Hawk" as he liked to be known, asking if he could join them on piano whenever they played a gig which had one in situ. Paul agreed, and Trevor turned out to be a valuable addition to the band, on the occasions when they played a well equipped venue! Other groups appearing regularly at the pub were the Wild Angels, who had come out of a rocker hangout called the Ace Cafe during the late sixties, and were a kind of Eddie Cochran- Gene Vincent combination who had already made something of a name for themselves playing on the Bill Haley tour of '68. Another of these bands, about to make a name for themselves, were Good Earth, a skiffle group who soon changed their name to Mungo Jerry and had many hits during the seventies, including the "In The Summertime", still a favourite with Radio One DJ's. The Hellraisers with Graham Fenton (now with Matchbox) and Lee Tracy and the Tributes were also regulars.

Back in Cardiff, the band returned with renewed vigour to the rocker scene, although Paul knew that now more than ever he'd have to get tough with the "Peddlars" Brian Williams and Stephen Pryor, who were holding Shaky back more than ever. Things came to a head during the autumn after they had played a social club one windy Saturday night. Stephen Pryor had hired a van for the gig, which had a piece of mesh between the driver and the back - perhaps for carring wild dogs. He and Brian Williams sat up in the front, insisting that Shaky, Paul and the new guitarist Carl " The Curse" Petersen, shared a space at the back together with the equipment (such as it was). That night, the valued bingo prize had mysteriously disappeared from the Social Club office - which had, strangely enough, adjoined the make-shift dressing room. In fact, it was Shaky who had first laid hands on the prize - a beautiful basket of fruit and vegetables grown in some local worthy's back garden. But he was not the selfish type, and this fruit was being lavishly shared out in the back of the van on the way home. It was, actually, making a bit of a mess. When Paul, Carl and Shaky had sated themselves with as much as they could stuff down, they started enthusiastically strewing it - or throwing it - around the small enclosure. Banana skins, grape pits and pieces of rather squelchy orange peel someow found their way through the mesh. Brian and Stephen never played in the Sunsets again.

Paul was relieved - it saved him the job of sacking them outright, and it meant that at last he could move his old friend Rockin' Louie into the drum seat. Since the Back-beats days, Louie had been in a few rock 'n' roll bands -like Paul, he was totally dedicated to the music and the life-style, and so wasn't too unhappy about taking the back seat behind this new young upstart - the same one who had approached so many years earlier to ask him how he did it, when he was the rather notorious main-man of the Backbeats. There was just one more addition to make to the Sunsets after that, and he arrived soon after - Duane the Fink, known to the Department of Employment as Paul Dolan. Duane had been the rhuthm guitarist with a band called the Skyliners, a rock 'n' roll band ofPenarth who could count themselves as the friends, associates and firm rivals of the Backbeats in the good old days. More recently he'd had an affair with a young girl who had left him, and so to recover he'd tem-proarily joined the RAF as a bandsman, where he was not a happy man.

When approached by Paul to come and join the Sunsets, having left the RAF, he was cajoled into becoming a rock 'n' roll horn player. His ability as a rock 'n' roll saxophonist was somewhat strained by the de-mands put upon him, but he was a good all-round musician; and available. He loved rock 'n' roll, and that was the main thing to Paul at the time. It was early November when John Lennon appeared at a Peace Festival in Toronto, wearing a white drape suit and singing a couple of rock 'n' roll numbers. It reached the ears of the rock fans in England as something of a joke - John Lennon had never before expressed a love for their music. Paul Barrett seized his chance and wrote a letter to the assembled music press which went thus:We understand John Lennon wants to join a '56 type rock 'n' roll outfit. Well, if he's still got the white drape suit he wore in Canada and if he knows all the words to "At The Hop" then we'll give the kid a break. Rock on-
Shakin' Stevens and the Sunsets.

The press reaction was immediate, and even the nationals had fun trying to get a comment from the Great Man on his job offer. One headline read "Situation Vacant for John Lennon". The publicity was good for the band, be-cause just a few weeks later Paul got a phone call from a local agency. They had just spoken to the Rolling Stones office in London, who wanted to book Shakin' Stevens and the sunsets for their Christmas show at the Seville Theatre! Paul listened to the offer from the agency with-out interest. "Go Away" he told them, and put the phone down. He wasn't going to deal with people who had had nothing but disdain for the band previously. Paul could organise his own deals. It took a bit of effort, but he found the right phone number and was soon arranging the deal for himself. It was all set.

During the late sixties the Seville Theatre was a fairly major venue around London. Every Sunday night they organised rock concerts, and the Stones was to be their largest event of the year. The Stones were known - and still are known - for eccentricity in their choice of support band, and it's not too crazy to suppose that they had been attracted to Shakin' Stevens and the Sunsets by thier sheer cheek. Whatever the reason, the band was booked to play two shows at the Seville Theatre on December 14th -it was their first truly professional booking. The Sunsets' line-up for the Stones show on the 14th was Rockin' Louie on drums, Trevor "The Hawk" on piano, Stephen Percy on bass guitar, Duane the Fink on Sax, Carl Petersen on guitar and - of course - resplendent in his newly cleaned drape jacket, Shakin' Stevens.

Snippets from a couple of mixed reviews read as follows:

I suppose we must expect a few surprises when Jagger is involved and we certainly had one with the opening act, Shakin' Stevens and the Sunsets. They were greeted with gasps of incredulity when the curtains drew back to reveal a rock group looking as if they had stepped straight from the local Palais circa 1958! Drape, tartan jackets (Paul's), string ties, sleeked black hair, thick crepe soled shoes...they were all there! I had to look twice to believe my eyes but to be fair, they far from disappointed my ears with some real old rock ‘n' roll classics.

John Wells.

And this one:

The only unfortunate phase of the event was the supporitng bill, which included a rock ‘n' roll band called Shakin' Stevens and the Sunsets, a magician with a lengthy and obviously fixed act and Mighty Baby. We could have done without all three - admirably. Shakin' Stevens blasted everybody into slumber with delapidated versions of many rock ‘n' roll standards served in Wimpy Bar fashion. Nobody knows who Shakin' Stevens was but nobody shook uncontrollably. In fact, one member of the group did not sing, did not jive and did not play; he announced in a mumble that when the lights go out things begin to roll. Apparently they had already rocked.

Lon Goddard.

Why two such opposing reviews, you may well ask. The answer is simple - Goddard attended the first show, before the dressing room wine arrived. By the time John Wells turned up, along with London's beautiful people, for the second show, Shakin' Stevens and the Sunsets had helped themselves liberally to the Stones' hospitality and were much more prepared to fill the theatre with a little rockin' music. For them, the whole experience had been just a little traumatic - Shaky had never played in anything larger than a dance hall, and had certainly never had to face anything but the most ardent rocker fans in his own home territory. Now suddenly here he was, thrust into the world of millionaire pop stars, and beautiful people - how were they going to take his music? Paul went on stage with Shaky for both sets but even his presence didn't help much.

Nerves attacked all of them that night, and their pitiful equipment didn't help cover anything up. In fact Rockin' Louie had to borrow Charlie Watts' drum sticks, and when he found that a snare drum stand was missing from his kit he used an upturned fire bucket in its place. It took a .lot of guts for that small club band to jump into the Seville Theatre on the back of the greatest rock band in the world, though, and Shaky, Paul and Louie knew they had to see it through. There were a thousand other bands who would have taken their place if they chickened out - like the Wild Angels, to name but one, who actually turned up at the Seville Theatre complete with a van load of equipment earlier in the day with some story about Shakin' Stevens and the Sunsets breaking down on the motorway and sending the Angels in their place. Unfortunately for them, Shakin' Stevens and the Sunsets had sped up the motorway just hours before them and were already well ensconsed in the theatre. It was a nice try, though.