five

Some Things Are Meant to Be

1970

Women’s libbers ruin the Miss World contest. Germaine Greer publishes The Female Eunuch. Anne Nightingale becomes the first women DJ on BBC Radio 1. Janis Joplin is dead. The Beatles formally announce they’ve split.

Because Fab was now Fab 208, the writers made regular trips to Luxembourg with a photographer to get stories on all the DJs and the wonderful life they were supposed to be having out there.

In truth, the guys were bored rigid most of the time as there were few clubs, few expats and basically not a lot to do. So when we turned up it always cheered them up. There was Tony Prince, Paul Burnett, Bob Stewart, Dave Christian and of course, David ‘Kid’ Jensen who had quietly turned himself into one of the most popular of the DJs with the listeners.

They worked out of studios in the Villa Louvigny, an ugly building complete with tower, surrounded by parkland on the edge of Luxembourg town and I can vividly recall my first visit there. As our car, driven by Tony Prince, drew up outside the so-familiar building (from the many photos of it I had seen over the years) I felt that awed, pit-of-the-stomach feeling again, a huge excitement to be here, at 208 at last. Once inside the studios on the second floor, sitting quietly listening to Tony do a show, thinking about the millions of listeners, I once more had that ‘what a great job this is’ feeling. Someone was paying me to live out all the dreams I ever had as a child.

I have been given a small transistor radio for my birthday. What you do is, you go to bed quite early unless it’s Dr Kildare night. Then you tune into medium wave 208 and spend the next couple of hours trying to keep the station in tune while you listen, enthralled, to those big, booming cheerful voices coming from Europe, introducing track after track of wondrous new music – Beatles! Stones! Acts from America – Roy Orbison, Elvis, Neil Sedaka, Ricky Nelson, The Everlys. 208 is quite the most glamorous thing ever.

The worst bits are the adverts. Sometimes you wonder if you can even put up with Horace Batchelor and finding out how to spell K E Y N S H A M, Bristol, one more time – but you do. And then just when Billy Fury comes on, the station fades and you want to throw the transistor across the room because you’ve missed most of it by the time the sound comes through again.

You have to listen out for mum coming upstairs and later on Veronica, Mrs Hill’s daughter, will come to bed and you definitely have to turn off the trannie or she’ll shout at you and rip the covers off your bed.

Because Radio Luxembourg listening was somehow illicit, fraught with danger, and hard to actually hear because of the crackling and hissing, it made it even more fantastic. It was like a secret world that I, and hundreds of thousands of other teenagers in the early ‘60s, shared.

Remember Radio 1 didn’t start until 1967, while the offshore pirate stations such as Caroline, which had started up in 1964, mostly had reception too poor for landlocked places like Oxfordshire. Also, they avoided broadcasting during the evening out of respect for 208. So throughout my early teens – if you had a trannie and you had a bed, you had 208 to transport you to a more exciting life, and, much of the time, that was all you had.

Alan Freeman, David Jacobs, Jimmy Young, Jimmy Savile, these were the original icons on our little radios – mostly pre-recording their shows from the London headquarters at 38 Hertford Street – not that we teens knew that at the time. Out in Luxembourg in the early ’70s, the next influx of boys often did DJ stints at the largest local nightclub to pass the time and earn a bit of extra money. They also quite often had formal lunches and receptions with visiting bigwigs and dignitaries from all over Europe.

It was at one such lunch on my first visit to Luxembourg, in April 1970, via the Luxy headquarters in Brussels, that I was seated next to Kid Jensen. It had been a good year or so since I’d seen him up at the office when he first arrived in London. We’d spoken on the phone a few times when I needed to interview him for a few words of copy, but he was still shy so we hardly exchanged more than a few words during the lunch.

However I did have the feeling that he liked me and I had had a couple of glasses of wine, so the devil took over towards the end of the meal and as he turned away from me to talk to someone else, I whipped his as-yet untouched dessert away and swapped it for my empty plate. When he turned back his face was a picture – all men love puddings.

‘Where’s my dessert?’

‘You ate it, Kid.’

‘I did?’

‘Yes – don’t you remember, you said how great it was!’

Soon I began laughing and returned his pud to him from where I’d put it under the table.

That broke the ice and I learnt a valuable lesson – a sense of humour helps in most situations. We spent the rest of my two days there together, to the slight disapproval not only of the Fab photographer who’d accompanied me and thought it unprofessional to cohort with the interviewees, but also of most of the other 208 DJs, with the exception of Tony Prince who encouraged us in our romance, so thank you Tony.

When my few days there were up, Kid drove me to the airport and I felt bereft when the plane took off. I guess I was in love – with an actual person, not a photo or an image on the TV – for the very first time. I got back to Avonmore Road, exhausted from hardly any sleep, and went to bed clutching the radio, with 208 on, of course. Some habits do die hard.

Trying to keep a romance going when he had to be there and I had to be in London was extremely difficult, however. Faxes hadn’t been invented, let alone computers, mobiles, Skype, tweets or anything remotely similar to all we have today. We had the post and we had landlines (but I still didn’t even have a phone of my own, only the landlady’s communal phone downstairs).

We did talk on the phone once or twice but somehow reverted to our shy personas and these talks were less than successful. It was months later that we met again – Kid came to the UK to cover the Isle of Wight Festival, which was revered as the UK’s answer to Woodstock and attracted some of the greatest names in music. This year Jimi Hendrix and The Doors were topping the bill. Betty decided I should go and cover the event.

I could hardly wait to see Kid again but when we did meet, in a large room in reception at our hotel, there was Kid, an assortment of radio hangers on, and a young blonde woman called Anne Challis who worked for Radio Luxembourg in London and whom I had met a few times before. Not only was she quite attractive, she was also sitting next to Kid and was sending distinct ‘he’s mine’ messages across the room, or at least that’s what I thought. While we waited for our rooms to be allocated, Kid stood up and came across to me. My heart started thudding. At last!

‘Hi! How are you doing, Judy?!’

‘Fine thanks, Kid – how are you?’

‘Yes, okay – I have a note here for you.’ With those few words he handed me a piece of paper, then returned to his seat. I opened the note but it wasn’t from him – it was from Tony Prince and was just two names – Kid and Judy – with an arrow and heart in between the two and Tony’s signature at the bottom. So Tony wanted our romance to continue – but did Kid? He wasn’t exactly paying me much attention. He’d walked back to sit next to Challis and didn’t seem to even glance my way. Once again my lack of confidence surfaced and instead of going across to him and showing him the little cartoon as I should have, I stayed put, stuck, in my chair. I had no idea what to do.

We were all shown to our rooms and to my horror when Kid went into his, Anne Challis followed. Devastated, I continued down to my room and cried. The next morning she stuck to him like a leech, he and I had no chance to say anything to each other, and those two days at the Isle of Wight were ruined.

I was broken-hearted, I guess. My GSOH had deserted me and I could think of no way through the toughened-glass wall that seemed to be between us. Mainly because I couldn’t understand what had gone wrong, and also because my Leo-ness prevented me, as it did so often, from swallowing my pride and just making the first move. I knew Kid wasn’t the sort to gloat and parade a new woman like that in front of me. Did he know what was in the note? Couldn’t he see how upset I was? I wasn’t to find out the answers until months later.

To ease the pain of seeing Kid around at the festival and not even being able to talk to him or hug him, I tried my first drug. Well actually that’s not true. I tried my first drug because I didn’t know what it was. The person who shared his joint with me was called Jim Morrison, lead singer with The Doors.

Attempting to be the professional that I was slowly becoming, despite my misery I carried on with trying to get interviews, and of course, watched as many acts as I could. The line up that year was quite fantastic with so many huge names from the world of music – apart from The Doors there were (among many others) Ten Years After, Emerson Lake and Palmer, Joni Mitchell and The Who, all of whom appeared on the Saturday, and Kris Kristofferson, Free, Donovan, the Moody Blues, Jethro Tull, Joan Baez, Leonard Cohen and Jimi Hendrix, all of whom appeared on the Sunday, the last night of the Festival.

But getting interviews wasn’t quite as easy at it should have been. For one thing, I had turned into a wimp. All the bravado which was now usually in place back at Fleet Street and surrounds had vanished because here were not bubblegum popstars dying to have you interview them so that you naturally felt superior and in control, but real musicians, actual American rock idols, huge, huge stars – people who attracted the likes of The Beast at the NME, The Times and Rolling Stone to interview them. The acts and the media here were real cool people, man, so all my life-long old feelings of inferiority returned and I felt so far not in control and wanting to get off that island now, a feeling reinforced by the sniffy attitude of most present to teen magazines. But I knew I had to return to the office with some stories.

I had a backstage pass – in those days backstage at a festival was some rough grass, a couple of tents, one with alcohol and sandwiches, another for the acts to get changed in, and a couple of tiny caravans for the major stars. Well maybe not quite that bad but you get the picture. It was all very basic and of course it always rained at these events as it still does today.

At the IoW it was rarely the case that PRs fixed interviews for you (not least because nobody knew where anybody else was), you just grabbed people and started asking questions – a method of interview somewhat hampered in my case by my timidity.

So my technique was to wander round this scruffy backstage area until I found someone I vaguely recognised, then muster up the courage to approach them, or, if my nerves got the better or me, to walk away and pretend I hadn’t seen them in the first place. All Saturday morning I had had very few sighting of the major stars as they didn’t really get going until past lunchtime. I was beginning to worry that I really would be going home with nothing when later I spied Morrison heading towards the refreshment tent on his own. My heart started racing not because I fancied him, but through my old companion, fear. And I did it anyway – hurried, as casually as was possible, over to him, lied about what magazine I was from and asked if he would chat. Sure, sure … it was hard to keep talking because he did have the most fantastic face, eyes, hair, body … he looked like a cross between a Greek god and Christ, but better looking and nicely clean-shaven.

Because the Fleet Street people I mixed with were firmly based in alcohol for kicks, not drugs, I had little experience of drugs of any sort or what they did to people. I had no idea of the physical effects or the brain effects and I had no idea what drugs of any sort looked like, smelt like, or how you took them. Hard to believe now, but true. The stories of rampant mass drug taking by all in the press, the music business, fashion, film and so on during these years are way off the mark. Yes, it happened, but of all the people I knew during these years very few did more than the occasional puff of hash.

Despite my ignorance, I did strongly get the feeling that Jim Morrison was off with the fairies. He was aware of me but in no way on the same planet.

It didn’t seem laid-back to take notes so we just talked, in the bar, as best we could between us – he was pleasant but monosyllabic in his fairy world and me also monosyllabic on planet fear trying hard to stay cool. As you may imagine the interview was about as productive as a chef in a famine, but at least I’d met him. I don’t recall any hangers on, managers, whatever, being there at all. Strange. He was a big star. But I guess he did his own thing.

Anyway, he offered me a roll up and I smoked it. I smoked twenty cigarettes a day at that point but found the taste of these little homemade ones quite disgusting.

Of course it contained weed but at the time I genuinely didn’t know. I also didn’t know that you were meant to share a joint so I smoked most of it myself while Jim Morrison, fairly politely in the circumstances, looked on. Eventually I put the stub in a nearby ashtray whereupon he rescued it and finished it off. He wandered off soon after and later was up on stage in front of the 500,000 crowd on Afton Down, me included. Another of those moments where I had to pinch myself. Surreal.

Less than a year later he was dead.

How did I feel after the joint? Well it dulled the pain I had been feeling but also addled my brain more than alcohol had ever done and made my mouth so dry I detested the sensation. Weed or any type of cannabis just doesn’t suit me and although I tried it once or twice more, I eventually decided I just was never going to be a bona fide pothead – and stuck with the Scotch and cokes and the wine.

The dubious effects of the joint wore off, and I was left feeling tired and strangely depressed. Because of my distracted state, I seemed to spend the whole weekend on my own although I knew I had gone there with a photographer and I knew several other people who had been on the same journey down there with me. Where they all were, I can’t say, nor whether or not they managed to get back to our hotel at night, nor how. Kid Jensen had apparently vanished into thin air. There were just thousands and thousands of strangers, all of whom seemed to laugh the whole time or dance or sit, smoking. Everyone having a good time, except me. That was the biggest crowd I ever felt lonely in, that’s for sure.

It was Saturday evening, with two more nights of the festival to go and no early finishes – at the IoW the music went on until morning. I was obsessed by trying to figure out where I would sleep, hoping that I would find some way back to the hotel. I have never been good at staying up all night and was often laughed at when I started clubbing with Julie Webb, when I would always be the one asleep in the corner of the Revolution – the mega hot club of the day – or wherever, at midnight. Our hotel was probably 2 to 3 miles from the festival site and I had naively assumed that there would be transport back to the hotel after the end of the concert each day, but had been told by a couple of people backstage that this was never going to happen.

No transport, nothing at all, no chance of a taxi – even if you could have called one he’d never find you in the midst of thousands of people.

Around 1 a.m., I decided to walk back – but of course there was no street lighting, and anyway I didn’t know the way. So I had to abandon this attempt, and was eventually forced to opt for a sleepless night under the stars (the ones in the sky, not any of the acts), wretchedly wondering where Kid was and how he and Anne Challis were getting on.

By the second night I couldn’t have cared less who was on the stage, and having managed to have a short chat with both Joni Mitchell and Donovan (chosen by me because they didn’t look too scary; I had used up all my bravado on Jim Morrison), had also given up on trying to find interviewees. By this time I had managed to muster the courage to shout at a few people and organise myself a lift back to the hotel, but that would only happen after Jimi Hendrix had been on. The concert was running later and later, and by the time he did appear it was well into the early hours, and he then set about playing a long, long set to an audience all of whom bar one seemed ecstatic. I was vaguely aware that he was up there on stage being brilliant. I can still remember the whining soaring adrenalin-boosting sound of his guitar, but, hardly able to keep my eyes open, I couldn’t wait for him to finish so I could go.

Next morning I went home as soon as I was able, and am probably the only living person who attended one of the historic Isle of Wight Festivals, saw both The Doors and Hendrix perform, had access all areas, and came home convinced that it had been one of the most miserable weekends of my life. Let’s put it this way – it was another thirty years before I ever went near another festival in the UK, and that was to see my own son Chris perform.

Eighteen days later, Jimi Hendrix was dead. And I didn’t see the Kid again for a few years by which time he was happily married with a dog and a baby, living near Sherwood Forest and working for Radio Trent.

But a few months later I did find out a bit more about what had gone wrong that weekend between the Kid and me. I had to interview Tony Prince on the phone and in the middle of the conversation he suddenly said, ‘Why did you blow Kid out that weekend at the Isle of Wight?’

Taken aback, I said, ‘What do you mean – I didn’t blow him out! He blew me out! He was with Anne Challis!’

‘Oh Judy you are so silly. Why do you think I wrote that note for him to give you? He couldn’t wait to see you. But he is shy. I thought you would read the note and all would be great.’

‘Well he was with her all the time and he didn’t even talk to me. She was in his bedroom.’

‘Judy, he didn’t fancy her. He wasn’t sleeping with her. He didn’t want her in his bedroom, she just followed him around the place. It was you he wanted. When you read the note and you didn’t do anything, he thought you didn’t want him any more … he was gutted …’

Many, many years later I did meet up with Kid again – we both felt we had ‘unfinished business’ to talk through. At that meeting, he told me that in fact Anne was gay. And when he said that, I remembered, so clearly, the time she turned up unannounced in my office at Fab, bearing a packet of cigarettes for me. At the time I couldn’t understand why she’d done it. But perhaps, just perhaps, it was me she had her eye on, not Kid at all.

Some things just aren’t meant to be. We both ended up happily married to other people, but do you ever greedily feel that just one single passage through life somehow isn’t enough?

Around the time of the mix-up with Kid that kept us apart, I had had other things on my mind as well and was still trying to get over one.

I realised I was pregnant just one week after I got back from that first Radio Luxembourg trip in late April 1970. When I had been out there, I began to realise something wasn’t quite right with my body. I had been sitting with Kid in his room, on his bed, wearing my best miniskirt and tight top, and we had been having a discussion about size and shape.

‘I hate my body’ I said. ‘I am too thin.’ And he said, ‘No, you’re not – you’re not thin at all.’ I looked down at myself and realised that he was right, I wasn’t really thin any more. And, more pertinent – I seemed to be developing a fat stomach. I shut up about my size, and back in my hotel room stripped off, turned sideways and looked at myself in the mirror. My belly was most definitely sticking out. And it was hard, firm. I began to have a nasty feeling that something was far from right.

Back at home, I returned to work and developed a strong and urgent craving for oranges, day and night. I was in the Ladies at Fleetway three days after I got home, sitting on the loo, wondering if I’d ever have a period again (they’d never been that regular), craving an orange, gazing at my fat belly, when I noticed a dark line going from my navel downwards.

And then I knew with a certain horror that I was pregnant. And there could only be one father. A man who had been in my life, in quite a casual way, for the past few months. A man who, again, was married, had three children of his own, one of whom was only just born – and who was my boss.

I couldn’t have got it much more wrong.

I had been warned off him several times by Betty Hale – and he himself later told me, laughing wildly at the joke, that she had confronted him when he arrived as our publishing boss, saying, ‘Now, don’t you go anywhere near my girls!’ He had a reputation as a ladies’ man, and very deserved it was.

Being the kind of person who hates being told I can’t do something, as soon as Betty warned me to stay away from him as he was a) married and b) a womaniser – I couldn’t resist. Of course I couldn’t. He often drank in the Hoop and Grapes, and so did I. He was personable, charming, slim, blonde and with a great smile. I was young, with long hair and long legs.

So the inevitable happened – eventually we got together. At the time, I found out later, he was just finishing a relationship with another girl who had worked for him, who also had a guy of her own. These were the dying days of the Swinging era, the pill was easy to get (not that I was on it), and that is what one did. The world of publishing was very incestuous and it seemed that at one time or another, everybody ‘screwed’ (the word of the day for partaking in sexual intercourse) everybody else. Compared with most of them, I was a true innocent.

He was still living with his family and I am sure thought of me as nothing more than a passing amusement – we certainly had little more than a ‘drink in the pub occasionally followed by a taxi home to my bedsit, sex’ kind of relationship. Apart from anything else, I was terrified that Betty would find out and find a reason to sack me.

I was chatting with Georgina in the office one day a few months earlier after the first time I had slept with The Boss, and she offered me three months’ supply of the pill, which she had got for herself and then decided not to take. Gratefully I took them from her and began them.

As it turned out, it was already too late and I must have been pregnant after the first time we slept together towards the end of December 1969.

After that day in the loo, I went to my GP near Avonmore Road who within a few days confirmed my pregnancy. He arranged for me to see a consultant in Wimpole Street and I was given a price, £80 (over £900 in today’s money), for an abortion. The next time I saw The Boss, I told him I was pregnant, said I wanted an abortion and could he pay me something towards the cost please?

In the end he paid half, and my sister, who was one of the few people I had told, lent me the other half. For some reason, which escapes me now, I also told Betty, who to my surprise was brilliant, and Heather Kirby, our fashion editor, who was a complete brick throughout it all and even picked me up from the hospital afterwards.

That abortion is another thing, like the Bertie Green episode, that I totally erased from my mind after it happened. There was little to consider re pros and cons.

I was four and a half months pregnant but it never really entered my head to keep the baby. The father was married and my boss, I was 20, I saw no way to raise a baby on my income – or, indeed, to continue with my job if I had a baby, I lived in a no-babies-allowed house, and could not see myself as a mother at all. My mother, who around this time was living with and looking after my gran, and who had fairly poor health, was in no position to help me look after a baby either.

What kept me going throughout was the thought of the Kid and when I might see him again. It was a good job I didn’t know how the Isle of Wight would turn out.

But from time to time, even now all these years later, although I can’t/don’t want to remember which hospital it was, or the exact date of the abortion, or anything much else about that time – I do remember giving birth to the foetus. I was too far gone for an ordinary scraping and so had had a birth-inducing injection in my belly. After several hours of fairly serious agony, the nurse brought a stainless steel tray and squatted me over it on the bed. A few minutes later, I pushed the foetus out. I remember looking down at it, all pink and curled and about the size of a kitten, and wondering what sex it was, before the nurse came and took it away.

A couple of weeks later, Betty and Heather decided to ‘give’ me another press trip abroad, to help me, I am sure, ‘get over’ what had happened in the past couple of months.

This time the visit was to a Swedish music festival, where I was to interview ordinary Swedish teenagers about their lives, their make-up routines and whatever.

The plan was to get the plane out of Heathrow with our photographer Roger Brown, all the music press people and some of the English stars who were appearing at the festival. We’d go straight to the festival, stay the night, then fly back the next day.

That was my first experience of P.J. Proby, the singer who had made his reputation, mainly, by splitting his pants on stage but whom I had always admired as I thought he had a great voice.

P.J. was due to appear at the concert and was on the plane, getting fairly tanked up on the free booze. By the time we were nearing Arlanda airport, Stockholm, Proby was staggering about the aisles, singing and trying to tell us all jokes and stories. And the air hostesses were trying to get him to sit down. He pulled one of them down onto his lap where she kept him busy and pinned down while we landed, thus saving us from having to go around again and perhaps circle for an hour or two. P.J. continued to play to the crowds at the airport as we waited for baggage and it is hard to believe that he managed to perform only a few hours later, but perform (on stage, that is) he did, and quite well, too.

We were driven through the Swedish countryside for mile upon mile – me staring out of the coach window and wondering how any country could be so beautiful but so bland and boring and sterile all at the same time. In other words, I didn’t like it much.

By the time Roger and I reached the festival, having also had our share of alcohol, I wanted nothing more than to go to sleep but had to knuckle down and find lots of teenybopper Swedes to interview and photograph. Every time we found a really pretty one, she didn’t speak enough English so it took a long time, and I seem to remember making most of these interviews up when I got home in the hope that the Swedish girls definitely wouldn’t be finding copies of Fab or translating their ‘quotes’.

Heading the bill at the festival were a band of hairy Americans called, I am pretty sure, Blood, Sweat & Tears – proper rock merchants whose set I found distinctly underwhelming and which also gave me a nasty headache. That said, they were one of the top bands of the day. I just had little taste, that’s what it was.

After a couple of hours sleep it was back to the airport and the UK. One thing I will say – Jim Proby was a lot quieter on the way home. But after we said goodbye at Heathrow and he went off, smiling his nice crinkly smile, I kind of missed him for a while. He was a good bloke. Next time I saw him some years later, he was Elvis.

Whether or not the visit to Sweden was the tonic I needed after the events of May I am not sure – on balance, probably not. I was knackered for a week after.

Over the next year I saw little of The Boss … there is nothing quite like an abortion to put a tarnish on a budding romance. On my 21st birthday, on 6 August 1970, I went out to dinner at an Italian restaurant down the Fulham Road with Georgina and her boyfriend Roy. If she hadn’t taken me out, I would have been on my own. So much for my fabulous life.

A few weeks later, The Boss did buy me a small dried flower ornament – which I still have today – as a belated present, at which point I realised that the affair hadn’t been extinguished along with the life, just put on ice for a while.

Gradually, after a few months of emotional turmoil, by the end of 1970 I began to find things about life to enjoy once again. My diary says that I met Robin Gibb, Simon Dee, Matt Monro, Rod Steiger, Dionne Warwick and Martin Jarvis that year – but there were many more. I remember travelling down to Jenny Agutter’s home in a peaceful spot outside London – at 17, she was a huge star because of The Railway Children but was about as shy and quiet as I had been at her age.

The diaries are slightly frustrating to look through now because I only kept them in a very offhand, perfunctory irregular way – sometimes you’ll find a page saying, ‘Rod Steiger, 11.30, Dionne Warwick, 2.00, driving lesson 3.00, dentist, 4.00.’ or ‘Monday, David Essex, Tuesday, The Osmonds, Wednesday, Paul McCartney, Thursday, buy egg poacher’. I think I was too busy living and doing to keep a diary properly. In September I booked a holiday to Holland with my mother – the only proper holiday she and I ever had together alone, and the first time she had been abroad since a school visit to Paris when she was very young. Why we chose Holland I am not sure, unless it was that Mother wanted to try to find her long-lost relatives – her grandfather had come to England from Amsterdam as a child.

We caught a ferry to Ostend, then boarded a tour coach which took us through Belgium and Holland, finally arriving at the town of Valkenburg in the only hilly part of the country, in the south-east near the German border.

We had a great week, going down the Rhine, wine tasting, sightseeing and generally enjoying ourselves, and in any boring moments I could regale Mother with many of my show business tales. She had always had a great interest in the world of showbiz and some of the glamour of my job rubbed off on her – she loved it when she saw my picture or byline here and there, and when I had gone to the premiere of The Magic Christian, my mother was there in the crowd to watch me, loving every second of it – and loving the tales later of how I had shaken hands with Peter Sellers and Ringo Starr and seen Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon this far away, so close I could see the violet of her eyes and the hair in his ears.

She quite often came up to Avonmore Road to stay for a few days and, if she was well enough, we always got up to mischief. Back in Buckingham, Mother didn’t get out a lot – she was no longer friends with Mrs Hill, whose lobotomy had turned out not to be as successful as had been hoped; her sadistic tendencies had begun to return and Mother had decided it was best to give her a wide berth. Not before time, is what I thought.

By the time we returned from our autumn holiday, I was more or less back on track. Most evenings I would go out with Julie or occasionally Georgina, Nigel or one or other of the guys I knew from the music press. Gordon Coxhill was still around and I was friendly with Roy Carr, another journalist on the NME, who had an encyclopaedic knowledge of music and a music collection to match – once Julie and I visited his small flat in the city and it was like a cave chock full, ceiling to floor, with vinyl. He lived for music and should have been another John Peel.

He may have fancied his chances with me a bit but he never did anything about it. He wasn’t one of the world’s greatest lookers – he had a ZZ Topp kind of beard and a rather hunched posture, always wore a black leather jacket and just didn’t have a lot of sex appeal but he was a truly lovely man. Roy, I think, realised that I was in a marginal depression that autumn and took charge to ensure that I wasn’t hanging around Avonmore Road on my own too much.

One day in October we drove down to the Orchid Ballroom, Purley after work to see The Who. The place was small and considering The Who were by now very big, having released Tommy and broken the USA, it was really too small a venue for them to gig. But they liked doing small places in between the stadiums, so there we were in this ballroom surrounded by crazed Who fans pushing and shoving and for reasons I will never understand, the stage had been built way too high, so that wherever you were in the room, you had to crane your head backwards as far as you could to get a look at the band.

They played to an ecstatic crowd for probably nearly two hours – certainly by the time the set ended I had a hugely bad pain in the neck, a monstrous headache and was slightly worried because my escort appeared to have vanished in the crowd.

Roy knew everybody in the music business and quite a few media people had been invited down to Purley. But he did return to find me, squashed and wishing I’d not had high heels on, at the end of the gig.

It was only a few weeks later that I got the chance to see The Who again – Julie had been invited to their gig at the Hammersmith Palais which, I believe, was the last night of their little autumn tour. We arranged to meet there as I had a film screening to attend beforehand.

I arrived at the Palais and pressed through the crowds – I could see this was going to be a wild night even by Who standards – backstage to find no sign of Julie, but the members of The Who trying to get themselves dressed and ready for the gig. A few familiar faces were there from the music papers but I didn’t know them that well so settled into a corner to wait for Julie. No show, so I crossed the room to help myself to some drink. When I got back there was Keith Moon, rifling through the handbag that I’d left on a table.

‘Er, Keith – hi! That’s my bag.’

The Moon turned round, his face in that expression you’ve seen in photos a hundred times, naughty, cheeky little boy. ‘Oh sorry, love, sorry, I was just looking for this …’

And he held up my best Biba lipstick. ‘You don’t mind do you?’

Well I wasn’t going to say no. ‘Well of course go ahead … but I’m not sure it’s the right shade for you …’.

He laughed and retreated with his prize to his corner of the room and I watched fascinated to see what he was going to do with my lipstick. He removed his T-shirt and proceeded to draw an intricate pattern with it on his fairly hairless chest, finishing by drawing concentric circles round each nipple. Then he put his T-shirt back on and sauntered over to me again. ‘Thanks!’

And he handed me back my lipstick – or I should say, the empty container as he’d used every bit of it on his body.

He was so sweet though that you couldn’t be cross with him.

After the support act had finished and Julie had turned up, we made our way out front where a sea of bodies was pressing into the stage. The Who came out, Keith looking demure in his white T-shirt, and proceeded to do a fantastic end-of-tour set.

The mob got wilder and wilder and I managed to retreat to the back of the room where there was space to breathe. Shortly before the end of the set, off came Keith’s T-shirt and I stood there looking at this crazy little guy, drumming wildly and wearing my lipstick on his chest.

You know what emotion I felt? I felt proud he was wearing my lipstick and proud to be part of this scene. Part of me realised that this time was something special, that The Who would be recognised as one of the greatest rock bands of the twentieth century. But by far the biggest of my emotions was sorrow and guilt – because the lipstick was too muted a colour to be seen properly under the lights. Poor Keith! If only I had bought the bright red Chanel, not the dusky Biba! That’s what I thought.

The set ended with Pete smashing up his guitar. The Who had become famous for the amount of equipment that was wrecked on stage, but you didn’t always get to see this; it hadn’t happened at Purley. So if a guitar got smashed you felt, kind of privileged to witness it. As the boys left the stage, the audience carried on rioting and fighting, and I slipped out and walked the few minutes home to my room, the sounds of the crowd and ‘My Generation’ and ‘I Can’t Explain’ ringing in my head as I strode through the dimly lit, deserted back streets of West Kensington at the end of another ‘ordinary’ day.

A day when I saw Pete Townshend break his guitar. And Keith Moon stole my lipstick.

I kept that lipstick container for some while as a unique souvenir of Moonie and an incredible evening.