Puck

Friday, August 4th, 1972. Two fairly naive teenagers set off from their home town of Middlesbrough on a bit of an adventure; they were hitch-hiking to London to go to the London Rock and Roll Show at Wembley Stadium, the first time anything like that had ever been at Wembley. I was one of those teenagers; the other was Puck. We had a good journey down; one lift to Wetherby and then another all the way to London in a builder's crew bus. That was interesting. The bus had around 12 seats and was full of hitch-hikers; I was in the front seat next to the driver and kept having to prod him every time he was close to sleep. We arrived in London in the early hours of Saturday morning, and settled down to try and get some sleep in the waiting room at Victoria Coach Station.

Puck was a character. He was the sort of lad your parents didn't really approve of. He had longer hair than the rest of us, always looked a bit scruffy, came from the 'wrong' side of town and when the rest of the friends were getting settled in jobs and careers, he was always out of work. But if they had taken the time to get to know him better they might have liked him. He was the artist, the philosopher, the thinker; he couldn't afford to go out with the lads but we'd always see he was OK for a drink, and he was always good company. I didn't get any sleep that night and I don't think he got much, so around dawn we set off to walk along the Embankment. Puck was over the moon to find a sculpture by Henry Moore on display.

We headed over to Wembley for the show. There were lots of acts that were famous at the time; the first ever show by Roy Wood's Wizzard, Gary Glitter (who was booed off the stage), Bill Haley and the Comets, and then on to the stars of the show; Bo Diddley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard and Chuck Berry. Litttle Richard thought he should be the headline act so refused to come off stage to let Chuck Berry on, in the end Security had to manhandle him off, still trying to sing, and Chuck then over-ran the official end time.

We came out at about 11pm and it seemed like a good idea to start hitching home straight away. For some reason we thought the M1 started at Watford so headed there. Of course, we didn't get a lift and after a while some lads in a van stopped and said they couldn't take us anywhere, but we were welcome to come and sleep the night at their place. We went back there; drugs were on offer but that wasn't really us and we were just so tired that all we wanted to do was sleep. The next day they gave us breakfast and a lift back to the motorway and we started again.

We'd been spoilt by the speed of our journey down. It took us another 24 hours to get home, our last lift being with a foul-mouthed lorry driver who dropped us outside Bradford Town Hall. We'd had enough by then, and found the station and got a train the rest of the way.

This is the point where normally I'd say, I wonder what happened to Puck. But I don't need to; I know. He married my girlfriend. I didn't bear him any grudge; she did all the running, clearly we weren't going anywhere, and he was just so pleased; I don't think he'd had many girlfriends. Inevitably though, we lost touch. I moved away, and we both got on with our lives.

I heard a lot later that in the 1980's, his marriage broke up. Shortly afterwards, he was found on the banks of the River Tees. A tragic accident, they said, but everyone knew he'd taken his own life.

I found this DVD on Amazon a little while ago. Amazing what memories it brought back.