I was going out with a girl called Janet and Sarah at the time. One was dark and one was blond. Janet worked in the same office as me. Sarah didn't, cant remember what she did. A couple of years later, as I was in Austria I sent her a postcard with the words:
"The weather is here, I wish you were beautiful."
She hasn't written since then. I always get things mixed up.
But I was playing street music and parties and stuff at the weekends too in London at that time. I used to live near Kingston. I had a cassette recorder and tried my first attempts at multitracking. But it's shit on something like that. You basically record something, record to the second deck and dub over it. It gets slower and slower and you have to keep tuning your guitar down.
One saturday morning I was playing in the shopping centre in Surbiton, when this strange guy called Rob came up to me. This was actually a daily experience, meeting strange people I mean, but this one was really strange. He thought he was a spy or something and wanted to record a song with me for his son living in Sweden.
We tried a few things, but the only problem was that he couldn't sing, which didn't seem to bother him that much, so we carried on. He had all kinds of slushy "I miss my son a lot, I want him back" kind of songs. I couldn't really relate to this, not having children. I thought you'd be glad to get rid of them, but Rob wasn't.
One day, after meeting Rob for a few beers, I made a fatal mistake - I told him he looked like Donald Sutherland - from that day on he tried to pull off girls pretending he was Donald. I told you he was mad.
I visited him in Kingston, and he told me a friend of his is coming round called Roland and that he played violin.

That was the day I met Roland and heard his first "All right mate, ain't got no money, can you buy me a beer, I'll pay you back after I've played."
He was a 100% street musician. He was good too. He used to play for the Young London Philharmonic, had also played with Elvis Costello and Steve Winwood. He had perfect pitch, could write down notes just listening to a song, could play violin, mandolin and piano - but there was only one problem - he was mad.
He had a thing about dirty underpants - I don't mean he liked them, he used to think he had to change them 10 times a day in case he met a girl - which he did quite often, and he used to bullshit them into bed, and then borrow money from them, fuck their dog if they had one, play `em a tune on the fiddle and be on his way....
His whole life actually revolved around girls and borrowing money from everybody - and playing violin of course.
I haven't seen him for years now, last thing I know he got married in Austria, had a kid, got divorced, grew his hair, went back to London and started playing for a band or something...but that was about 94 or something.
But let me tell you what happened next.
Roland put up his finger, which he always did when he thought he had a good idea, and said:
"Well, let's play together tomorrow."
So we did, I phoned work and said I'm ill, and we hit the street in Kingston, in the evening we did 2-3 pubs, got drunk, the usual shit.
After a few days, Roland put up his finger again and said:
"I know, why don't we go to Austria together and play there, I've been there 3 times before, and actually I was on my way there now."
I said:
"Ok."
So, I gave up my flat (which was shit anyway and owned by a crazy swiss woman who went grey overnight and had an even nuttier boyfriend "Mike the window seller" - yes, you want double glazing, buy it from Mike.), gave up my job, bought a back pack and a sleeping bag (actually 2, Roland had left his at a girl's flat) and 2 plane tickets. This all took a couple of weeks, in which time we played in some pubs in the Kingston area, got drunk, generally did lots of crap whilst prepairing for the adventure.
I know Rob always felt more and more like Donald Sutherland, he was quite getting into it, wish I never said anything, Roland was always trying to pull girls and complaining about his parents, which were quite strange, and told me his life story.
He was especially proud of landing a VW Beetle in his parents front garden (on it's roof) when visiting them one day. It was no surprise, they were trying to drive together, all three of them, and had some kind of coordination problems with accelerating and steering, Roland couldn't drive anyway (except he used to drive me mad sometimes.)
Roland told me lots of shit about Salzburg in Austria where we were heading, most of it lies as I found out later.
Janet was heart broken, Sarah maybe too, can't remember, my mum said where's Austria?, my dad too. They wanted to know when I was coming back, I said in a few weeks, that's 15 years ago now, it's all taking a bit longer than I expected....
During this time, before we actually flew, Roland and I started learning more and more songs, we did irish jigs, ballads, Talking Heads, Bowie, Simon & Garfunkel, all sorts of shit. We played well together I think, well we made money from it, what was good, because this would be all we would be living from as soon as we got to Austria.