Though our home turf was north London, Gunrunner also wandered south of the Thames from time to time. To the Bedford in Balham , for instance, with its revolving stage, which was hilarious. One minute we were looking at the audience, the next singing into a wall. I still have an image in my mind of a guy with a live chicken that he danced around in front of us. We thought that a bit strange, but nobody else seemed to. At the end of those gigs it was worrying having to take the tube from Balham to Finchley Central, past Brixton and other ruffian places, alone with my guitar late at night.
We were always a very tight band and sounded good, with a lot of vocal harmonies. But we were not original at all and played mostly covers: Steely Dan, Eagles, The Band, Beatles, Stones etc. Our version of Sympathy for the Devil was popular for a while and my WEM tape echo took up a lot of space in that. We had fun while we lasted, learned a lot and even got paid. We also got bigger gigs every now and then. Like supporting Judas Priest, the Edgar Broughton Band or the time we drove 350 km in the Ford Transit to York to support Mr. Big. Not the Mr. Big who later became properly big, but a 70’s UK hit band with the same name. We even got to play at Ronnie Scotts Club in Soho, which was quite a big deal.
At one point we made a studio recording for producer Tony Pike, but we had no recording experience, were probably terrible and it anyway didn’t lead anywhere. We even had a sort of manager at that time. When Tony Pike wanted £30 to release the recordings, our manager refused to pay it. Though, to be fair, £30 was a decent weekly salary at that time. Consequently, there exists no recorded Gunrunner music. Maybe it’s just as well, though I do have some slight regrets on that point. No photos either, which is a great shame. None of us owned a camera?
Our music also changed as personnel changed. Chris Newport left, so we had no keyboard player to soften things and the guitars took over. When Phil Brown joined on bass, the sound became even harder. Phil pumped the bass with a plectrum, where the previous bassist (John Henry) was more of a finger-picking rhythmic player. Chris Morrow and I adapted our guitar playing to fit Phil Brown’s style, and out went the demon west-coast style.
My final gig with Gunrunner was at the end of 1976 when we played at a nightclub somewhere in west London. We had invited another guitarist in (whose name has slipped away in the mists of time), but he and I did not get on very well. I found him weird and churlish and he most likely found me odd and difficult. The end came when I got stressed and started playing a song before he had finished tuning up. If looks could kill, I would not have been alive to move to Sweden seven months later. I was dropped off at home after the gig, unloaded my amp, and that was the last time we saw each other. But both Chris M and Chris N turned up in Cambridge for a Men On The Border gig in 2015 and it was great to see them and a whole bunch of other people from London. Chris Morrow reappeared at MOTB’s Corn Exchange concert in Cambridge in 2016, 40 years after our last gig together.
Out Demons Out/Apache, is a classic cut from the Edgar Broughton Band.