THE SUBTERRANEANS- MY FLAMINGO

Of course, there had been also the Subterraneans adventure, with Nick Kent, Glen Matlock and Chris Musto. We had had a good start though. Nick had great songs. He didn’t have a guitar so I had lent him my green Fender Jaguar. He used to love it. His thing was to play in G open tuning, like Keith Richards. At first, it had been tough for me to play with him, because I had to try to understand and follow the chords he was doing on the guitar. So, in the beginning, I simply tuned my guitar in G like him and I would reproduce the positions of his fingers on the neck. I then went back to a normal tuning. On the other hand, I really did enjoy the harmonies that this way of playing would give and today I basically always play in G open tuning. We rehearsed for about a month, really enjoying playing with Nick, still continuing the Flying Padovanis with Chris, and of course we would do that in the Vauxhall place. It was also a great pleasure to finally play with Glen Matlock, who had been my friend for a long time and who I would bump into non stop at night, in bars or in clubs where he was most of the time totally drunk. Glen used to drink a lot in those days and there was nothing you could do about it. Today, he is like a brand new coin! With the Subterraneans, we had had a good preparation and we had booked the ‘Screen on the Hill’, an old cinema in Notting Hill Gate, and we were supposed to give our first concert. A lot of people were talking about it. And they were saying good things. Nick had put out a single My Flamingo on Demon records and that single was actually brilliant. Nick got scared. I don’t know whether he was afraid and thought people where just going to slag him off or whether, simply, he didn’t feel up to it, but he basically disappeared the day before the concert. We never heard from him for a month. And then, Chris told me that someone had seen him around back in London….