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given to mortar boards and scholars’ gowns. Always with sheaves of music tucked under his arm. A hurler of chalk dusters. The man who conducted the choir. His head was too big and his feet were too small and he smiled when he spoke of Space Travel.
    There was a mic up on that stage. The school microphone. It was a Telefunken U Forty-Seven. Every school had one of those. A few years later, no school had one, because with the rise of the minicab, the Telefunken U Forty-Seven had a penchant for picking up the signals of the cab offices and broadcasting directions for cabbies, to the great merriment of assembled students.
    I was just dying to sing into that mic. We’d had to rehearse micless, and there was to be no amplification other than that mic, which meant that I was going to have to hold it near Toby’s uke when he did his big solo.
    Fearing as we all did that Mr Jenner would announce us as ‘the school pop group’ or something equally uncool, Rob had penned an introduction that would introduce, as it were, the term ‘Rock God’ into popular culture.
    That one, I note, lasted. While the other one – ‘Cheese God’ – apparently did not.
    Mr Jenner walked up to that mic and tap-tap-tapped upon it. If something was to be achieved by this tapping, we, cowering (uncoolly, if I remember) all beside the stage steps, didn’t hear it.
    ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he began. The crowd went ‘boo’ and ‘hiss’. Not the kind of thing you could get away with on a school day. But this wasn’t a school day. This was the school dance.
    ‘Calm down. Calm down.’ Mr Jenner affected a light-hearted mien. ‘I know you’ve all come here to let off a little steam.’ We watched Mr Jenner from the side of the stage. He was going to read out Rob’s introduction, wasn’t he? He had stuck it straight into his trouser pocket when Rob had given it to him. He hadn’t even read it through. And now-
    Mr Jenner did not take the introduction from his trouser pocket. He had words of his own to say.
    ‘These young gentlemen have rehearsed very hard,’ said Mr Jenner, ‘and I know that you are really going to shake, rattle and roll to their happening sounds. Please give them a really big hep-cat welcome: the school pop group, The Rolling Stones.’
    I looked at Neil. And Neil looked at me. And Neil looked at Rob and Rob looked at Toby and Toby in turn looked at me.
    ‘I’ll get him for that,’ said Toby. ‘You just see if I don’t.’

7
    The Rolling Stones weren’t that bad, I suppose.
    Because, after all, it was their first ever gig.
    The one that never gets a mention in biographies, authorised or otherwise. The one with the original line-up. With Wild Man Fosby on tea-chest bass and Mick Jagger’s sister on uke.
    And Bill Wyman on uke. And Mick Jagger on uke and vocals.
    My uke. And my microphone.
    In case the reader is experiencing some degree of confusion here, allow me to explain, for it was my intention to create this confusion in the hope that it would in some way mirror the confusion that I and my fellow members of The Sumerian Kynges found ourselves in at the time.
    We thought that Mr Jenner had simply got the name of our band wrong when he was introducing us. But not a bit of that. He wasn’t introducing us at all. He was introducing The Rolling Stones. A band that he had himself been coaching in the evenings. With the ukuleles that we rehearsed with during school time.
    And Mick and Keith and Brian and Mick’s sister pushed right past us on the left-hand stage steps (looking from the audience), snatching our ukes from our hands as they did so.
    We were not pleased about this at all.
    Toby was in a blue funk! [6]
    ‘I’ll kill one of them,’ he said. And he pointed to one of The Stones at random. Brian Jones, I believe it was. ‘I’ll kill him!’ said Toby.
    Rob made calming gestures with his ukeless fingers. ‘It will all be all right,’ he told Toby. ‘They can be our warm-up act. Get the crowd going.