Sex and Drugs and Sausage Rolls Read Online Free PDF

cannot play the twenty-minute solo you should not step onto the stage with a Strat strapped round your neck. Leave the Strat to Hendrix. Leave the Strat to Stevie Ray Vaughan [2] .
    So that’s how John Omally left it. He left the Strat to the great rock legends, whom he joined onstage in his dreams.
    But the point of all this, and there
is
a point, or else it would not have been mentioned, the point of all this was that Omally had recently heard tell of a rock band playing pub gigs in Brentford that owned to a Strat-playing fellow who could, in the words of one who’d heard him play, “make that mother sing like an angel and grind like a thousand-dollar whore”.
    Which is something you don’t hear or see every day, especially in the suburbs of West London.
    The Stratster’s name was Ricky Zed, although his employers at the West Ealing Wimpy Bar, where he worked as the griddle chef, knew him as Kevin Smith. The band was called Gandhi’s Hairdryer and they were playing tonight at the Shrunken Head. Which was why Omally now sat in his kitchen. He was polishing his winklepicker boots.
    For Omally wished to look his best tonight. Omally wished to see this band and if they were all they were cracked up to be and indeed if Ricky proved to be the new Jimi, or the new Stevie Ray, Omally hoped to make them an offer he hoped they would not refuse.
    An offer to manage them.
    Because Omally had also heard that the Gandhis were looking for a manager.
    Now the fact that Omally had never had a day job, nor indeed knew anything whatsoever about managing a band, did not, in his opinion, enter into the equation.
    John felt deep in his rock ’n’ roll heart that he was born to such a role. Wheeling and dealing, ducking and diving, bobbing and weaving and things of that nature were what he was all about. He was a man with no visible means of support who somehow managed to enjoy a reasonably comfortable lifestyle. Even if it didn’t run to any toys for boys.
    He was management material.
    If cut from humble cloth.
    No, if this band had potential, he, Omally, would realize this potential. And if he couldn’t play the Strat he would bathe in the reflected glory of one who could. And also in the heated swimming pool into which he had driven his Rolls Royce [3] .
    Omally buffed his boot and hummed a little “Smoke On The Water”.
    The kitchen clock had long since ceased to tick, but John’s biological counterpart told him that opening time drew near. He took his boots upstairs, shaved and showered and put his gladrags on. They were slightly ragged, but they were extremely glad. Omally chose for this special occasion a Hawaiian shirt that his best friend Pooley had given him for Christmas, a dove-grey zoot suit he had borrowed from this selfsame Pooley, and the aforementioned winklepicker boots, which in fact were also the property of the also aforementioned Pooley. And which Omally had been meaning to give back. Examining himself in the wardrobe mirror, Omally concluded that he looked pretty damn hot.
    “You, my friend,” he said, pointing to the vision in the glass, “you, my friend, will really knock ’em dead.”
    He teased a curly lock or two into a bit of a quiff, struck a pose and did the Townshend windmill.
    “Rock ’n’ roll,” said John Omally. “Rock ’n’ roll and then some.”
    Ring ring went the front doorbell as John went down the stairs. He skipped up the hall and opened the door and greeted the man on the step.
    “Watchamate, Jim,” said John.
    “Watchamate, John,” said Jim.
    The man on the step was Pooley. Aforementioned Pooley and John’s bestest friend. Jim, like John, was “unemployed”, but where John did all that ducking and diving and bobbing and weaving, Jim applied himself to science. The science of horse racing. Jim considered himself to be a man of the turf and had dedicated his life to the search for the BIG ONE. The BIG ONE was the six-horse Super-Yankee accumulator bet. Which every punter