THE ASTEROIDS - 1957

Mick Morris - guitar & vocals, Eric Beer - guitar, Ray Blackman - guitar, Michael Oliver - tea-chest bass, David Grieg - drums, Gerry Osborne - washboard

I’d been having lessons on violin for several years but had finally given up using the bow and taken to mercilessly strumming the poor thing like a guitar. Eventually people took the hint. At Christmas, just before my thirteenth birthday, my Granddad bought me a ‘Tommy Steele guitar’ (actually a ukelele made of yellow plastic!) and the following Easter Dad came home carrying an old guitar he’d bought from a mate at work. Desperate to get into a skiffle group and armed with a handful of four-string chords adapted from experiments with the violin and ukulele, I set about persuading various friends from school and elsewhere that they wanted to be in a skiffle group too. David, Michael and I were in the same class at school and Eric, I think, was in the year above. Gerry Osborne’s family lived next door to us in Odo Road, Dover. Ray Blackman’s dad was going to drive the lorry for our first public performance - as an entry in Dover carnival in August 1957 - so he was invited to join the group too!

The Asteroids played a few more gigs that summer, mostly at local youth clubs, with a repertoire culled from Lonnie Donegan, Chas McDevitt and other early British skiffle pioneers but in early October 1957 I had to go into hospital where I remained on and off for some months. The good news was that I was allowed to take my guitar with me and by the time I finally got back to school in January 1958 my playing had improved a lot. The bad news was that while I’d been away most of the others had lost interest and the Asteroids were no more. I joined the Melody Makers dance band and played with them for the next two and a half years during which time Gerry and I continued to play together in a succession of line ups which at various times included many other friends including Les Godley, Gordon Vowles, George Nunn, Paul Dunn and Brian ‘Jake’ Aitken.