Fact #68071
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Barry Dickins (booking agent) : I had seen The Who at The Goldhawk in Shepherd's Bush, and I just basically harassed their managers, Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp until they let me be their agent. I lost them again after about a year. Obviously I didn't have a lot of experience, but I used to be very good at lying. As their agent, I would phone people up and put on a gruff voice and say I was 23.
I remember we were all staying at a bed and breakfast place in Wiltshire ... there was a promoter down there called Graham Orford did gigs at The Top Twenty Club in Neeld Hall, Chippenham (May 15, 1965) ... and Keith Moon and John Entwistle were sharing a room, and they had a road manager called Dave but they called him Cyrano because he had a big nose, and he decided to show us how you could turn a cigarette lighter and can of hairspray into a flame thrower. Unfortunately, we set fire to one of the net curtains on this huge 12ft high window. None of us had any money so we didn't know what we were going to do.
We decided to take it down, and just pull the other curtain over so it covered the whole window. As I was the tallest, I was volunteered to climb up on top of a cupboard to pull the curtain, but I couldn't get up to it, so we considered putting a chair up ... and the upshot was that I ended up jumping off onto Keith Moon's bed and broke the bed, which made matters much worse. For years after that, whenever I met Pete Townshend, he'd say, 'Hello, Barry. Broken any beds lately?'
(Source : interview with Johnny Black for Audience magazine, February 2013)
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I remember we were all staying at a bed and breakfast place in Wiltshire ... there was a promoter down there called Graham Orford did gigs at The Top Twenty Club in Neeld Hall, Chippenham (May 15, 1965) ... and Keith Moon and John Entwistle were sharing a room, and they had a road manager called Dave but they called him Cyrano because he had a big nose, and he decided to show us how you could turn a cigarette lighter and can of hairspray into a flame thrower. Unfortunately, we set fire to one of the net curtains on this huge 12ft high window. None of us had any money so we didn't know what we were going to do.
We decided to take it down, and just pull the other curtain over so it covered the whole window. As I was the tallest, I was volunteered to climb up on top of a cupboard to pull the curtain, but I couldn't get up to it, so we considered putting a chair up ... and the upshot was that I ended up jumping off onto Keith Moon's bed and broke the bed, which made matters much worse. For years after that, whenever I met Pete Townshend, he'd say, 'Hello, Barry. Broken any beds lately?'
(Source : interview with Johnny Black for Audience magazine, February 2013)