Simon Finn Writes
I cam to London in 1967 and was thrown into a ife that was completely new to me, at once very exciting and incredibly harsh. My first performance there was about three months after my arrival, opening for Al Stewart at a Soho club called The Marquee on their 'Wednesday Folk Night'. It was organised by a man whose name just came back to me the other day, Roy Guest. Roy paid me a pound, Al probably got paid two or three times that. He deserved it, I used to have to borrow his guitar and I always messed up the tuning. But I was in heaven. And a pound goes a lot further if yo don't squander it on shelter. Back then you could eat for three days on a pound. My songs at this time were sweet and Donovany and probalby around half of them were about a girl who went out with me despite my sleeping on park benches. Her name was Jane and we have remained friends for life.
A couple of months later I landed what I thought of as a "really cushy number", regular employment, a bleat-while-they-eat job in a restaurant called 'Borsch and Tears' on Beauchamp Place in London. The proceeds of this paid a bed-sit that was almost more disturbing than the street.
I think it's worth explaining a little of how the music world worked in the sixties. The cassette recorded didn't exist and the tape recorders that did exist were expensive. A large number of performers therefore relied on music managers and record company executives hearing them and liking what they heard sufficiently to pay for a 'demo' which was a 45rpm acetate record that could be taken around and played to other record execs. If you were a solo artist they would often throw in a few sessions musicians for backing. It was an exciting step and has no modern equivalent really.
In the winter of 1967 i walked into a studio on the Old Kent Road which was part-owned and run by Vic keary. Vic agreed to make some demos, one of which was called 'Butterfly'. A few months afterwards the company closed down and Vic and I weren't to run across each other again till the spring of 1969. At that time he was starting Chalk FarmStudios across from The Round House in Camden, North London and he agreed to listen to a new batch of songs I had just completed. He listened to 'Jerusalem' and a couple of others and smiled. "It's quite a change from your old songs, Simon. They're kind of weird, but I like them." Which I realised even back then made him a very unusual producerin the music world of that period.