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JG300-Stoopy

Any fan of the movie "This is Spinal Tap" (and most of us are) will certainly enjoy hearing the real story behind the inspiration of their ill-fated "Stonehenge" stage production. All these years I thought it was based on a Led Zeppelin story, but Black Sabbath's Ian Gillan tells the hilarious tale which I thought worth sharing...

(for the second story it also helps to know that Ronny James Dio was a man of very short stature)

Smile

Shades

This is a story that may, or may not, have happened when I was much younger and any rock stars mentioned may, or may not, have actually existed or even been based on real people.
Long story short (I won't go into how it all happened, which is very boring).

Some friends and I were drinking in a Dorset pub with Gillan many years ago.
Over here Pubs and bars had restrictions on their drinking hours and these used to be even tougher.
So at ten thirty, we were all "Locked In" which is when the pub would stop serving alcohol to customers and lock the doors.
If the 'Rozzers' came round asking questions the landlord would tell them that the Pub was closed and he was having a quiet private drink with some personal friends and guests (not that we were very quiet.., Gillan was there for a start!).
Anyway, after a while, Gillan suddenly jumps up shouting, "Quick, we have to go!"
We had no idea what was going on but it was Ian Gillan, so we tagged along.
Outside the Pub' he'd parked his Rolls Royce, which we all pile into the back of and off he drove, like a Banshee (sorry Banshee), through the country roads.
We end up at midnight parked atop one of the cliffs looking at each other with puzzled expressions, while Gillan turns on the radio.
My mate asks him, "What's going on, Ian?"
He replies, "I'm booked to do a live national radio interview in two minutes and I want to see how they get out of it!"

I won't mention the station but it was at least an hour away from where we were and there was no chance of his being there in time.
It a significant broadcaster to the U.K. back-in-the-day!

Just thought I'd share.

JG300-Stoopy

Wow, COOL story Shades!!!!

Shades

Ty ty.
Gillan used to have a guy called Bernie Torme as his guitarist (don't know what happened to him).
Very, very, nice guy but he had a dreadful stutter when he spoke.
You could be waiting minutes for him to say something.
But he sang backing vocals perfectly and on cue, to the beat of the song.
One day, someone suggested he should try speaking like that;
ie, think of what he wanted to say and then say it to a beat.
And it worked.
The down side was that he would then do things like go up to the bar to order and have to slap the side of his leg to establish a 'time' to deliver his message.

You'd see him count out a beat and then speak.
| 1 . . . 2 . . . 3 . . . 4 . . . |
"I'll - have - a - pint - of - beer, - and - a - packet - of - crisps - please!"

Great guy, weird conversationalist.
Smile

John McCoy's (Gillan's bass player) son played some support gigs for us in the mid-eighties as a drummer, in a band with our guitarist's nephew (an amazingly talented guitarist/writer who was one of the millions of undiscovered talents of the world).

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