Two laws I understand; the law of gravity and the law of unintended consequences. And one can lead to the other, very easily. And it always starts with a phone call. “We’ve got a band together and we need a manager and you’re the only guy we know who can play the telephone.”

And that is how I got into the music business full time, back in the misty past, when the Berlin wall was new and shocking. Before that it was jazz and blues, my first love. Helping out at clubs and concerts, writing reviews of Ellington and Jimmy Rushing, drinking with Champion jack Dupree and Memphis Slim and Willie Dixon and T-Bone Walker. I even shared a table at the Blue Posts with Roosevelt Sykes, ‘The Honeydripper,’ and a fine gentleman by the name of Speckled Red. They don’t write them like that anymore. That was the late fifties, early sixties.

My day job began as a sales engineer in the machine tool business followed by several years in London’s emerging advertising and marketing world, a trendy place to be at the time. That was before the city’s streets were paved with Styrofoam containers, when Carnaby Street was a dirty alley, Mods ruled the Marquee Club and Rod Stewart drove a little orange-coloured plastic sports car.

I first managed Andromeda, a London band, and we played for peanuts all over the place - Peterlee mining community somewhere in the north-east and then the next night in Birmingham and the next back up the newly built M1 motorway to a college in Leeds or Bradford or some other forgettable, rusting city. Home from home was the Middle Earth Club in Covent Garden where I decreased my debts an inch or two by running a bar which served the worst coffee in the hemisphere. But all were zonked, so who cared, who could taste in a club which opened on Friday night and closed on Monday morning and where the strobe lights never paused. But it was the later sixties by then, and the suits in the record companies grew their hair and said we played ‘underground’ music, which in the basements of Covent Garden was true enough.

Then another phone call. I think. Something about a bunch of Americans who preferred damp Europe to bloody Vietnam. Heard them play in a basement room at the Beatle’s Savile Row office, the place where they did that last gig on the roof. The band was called Daddy Longlegs, a trio then with a knock-out guitar player and tight bass and drum unit. First impression? This was the real McCoy, the genuine article. We all knew about Haight Ashbury hippies, Woodstock had been the previous year and we all had long hair, but these guys were real. It was not a uniform, it was a lifestyle. They had spent time in the mountains, trailed the inevitable groupies, knew their grassland botany. Most importantly for me, the music was great. Unlike the heavy handed British groups from Birmingham and Sheffield, these boys bounced along, Rockabilly style. They swung almost like a jazz combo, with Steve’s guitar lines singing on top, Kurt’s bass lines driving, Clif’s drums snapping at their heels. It wasn’t long before Moe arrived, the taste of Vietnam reality still in his head and his heart, to add a manically joyful shout’n’holler to the band’s stage act, which was loved by all.

There followed a couple of years of madness on the club circuit, at festivals and in recording and TV studios throughout Europe, interrupted by sleep in cottages in Somerset and Suffolk and Sussex, the prettier parts of England, which were affordable then. And then it was over. Like the dot.com bubble this band of innovators was swept away by the industrialized, monetized and over-loud rock music of the seventies. The band drifted apart, some this side of the pond, some the other. And then the Internet was born. By which time, another long story of more unintended consequences, I had passed through a period as a BBC writer and interviewer, had spent time in France and ten years reporting from ‘behind the iron curtain’. Finally I was living in Poland with a newish wife and young twin boys.

Hard to believe but I was working for the new Polish government, alongside my Polish wife, when one evening I typed the names of the band members into my computer search engine. Within a few minutes I had an email address for Kurt Palomaki – not too many of them online – and had discovered that Moe Armstrong was not just alive but was all over the web, famed for his work in the mental health sector. Steve was sunning himself in Tobago and Clif was missing but presumed alive.

Since then we have stayed in touch via the miracle of the world wide web of wonders. And now, sadly and tragically without Steve, we find ourselves singing the old London music hall song – “We’ve been together now for forty years”. It can’t be, surely? But here we are, the new demographic high! It is our generation. Again! So Baby Boomers, let’s play the music and dance!