While I was at the factory I got a few gigs with the odd dance band and a few small outfits. I soon had a regular number of gigs going and as people got to hear about me they increased.

It was too expensive to own a telephone in those days so people used to phone the factory or more usually pop round the house and say can you do this gig tomorrow night for 35 bob? Of course I could: I could buy a second hand cymbal or drum with that. So the more I gigged the more I built up my kit.

It was 1955 then, and I was eighteen, something of a late starter. I gigged like this for three years. During those years the new rock scene was just starting but I didn't go for it at the beginning. It was the jazz scene that I was aiming for, yet it was for the pop scene I was destined.

A phone call came through one morning to the office from a young guy called Jimmy Stead. He asked me if I wanted to join the John Barry Seven? The John Barry Seven was an all Yorkshire Band of note, so I said yes immediately. John Barry was changing the band little by little, because the original band before 1958 weren't good sight readers. He was getting a lot of backing work so he wanted readers.

After a quick rehearsal we were off. In late 1958 I joined the Seven and went to London in a van jogging for six hours down the then Great North Road. When I got down there I was knackered, having picked up a tummy bug on the way. I had to go to a week's rehearsal at Barry's flat feeling absolutely shattered. This was the first time I had been away on me Jack Jones - and I felt exhausted and slightly homesick. I almost packed it all in then, but somehow I stuck to my guns and what was to happen, happened.

I gained  a lot of experience from this move for later session work, for now I had become one of the three new faces - together with Clem Clatimmi of the Tornados, and Brian Bennett - on the London scene playing rock and roll. We were the new stylists after the big band drummers of the fifties.

After my initiation we went out on tour in late 58.