Growing In Confidence

After a couple of weeks my playing had improved so much that Billy was obliged to pay me as I had also begun to do a couple of vocals, one of them, 'Sucking Cider through a straw", becoming a firm favourite with the crowd. More importantly I had been noticed by Brian Holland who ran a local concert party a popular form of entertainment in the fifties which would soon be killed off by television. I became a member of his concert party, travelling to places like, Alvechurch, Inkberrow, Bromsgrove and Tamworth, my world was expanding and I was enjoying it immensely. Brian took a keen interest in my progress, coaching and rehearsing me. He told my mother that he was grooming me for the Carrol Lewis talent show, but his real intentions were revealed one day, when his hand started sliding my trouser zip down. Naive as I may have been at that age, I quickly realised that this was not in the script and from then on I kept him at arms length.

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