Free Ain't Bad for a Pink by Sandra Gibson Page A

and people were lingering for a late night drink. Someone remarked that “The Stripper” had tempted no dancers; my girlfriend said she would dance to it so someone put the record on again. She wore a long evening gown and she started to dance. Sexy and erotically teasing, she was very accurate in her timing and by the end of the record she had skillfully removed her dress to reveal she was wearing nothing underneath and had everything to show. Then she walked slowly to the bar, sat down and ordered a drink.
She had style.
    Never seen a landlord more delighted. He invited her to dance at The Crown professionally but this resulted in an interesting demarcation between the amateur and the professional. What had been excellent as a spontaneous gesture became banal in different circumstances. She wore a bathing suit and managed not to look sexy or dance sexily in it. Perhaps the amateur performance came from the heart; the professional dancing from the head.
    I remembered this when I went to Hooters in the US: a well-known establishment famous for its sexy girls. I beg to differ: they wore sports clothes and very firm bras.
    Strangely enough, a later girlfriend illustrated a different side of this audience-orientated behaviour. She favoured public sex but it wasn’t public because no-one knew what we were doing on the park bench! She had had sexy glamour photos taken before she met me and one of the studies is very revealing but not in the sense you would think. The photograph I have of her is professionally posed and very static. It’s arty and in a fin de siecle setting: she leans on the mantelpiece of an Edwardian tiled grate. There is a conch shell – a typical piece of erotica – on the mantelpiece and an oval-shaped mirror above, which doesn’t reflect her face, or anything else. She is dressed in a pair of brief knickers, and a sheer flimsy calf-length black skirt through which you can see her suspenders. Her dark stockings have seams and she wears high-heeled shoes: not stilettos as in the early Sixties, but something more of the New Look Fifties style. Her top is see-through and she is wearing a black bra. She has a beautiful hourglass figure but the setting and the stillness in the body give a feeling of detachment, amplified by the fact we don’t see the face. The whole effect is one of the artful use of fetishist clothes and items, to produce an erotic tableau. But it’s depersonalized because you can’t see the face. She has turned her back on the viewer. Did she dress up entirely for herself?
    Whilst with me she changed her image and took to wearing neutral, unisex clothing but I don’t know why.
Chameleon
    Our band was subsidised by a side band called Chameleon that did regular gigs for money so that the weekly wage would be fairly stable. The line-up was Pete Whittingham and me in our usual roles on guitar and vocals, Melvyn on drums and Keith Brammer on bass guitar. He was a fellow sportsman who’d played in a band with Geoff Ambrose: the owner of Speedway Motorcycles. Al Dean had a position in another band anyway. Chameleon was fun; it had a popular, commercial bias and was conceived as a local way to supplement earnings without involving the Skunk Band. In order to raise the status of the main band I had to separate it from the undiscriminating need to get paid. I sought gigs further afield and I was choosy and uncompromising in order to get the band into the proper circuits.
Your Morning Call, Sir
    I decided the most important thing in running a band was being straight: I was the chief and people had to be professional about things . It might not have looked that way on the surface, when I was digging Whitty out of the pub but underneath things were tightly run. It was the same with the business – otherwise we wouldn’t have been so successful. And somehow it all worked because there was consensus; we were all mates; we had a good time. I don’t think I saw myself as a conventional boss – I