Usher previous girlfriends tv#

David had decided on a different band that didn’t include me. One day I turned up at Haddon Hall, and there were a group of musicians there from a band in Hull (yes that would have been Mick Ronson, Woody Woodmansey etc). I used to stay on the bus and go visit David. Well that didn’t happen! Downham is near Bromley a short distance from Beckenham and Haddon Hall. I had only recently left school and was enrolled at Downham College to take my GCE ‘A’ Levels. Quite often it would just be the two of us but I do recall other people around. I knew David for about a year, I remember him as being outgoing, a big ego, curly longish blonde hair, slightly crooked teeth and smoked a lot….it was a long time ago.

This was in 1969 and David was at number 5 in the charts with “Space Oddity”.ĭavid wanted to put a band together, with me in it, but I was a very young, very shy 18 year old from the North Kent suburb of Bexley. I met Angie too, she was pregnant at the time, but she wasn’t living with him then. I was feted a bit by him taken to meet his producer Tony Visconti, invited backstage at his gig at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on the Southbank. He (as I learnt later) had a penchant for discovering new musicians. I played guitar and he played his acoustic or the piano. The landing was around the outer walls of the space bit like a veranda and David would have a bed up there sometimes. Presumably the other flats were behind them. This would have led off to various rooms but they were closed off. One of which was used as a bedroom, there was a small kitchen, but the main feature was a sweeping staircase that led up to a stained glass window, and then swept both left and right to the first floor. If my memory serves me well there were three large rooms. Haddon Hall was a sprawling Victorian villa that had been converted into different flats. This happened to be one David Bowie and I spent the next year hanging out at Haddon Hall with him playing music. I was the one who used to get the gigs, and so I approached the promoter of The Arts Lab in Beckenham, which was in the backroom of a pub called The Three Tuns. The first band I gigged with were called Just Good Friends, when I was 18.

JU : I joined my first band at the age of 15. At the time I was into Led Zeppelin, Jethro Tull and The Beatles. I just didn’t consider that to be anything extraordinary, although as a female, it was, back in 1964. I loved music and wanted to do more than just dance to it.

JU : I started learning the guitar at the age of 13. PGD : Let’s start at the beginning then, tell us when you first started playing the guitar? And it was about real audience participation, rather than sitting cross legged on the floor head banging”. Looking back on it now I think the Sex Pistols wrote really great pop songs.

The idea that people got into bands before learning their instrument was an anathema to me. I was desperate to be a really good musician. “The punk thing – to be honest I hated it ☺. We started off by asking her about our own favourite subject, to which she replied…. Three girls, three singles and over three decades later, punkgirldiaries finally caught up with guitarist and principal songwriter Julie Usher for her take on girls with guitars…by way of exploding drummers, David from Beckenham, Pilot, Depeche Mode and The Mo-dettes. Take it from me, as a teenage Punk girl I remember The Flatbackers only too well, in 1980-ish, they were among the first clutch of bands that I saw play live, and back then I was both impressed and inspired and possibly a little bit awestruck by these girls and their creatively crafted power pop.

Usher previous girlfriends tv#

During this same period they also recorded four BBC Radio sessions for John Peel, as well as sessions for Kid Jensen, Peter Powell and even daytime Mike Read, they rocked on the TV and yet….somehow, somewhere… they seem to have fallen through the cracks of girl band history. From 1978 until 1982 they gigged all over the UK in clubs and colleges, they had lots of press, they had a record deal and released two crazy catchy singles. The Flatbackers were an all girl 3-piece from South London. Above, The Flatbackers from left Lucy Dray, Lynn Monk and Julie Usher in 1980