I've got to take a guitar in to be fixed at The Music Inn just along from the Running Horse - so I'll look in at the wake.

I never really knew him. Though our paths crossed a few times. The first time was maybe 1969. I was a student and someone said - theres a guy down the folk club selling drugs - he's got acid. so naturally I went. the college we were at, was sort of insular - we didn't go o the town folk club in the ordinary way of things.

Dave was doing a bizarre sort of act at the time. You could tell he had some nice moves on the guitar though. My chief memory of it was that it involved taking the piss out of Jimi Hendrix's sliding riff on The Wind Cries mary. We cornered Dave in the interval, bought a tab of acid out of a polythene bag. he had a bill of fare. The mescalin, I remember was a pretty purple. we paid him a quid and took half a tab each. I talked a lot and got very paranoid.

About five or six years later. I had a jug band (Juggerlugs) doing a residency at Tamworth Golf Club FC. We didn't book the acts. But Dave was booked. He was working with Joe Stead's Sweet Folk and Country agency and record label. And it was the first time I had really got to see his act - The Farting song ('Wottaboutahot waterbottleWibble?), Ban the Bow - the bizarre and brilliant guitar runs that seemed to lead nowhere in particular - but always came good. All delivered by this bewhiskered, balding chap slouched over an old Guild guitar - which was a curiosity in itself. The sides had about twenty splits in it, and it had obviously been glued back together - but it still sounded fine.

Downes and Beer were doing so well after Sweet Folk and Country had given them the impetus to become national figures on the scene - that I suppose I hoped for something of the kind for Dave. It was during that period I had a guitar built by Rob Armstrong, and Dave had been the best man at one of Rob's weddings. I suppose this must have in the days of the New Modern Idiot Grunt Band. rob told me loads of stories about Dave - how he'd lived in Canada, how he collected comics - long before the collecting of ephemera was fashionable.

I saw his act a few times more, but the one that performance that really sticks in my mind was a time in the 1980's in Long Eaton. I was full time in showbiz at the time, and I took a friend who was a comedian, Tich Cooper. Tich was blown away by the act. he said to me, that is the most brilliant appropriation of Rob Wilton's technique, I have ever seen. And once that pointed out to me - I could see it.

I don't want to get on my hobby horse again, but this is what tradition is really about. Its not simply digging up some old material and demanding respect from the great stupid masses. But to breathe life into a discarded technique so seamlessly that hardly anyone would realise. It takes talent and application.

After that I seemed to see Dave at various of my gigs. There was something about me that he liked, because he always left a Guinness for me behind the bar.

In the 1990's I used to do a gig in Bingham at the Moot House and his sister Kath and her husband used to come and see me. They hadn't seen Dave for years. I can't recollect seeing him play after that time in Long Eaton. I know he told me he was bitter about losing the residency at The Fleece.

Someone said he was living rough - he might have been from his appearance. I was in no real position financially to help him, and I didn't really know him that well. Every avenue I explored musically was turning to shite. When its like that, you just hang on and hope it gets better for yourself.

Anyway no one else seemed to be supplying memories of this very talented and entertaining man - so here are mine. fragmentary I'm afraid.