This is a true story and as they say truth is stranger than fiction..... I think the moral is; be careful how you choose your friends and be careful what you carry in your pockets.

A few years ago now, just after I started to get back to serious music making again, my wife and I and two friends went to our local large theatre to see The Blues Band. For those that do not know them, they are formed from various notable performers from the British blues boom of the 60s, including Dave Kelly, Hughie Flint and ex Manfred Mann stars Tom MacGuiness and Paul Jones.

Hughie Flint you may or may remember as being responsible, for in my opinion the worst ever recorded drum solo, on the track 'What'd I Say' on the John Mayall/Eric Clapton 'Beano' record, Blues Breakers. I have it now on CD and mercifully I can just skip it, in the good old days we were too worried about scratching the record, so we just grinned and bore it (but I loved him dearly). That battered old record became something of a religious relic then, but I digress.

At this time I used to carry around in my pocket one of my blues 'harps', mainly because it was small enough to do so and you never know when you may need it. Be Prepared, is the old Boy Scout motto, this was to prove my undoing.

We sat in the front row and really enjoyed the first part of the show. However the band did a bit where Paul Jones (a gob iron player of some note) would get members of the audience to sing with them. This was unknown to my wife and I but not to our 'friends'. The song was 'Wang Dang Doodle' and the idea was that the audience would sing the 'all night long' bit.

The first few members of the front row stood up and bravely sung their turn but when it came to our friends they declined and pointed to us saying we would do it My wife being very loyal, quickly pointed to me and said I would do it, as I was at the end of the row and had no one to point at I 'reluctantly' stood up to sing.

At that point our friends said to Paul Jones that I had a harmonica with me and that I would play it. He looked at me, in an interested sort of way and asked if that was so. The band was still vamping along at this point and as anyone who knows about these thing is aware, this type of harmonica being a fairly simple instrument, you need to have a different one for each different key you play in. So I thought the chances of me having the one with the right key for the song being played was pretty remote. So I confidently replied that I did but I was sorry that it was in the key of C (which meant that the band would have to be playing in G).

You can imagine my horror when I looked at Dave Kelly as he smiled and nodded to me to indicate that they were indeed playing the song in G and that I knew, I had nowhere to run!

I did play and except for an understandably nervous start, I enjoyed it greatly and the band and the audience seemed to as well. The band I think because in made it a change and I didn't mess up the act completely, the audience mainly because it was me suffering and not them. I sat down a complete nervous wreck and visibly shook like a tree in gale, but what a backing band I had that day. Plus the chance to play with my boyhood hero Hughie Flint.