`Blue Rondo A La Turk ....saucy old name that, eh ?
I still don´t know if it beganas a joke, or whether it was a serious exercise in ´anything´s possible´. But Graham Ball, band managers booked a rehearsal room, and Chris Sullivan found himself along with Christos Tolera and Ollie O´Donnell ( of hair and later Le Beat Route fame) as one of three singers in a band that included giant Spandau Ballet and Blue rondo roadie Steve Marshall on sax, O´Donnell´s brother Jimmy on bass, and Chocko Mick Bynoe, an inveterate Ealing playleader, on percussion. Actually, thinking back on it, it must have been a joke, they were absolutely hilarious that evening.
Within a month Steve Marshall and Ollie had left, and they still didn´t have a drummer. Ollie is still wearing his red tartan zoot suit today. Mick Bynoe: ´Those early rehearsal were bad, man. But we have such a good lauch that you just stick with it because of that.´
´Im not sure when it became serious. once the name was know outside the seven or eight delinquents who formed the nucleus we ahd to follow it through, ´
The first time I saw Moses Mounthbassy he was wearing a full length pin-stripe overcoat with a polka-dot pocket handkerchief, a black suit, black gloves, and immaculate side lace Oxfords. He´d come up to London carrying his sax, having heard the word that his old dancing partner, Sullivan, needed a horn man. Looking like that, you knew he had the job before he´d even whetted his mouthpiece. Then came a young jazz-trained drummer, and mark Reilly from Luton way, a friend of Moses´s from the northern soul circuit who was reputed to play a mean funk guitar and pen a tasty tune, as well as dancing like a dream. All of a sudden the magnificent seven seemed complet.
´At that stage we were like a radical bop, beatnik band. Raucous sax and heavy poetry, very Last Poets´
TEXT - ROBERT ELMS
THE FACE - DECEMBER1981