Malcolm-Morley.com  Archive
Roundhouse gig poster


Malcolm recalls:
This was the last known performance of Help Yourself. It is memorable to me on several fronts. On the morning of the gig I woke up in a sleepy village in Switzerland where Ken and I were on tour with the Man band. We nearly didn't make it to the gig as the van taking us to the airport ran out of petrol . We missed our appointed flight, managed to get on the next available and arrived just in time to tune up the guitars and walk on stage. We hadn't played together for about 9 months to a year.

Strangely the Roundhouse crowd went delerious with joy over our performance and I had to go back on stage to calm them down and say we couldn't do any more because John Stewart (I think) was waiting to come on.

The other memorable thing to me was Dave Robinson falling asleep during Mike Nesmith's performance. This caused Leonard, a fanatical Nesmith devotee, to burst his trousers in a fit of apopleptic rage. He had to be restrained and then gently led to the dressing room, where he became quite tearful... Leonard had been grouchy and on edge from the time we had ground to a halt in Switzerland (as the prospect of missing his beloved Nesmith loomed large) and the sight of a slumped Dave Robinson grossly snoring backstage to a tender Nesmith ballad was the straw that broke the camel's back as far as he was concerned.

It was quite a day. The Roundhouse crowd's rapturous reception to the Help's performance had a strange effect on me (I left Man not long after) nevertheless it was I think, a fitting end to the Help Yourself saga.

back