Doctor's Pond

RR: "Any time Mardenbeat wanted to throw a party (any funds left over after paying for the Benson hall went to charity) there would be loads of groups willing to play and a packed house of people all having a good time. The Mardenbeat "Summer Fun "party, for instance, raised a fair wad of cash for Ethiopia. Then on August 31st there was another party out in the open air at Roundway Down between Devizes and Calne. There had been a party held there every year around this time ever since a pack of bikers built a bonfire up there. one night and shared a barrel of cider and an ounce or two of grass; it is the nearest thing to a one-day, all-night free festival in our area and that year the "Battle of The Beanfield" (over the Stonehenge festival) had happened too so we had the police taking names and generally delaying things in the afternoon, so the stage didn't get built until it was dark. But later on I went onstage with Steve Lines (guitar), Simon Bewlay (drums) and Keef Wilson (bass) with me playing slide guitar and singing The Gun Club's "Walking With the Beast" among other songs. This was the first live performance (with me involved) of the band known as The Doctors Pond. The second time we played as this lineup (19th October) the Tryp album was finished and we had actually rehearsed a set of songs that included "When Fate Deals its Mortal Blow" "The Spin" and "Walking With the Beast" by The Gun Club plus Danny & Dusty's "Song for the Dreamers" and, to finish, "Sister Ray". The place went crazy. Meanwhile, Christine had been practising guitar again and got her own all-girl band together in time to perform at the Mardenbeat Mutant Rock party on 2nd November as The Mystery Ghouls, with The Doctors Pond on the same bill. Also, at home I continued to put the Tascam Portastudio to good use, doing commissions for local radio advertisements and writing yet more songs".
By this time (we're still talking 1985) the reissue business was also just about taking off and Rustic Rod got kind of wistful thoughts about how Magic Muscle really deserved to be in there, deserving a lot more attention than they'd ever got. Even if the band seemed lost in the passage of time, there were so many records coming out by bands that even he'd never heard about, from the mists of time as it were, that he felt something should be done or he'd regret it forever. Around that time, journalist Colin Hill was advertising for people to get in touch who were either in a band or knew about a band from 1968 to 1972 or who had current releases on independent cassette labels like Acid Tapes or who were in interesting contemporary bands of the garage type.
RR: "So I contacted him, wrote a letter to Colin Hill saying "Look; 1 fall into all three categories: !'m not only in a contemporary band (Doctors Pond) I've got a release on Acid Tapes (The Tryp cassette) but I also fall into the other category of 1968 till 1972 and ! was in one of the great unsung hero bands of the nineteen seventies, Magic Muscle" So Colin wrote back, saying "Hey, Magic Muscle were the first band that my wife and I saw together live, in Plymouth" So coincidences started to happen, which included an old friend of Colin's, Pete Flanagan, dropping in, staying with them for a short holiday, I believe. Colin put on the tapes that I sent him, cassettes of old Muscle music, and Flanagan remembered, like, "Hey, Magic Muscle! I actually put on a couple of gigs for those guys and ended up managing Stroll On". So there were a lot of things clicking and he said "I'd really like to put out a Magic Muscle album; get Rod to get in touch with me." And it was just a simple matter then of me contacting Flanagan. I'd loved everything that Zippo had ever released, you know, from the Green On Red...! won't go through 'em all, I've loved every single record on Zippo and the thought of Magic Muscle coming out, albeit on a subsidiary of theirs, really appealed to me".
So the year of 1985 went out in style but the most important thing for me personally (even greater than the fantastic musical scene I had become apart of was that I had gone all year without taking a single alcoholic drink! This marks the end of that period of my life (about seven years) where I had lost my way. I have made much of my fight with the bottle because alcohol is so easily available (tho' incredibly heavy and dangerous stuff and therefore quite easily related to. I have spared you the "stories from hell" concerning my drug-injecting addiction that stretched over a span of more like fourteen years. This too had been conquered by 1985, although to this day I still have to take prescribed drugs to combat the damage done to my system in the seventies However someone who had waited too long to get the message, Phil Lynott, didn't make it far into 1986... he died on January 4th, Magic Muscle's spiritual birthday.
This was the year Chris and I were forced to move out of our beloved cottage, so while the actual eviction notice was hanging over us I felt I could no longer keep regular practice dates with The Doctors Pond, which was a shame really because by now we were playing our own stuff but anyway I quit the band in order to stay close to home for our last few weeks there.