1968 - Otis

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September 1968. New year at school and streamed into a hierarchy we didn't have before. From the familiar to a new world - again - the only continuity for me was the same form room and the same form master. I picked a desk in the middle of the room, thinking I could just shrink into the room, unnoticed. Nervous. Not confident. Frankly, scared - again. The lad to my left was from another class. I don't think I'd ever spoken to him in the first two years of school, but he spoke first and asked me (as you do at that age, because, frankly it is the most important thing to know) what music I was into. I can't recall my answer, but I do remember that he spoke about his music with passion and talked about artists that I'd only vaguely heard of. That boy was known by the nickname Otis, after his hero, the great Otis Redding. John Gary Kyte is his name and he is one of my mentors. And despite the distance in time and geography between us over the last four decades, remains my first and always proper mate. We were square pegs - and we both had friends from before that didn't fit the mould we were expected to have been formed from. The Lads came out of these early beginnings and it also turned out that the Green was a common factor. The Green. The Baggies. Origins, if not now home.

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