I must say I have enjoyed the olympics....especially the friendship between the
competitors,,, and the unbelievable skills of the young teenagers in the
skateboarding,diving and gymnastics.....good to see respectful and well behaved
youngsters displaying their talents instead of giving TV news coverage of complete
morons throwing missiles at the police and the ambulance service....or acting like
neanderthals at football matches.....even the boxers give each other a big hug after
battering each other....let's hope some of this rubs off on the low life we have to put up
with nowadays.
s week my final travel feature takes us to Finland....not with Monty Lister but he
strangely features in it....It was back n 2001 when I got a gig at a skiffle convention in
Finland....I put a skiffle group together and off we went.....we arrived on a Friday...did the
gig on the Saturday...spent Sunday looking around and back on the Monday....at the
time I was working with Monty Lister on his Sunday morning programme on Radio
Merseyside so I told him I would be missing on that day....the gig went very well on the
Saturday night and the next day we were wandering around the town when a guy comes
up to us and tells me how much he enjoyed the music and invited us to his restaurant for
the afternoon....so we all jump in his car and he puts on a CD telling us this was the sort
of music he liked.....first track was Monty Lister interviewing Bill Haley.....I couldn't
believe it....he asked me if I knew this man....so I told him if I wasn't sitting in his car
somewhere in the Arctic Circle I would be on the radio with him at that moment....took
me a while to get over it....what were the chances of that?
The story behind the Finland gig was I wrote a song for a dear friend of mine who was in
one of the first skiffle groups in the area....called The Atlantics.....his name was John
Lomax who I was inspired by in the late 50s....we became good friends when we met in
the 90s which is when I wrote the song for him.....he sent it off to Hankasalmi in Finland
where they have an annual skiffle convention.....we were then invited to go and perform
there which we did....I put a small skiffle group together with John and we went there as
The Atlantics....and had a great time.....so here is the song....The Story of Skiffle.
