It was good to read Stephen Burgen’s memories of the Juniper Blossom blues club that he helped to run in Cambridge circa 1968 (Christine McVie used to play at the blues night we ran as teenagers. We were all besotted, 2 December).
Stephen credits me with being the driving force behind the club. In fact I ran it with the late, great drummer Pip Pyle, with whom I was playing at the time in Bruno’s Blues Band, which later became Delivery. It was Pip who had the contacts to the agencies for the bands and artists that we booked. And I was no longer “still at school” when we ran the club – I had met Pip at the Cambridgeshire College of Arts and Technology, where we were both supposed to be studying for our A-levels.
Stephen writes that I “also tried to book what was then Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac but as I recall they wanted £50, which was out of our price range”. In fact we were able to book the band (before Christine joined it) to play at the Red Cow for the princely sum of £45 – that was a good night!
My memories of Christine were of a friendly, unassuming and approachable young woman from the Midlands who took a back seat in Chicken Shack: Stan Webb was the main singer and lead guitarist, while Christine would only sing a couple of numbers over the course of an evening. On one of the several occasions that we booked them, the whole band came to stay at my mother’s house after the gig, and I got up to find my mother making breakfast for everyone.
Jack Monck
Harwich, Essex
