On the club circuit in the 1960s, there was an unwritten rule about keyboards. The stages in most clubs were tiny, so whichever band was headlining got their choice of keyboard on stage first. If you were the support act – if, say, you were Reg Dwight, the keyboard player in a hard-working but minor band called Bluesology – you had to use whatever instrument the headliner used, because there was no room to set up your own gear.
My nightmare, which regularly came true, was arriving at the venue to find a Hammond organ on stage. The Hammond was an enormous, intimidating thing, like a chest of drawers with a keyboard attached. It had foot pedals and drawbars that changed its tone, and a huge speaker with a fan in front of it called a Leslie cabinet, which gave you a vibrato effect. I didn’t know how to work any of it. It felt like being at the controls of a spacecraft: a spacecraft that I had absolutely no idea how to fly.
