Peter Daltrey

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It was high and blue: we were In the Room of Percussion. Ed..s bedroom at the top of three flights of narrow, shadowed stairs. June had seen a ghost. We..d messed with a oija-board: there was a Welsh couple living in the loft. They were two hundred years old and dead. Ed had a huge Chinese paper shade inside of which he..d fitted a blue 40watt bulb. The mystic light that permeated with difficulty every corner of the small room was almost breathable: it got inside you; we levitated together. We also drank the cheapest gut-rot Bull..s Blood and this probably had more to answer for than the writer-brothers bonding.

I would give Ed batches of lyrics. I wrote all the time and so Ed would get a dozen sheets of neatly typed lyrics. Over a period of weeks he would sift through what must have mostly been dross to find the ones he could work with. I..d get a call: "I..ve got some songs. Bring some Blood." We..d start the evening with a Chinese meal at a local restaurant. The crab and sweet corn soup was so delicious we..d have quite happily had a couple of bowls of that and left. And the lychees. We would go back to Ed..s parents.. house. Mr.P would be in his tiny room where time literally stood still. "Hulloooo, Peeete!!" An impressive, tall man with a chiselled, Slavic face, Mr.P wore glasses with a magnifier over one lens. This served to make one eye huge and all-seeing. The spirits came out. Tiny glasses of fire. In the kitchen Mrs.P would be working at the table, dwarfed by a mountain of trousers. The needle would be flying. "Oh, you boys...!" she would grumble affectionately, shaking her tiny head in mock dispair. Lovely people -- gone forever -- but living for eternity in the minds of those who remember them. And Fred, the old black Spaniel: overweight, over-sexed and over here. Well, over there, actually, pushing up daisies in paradise.

We..d pass a dozen or so of Ed..s many sisters as we climbed the stairs to his room. Once inside Ed would become a nervous wreck, worried about revealing his creations. We..d sit on the bed and Ed.. would eventually play me the new songs, accompanying himself on guitar or on the piano that we..d manhandled up to his room on his birthday. Ed had a good voice and would set the standard for many songs that would later become my vocal responsibility. It was thrilling to hear a lyric that I..d written weeks or months before taking on musical flesh and bone and turning into a song. I was rarely disappointed. Now the real drinking would begin. I once came round with my head stuck between the bed and the wall. All I could hear was a distant, uncontrollable laughter. Sometimes we..d walk the cool streets just to try to sober up. We stood before a statue of Jesus outside a local church, but ran away in terror when we saw it move. It was on one such night, probably slightly later in the year, that we first heard John..s, ..Lucy in the sky with diamonds... We stood in the two AM darkness clutching a transistor tuned to Luxembourg as John..s disembodied, magic voice drifted from the radio like so much star-dust.