2 #3
Nowadays she kept to a much slower time, little more than a fast-walking pace actually, but it suited her better, and meant she could go further, more comfortably.
It always amused her when eight-men rowing teams sped past her on the water as if she were standing still, but she was content with the fresh air, moderate exercise and the de-stressing release of endorphins.
Her circular route completed, she returned home, took another quick shower, pulled on her oldest pair of leggings and a loose T-shirt then walked over to her small kitchen area to check out the contents of her fridge.
They weren’t particularly inspiring, but she had the makings of a mixed-bag omelette and set about chopping up some ham and slicing a large beef tomato.
As her hands busied themselves with her meal, her mind was going over all that she’d learned about her latest subject so far.
According to Elizabeth’s view of things (and Lyssa wasn’t going to take any of that for granted without independent research of her own), Monty had been no mere hanger-on in the Lucky Cuckoos camp; and certainly not just a pretty face whose sole role had been to keep Glen Bannister happy and amused.
Instead, she claimed that her relation had been the fundamental force behind the band’s success.
To back up this contention, Elizabeth had managed to find several documents and receipts establishing that Monty had used her own money to help fund the band’s original efforts to hit the big time.
(After inheriting money on her eighteenth birthday from her deceased grandparents, she’d raided the trust fund to buy the band new and better instruments and a comfortable touring van, and paid studio fees to get their demos cut.)
Not only that, it had been Monty who’d chosen – and initially paid – their manager, Luke Raines, for his services.
And in a cut-throat industry notorious for dodgy management dealings, he had turned out to be one of the more trustworthy financial advisers who hadn’t ripped them off with poorly worded contracts.
This meant that the band had never been cheated of royalties, nor had they been forced, like so many other bands at the time, to sue in court for ownership of their own songs.
He hadn’t accepted backhanders from the more unscrupulous record company bigwigs or radio broadcasters either.
A shrewd, hard, canny man, he’d steered them straight and (from what Lyssa was able to tell on first showing) had successfully kept them in the spotlight for four years – which, in an era overflowing with talent, had been no mean achievement in itself.
He’d also been something of a Dutch Uncle to the band, doing his best to try and keep them from the excesses to which young, working-class lads, on suddenly finding themselves flush with money and fame, must have been prone.
On these facts alone, Lyssa could tell that Monty Montrose had indeed been no mere pretty face.
But the one thing which had stood out most of all for Lyssa after spending an hour or so trawling through old newspaper articles about the Cuckoos – the one constant theme that the band had ultimately become most famous for – was the irony of their chosen name.
For although the Lucky Cuckoos did indeed become notorious for their luck, their luck was mostly all bad.
Very bad.
The first indication of this was obviously the tragic death of their lead singer, Glen Bannister, but it was as if his early death became a catalyst for the tragedies that were to follow.
Their lead guitarist Ron ‘Racey’ Joiner became severely alcoholic, perhaps partly due to the band’s decline in the latter half of the 60s, but there was also much speculation that his father – who’d also been similarly afflicted – played a significant role as his enabler.
The father died in 1972, but his son was not long in joining him and was dead by the age of thirty-five.
The next to suffer was the drummer, Micky Ventriss, who lost all of the money the band’s manager had accrued for him, the victim of a clever conman who cheated many investors out of millions of pounds.
As a result, he became increasingly bitter and self-destructive, and eventually his wife left and divorced him, and was awarded custody of their children.
Forced to take menial jobs to support himself, he died aged forty-five, a bitter and resentful man.
But perhaps the one who suffered the most in this jaw-dropping run of bad luck was the band’s other guitarist, Arthur ‘Artie’ Lowell, who lost both his wife and only child in a car accident in the late 1970s, and became a recluse, living on a small Scottish isle and never venturing out in public again.
He died in his early sixties, never having remarried.
And, of course, although not an official member of the band, there had been the fate of Monty herself, the beloved or reviled (depending on your viewpoint) wild child and icon.
No wonder the Lucky Cuckoos had earned for themselves such an unenviable place in pop history as one of the unluckiest bands of that era.
And just how, Lyssa mused, should she tackle this aspect of the book?