And so, patient readers, we come to an afternoon tea-time at Phil’s flat. We had a double booking at the Pink Toothbrush and each band had paid. But we had to do only one load-in and one load-out to do both gigs. That meant time for a cuppa before we sallied forth.

On the floor in the living room was a Gauss loudspeaker transducer. A big sexy pro grade woofer, of great expense, power and durability. As long as nobody drops something on the cone and rips it. And someone had.

Phil was hacked off. The driver was very costly and he wanted to fix it. It wasn’t worth taking to see Great Uncle Bulgaria at Wembley Loudspeakers for a whole re-cone. So he thought, “Why not try some Araldite?” He mixed a little up and after pushing the honest paper pulp cone rip back together neatly, he applied it.

And it dripped down the cone…

Just trying to tidy it up and realising, idly that he had way too much glue mixed, Phil ended up coating the whole driver with it, saying “Well, it’ll be like the rubberised coatings you get, but rigid. I wonder how it will cope with the extra weight?” And with that, off we went to the gig.

And that was that, I thought, until the next day.

Phil had a pair of huge Tannoy Westminsters and a small set of JBL speakers that were perched atop them, in his living room. He could play either pair, switched, from his HiFI and I was astonished at the experience, never having heard sexy home speakers before. They sounded amazing. The ones my mum had with the Binatone record player were awful.

He had this single-chassis lumpy hifi unit that lay on its back, a ROTEL I think, and the speakers all ran from it. Phil had had it breathed upon, apparently, and had added a bunch more power output transistors to make it fully a thousand watts.

Kilowatt was a favourite term for Phil and still is for me.

That poor torn Gauss was just there on the carpet, looking shiny and the rip didn’t show any more. It was fixed.  With a fat wire, Phil connected it to the amp. It looked neat, almost as if it was meant to be epoxy-coated. With that odd face-splitting grin of his, Phil fired it up. “It’s rated at two hundred watts.” He turned it up and up and ever yet more insanely up… Until it was taking the full kilowatt of output that this thing could make, from a flaming signal generator just sending a nasty deep pure sine wave of bass tone into the guts of the Gauss.

It was not enclosed but the loudspeaker didn’t care. The whole flat just started to become one with the huge cast chassis of the stout Gauss woofer’s moving mass on the floorboards. You couldn’t hear yourself think. “What do you think of that, then?” Said Phil, loudly as he turned it back down. “ARE YOU KIDDING!!” Holy heck, I was glad nobody was in downstairs.

And all that, meant I was literally there when the lightning spark struck!