Hippy Hippy Shake
one day and ended up living there. He moved to Canada and got married.” The guy was Richard Le Beau and his brother Peter played the guitar. Bernhardt Rebours recalls:“Peter and I had got into a little band called Firebird that rehearsed at Dial House – that didn’t go anywhere.We did one gig at a college in Canterbury, but it didn’t really work. It was all so . . . lame. “I’d really liked the way Penny worked with me at college.This is at the time when things like Steve Reich and Terry Riley and that minimalist sequential music was coming out from America. It was a big influence for me. It was something I really liked working through, almost into a meditative state. “It was at the time when the Mahavisnhu Orchestra was really making an impression. Peter wanted to be John McLaughlin, he had the SG double-neck and all the rest of it. I was into piano at the time, and Pen had made a percussion kit from bicycle wheels and bits and pieces. He had a strange foot-pedal operated radio that tuned the radio into different noise between the stations. There were contact mics on bicycle spokes, tin cans – it was incredible. I had a cheesy electric piano, and my big investment of the time was a monophonic synthesizer.” Ceres Confusion would play every Friday night in the music room at Dial House, taping their results onto cassette, one of which was the above-mentioned ‘Doses Of Neuroses’. Bernhardt remembers: “We’d start about 8.30, play for a couple of hours, have a break then get back into it until maybe about midnight or one o’clock, totally exhausted. . . It was an environment where we could really learn to be instinctive, intuitive, about the direction the music was going.” The closest the band came to unveiling their sound live to the public was at the Stonehenge Festival. Bernhardt: “I think it was the last festival they had which was right up against the Stones, not on the other side of the road.We’d heard that Van Der Graff Generator were playing there. It just didn’t feel right – it felt really decadent, it didn’t feel a good environment to play in. We’d brought all our gear down, but we just couldn’t face it. So, no, we didn’t do any gigs – I don’t know if anybody would have stayed for very long! Because it was so intense, it was like Mahavisnhu Orchestra meets punk. It was so extreme – some
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