The Timperley Early

  The Timperley Early  
‘It’s A Topsy Turvy World’ c/w ‘Sunday Morning Market’

Released 5^th November 1965. Waverley SLP 296

Keith Easterly (vcls, electric guitar), ‘Saint’ Rupert Lee Travis (bicycle pump), Robert Doorway (bass), Smeagol Turnip (autoharp), Pierre le Fanu (accordion), Vincent St Mathers (drums)

“It was a tragedy. It really was. They could have been as big as The Tinkerbells”.

A glowing tribute from erstwhile Timperley Early manager Rich Wyngarde. So why did a group capable of producing such delightful, commercial numbers as ‘It’s A Topsy Turvy World’ fail to find stardom? The reason lies with singer and guitarist Keith Easterly.

 

By late 1965, Easterley’s massive daily ingestion of LSD had led to some peculiar habits. He lived in an abandoned sawmill outside Guildford, which still had a functioning buzz saw. One evening, Easterly and drummer St Mathers ingested a larger than usual dose of liquid LSD, took their clothes off, painted their bodies purple and freaked out.

St Mathers switched on the enormous buzz saw (“Because that’s the sort of thing I did”, he later said in court). To his amazement, Easterly shouted ‘Hallelujah!’, ran over and jammed both of his arms down on the huge, revolving blade, instantly cutting them off.

St Mathers remembers : “Both of his arms came off. Keith looked at his arms lying on the floor and said ‘Wow’. I knew then that his guitar playing days were over”.  

Easterly was rushed to hospital. “They had to amputate”, says St Mathers, still obviously freaked by the experience. “Both of his arms had to come off. No. I didn’t understand that bit, either”.

The hospital staff were apparently ‘taken aback’ by the sight of two naked, screaming, purple men – one without any arms – and of course it was a catastrophic blow for the group. Easterly was never the same after the accident and refused to play the guitar, on account of having no arms. He later privately claimed to friends that he’d been edged out by St Mathers, who wanted to change the musical direction of the group. 

St Mathers vehemently denies this, pointing out that the band still play ‘It’s A Topsy Turvy World’ at their reunion jazz-opera-haiku gigs today. “It’s just a great song”, he says. “If Keith had written more songs like that after the accident, rather than interminable numbers about his arms being sawed off, it might have been a different story for The Timperley Early”.