I saw him on stage and my crush was instant
I wasn’t really ‘working as a waitress in a cocktail bar’ — as that famous song by Human League has it — when I first met David, but almost.
It was 1968 and I was waiting tables at the swan at Moulton in Lincolnshire, where we both grew up. I was 14 to his 18, but I developed an instant crush on the long-haired guy in flared trousers who played lead guitar with his band Purple Haze (named after one of the hits of his idol, Jimi Hendrix).
after that, I did the rounds of various village hall dances where I knew he was performing in the hope he’d ask me out.
But stubby, as everyone called him, was so painfully shy that in the end I made the first move — although it was two years after I first set eyes on him.
I plucked up courage to ask him to buy me a
vodka and lime — a drink I didn’t like but which I hoped would help me appear sophisticated. He confided years later that he’d had just enough money in his pocket to pay for it.
we were inseparable from then on, travelling all over the country in an old Commer van for Purple Haze gigs.
the band might never have topped the charts, but they supported a number of well-known groups including the Herd — although David liked to joke that his main claim to fame was once standing next to Ozzy Osbourne in the gents’ at a music festival.
stubby was a self-taught musician. while his shyness never left him, music brought him out of himself, and though his day job was as a welder — he later set up his own engineering company — his life-long passion was music and performance. when I remember him now, it’s always with a guitar in his hand.
In 1998 he formed his own band, Dr stubbs, followed by Bad to the Bone, and he started performing vocals as well. He was good with hecklers: once, when someone in the audience
shouted: ‘Oh stubby, why are you still playing that guitar so badly’, he shot back with: ‘well you keep coming to see me!’
we married in 1973 and stubby was a wonderful father to our two children, Kieran and Lindsay (and later grandfather to Caine, 18, and Jasmine, eight). some of my happiest memories are the holidays the four of us spent on the norfolk Broads on our river cruiser, the wanderer. Of course, the guitar always came, too.
tragedy struck our family when Kieran was diagnosed with a brain tumour in 1998. He fought a long battle with the disease and died in February 2015 at the age of 37. My husband was heartbroken and six months later he was diagnosed with bladder cancer.
Even then the music didn’t stop: his last gig, three months before he died, was at the pub where we met all those years ago.
I like to think that wherever he is now, the music’s still playing.
DaviD ‘Stubby’ StubbS, born February 3, 1950, died November 25, 2017, aged 67.