our trumpeter then was bob kerr, great player, and a fun guy. but he was friends with (songwriter and producer) geoff stephens, who'd made "winchester cathedral" with session men. and he knew bob, so he rang bob up saying: 'what am i going to do? "winchester cathedral"'s a hit, and i've got no band to promote it.' so bob came, flushed with excitement, to the rest of us at our digs, saying, 'we can be the new vaudeville band!' and we said, 'certainly not, no way!' so, bob couldn't understand this, so we said, 'well, go, you go and do it then, if you want to. go, never darken our towels again!', kind of thing. but the next thing, on "top of the pops", was the new vaudeville band, with the singer looking exactly like viv, in a sort of lamé suit, all the musicians wearing the kind of suits we were wearing, with two-tone shoes. they'd even nicked the cutout comic speaking balloons, which we made out of hardboard, with a fret saw, and painted white, and then wrote, 'wow, i'm really expressing myself!' to hold over somebody's head while they did a saxophone solo. there was the entire image, and for the next few weeks people were saying to us, 'hey, you're like that new vaudeville band!' and that's when i think legs larry smith said, "well, look ...'—he'd always been arguing for doing some more modern material, so we all said, 'right, now we start writing our own stuff.' "