Immigration negotiated and baggage in hand we trooped into the arrivals hall to be met by Horst Fascher, ex-boxer, manager of The Star Club and one time jailbird, having spent time incarcerated on a manslaughter charge following one of his more unfortunate fights. Short and stocky and possessing one of those slight lisps that so many pugilists seem to have, he welcomed us in his bluff but jovial Germanic manner and led us out to the waiting white Cadillac coupe;. We were suitably awed, We were still at that age when your car stood for more than your breeding or your brain power and we had never stood next to let alone ridden in a Cadillac

We went straight to the club leaving the hotel check-in formalities till later, and by the time we arrived The Beatles were into their second set of the night. This was what we wanted to see. We had heard from the bar staff and the customers about this ragged looking long haired band of Scousers during our last trip and had watched them rise from a bunch of no marks to a number seventeen position in the British charts with Love Me Do. We were impressed by this. Cliff Bennett and The Rebel Rousers had been recording for almost three years and despite releasing half a dozen singles we had not even managed a sniff at the best selling lists. 'Only number seventeen?' I heard someone scoff much later. At that time I would have shown my arse in Debenhams' window for a number seventeen. Ironically the wheel turns full circle and the feeling is much the same nowadays. Debenhams, prepare yourself for my naked butt.

We stood and observed with a steely determination to remain dispassionate about these potential rivals. After all, we were the groups' group, the hard edged brass-based outfit who sold soul to the ballrooms and were respected and admired by other musicians while the rest of the big jessies around the country ponced about the stage imitating Cliff and The Shadows, strumming along with thin guitars and lightweight bits of musical fluff they passed off for a rock and roll repertoire. We were here to witness the dismantling of a myth. But it was not to be.

They were good. Very good. Just guitars, bass and drums like the rest of the run of the mill outfits but tough and raunchy and with more edge than a broken piss pot. On top of which they had personalities that were as mature as a ripe old Camembert. We may have been all around the same age but we were boys while those four figures up there on the stage were men. They were a little more reserved than we had been led to expect but the Brian Epstein-imposed suits and the first glimpse of fame had maybe calmed them a little. That night they were in an assortment of black and white waistcoats, ties and shirts. They were well aware of what they had to do to make it and they exuded a natural power and charisma as they worked their way through their hour on the podium and contemplated the fortune that was ahead of them. Cliff Bennett, not a man to bestow a compliment carelessly, loved them. So did I.

As they played and sang they bantered with the crowd in pidgin English and pidgin German occasionally pleasing punters with the odd request. There were shouts for special songs from Bettina as she tended her bar towards the back of the converted cinema building. 'Ein wunsche for Betty' Lennon would yell and the more than buxom blonde would pout back, throwing a big air kiss in gratitude to her beloved John. Bettina was a large girl, imposing and hard to miss as she dispensed her drinks, looking for all the world like two women sewn together, with a vanilla coloured candy floss beehive hairdo and a bosom on which you could land a helicopter. I fancy that more than a few had already crash landed on those mighty orbs.

The following evening, New Year's Eve, I encountered John Lennon exiting the dressing room area as I was going in. I introduced myself and raised a hand in friendship. He shook it and listened as I told him how much I enjoyed their set and that I hoped they were going to have a great success with the new single, due out in January. Oh yeah, Frank', he replied with a guarded deliberation and a piercing gaze. I watched your show. Great. I've been talking to people in the club and it seems that next to Cliff you're the most popular member in the band'. He paused. I can't think why. Your harmonies are fucking ridiculous'. There was a second or two of deafening silence as I tried to assemble my thoughts. Had I heard right? I had never encountered this kind of instant frankness before. Obviously there was a joke there somewhere and I had missed it, but he wasn't laughing. Neither was I. Inside I was trembling. I was a nervous person at best and I was not at my best.

Well anyway, I hope it all goes well for you', I continued, waffling like someone now on auto-pilot. Yeah great, all the best', he answered magnanimously. The ships passed in that German night and the next day they few off to be legends and conquer the world. I merely wanted to conquer my embarrassment. I met no other Beatles that evening. I had no wish to. I was all Beatled out. I was not a complete pillock. I had no wish to repeat such an encounter until I had honed my skills in the thrust and parry of witty and sardonic conversation on the grindstone of experience and academia. I had severe doubts though that they would ever match those of Mister Lennon.

The entertainment planned for the second evening was something else altogether. Mike, John and myself, along with our road manager Barry Delaney, were driven into Quezon City in one of the rock and roll cars. Chris had begun to separate himself from the rest of the group by this time and we left him back at the coliseum to do whatever eccentric people do in their private moments. We were ushered into what we assumed was a perfectly ordinary night-club.

Inside the long, low room was crowded and smoky and we were shown to a prime position in front of a small stage where the entertainment,which had already commenced, appeared to be a female dancer, petite and pretty and undulating in smooth seductive movements as she made eye contact with the largely male audience. There was a sprinkling of women in the place but the degree of prettiness and the manner in which they were groomed and painted seemed curiously at odds with the casual attire of the men which was casual to the point of being scruffy.

Before we had the chance to offer either our acceptance or refusal we were joined by five young women who, without so much as a 'May I?' distributed themselves evenly amongst our party. The penny, which to that point had been waiting patiently for my miserably ill-equipped brain to kick into gear, finally dropped with all the weight of a girder. I turned to the stage to discover that the all too few items that had been covering the vitals of the girl dancer had magically disappeared. I was staring wide-eyed at two fried eggs and a toasted sandwich. My God, I thought. I'll never go to heaven now. I've seen a woman's thingy.

The girls by our side put their years of learning the art of social interaction into practise and made vain attempts at conversation to probably the most reluctant customers they had ever encountered. We were simply not customer material. They could not even hope to obtain our compliance through the effects of alcohol either. The fizzy soft drinks we sipped nervously assured our absolute sobriety. They might as well have tried to seduce the Pope.

Trying to make conversation was hell both for them and us. Being hopelessly English we would go to any lengths not to appear rude but sentences stuck in our gullets as the girls struggled through one of the most intense and difficult training exercises they would ever experience. We stuck it out for the shortest time that politeness would allow and then, in the best tradition of the man from The News Of The World, we made our excuses and left.

Whether the girls were miffed or not we neither knew nor cared. I assume we were expected to whisk them off to places unknown where we would he expected to do unspeakable things. Unfortunately for them unspeakable things were not our style. We would not have been good at it anyway. We saved ourselves the embarrassment of premature ejaculation by prematurely ejaculating ourselves from that particular den of iniquity. We were probably stealing food from their babies' mouths as they saw their fees, no doubt taken care of by our promoters, vanishing towards the door but we just wanted to get our crimson faces out of that place and into our beds - alone.

As we passed the reception counter the owner, a large black woman whose appearance was a cross between the lady who sang Happy Talk in South Pacific and an overstuffed leather sofa, smiled at the exiting bunch of pale and pathetic British eunuchs and handed each of us a bag of M&Ms. She had us sussed alright. We were babes but this was not toyland. Any toys here can probably be found nowadays in a branch of Ann Summers.

Keep going east and you will finally end up west. When you touch Australia your voyage has reached the point where it begins to turn back on itself and the sights and sounds start getting familiar once again. Continue and you will eventually disappear up your own amplifier. In one way that is quite reassuring but on the other hand seems a bit of a fruitless journey to travel so far and encounter people and places not too dissimilar to yourself. It's a bit like travelling fiom London to Paris only to have lunch with people from Balham. And only under exceptional circumstances would I even travel to Balham to have lunch with people from Balham.

We had been to Oz once before, in 1964 when we headlined a package which also included Del Shannon, Eden Kane and Peter and Gordon, not to mention New Zealand's own 'Queen of the Bluebeat' Dinah Lee. I can remember few things about Dinah Lee. At the top end she sported a CilIa Black haircut and at the other extremity she was firmly propped up by a rather large pair of feet. She sang her current hit record, a song that boasted the incomprehensible Lyrics doo way akaway. If i've misspelt those incomprehensible words I am sure that it is of infinitely less consequence to the world than if it had never been spelt at all. Another thing I remember was that she kept disappearing into Peter Asher's room late at night. Or he into hers. And Peter looked such a sweet 'butter wouldn't melt in his mouth' kind of a guy.

Del Shannon was still riding pretty high on the success of hits like Runaway and Hat's Off To Larry in those heady days before you could go out and buy a similar haircut to his for £6.50p a yard at Carpet World.

This time we were no longer headlining. Our career graph was on a downward course and our agent had glibly passed off the tour to us as being a 'double top' in a poor attempt to pander to our vanity and to salvage some of our self respect. But as our hits had sunk to a disap~ pointing number twenty with Take Me For What I'm Worth and their last six releases had been one, one, one, one, one and two in that order it was pretty clear who were the mutt nuts in this little bunch of musical mongrels.

Their newest success was Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown but we had the feeling that Chris Curtis could well be heading for his first. He was not a happy bunny about our loss of status or the coupling with an outfit so much higher up the scale in our mutual workplace. Our last visit had been a tour deforce and now we were forced to tour in a new position.

ln truth Chris, who had always been more than happy to accept, or even demand, the credit for picking our hit records regardless of anybody else's input (sometimes true, sometimes not quite as clear cut) should have been equally happy to don the mantle of blame when they failed to deliver. The words cake and eat somehow spring to mind. But I have to say, right or wrong, pleasure or pain, Curtis was a malice-free zone and deep down there was a heart as generous as Santa Claus and as big as an ocean. He was becoming a bit of a pain but you couldn't help but like him.

The shows went well. How could they do otherwise? The Stones were huge and we were still very much a saleable commodity. Both groups got its fare share of screams. We were on little more than nodding terms with them although I found it quite easy to talk to Bill Wyman, and Charlie and Shirley Watts were a delight to socialise with.

Jagger and Richards I found a little more remote and in the main I steered clear, memories ofJohn Lennon's sharp tongue still strong in my mind. But when we did exchange a sentence or two they were actually very pleasant, Mick in particular. Anyone with a twinkle that bright in his eye could never be all bad. Brian Jones was two years away from being eased out of the band he had given birth to but already he seemed to be on the perimeter of things, floating in and out of the action like an exotic but somehow sad butterfly. Colourful but at the same time fragile and easily damaged. Maybe it is only with the value of hindsight that I recall feeling that he almost appeared to be aware that things were slowly slipping away from him,

Australia was still fairly understated and open by London standards but it was a notch or two up from New Zealand. Aussies are a free spirited people willing to do anything and go any distance on a fun-fuelled impulse. If they weren't fuelled by fun they were most definitely fuelled by beer. Gallons of it. Most of the time it was both and I envied them their spontaneity and openness. At this early stage in my character development I was neither alcohol-fuelled nor spontaneous.

The weather there was warm and the air clear and clean. New buildings rose amongst the old Victorian terraced cottages with their cute verandas and wrought iron embellishments, some of which were maybe a touch overwrought. The controversial Sydney Opera House was still a building site with its enormous cowls inspired by the white sails of the passing ships and the even more enormous and never-ending cost that threatened to bankrupt the city.

We performed in the old Sydney Stadium, an edifice which to my eyes consisted of little more than sheets of corrugated iron and was fortunate not to collapse under the noise and vibration of the volume The Stones played at which, for those times, was prefty high on the decibel scale. I stood watching them, mesmerised by the energy if not overawed by the expertise. These were primitive times and there was much to be learnt by all of us. A fan by my side remarked that Keith Richards could make his guitar talk. I could see what he meant. And I could almost hear the guitar saying take your hands off me, you clumsy oaf. But it was impressive, of that there was no doubt. This was not really so much a demonstration of music as a display of sex and power, and on that level it worked to perfrction.

Over in our camp Chris appeared to be coasting through the days in a distant haze, his eyes dilated and staring even more than usual. Something was not nght. We were all waiting for something to happen although we had no idea what. It was like Channel Five television. Everything was being observed through a haze of tiny dots and you had the feeling that if only you could join up those dots the greater picture would come into focus.

We had all changed and we all understood how everything must change. We were no longer the sylph-like rock gods of their teenage memories. And they were no longer the shapely young groupies and skinny-ribbed fashion dandies who had once hoped to die before they grew old. If that had once been their intention they had unfortunately left it a little too late. They forgave us our trespasses and we forgave those that trespassed along with us. Age is a world that nobody gets out of alive.

Suddenly we found ourselves back in the public eye and riding on the crest of a slump, Almost overnight the decade known as The Sixties had achieved a profile hgher than it had been since the first stirrings we all felt with the raw naiveté and hypnotic simplicity of Love Me Do. The press coverage was extensive. They could not deny the resurgence in interest. But neither could they resist lunging viciously with their sharpened quills.

The Guardian reviewer unfairly called Sarstedt that incomparably bad lyricist. Unfair, I cry. The words of A Brand New Love Among The Ruins must surely give the lie to that glib exaggeration. Had he ever listened to them? The same writer attacked Gerry Marsden for not remaining the slim-hipped teenage idol he had been twenty years before. But twenty four years on we were no longer selling sex. We were selling memories, slightly used and slightly flawed maybe, but it was a perfectly good commodity. Everybody with an ounce of sense knew that those memories would have to take account of constantly altering physical appearances. The write-up failed to point out that Gerry's voice was just as good and as strong as it had been more than twenty years before, still with that street-wise Dingle-raised throatiness that had once sent shivers down the spines of legions of barely pubescent girl. And if someone does not like what they see or hear, if it is just not their idea of 'cool' then it is such a simple act to just stay away. The years change our looks. There is no escape, that's for sure. But there's no reason to lay down and die.

No matter how many great reviews a performer receives it can never eradicate the pain of the lone poisoned quill whose vitriol-laced ink remains indelibly tattooed on the brain forever and a day. It will seem so unfair that you and your great talent are being vilified by some pimpled prat with a face like one of those newspaper games, where you join up the dots to reveal a barely distinguishable caricature of George Best. A no-account scribbler whose venom I would like to believe, is probably fed by the shame that he has a penis the size of a button mushroom and the literary skills to match.

The trouble with the young is that they feel that youth is some great thing that they have achieved when in fact they achieve nothing. It is simply a fleeting passage of time before they, like everyone else, hurtle inevitably towards old age. Nobody gets away with it, not unless they have the misfortune to die young. No matter how trendy you imagine yourself to be at nineteen, eventually you are that 'old fart' you derided in your younger days. The rap and grunge of today is the 'old folks' music of tomorrow. And don't you believe anything else. Abuse your elders simply for acquiring age and you subconsciously abuse yourself.

If there is an audience that believes it can enjoy an evening wallowing in nostalgia and is willing to pay an entrance fee then there is a reason for an artiste to haul his ageing body, whatever state of decay it might be in, onto a stage. Some bodies wear better than others. Some talents wear better than others. And it is only the people who make their way to the clubs and theatres who can judge whether the expanding waistlines and the receding hairlines have passed the litmus test. And if there are people who believe that this will not be an uplifting or entertaining experience then the solution is ludicrously simple. Do not go. But there is never any reason to suggest that others might not partake of something simply because you yourself do not wish to.

We suffered rather less in that particular review. The writer was complimentary about our music. 'Still sharp, still convincingly serious about what they do', he wrote. The only barb tossed at us was reference to our shirts and suits coming from Man at C & A. He was wrong. They came from Principles. Same thing really. High street chic, or, more to the point, high street cheap. Anyway, we were happy to have got away so lightly, Of course along the way we took our turn to receive the brickbats. I will avoid repeating anything negative here, Why should I? It's my book.