11th May 1997

Purple Loons

The early Seventies were a style disaster, and not a good time to go to university if you were going to be famous later. Tony Blair's hair, a running battle zone at school, now explored his shoulders. His father says he went to Oxford to pick him up in his first year, and met a long-haired undergraduate, shirt open to the navel, a large ceramic cross round his neck and a long, black synthetic skin coat with a red lining. 'I wondered who the hell it was. Then he said, "Hi, Dad".

Blair chose to study Law, because of his father, although he has since said that he wished he had studied history. Law was and is a tedious subject to study - involving large amounts of rote learning and offering little opportunity for flights of intellectual exploration. For no obvious reason, he also chose St. John's, an all-male college, and a rather dull and conservative place, according to contemporaries, in preference to one of the more 'progressive' or radical colleges like Balliol, where his brother went. He certainly stood out.

The Ugly Rumours were public school rebels. The band was set up by Adam Sharples and Ellen, who knew each other from Winchester school, with drummer Jim Moon, now a merchant banker. 'We felt, looking at ourselves, that we were on the visual front a little bit tragic - yards of unconditioned hair and collective sex appeal of slightly less than zero,' says Ellen. 'What we felt we wanted was a charismatic, goodlooking lead singer, and Adam suggested this guy Tony Blair. "I met this guy Tony Blair in St. John's. He looks terrific. He can sing - I've seen him sing."'

So Blair was auditioned, sitting in the armchair in Sharples's room in Corpus Christi, where Sharples read Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE). Sharples and Ellen played acoustic guitar while Moon hit 'anything within reach in a rhythmical manner', says Ellen. And Blair sang. 'He was fantastic. He had a really good voice. It was a very high, powerful voice and he knew all the words. So we said: "Well, you're in. We're called Ugly Rumours and you can start tomorrow."'

"Tony turned up bang on time - incredibly punctual-brandishing sheafs of paper, of lyrics that he had transcribed, and we were fantastically impressed by this, because obviously we'd told him what songs we played [although] we didn't really know what the words were, but he had got the records and he'd stayed up all night transcribing them.

Blair's earnestness continued. He took the whole business seriously, Ellen says. 'I was amazed by how keen he was on the idea of rehearsal. I think we were just a little bit looser - "Hey, we'll just turn up and we'll be brilliant." And he was like, "No, I think we should actually practise this and get it right."' Ellen is the only member of the band who stayed in the music business. He presented the Old Grey Whistle Test, edited the music magazine Q and is now publisher of Mojo magazine. His account of the band's first gig, in Corpus Christi's oak-panelled sixteenth-century hall, is a comedy turn in itself (BBC TV Newsnight, 10 June 1994). They rehearsed - 'not very rigorously' - in the underground car park across the road, came on stage at 8.30 and 'shuffled into some lumpen riff'. Enter Tony Blair, stage left, in purple loons and cut-off T-shirt.

He comes on stage giving it a bit of serious Mick Jagger, a bit of finger wagging and punching the air. And we go into our third song and - complete catastrophe - the drums begin to fall off the drum riser. I can see it now in slow motion. One by one they just fell apart and rolled off the stage and onto the floor. And we were all absolutely frozen with horror and embarrassment. The audience are looking at us, and we're looking at them.

And Tony just got straight in there and dealt with it brilliantly. He grabbed the microphone and said: 'We're the Ugly Rumours. Hope you're enjoying yourself. We're playing on Saturday at the Alternative Corpus Christi College Ball, supported by a jazz-fusion band and a string quartet. Hope you're going to come. Are you having a good time? I can't hear you at the back. Corpus Christi how are you?'

All that sort of stuff - really ludicrous. He held the entire thing together, and we were just amazed. We were running around behind him trying to nail these drums back again. Got the kit back. Plugged in.

The noisy Entertainer spent his time outside St. John's, in pubs and parties in other colleges, where he was a member of a number of overlapping social circles. Blair the Contemplative spent his time in college, working quite hard, reading a lot and - for a law student - quite widely. 'I was very interested in political ideas,' he says. 'I was reading everything from Tawney and William Morris through to Gramsci and Isaac Deutscher.' He developed a strong relationship with a small number of people in St. John's who were interested in politics and religion. Marc Palley was one of them, but the informal coterie revolved around an Australian mature student called Peter Thomson, whom Blair describes as 'spellbinding' and 'the person who most influenced me'.

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