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the news that pedestrians are to be banned from Cambridge city centre,’ reported Morris. ‘The council ruling follows concern over congestion in the city’s increasingly crowded streets. Market traders are up in arms, claiming that already recession-hit trade will dry up completely if no one is allowed to walk within half a mile of their stalls. But the council are unrepentant. “There’s no pleasing these tossers,” said a spokesman this morning. “You clear the streets so they can unload their vans and they turn around and crap in your face.”’ 15 When Morris left Andy’s, he was presented with a history of lithography from an academic bookshop in town.
    Morris was himself active in local bands. He played funky bass in the Exploding Hamsters, made up of students from the university, a slick, brass- and percussion-led dance outfit. In a similar vein were Somewhere in the Foreign Office, with trumpet, trombone, guitar and two lead singers, a bunch of young, talented musicians out for a good time and loosely kept in check by Mark Graham, who at almost thirty was able to pull seniority on most of them. The band’s finest hour came through their agent, who specialized in military gigs and booked their uptempo rhythms into RAF, USAF and Royal Navy bases in the very north of England and in Scotland – including Marham, Lossiemouth, Faslane and Swinderby. They set up in the canteen while the chairs and tables were cleared away and, Spinal Tap -style, frequently played to an audience as small as thirty, one of whom could be relied on to loudly request ‘Freebird’ while the rest sat with their feet up. None of the musicians took the project too seriously. Singer Steve Breeze kept his fellow musicians amused by telling the audience they were off on an arena tour but just doing a few warm-up gigs first. Morris and the other band members would try not to crack up as the base personnel appeared to take everything at face value.
    All ten of the group crammed into a Fiat Ducato van with their equipment and tents, the budget not stretching to hotels. Being constrained to canvas led to some unforgettable moments, like the big beach fire under the aurora borealis on the coast of Scotland and a night at a hippie commune called Findhorn. The band were allowed to stay, even though they confessed the next gig was at a nuclear base, on the understanding that they promised to beam ‘psychic rays of love’ to the military staff on the base.
    There were no egos on the road – everyone got on well, acted as their own roadie and made up rude songs for the long journeys, when they weren’t playing Thomas Dolby’s ‘I Scare Myself’, a favourite from 1984’s The Flat Earth . They shared a sense of humour influenced by the Pythons and the ubiquitous filth of Derek and Clive. Chris would bring out his impersonations of Jagger and Richards in which he was joined by Steve Breeze.
    Morris generally stuck to bass duties in the band, though he was able to turn his hand to a number of different instruments. He was beginning to find himself as a young man. The acne he’d suffered was clearing up, though Morris seemed to Mark Graham to be capable of being quite sensitive – ‘I just remember him being a happy soul,’ says Graham.
    Morris was popular and always surrounded by girls at the gigs. ‘He had a sort of animal charm about him,’ says Steve Breeze. ‘The whole thing about him was his magnetism. It was quite strange for a guy who was a really nice bloke.’ It was a carefree time, with no real responsibilities. But the band knew there were too many of them to have a realistic chance of making a living; they were too talented to wait around and they drifted apart, finally concluding with one last festival gig.
    Over the summer of 1984 Morris got a gig playing bass for the Cambridge Footlights Revue. The four-piece band featured a number of different drummers and Cambridge students Hugh Levinson and Roy Margolis. With his