27) My Life after The Fabulous Falcons

The rest of the guys, decided to leave it all behind. They headed to Singapore where they formed another band The Brain. In the boring town of Grik, I somehow lost touch with the world of music and the exciting life I used to lead. I was stuck in Grik working in a mediocre job that I really didn’t like. My band-mates and I have taken completely different routes in our young lives and soon I lost contact with them too.

Since I left the band, I completely lost touch with music and I left the happy band days behind. In Grik it was just work and then off to the club for a game of cards with colleagues and sleep. It was the same routine day in day out till the weekend came and I travelled back to Ipoh and returned to Grik on Sunday. Life was really lousy and I felt I was wasting away in Grik. Then after three and half years in Grik, the good news finally came. I was being transferred back to Ipoh, my hometown. It was already April 1971 and I was glad to leave the village kind of life I led in Grik to at least a more civilized life in Ipoh. I was glad to be home with family and Liz.

On December 23^rd 1972, Liz and I were married and the following year in October, our son Donovan was born. I was happy once more with a family of my own and I never thought much about music anymore. We had our own little nest and were doing ok until Liz had to give up her job to stay home with our firstborn, Don. Times were difficult with only one income now and we had little help from family. In April 1977 our younger son Jason was born. My young family was now complete. My wife, Liz took care of all the household chores besides taking care of our two young sons and I had to bring home the bread, so to speak. With my civil servant’s salary, I found it really difficult to make ends meet with a very young family to feed. This same year too, Liz’s mother passed away and my brother-in-law Andrew stayed with us briefly. Knowing of our situation, he suggested that I get back to music as a way of a second income. So that was how I bought an acoustic guitar from Andrew and started playing the guitar again hoping to get a gig to restart my music career.