When our recording career went the way of all vinyl, the Fourmost took up a life on the cabaret and club circuits of the U.K. and Europe. We had a firm grounding in the art of entertaining an audience. It was not our way to go on stage and sing the hits and hope it would be enough. We had always been a show group doing comedy and impressions but that side of the band wasn't apparent in our pop career but it made a huge difference on the circuits.

I know that it is a nerve-wracking experience to do concerts at large arenas but, before you play a note, you know that the audience is on your side because they have come to see you in their thousands. All you have to prove is that you are worthy of their trust. But going on stage at the dead of night in front of an alcohol soaked audience who are daring you to entertain them takes a different sort of discipline and if talent is not there you have no other choice but to accept humiliation. I know which job I would rather do for a living. The unfeeling critics who deride the artists whose life at the top had become an existence in the real world should keep their mouths shut and their pens inactive, unless they have the guts and ability to try it themselves.

I am now retired from any sort of show business activity but a continuous source of satisfaction for me is the memories. The good times far outweigh the bad ones and the fact that you had to mature pretty quickly if you were to survive on the road gave you an inner confidence and a head start in life. I had the joy of meeting and working with people I had only fantasized about and that cannot be bought. In the odd quiet moment when I look back on my adventures in the Sixties and beyond, a tiny voice whispers in my ear, "Did you really do all that?" and a much louder voice replies, "Yes, I bloody well did!!"

Editor's Note: Billy is currently working on his autobiography and we look forward to reading it.

I remember that the name with which Bob Wooler actually renamed the Four Jays was the Four Mosts. It was Brian Epstein who then truncated it to the Fourmost.

Billy was one of several group members who wrote for Mersey Beat. Here is the text of an article by Billy called 'Have You Changed?' which appeared in issue No. 72:

"Have you changed? The question is not, as you may at first assume, a rather personal enquiry into the state of your underwear - but a statement more than a question about the alteration of a person's character.

"This problem, faces every performer who achieves any given amount of success.

"You see, the people who knew you before this success was gained assume that you will automatically alter with it. But, not only the above point is taken for granted by your friends, but they also think that the more you achieve or the higher your rating, so your head will swell in proportion.

"This may be true for the performer who seeks recognition so that his hat size will benefit, but for the average hard-working artist it is a great and grossly misunderstood burden.

"What most people find, unfortunately, is that after being on the road and away from the environment he knows and is comfortable in, he returns home expecting to find things just as they were before. He thinks he can go to all the old places with all the old people and still have a good time.

"Instead, when his mates meet him they think he has changed without giving him a chance to prove that he hasn't. Instead of going to the 'local' where he'd like to go, they take him somewhere to 'show him off' so that they can click with the girl they've been fancying for a few weeks - leaving him to go home in his own. This does happen!

"Now, who is the changed person? The friend or the rather bewildered performer?

"After a few treatments like this the artist gets to the stage where, when he comes home he will seek out other artists, or will go to a place where people in the same profession meet. This is simply because he is in the same boat with these people and will never have to put on an act in front of people who will stare at him and make him (because of their actions) feel as though he has, in fact, changed; not just a little bit but altogether.

"His friends wonder why he doesn't go out with them anymore and then conclude that their so-called 'famous' mate doesn't think they are good enough for him - he is big-headed and they tell their other friends this.

"If they could only have treated the friend just as they did before, this situation would never have arisen and a lot of nice people would never have been placed in an awkward predicament.

"This, let me say, is an assumption on my part, put together by scraps of information I have picked up all over the country.

"But let me put it this way - I have good friends, I'm lucky!"

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