The Authentics were always fighting a losing battle, because of Giorgio Gomelsky’s negative attitude toward us. We even got to the point where Jackie DeShannon, whose song ‘Needles And Pins’ had just been a No. 1 hit single for the Searchers, wrote a single for us and co-produced it with Jimmy Page, but Giorgio never did anything with it, because he wanted her to write for the Yardbirds.

Even when those two tracks appeared on Jimmy Page’s ‘Back Pages’ CD a few years ago, they acknowledged the band by saying that the Authentics were Mike O’Neil’s band. Mike was a keyboard player that Giorgio introduced to us; he played with us for a while and then disappeared. He was a good keyboard player and a great character, but he never had any input other than that. His place was eventually taken by a great harmonica player ‘Dutch’ - real name Nigel Reevley Mills - from Kingston. He was great and a real plus to the blues feel of the band.

My brother John started writing folky material; he wrote songs for Julie Felix and Adrienne Posta. Then as the flower power thing came in, we left Giorgio and Ricki Farr, the brother of Gary Farr and promoter of the Isle Of Wight Festival, took us over, but it didn’t really gel and nothing really happened.

We started playing for Rik Gunnell at the Flamingo and by then, my brother had written a lot of songs. Andrew Oldham took us on, and my brother wrote and recorded a double album called ‘The Maureeny Wishfull Album’ for Immediate Records. I did the cover art - but unfortunately. Andrew Oldham disappeared with the master tapes!

John eventually got one of the master tapes back and pressed the record himself. He markets it on the Internet and it’s now a collectable item, because Jimmy Page plays sitar and Vik Flic, Big Jim Sullivan (who is now Tom Jones’ guitarist) and all the good session artists of the time are on it. The master tape of the other album, which I’m playing on, was unfortunately never recovered.

But it was music I didn’t want to play, because I was still heavily into rock blues. Eventually, I became so disillusioned with the music business, I got out of it and went back to book illustration, graphic design and animation for children’s TV, which is what I’ve done ever since.

I moved to France in 2000 and still illustrate children’s books and produce characters for animation for an American company, and I am in the process of building a website for the Authentics. I’ve got a blues band in France now which is very popular and we are in the studio at the moment recording a CD which will be on sale from the website

At the moment, the band is called Blues Power, but we’re thinking of reverting back to the Authentics’ name - it would bring things round full-circle.

Did you ever see the Authentics perform in the Sixties? Berne is looking for Authentics’ memorabilia and memories for his new website, so if you can help, share your memories here!