Tiny Tim at Afton Festival

Murray Lerner's Message To Love has a marvellous piece of footage where Bert Block, who came with Dylan the year before, says "You know Murray the ukelele won't tune without the money". Both Jack Richards, drums and Cas Caswell double bass played for Tiny Tim that day. Cas Caswell recalls:

"Tiny Tim sent word that he didn't want a rock'n'roll backing. That he wanted some reading musicians for the parts, more of a jazz trio. They didn't want Pete Kelly because his own MD played the piano and so in the end it was just Jack Richards and myself. To be honest the whole thing was a complete shambles. We dutifully went along. It took me about five hours to get to the gig because of all the traffic jams. Took me about seven hours to get home afterwards as well. I did about a twelve hour stint away from home for forty quid. Which was the Musicians Union rate, which we never got.

To add salt into the injury as we went on we saw the manager insist on Tiny Tim's money and these guys came up with this enormous suitcase absolutely packed with large denomination notes and he wouldn't even accept that. He insisted on seeing every last pound counted out. It took nearly an hour to count the money and that's why they were asking Joni Mitchell to keep going.

We had this grim section in the caravan with our tonques hanging out watching all this lolly changing hands. Jack and I didn't have the courage to ask for our forty quid and we never did get it. Just a few months ago, this guy who's just put the film together and the CD and the video, he suddenly got in touch with Jack and me, he said he'd tracked us down and would we settle for five hundred dollars each for the recording rights? It's the longest time I have ever had to wait for gig money. It was thirty six years to the day except that Jack's been paid and I haven't . . ."

Tiny Tim says on the film how it all ought be free and love and everything. If only they could have filmed that little bit at the back there.

It was mind boggling to go out on that stage and look and see an audience, I thought I was going to be nervous. If you play in front of fifty people you're pretty nervous, if you play in front of half a million people you're more nervous. But because it stretched over the horizon suddenly there was no nerves at all. Because it was totally meaningless. There was this ocean of people. There was no part of the landscape you couldn't see full of people. The MD said here's the dots lads and off we went."

Cas Caswell, Island musician who played double bass for the late Tiny Tim at Afton

Interviewed by Vic King, Mike Plumbley and Pete Turner, Picnic in the Park, Cowes, August 1996