Mansfield group 1957 – 1960

Of the many groups that must have called The Phantoms in late nineteen fifties Britain it is this group that a young Leo Lyons first joined starting his lifelong musical career. Leo is best known as the bass guitarist of blues rock group Ten Years After who will always be remembered as one of the legends of Woodstock and also as Nottingham’s greatest musical export achieving great success in the sixties and seventies. Leo has continued to work in the music industry as a producer and still plays today with his band Hundred Seventy Split.

Leo was born David William Lyons on Tuesday, November 30, 1943 at the Mansfield General Hospital, Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, England in the heart of the East Midlands coalfields. The World was at war and his father was away serving in the army. He was killed in action in 1944 when Leo was only nine months old.

Most of the men in the family were coal miners but there was a love for music in the family. Leo’s grandfather was an accomplished singer and brass band player. His grandfathers brother Morgan Kingston, also a former miner, was a professional operatic tenor and Columbia recording artiste. He sang for President Woodrow Wilson at The White House. Leo never knew either of them but remembered, as a very young child, listening to his Great Uncle’s records on a wind up gramophone.

He grew up in, what was for him, a haunted house, a disturbingly haunted house, which later made for his interest in the paranormal. When I was 5 I had polio. He was very ill when he was young and had a strong fear of the dark and up to the age of 16 he thought I was going mad but as a kid he also had a fascination with the American west. There was no rock music until he was a bout 10 or 11 and he would listen to a faint signal from Radio Luxembourg for a couple of hours in the evening.

For some reason amongst the record collection were 78’s of Lead Belly and Jimmy Rogers. That was the first time Leo heard a guitar played. The sound blew him away and I tried several times to make a cigar box guitar with no success. Like a lot of his contemporaries he loved the Skiffle music craze that swept the UK in the 1950’s. In particular he liked Lonnie Donegan. He desperately wanted a guitar but could not afford to buy one but there was a banjo that once belonged to his Grandfather and he started playing that.

Skiffle broke in Britain but, as for many, the real explosion was when he first heard the electric guitar and hearing Rock and Roll from Bill Haley, Little Richard, Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley. He went for guitar lessons and and his guitar teacher introduced him to some other pupils who needed a bass player. They had no bass player and he had no amp so he borrowed an electric guitar and played bass on it. He first started playing bass notes on a normal guitar which mean’t he played it an octave down and although the amplifiers at the time didn’t really handle the bottom range this all shaped his style and in some ways it became an advantage. The other pupils Leo was introduced to were known as The Phantoms.

“When I finally got a guitar I started lessons with local teacher Frank Wooley. He introduced me to some of his other pupils who had a band called ‘Paul Dennis And The Phantoms’. They needed a bass player and they invited me to join them. At first I played bass lines on an electrified Dobro guitar belonging to my guitar teacher. I eventually raised some money by selling my bicycle and bought a Hofner Senator bass guitar on Hire Purchase (deferred payment). From that moment on I never looked back. I knew bass was the instrument I wanted to play. My guitar teacher Frank was disappointed and said that it was wasting my talent”.

The line-up was:

Paul Dennis: lead vocals (b. Dennis Smith)
Leo Lyons: bass
Bob ?: lead guitar
Norton ?: rhythm guitar
a guy ?: rhythm guitar
a guy ?: rhythm guitar
Dave Quickmire: drums (b. David Michael Quickmire, Friday, December 11, 1942, Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, England).

As Bob ? had an amp, he got to be the lead guitarist. As for Lyons, he had a choice of playing either rhythm guitar or plugging into Bob ?’s amp and playing bass lines on his guitar. He became the bassist as they had three rhythm guitarists already. ‘The Phantoms’ were a hobby band and played gigs just for fun, usually relatives weddings, but on one show Leo was spotted by the manager of ‘The Atomites’, a popular local band who were intending to turn professional and move to London. In the late summer of 1960 he was asked if he’d like to join the band and he did.

Paul Dennis and The Phantoms probably carried on without Leo but for how long isn’t known.

This background to Leo Lyons is put together from “Leo Lyons Interview with The Backbeat Experience“, “Leo Lyons interview with “Psychedelicbabymag” and John Warburg’s conversations with Leo.