A well-known figure from the Kent music scene of the 1960s, who once allowed superstar David Bowie to hang out in his flat, has made a nostalgic return to his home town.

Peter Jansen, guitarist, singer, banjo player and song writer, grew up in Maidstone, but has spent the last 46 years living in Canada, with his wife and fellow performer Mary Kingsley.

Amid the ever-changing music scene of the early '60s, Peter founded Band Seven, which later morphed into the Manish Boys, a ban which gave a place to a new young singer and saxophone player called Davy Jones.

Peter recalled: "He was a nice guy. He and another member of the band, Paul Rodriguez, used to hang out in my flat in Bower Mount Road quite regularly.

"Davy had quite recently left Bromley Art College and he was eager to make his musical performances more theatrical.

"In those days there was nothing to hint that he was going to become superstar, though he himself was always convinced he would be."

Peter recalls a conversation in the Giaconda Coffee Bar in London's Denmark Street, centre of the pop music industry, where he, Paul Rodriquez, Davy Jones and two other Maidstone musicians, Woolfe Byrne and Bob Solly were chewing the cud.

He said: "We were talking about the impossibility of Davy's name. There was already a Davy Jones, who was lead singer with the Monkees, and it had just been announced that he was take to on the role of the Artful Dodger, when Lionel Bart's new musical Oliver! opened. We realised he was going to get all the publicity.

"Also there was a Davy Jones and The Cabin Boys, and a Davy Jones who was a blues singer in the States.

"We were saying Davy would have to change his name. The Stones was were just making it big at the time with their front man Mick Jagger. Someone said, Jagger sounds a bit like dagger, perhaps we should think of another knife?

"The suggestion we came up with, and I can't quite remember who had the idea, was Bowie, after the Bowie knife."

By then, Peter had left the Manish Boys and went on to pursue his own career, but he said: "I stayed in touch with David on and off over the years. After he left the Manish Boys, he used to live in a second-hand NHS Bedford Ambulance – all the bands had them in those days to cart our equipment to gigs. He used to park it in Soho Square at night, and outside the Giaconda during the day, just to be near the music scene."

Years later, after he found fame and fortune, Bowie told the press that he had never liked Maidstone and had once been beaten up in the town.

Bowie said: "It was just this big Herbert walking down the street. He just knocked me down on the pavement and when I fell down, he proceeded to kick me for no reason that I can fathom to this day. I haven't got many good memories of Maidstone."

Peter Jansen did not recall the incident, but said it did not surprise him. He said: "Maidstone was quite a rough place then. There were basically two gangs, the Smiths and the Drapers who liked to beat each other up and anyone else they could get hold of.

"I remember when I used to walk home from school, there was one area I always used to skirt around, it wasn't safe to walk through. Davy with his unusual looks would have been an obvious target."

Peter, who grew up in Bower Mount Road, was pupil at Sutton Valence School when he first picked up a guitar.

He said: "I was 13. Lonnie Donegan had just burst onto the music scene like a tidal wave. Until then pop music had been rather sleepy with people like Dickie Valentine and Ann Sheldon.

"Lonnie was just a raw energy that inspired everyone from the Beatles to the Stones. I used to practise on that guitar every minute that I wasn't at school until my fingers hurt so much I had to stop."

Peter soon formed his own skiffle group – the Cherry Pips. With a tea-chest bass, a washboard and a guitar and a "very classy" French horn. After playing church halls, they got a slot at the Royal Star Hotel's ballroom in Maidstone High Street during the intermission of the ballroom's regular band.

He said: "We were paid £2 10s – for the whole band. It seemed a lot to us. We were about 16 then."

They also got to know Maidstone's own rock and roll star Bill Kent.

Peter said: "Bill was a league above us. He had already made a record and toured America and he had regular gig at the Shepway Community Hall, where he let us play a couple of times in 1959.

As skiffle faded, the Cherry Pips became The Travellers, playing pop covers. Later Peter formed a new band – The Jazz Gentlemen Ragtime Players.

They played at Maidstone's hottest jazz venue – Highfield House off London Road, where other performers included Chris Barber and Kenny Ball.

On one occasion they were playing at their own party thrown for friends on the back lawn of Peter's parents' house, when a Rolls Royce pulled up outside. Brian Epstein, the Beatles' manager, got out and gate-crashed the party.

Around this time, the band won through to the final of a talent contest on Southern Television’s Home Grown series – only to be beaten by a 15-year-old girl tap dancer.

Some of the band members decided they had had enough, and so in 1963 Peter had to form yet another band to be known as Band Seven.

All went well for a time, but again the music scene was changing, R& B was all the rage. A change of style and a change of name to the Manish Boys (named after a Muddy Waters song) followed.

After a while, Peter and the drummer Graham Penny left to be replaced by Johnny Flux and Davy Jones.

Peter left Maidstone shortly after to go on a tour of American army bases in France with his new band, The After Three with Dave Kirby joining to do the blues vocals.

After the tour, three members stayed together to perform as Peter, Jan (Dean) and Jon (Edwards), working the clubs in London.

It was with this combo, that Peter had his one hit record, Mountain Boy, released in 1965.

From around 1969 onwards, Peter worked mostly as a solo artist on the cabaret circuit until in 1973, when he secured a residency at a club in Bermuda.

He said: "I found a club nearby also had vacancy, so I wrote to a girl singer I had met in London, Mary Kinglsey, and suggested she come out."

She did. Mary, who is now Peter's wife, said: "When we weren't performing in our own shows, we used to link up and sing together."
They must have made a sweet harmony, as the couple have now been performing together for 48 years.

After a tour of Canada in 1974, they decided to make that country their permanent home. They live in St Albert, just outside Edmonton in Alberta.

Peter said: "One of the things I like about Canada is there really is no class system.

"You can be performing with one table of people dressed up to the nines and on the next table would be a couple of farmers just come in, still in their working clothes. Nobody minds."

In Maidstone for a three-week visit, the couple are staying at the Grange Moor Hotel, only yards from the house where Peter grew up.

He said: "Obviously Maidstone has changed a lot since I lived here. There was only one bridge then, and it quite often used to flood at both ends which caused a bit of a problem."

"Fremlins was big in the town and of course that has gone. There is now much more traffic and way more charity shops, but I think there are also more pedestrian areas, and surprisingly, I think it's also cleaner than it used to be.

"As a teenager, I used to visit a coffee bar called The Fiesta near the Granada cinema, that's gone now.

"Also there was a delicatessen run my Mrs Syme in King Street. It had a deli on the ground floor, a restaurant on the first floor and a club in the basement where we all hung out."

Peter and Mary are still performing together, with Mary adding a ventriloquist puppet to their act.

They did a gig together just three days before flying to England, even though Peter is now 80.

Peter has now written a book on his long career in music, with reflections on Maidstone, on the 60s music scene, and on he and his wife's subsequent music career together in North America.

The book will be released in England in time for Christmas. It is titled: Let's Take It From The Top.

For release details, follow Peter Jansen's website.