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told us, he had performed in eleven different countries and 250 different cities. He announced, proudly, that buskers had been the Queen Mother’s favourite form of entertainer. ‘Some of the richest people in the world!’ he said. I assumed he was talking figuratively. In the old, good days, he explained, he could easily earn £200 for a day’s work, but now he was lucky if he made an eighth of that. ‘Nobody cares in this place,’ he lamented, gesturing towards an obese woman in a baseball cap across the road who was walking a German shepherd, as if it was all her fault. ‘My foot hurts too much to do more than three or four hours at a time. And I wouldn’t busk at night. Too dangerous here.’ He always carries his weapons with him – a sword, a bow or an axe. ‘The police have confiscated them a few times, but they’ve always had to give them back. It’s part of ancient law, y’know: a busker is allowed to be armed.’
    Ed was born in North East England but moved to Memphis in the mid-Sixties, and his drawn-out vowels reflect more of the latter. His wandering spirithad taken him from a cardboard box beneath the Brooklyn Bridge in New York all the way to the Robin Hood statue in Nottingham, which used to be one of his favourite places to play. I told him I spent the first twenty years of my life in Nottingham. ‘Do you know the story from the early Nineties about the busker who split his landlord’s head open with a broadsword?’ he asked me. I said I vaguely remembered something of the sort. ‘That was me!’ he said, bristling slightly. ‘He did kung-fu on me and I whacked him one. He got forty-five stitches. I got seven months in prison.’ Ed talked a lot about violence – the winos who’d attacked him while he busked, the drunken townies who’d tried to steal his instruments – and seemed to feel that the modern city high street was no place to hang out unarmed.
    The best period of his life was in Memphis, where he met Elvis’s dad (‘lovely bloke’), refinished the guitar that The King used on his ’68 Comeback Tour, and, with his band The Jesters, cut some rocking demos for Sam Phillips of Sun Records. He recalled the day that Phillips asked him to sign to the label in that vivid way people reserve for the moments that have made or ruined them.
    â€˜I’d been told by a friend that I shouldn’t do it, that I’d be signing my life away. I was stupid. I said no, and almost got into a punch-up with him [Phillips]. Biggest mistake of my life. Everything changed that day.’ A tear came into his eye as he said it, and I thought I saw a rare flicker of emotion from Peter. It was hard to know what to say, so I offered everyone another coffee.
    Earlier, before we’d settled on the coffee house as a good place to sit down, Ed had suggested we get a drink at a pub across the road from the town square, but, having entered it, he’d looked around nervously, then led us out. ‘Tapeworm,’ he’d hissed, by way of explanation. Throughout our encounter, he maintained a strange combination of paranoid energy and stoned lethargy, which seemed to fit quite well with the conflicting mixture of hippy philosophy and macho hostility that made up his worldview. The sad thing was, he talked a lot of sense, between the bitterness. It was hard to imagine a right place for Ed in modern Britain, but it quite clearly wasn’t Hastings. Had he thought about going back to London? ‘Yeah, but it’s a question of getting the money together. And where would I go?’ Would he think about playing at Nashville Babylon again? ‘I don’t know. It depends on the price. Playing for nothing – that’s just a mug’s game for me these days.’
    It was a blustery day in Hastings, oppressed by a low grey sky, and Peter and I found ourselves wandering around the town centre in