Blackmore came up with the most boring riff in it

Blackmore came up with the most boring riff in it.But before the arrival of the extended solo, your non-singing axeman was seldom in the spotlight. So there was Duane Eddy and Hank Marvin, but how many fans of Elvis, Gene Vincent or Ricky Nelson knew the names of Scotty Moore, Cliff Gallup or James Burton?Many a well-regarded guitarist never made it big at all, even by proxy – Ollie Halsall, for example, who played with such as Neil Innes, Kevin Ayers, Boxer, Jon Hiseman’s Tempest and Patto. If only you could bottle hindsight.So, if you can’t sing or you don’t click with the record-buying public yourself, the next best thing is to play with someone who can. Bored with session work, Page had the bright idea of forming the biggest band in the world. If you’ve really got your chops down, session work could be the answer. Stax maestro Steve Cropper is, after all, now nearly as well known as the singers he backed.
But he’s the exception.

How many pop-pickers have heard of Big Jim Sullivan, for example, who played sessions for everyone from Tom Jones to The Kinks, Marty Wilde to The Walker Brothers?Slightly better known are two of Big Jim’s proteges, Ritchie Blackmore and “Little Jim” – Jimmy Page. You’ve strummed through Bert Weedon’s Play in a Day, you’ve copped the licks from all your favourite records, you know how to play F#13(9). What’s next for the would-be star axeman, or axelady? You can’t write off to your favourite band for a trial. “If I only bought one outfit every five years and nothing but knickers in between …”We all started to calculate what we would have to do to afford an outfit that made each of us look this good. For, in her made-to-measure suit by Christian Lacroix, Daphne Priestley looks like the proverbial million dollars in something that, after all, cost only pounds 10,000.When you fall in love with it, haute couture starts looking like a bargain.The Independent would like to thank Christian Lacroix for making all of us who were involved with this competition feel absolutely like the bee’s knees and for making our winner look like the cat who got the cream.. Then Daphne saw herself in the mirror and the rest of us saw Daphne.Suddenly, what had seemed like the most joyously ridiculous prize started looking like the most sensible outfit on earth. At least I think that was what he said; by the time he got to the end of the sentence, he was sobbing uncontrollably, so like all the best newspaper reporters, I made my excuses and left.Of course, New Year’s Eve itself, over and done with once more, thank goodness, has an entire set of unique horrors unrivalled by any other time of the year.

There’s the feeling of utter dread and panic when you realise that another year has passed and nothing’s changed except for all the things that have got worse, so you desperately resolve that next year is going to be different, but even as you make these resolutions, you are filled with dark despair because you know you’re not even going to get to the end of the week without sinking back into the morass your life has become. Daphne Priestley became our voice of reason, our mother confessor. Boy, did our winner earn her keep.On the hottest day of a boiling hot Paris summer, Daphne had her first fitting (her measurements had been taken in London), when a toile of calico was pinned and tucked and ripped and pinned again.Madame Evelyne, the chef d’atelier at Lacroix, worked with deft fingers to shift and fit the jacket and to make the trousers sit just so. There was copy to file, pictures to ping electronically back to Canary Wharf and illustrations to be slaved over into the small hours. They stayed not in the Ritz or the Meurice, with the rest of the haute couture customers, but in the Independent fashion department’s much-loved old hotel, where they never bat an eyelid when we run photographic wire machine cables down the centre stairwell or process catwalk photographs in the bidet.Show time is a tense time, as Daphne quickly realised. Would Mr and Mrs Priestley like to be guests of Christian Lacroix at his summer haute couture show? Indeed they would.And so Mr and Mrs Priestley got their first experience of the Channel tunnel and a fashion show (complete with supermodels Karen Mulder and Nadja Auermann willingly posing with them). Swatches of black wool (each infinitesimally different) were attached for the approval of Christian Lacroix’s newest couture customer.

Should the waistcoat be gold or matching black? Should the pockets be opulently embroidered or chic and plain? These were new quandaries that concerned Daphne Priestley, who had never had to ponder such choices before.The next stage was rather unexpected. She told me that as she lives in a small house, she wanted something that would fit in the wardrobe and allow the door to close.Next came the sketches, which were works of art in themselves. A slim- to-the-waist jacket with jaunty, theatrical cuffs was suggested. He took time out to discuss form and function and to agree with Daphne that a trouser suit which she could actually wear could be every bit as dreamy as a ballgown.She told me later that she wanted something she could wear in her real life, not some dream life (which, unfortunately, the Independent could not provide to go with the outfit).

When her telephone rang last April with the news that she had won, Daphne Priestley of Maidstone, Kent, thought that one of her friends was fooling around. So began an almost year-long quest for the perfect outfit Daphne and her husband, Peter, travelled up to London. They were guests of Christian Lacroix at the opening of his Bond Street store. They met, and were charmed by Roberto Devorik, who looks after Lacroix’s business in the UK; and then, oh joy, they met the couturier himself.
Daphne was amazed that Christian Lacroix was neither haut nor grand, but instead charming, kind and concerned that her dream outfit be cut as she would like it and of cloth that she would adore. Back in March last year, the Independent invited readers to cut out coupons and send them off for a chance to win pounds 10,000 worth of Christian Lacroix haute couture.