Fond memories from Dave Battle: I have vivid memories of the fact that when we were having parties when we were 17/18, we all used to turn up in jeans or casual clothes and Dave would always turn up in his cream suit. Also we all used to turn up with lager and David would turn up with Mackeson's. It was a pretty shrewd move on his part because it meant that no one would ever drink his cans. He also had very different tastes in music to the rest of us and Surfing Safari by Jan and Dean or The Wanderer by Dion and The Belmonts would inevitably blast out at some stage. So, a 17 year old wearing a cream suit, drinking something your grandad might drink and playing music that was 20 years old. He wasn't exactly at the cutting edge of modern fashions but we loved him for it. I do remember at one party he started drinking Martini Bianco from the bottle and we were all saying to him that we just didn't know how he could drink that stuff. he maintained that it was beautiful and that we were the ones missing out as he proceeded to finish the entire bottle. I think that we were all quite impressed by this feat. However, I had recently passed my driving test and was driving that night. As Dave and I were the ones who lived over towards Bexleyheath, I was driving him home. On the way back, I became slightly less impressed by his drinking feats when, driving up Gravel Hill he leaned the entire top half of his body out of the window and threw up when I was doing about 40 miles an hour. It took me weeks before you could wind up the car window without a smear of sick on it. I also remember him "cruising" up and down Bexleyheath Broadway imagining that we were in some 1950's American car with white wheel tyres and lots of chrome, as he loved cars and music of that era - except we were in his dad's white VW camper van which was probably much more suitable for going camping than a Ford Thunderbird but was hardly in the "Greased Lightning" category. Mostly, I remember a decent, honest, thoughtful guy who always had a laugh, a smile on his face and was just great fun to be with. I was proud to know Dave Smith and, although we lost touch for a number of years, the positive impression he left on my life is indelible.