More on Sam's Song

I've since had a chance to talk to Sam Armitage (Soren). so I have this further snippet to add:

It was written at the start of the 80s, as a result of Zan and I gaining (probably unauthorised) access to a hostel bar, where we could drink Silver Dragons, cider and trop, and where there was a piano on which he could compose (his digs at the time having little musical apart from something like a Pekinese, though later it was to have an infestation of beetles.

(The Pekinese didn't have a direct influence on the beetles -- they came from an inadequately-sterilised convention tribble, and a pack of biscuits. )

And it was about who we were at the time, and how Zan saw me and my life.

Cliffs Notes

Harry's bar was indeed "nicked" from Chris Chivers, who was filking before it was called filking, and created it in Lunaville.

The "evening had just begun", probably because the "hours" would have been Zan's in the bookshop and mine in Chambers.

McIvor was a character of mine; he "nearly fell into the sun" because (stay with me here) McIvor (a journalist) was associated with Jet O'Conor (a space-pilot char of mine); her name came from the Wings song, which was on the album Band on the Run, in which there is reference to the Band nearly falling into the Sun.

The droid and the wookie are (probably) just from Star Wars (which did have a bar in it)

And the 49 bus ran (in those days) from Shepherd's Bush, where I lived, in the Hovel of cursed memory, to Battersea from where I could get another bus (the number of which now escapes me) to Streatham where Zander lived.