Keith Richards: "There ain't a band in the world that can survive without going on the road."

Bands make it Rock, but roadies make it roll; the unwritten rule of life lived against a constant backdrop of another city, another show.

Many a snivelling song has been written about anonymous hotel rooms, of the isolation and desolation of touring — but that's just the musician's tale. The roadie probably suffers more, undoubtedly works longer hours, and certainly gets paid less. Yet there is no shortage of them because that show must go on.

Bazz Ward, 43, has been a roadie since 1958 — one of the longest-serving in the business — and he insists that, while many of his tasks remain the same, some things have changed.

"The old image of the beer-swilling big fat geezer with the muscles — that's all gone now," he explains. "But there is still that throwback to the old days; the one guy who drives the van, sets the equipment up, pulls it all down and does a hundred and one things in between."

But for the most part, says Bazz, who now runs the hire department at John Henry's, roadies today are about specialising.

"Before you used to do everything," he says, "but now it's all evolved into different areas. You have stage managers, tour managers, guitar roadies, keyboard roadies and so on.

"The trouble with all that is when a guitar roadie, for example, might need to do something else — and he wouldn't know a drum kit if it fell on top of him. And some roadies take hours to do things when they could do the same job much quicker just by motivating themselves."

Working with "hundreds" of bands — everyone from Santana, The Band, The Nice, Derek and The Dominoes and Medicine Head to Gary Glitter, Stiff Little Fingers, Iron Maiden and the Sex Pistols — has taught Bazz the qualities a roadie needs in order to stay in the job.

"Basically, the whole thing is down to common sense," he offers. "It's only a matter of saying 'I've got to be at this place at a particular time' and doing that. You've got to have good timekeeping and sobriety — because some of these guys get stoned out of their tiny minds and can't do their job. That's no good to anyone.

"You also need to be tolerant — because some musicians are a real pain in the fucking neck. If they've gone out the night before and then they come to a gig with a hangover — and you've got something in the wrong place or things aren't exactly how the guy wants it to sound... some musicians can be real bastards.

"You've got to be prepared to molly-coddle them sometimes because, no matter what you're feeling inside, they are the blokes who actually go on the stage and play to make the money to pay your wages."

Wages vary from band to band — the amount of cash paid being determined by its success and the roadies' job — and such obviously wavering guidelines mean that there is no minimum payment and no roadie union to help negotiate one.

"It's a freelance world so you negotiate your own pay," says Bazz. "There's no way you can say a roadie should be paid this amount a week — because there's always someone willing to do it for less."

However, there is a good living to be made from the profession — if you chance on the odd Rolling Stones — and, of course, there are other benefits.

"The biggest advantage is that you get to travel the world for free and, also, it's a lifestyle," says Bazz.

"There may be a lot of hard work involved in touring — 18-hour days are normal — but if you're able to adjust your life to what you're doing, you can actually enjoy yourself.

"It's the guys who finish a gig and then want to go out clubbing all night — when they've got to get up early in the morning to do their job — who aren't on the ball and get into trouble.

"You're also away from home for a long time and, unless you've got an understanding wife or girlfriend, you can easily come back and find they've walked out on you. I lived with a woman for a few years, but when she had a problem — I was 6,000 miles away."

But surely there are certain, um, distractions on the road?

"Groupies?, yeah, they're still around — and roadies get their share, mate," he explains. "We usually get the best ones — because we're the first there. A roadie can travel the world, open a book up, and say 'I know this chick in New Orleans', or wherever.

"But it's not as rampant as it used to be, and America is where most of the groupies are, although there are still quite a few notorious ladies over here. Groupies are an occupational hazard, or an occupational delight — depending on which way you look at it."

Mick Jagger: "I like it on the road, I don't know what I'd do if I couldn't go out there. I think I'd go mad... I don't feel the same person on stage as I am normally."

The slightly deranged Rock musician is a creature well-known to Roger Searle, managing director of M L Executives, the musical hire and equipment company. He started out in the business as a roadie for The Who.

"You have to be fairly thick-skinned to be a roadie," he says, "because it doesn't always work to fight fire with fire. If you're yelled at — then it's not always advisable to yell back.

"Having worked with The Who since 1969 and dealing with, when Moon was alive, three of the volatile members of the Rock music profession in the guise of Daltrey, Moon and Townshend, and having witnessed over the years various items of equipment being thrown at various people, it encourages you not to get in that situation in the first place."

"It makes you much more thorough in your approach to work in that you know darn well that the net result of you not doing something is having Townshend lob a guitar at you — so you make sure that, whatever the cause of that situation is, avoid it like the plague. Forward planning, you see!"

Roger, 33, who has also worked with acts like Judas Priest, Rick James, Van Morrison and Bryan Adams, sees the roadies' job is pretty much all things to all men; everything from mending and tuning equipment to humping it on and off stage.

"A roadie is the other half of a Rock band, in many respects," he says. "A roadie is nothing without the band, however, the band is not a lot of good without the roadie.

"If you take very aspect of a touring Rock'n' Roll band these days, everybody in the whole situation is as important as the next. Because it's no good the band getting to a gig if the equipment isn't there — so the truck driver becomes important. It's no good the driver getting there and then the gear not being set up — so the stage crew becomes important.

"The band is the final visual concept as far as the general public is concerned, but the road manager and his crew are the people behind the scenes who make everything happen."

Different venues with different-sized stages all pose peculiar problems for roadies — although many of the larger concert halls in Britain have their own in-house crews on hand.

"As a roadie, you have to have patience — you must be adaptable," says Roger. "No two venues are the same. With the best will in the world one can sit down and do lots of pretty drawings and scale models of what the stage will look like when the gear is set up — but they might not mean a thing when you get to the venue. You have to be prepared to change things to fit.

"The people who fail in this business are the ones that walk into a hall and say 'Oh God!, the cheese doesn't fit the bread.' In other words, the gear won't fit the stage — we can't do the show. If everybody was to adopt that attitude then very few bands would actually work in England."

The importance of such dedication and diversity is not lost on many of today's musicians, among them Paul Young.

"When I was with the QTips and we were doing something like 300 gigs a year," he says, "it didn't really matter that much if we did the odd dodgy show.

"But nowadays, as my shows have got larger, each one of them has to be excellent. That's down to the road crew and, believe me, those blokes work long and hard to make sure that everything is working right. Roadies are very important — we'd be lost without them."

Roger believes that the problems faced by a roadie in his, or in some cases her, day-to-day tasks brings about a sense of logic in other departments. "It broadens the mind, shall we say, and it also helps you in the real world," he explains.

"In the music business, nothing is impossible; the impossible we can do, miracles just take a bit longer. So one tends not to get flustered when faced with the problem of, oh dear, the gas meter has broken down — what am I going to do now? You look at it in the same way as an amplifier breaking down; you phone the person who mends broken amplifiers. Being a roadie trains you to think very logically, very quickly."

So how does a would-be roadie set about becoming one?

Roger: "Most people I know who've become roadies are either ex-musicians that have decided the grass was greener behind the stage, or people who are employed by bands because they are mates, school pals, or the guy who lives next door and was just there.

"How I started with The Who was that I happened to have a van that worked one day when theirs didn't. So there are various ways of getting into it — and usually it involves a band being in the wrong place at the wrong time."

Bazz, a failed drummer for his sins, comments: "You've got to take abuse as a roadie, but if a kid is willing and he has some enthusiasm — give him a chance. I used to go on the road for £1 a night. I'd go up and say 'I don't know nothing, but give me a quid and I'll come and help you with your gear, and, please, show me what it does.' Things are a lot different now but the only way you can do it is to ask someone.

"You have to ask questions. If you don't know something — ask, and if you make a mistake — admit it. Don't try and bluff your way out, because a professional roadie will soon tumble you. If equipment goes wrong, you've got to know what to do with the minimum amount of fuss and immediately. You mustn't panic.

"Being a roadie is fine, and I'd do it for nothing to help some of these young bands out. Just buy me a pint. But if you're a big band and I come to the stage door at Hammersmith Odeon — don't you dare say 'Bazz who?'.

Roadies. And of their existence, dreams can come true. Take Lemmy, for example.

"Lemmy was my roadie," says Bazz. "Jimi Hendrix tour, 1967. He was the roadies' go-fer. He'll deny it, but it's a fact. He was there, humping the gear."

Dave Robinson, founder of Stiff Records and now a big wig at Island, was a roadie, too. And so were countless others, but we'll leave the real rags to riches touch to Bazz:

"The classic example of a roadie who became a world-wide star was Bon Scott. He was AC/DC's roadie, they heard him singing loading the van one day — and gave him the job as their singer."