1969 - What We Did on Our Holidays, Fairport Convention

*DISCLAIMER - all of the following is based on my admittedly faulty memory. To repeat the saying, 'If you remember the sixties, you weren't there!'

In the late sixties Steve had gone from group manager (The Mind Machine, which I will write about at some point), to light show creator. He has always been a creative whirlwind and if this was a superhero comic he would be the mad professor and I would be the trusty sidekick. Light shows seem to have come into being independently both in Britain and the United States. Pink Floyd were, as far as I know, the first British band to use a light show and, in America, bands such as the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane were employing lights at the Fillmore and Avalon ballrooms in San Francisco (somebody correct me if I'm wrong).

Anyway, Steve had started playing around with various lighting effects in The Cellar, using an old slide projector. He had added a motorised drive so that when a circular slide was placed in front of the light source the motored rotated it causing the effect to change.  The main ones I remember were:

Liquid Slide

• circular slides filled with coloured oils - as the slide rotated the blobs of oil moved around causing a constantly changing pattern of coloured blobs

Diffraction Grating

• Sheets of diffraction grating 

Polarising Filters

• two circular pieces of polarised glass with strips of sellotape between them

The lightshow was called 'Mushroom Lights' and consisted of two or three projectors, a collection of various types of slides, a number of spare bulbs for the projectors, Steve's car and a varying group of assistants (or, to go back to the superhero metaphor, 'sidekicks'). I remember one time Steve and I went down to London, I think to stay with our friend Jules, and going along to an electronics shop on, I think, Denmark Street, where Steve bought a whole pile of stuff; glass slides, sheets of diffraction grating, polarising filters etc. At that time it was very difficult to get hold of anything exotic or unusual so it was a case of make it yourself (in this case 'yourself' meant Steve, I was about as technically competent as the average iguana), or go to a big city to get it. So we came back with all this stuff which Steve then incorporated into the setup ready to take out to concerts.

Two shows I remember particularly; one was at Bolton Technical College where Family were playing.

Family

We didn't do the light show for Family, they were in the main hall, but Alexis Korner was playing in another hall and we did the lights in there, sneaking through to the main hall to see what the lights in there were like. They were good, very professional, but somehow this slickness meant that they weren't very interesting. Our show, on the other hand, had a handmade quirkiness, giving the show an atmosphere and an unpredictability which drew the audience in. I suppose it's a bit like a great deal of modern music; everything is perfect, notes are spot on and any imperfections in pitch are autotuned out, making the music sterile and uninteresting. This technical perfection means there is nowhere for me in it, nothing for me to latch on to. I suppose perfection is fine but it's not somewhere you would want to spend much time. Listen to some older music, from the sixties for instance (my era). Most of it is full of imperfection, full of life (or is this just me being an old man? 'Everything was much better when I were a lad.......' Ah well, ramble and moan over.

Fairport Convention

The other concert was Fairport Convention at Lancaster University. I think this was in 1969, but I'm not absolutely sure. Sandy Denny was still with the group and it took place in one of the refectories. One thing I distinctly remember is that Sandy Denny didn't like the lights. She seemed quite grumpy. I don't think it was our lights in particular, I think she would have had the same reaction to any light show. This is the bit where my memory fails me; did we carry on with the lights anyway? Or did we stop the projectors and just watch the band? I'm not sure, but I think we turned everything off and joined the rest of the crowd to watch them play. They were good, no doubt about that. They did a stunning version of Suzanne by Leonard Cohen.  It's strange, looking back now, thinking that a band of the quality of Fairport Convention would be playing in a relatively small college refectory. But the world was very different then. There wasn't the obsession with celebrity, with famous people being separated from us mere mortals by some sort of invisible wall. You could talk to rock stars, walk up to them at the bar, buy them a pint, have a chat. Steve and I once bumped into Jimmy Carl Black ("My name's Jimmy Carl Black and I'm the Indian of the group") and Don Preston from the Mothers' of Invention in a cafe in Manchester after a concert (I'll write about this at some point). They were fine, happy to talk, not acting out this big 'ROCK STAR' thing. Them were the days!

You know what? I think I'm getting old.

1952 - Bill and Ben, The Flowerpot Men

We moved onto Delamere Avenue in 1950, when I was about eighteen months old. The house we moved into, number twelve, was about a third of the way down a line of semi-detached, pebble-dashed council houses facing out over the roofs of the houses opposite towards Heysham Harbour and Half Moon Bay. It was part of a new estate, Trumacar which, when we moved in, was still being built. My mum used to tell the story of how I had somehow become friendly with one of the builders and how he had taken to letting me sit with him in the cab of his lorry while he was working. One day she heard a knock at the door and opened it to find him standing there clutching a tear-stained creature covered head-to-toe in a layer of dirt -  I had fallen out of the cab into a pile of gravel. Being very small and gravity being what it is, I hadn't fallen very hard and so, apart from a few bruises and scratches, I was relatively unhurt. That was the last time I rode in the lorry.

Bill and Ben were my first heroes. I was three when it started, but my first memory is of running home from school so as not to miss it on TV. As far as I remember it was on at about half past three and school was about half a mile away at the bottom of a hill, so it was quite a rush to get back in time - and of course there was no video recording or pause-and-rewind in 1954. The funny thing is that, in my memory, I am rushing back to number 11 Delamere, not number 12, even though we didn't move into number 11 until about five years later (that's another story which I'll come back to at some point). Bill and Ben was one of three children's programmes which were broadcast every weekday afternoon, the others being Andy Pandy and Rag, Tag and Bobtail. They all went out under the title Listen with Mother (no political correctness in 1954). But Bill and Ben was my favourite. They were string puppets whose arms and legs were made from flowerpots and they each lived in a large flowerpot watched over by a  flower called Little Weed. In each episode the man who looked after the garden where they lived went off to have his dinner and, while he was away, Bill and Ben would have various adventures, ending when the man had finished his dinner and was coming back to work. What I found exciting was that they talked in a sort of nonsense language which was almost understandable. For instance, when they were getting ready to pop back into their flowerpots they would each say 'Bop, bop diddle weed' (Bye, bye little weed), one in a low voice (Ben) and the other in a high voice (Bill), to which Little Weed replied 'Weeed'. This was the only thing she said, but she could express a range of things, from pleasure to anxiety, depending on how she said it (by the way, back in the eighties I worked as a volunteer at a drop-in centre in Lancaster. One day one of the other volunteers told me that his mother had been the voice of Little Weed! Now I've met one or two more or less famous people in my time, but to have met the voice of Little Weed would have been on a whole other level. Needless to  say I never did meet her).

One thing I loved about Bill and Ben was the music. It was simple, rhythmic (I think possibly marimbas and woodblocks) with a strange underlying background sound. One of my pet hates (and I have quite a few) is that a lot of modern music is too complicated and overproduced. The Bill and Ben theme has, to me, a beautiful simplicity. So too have the stories. Why all this particularly interests me is that Steve and I are trying to put together a children's TV show for which I am doing the music. When I was attempting to come up with a suitable theme tune it was the music from these early TV shows that I remembered.

Here it is. I'm not sure if it will stay as an instrumental or have lyrics added; I quite like it as it is but we'll see. What is it they say - you never actually finish creating something, you just at some point abandon it to make its own way in the world.

It's been great fun putting together the songs for the programme. I'll talk to Steve and see how he feels about putting some more of them on this blog. I can also possibly do a post about the process of putting together the songs - the writing, recording (the software I use is Cockos Reaper, it's fantastic) and arranging. I realise that this may be more interesting to recording geeks but, anyway, we'll see.

It's a strange thing, writing a blog. For one thing you have no idea who is reading it (if anyone!) There's quite a bit of ego involved in that you have to think that what you are doing is going to be of interest to someone who doesn't know you. I've resisted all of these things - blogs, facebook, twitter etc. - up to now but I realise that, apart from anything else, it's great fun! And, at the end of the day, if people aren't interested I can just stop writing it and go and do something else - like writing some songs, or doing the washing up.

1999 - River of Orchids, XTC

'With arms stretched wide'

George - hasn't a clue!

George doesn't know what he wants to do with his life; he doesn't even know what he wants to be doing tomorrow. I'm the same, I've never known what direction I was going in. The difference between George and me is that he's a dog and I'm not. You know how it goes, 'What do you want to be when you grow up?'. That's easy when you're a kid, 'Astronaut', 'Engine Driver', 'Ninja Assassin'. When you ask George the same question he just looks at you as though he's giving the question serious thought, but that's as far as it goes - silence (add the word walk or dinner and you get a more positive response. I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up, and I'm sixty three! Some people seem to know, they appear to have their lives all mapped out - school, unniversity, career. Me, I never had a clue. Oh I knew what I didn't want to be - boring, insane, accountant, insurance man - and I've done pretty well at avoiding three out of four (Guess!). But as to careers and long-term plans, no idea.

Just as an aside, about twenty years ago I wrote a song about insurance men; at least it's called 'Insurance Men'. I've no idea what it's really about and I know that some people find it a bit disturbing; even I find it a bit disturbing. Have a listen, see what you think. Maybe after you've listened to it (I've cut it down as the whole song is over nine minutes long), you'll have a better chance at guessing which of those four things I didn't manage to avoid! By the way, the song, along with most of the other stuff I've done, was recorded and mixed by my best friend Steve (of cellar fame) at his studio, 'The Mill' in Blackburn. So 'Insurance Men' is a 'Run of the Mill' production. I'll say more about 'The Mill' in a future post.

Anyway, on to the ostensible subject of this post. It's 1999 and there I am, fifty years old, bored, sitting in the back of a shop in the West End of Morecambe with a mug of coffee and a Mars bar, waiting for it to be time to open the door so that people who are not really interested can come in and sign up for courses they don't really want to do. Talk about fulfillment! It's the latest in a long line of jobs I've had since I left school - shop assistant (fired), trainee work-study engineer (failed), bonus clerk (bored), casualty porter (blood phobia didn't help), slot-machine-arcade manager (failed miserably, lasted one and a half days), security guard (how did I end up doing that?), office manager (for Steve, in his other role as designer and manufacturer of hand-carved pine furniture) and now, College Education Shop Manager. So how did it happen that someone who is reasonably intelligent and fairly creative ended up doing this?

One word - chance. One thing that distinguishes us from the animals (and me from my dog, George, who doesn't even realise there is such a thing as 'the future') is the ability to imagine possible tomorrows and then think of ways to turn our imaginings into reality - "Wouldn't it be nice to be lying on a beach in Spain. I know, I'll put some money in a savings account every week so that next year I'll be able to afford to do it". It's called planning, forward thinking. Well I'm no good at that, never have been. Many years ago I had a dream of owning a Gibson J200, that's a big, jumbo acoustic guitar much favoured by country musicians (and some rock musicians). So I found a big glass jar and stuck a photo of a J200 on it to motivate me to put money into it.

Jimmy Page playing J200

I don't remember how long it sat there on that shelf but I don't think it ever had more than a couple of pounds in it and that was no doubt taken out as soon as I needed some fags. The only time I ever played a J200 was in a music shop in Preston. They had one hanging from the ceiling and I asked if I could have a go. "Help yourself", I was told. I managed to bang it into another guitar taking it down (nobody noticed but I don't think I did any damage - fortunate as they cost a couple of thousand pounds, or they did then). It was nice to finally have a go but I wasn't over-impressed with the sound, though I was amazed by how light it was - it seemed as though it would blow away in a strong wind. So I never did get my own J200, but I do have a jumbo guitar, a Freshman FA400FBJ which I have had for about six years.

Freshman FA400FBJ

It's really nice but I've hardly touched it for the last few months (too busy reading my new Kindle!). Anyway, now I've learned how to put songs onto this blog I'll probably include some of the things I wrote on my Freshman. Don't worry, most of them are less weird than Insurance Men!

By the way, when I say that I'm not good at forward thinking, I am very good at forward worrying (I suppose that's the only sort of worrying that's of any use, backward worrying would probably be a bit of a waste of time). I'm good at worrying about all the worst things that might happen - nuclear war and cancer and global warming - but planning for it, forget it.

One of the things I did when I was sitting around in the college shop waiting for customers to come in was listen to music. I'd got into the habit of buying Uncut and listening to the cover CD at the shop before putting it on a shelf and forgetting it. How many cover CDs have you never listened to? Or listened to once then forgotten about? I had long forgotten what else was on this particular CD apart from one song, but one of the wonders of the Web is that you can go onto Google and find nearly anything, including the cover of the CD I am talking about. What's the world coming to? How long will it be before you can type in 'Where have I left my keys?' and it will tell you? Anyway, one of the songs on it was 'River of Orchids' by XTC, a band I had liked for years but had lost touch with. The song was very different from the things I remembered - 'Making Plans for Nigel', 'When You're Near Me I Have Difficulty'. Instead of angular guitars and fractured narratives this song was a dreamy, beautiful ecological ballad, slowly building up , almost like a classical piece. It took me right out of the shop and off to somewhere beautiful and calm (across Morecambe Bay to the Lake District on a warm, sunny afternoon - okay there aren't many warm, sunny afternoons in this part of the world but I can dream!) So what did I do but play it in the shop to anyone who would listen, including my co-worker and a guy called Cal who had started popping in for help with filling out various forms but ended up spending hours talking to me about music and recording and guitars and whatever else we were both interested in. Incidentally, a few years later Cal joined me, my wife and family and a group of friends on a camping holiday in Gloucestershire, which ended up being the wettest, muddiest and windiest ten days I've ever spent. But heck, that's camping in Britain.

I realise that I've got to the end of this post and, not only have I said very little about XTC and 'River of Orchids', but I've also meandered all over the place. Perhaps I can convince myself that incoherence is a virtue - perhaps I could have that  printed on a tee-shirt.

Let me know what you think about 'Insurance Men'. Whatever you think, I won't be offended. Honest.

1967 - Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Beatles

Living in a shed

I love my shed. It's my own private world. Okay, it's only about eight feet square with one window facing Half Moon Bay and a door to the back garden, but I can shut myself in here and not have to think about anything else. I've got a couple of comfy chairs in here and a small table and, of course, my record player (a Fergurson in a wooden case with a sort of grey leatherish lid. It's five watts! You could buy an extension to plug in to make it stereo but I don't have that.

Ferguson Record Player

In fact I've never heard stereo, the first time I hear a record in stereo is at my Swedish friend Mick's flat on Euston Road. He puts on Yellow Submarine and it's amazing, the voices moving across the room from left to right - or possibly right to left). Of course this is a long time ago and, my memory being what it is, which is mainly defunct, some of the facts may be wrong. But it's my story and this is the way I'm telling it; think of it as a kind of unreliable biography.

But the shed is real - and the record player - and the window looking down to Half Moon Bay.

I'm not so sure about the comfy chairs and the table but they do give it a more homely feel. The walls were bare brick but I remember we (probably Steve and I but I'm not sure on this) did paint it to make it a bit more liveable in. I wasn't actually living in the shed, just spending all my time there apart from when I was out at work or down in Steve's cellar or sleeping (so yes, I more or less was living in the shed). My mum let me have it so that I could have friends in and listen to music without disturbing the rest of the family (I say my mum, not my mum and dad, because it was my mum who ran things, who made the decisions. My dad was a shift worker so was often either out at work or in bed, and when he was at home he was generally involved in one of his hobbies - collecting wildflowers, astronomy, wargames, stamp collecting, model making - he was a man of many interests). Our house isn't a big house; it's a small house in a terrace on a council estate and there are too many people in it! Apart from my mum and dad there's my little sister Karen (who's about eight or nine) and I think my older sister and her three kids were still living with us - she'd left her husband and come back home. Plus the dog, Laddie, a brindle (I think that's what you call it when they have stripes) sort of greyhound, great dane cross. So with three adults, four kids, a dog and me in a three bedroom house you can see that there isn't loads of room. Being a teenager I needed a room of my own so I had the box room, a tiny room with room for a bed and not much else. I had painted it - three red walls, one black wall and a black ceiling - to give it that nice, homely feel. Most of the walls were covered in posters, mainly of the Beatles, but the black wall made a useful blackboard. Steve and I were into making up long, elaborate stories with cringe-making punch lines which were just plays on well known titles or phrases. I remember one of Steve's ended with 'Darling, piston, they're laying our gong' (GROAN!) Here's another (I know your'e dying to read it!) about three people in some sort of love triangle, 'It was just the old external train mangle'. I have to say I think that was one of mine.

Prosecuting Attorney: My lud, I believe that these despicable creatures - pointing at the two  long-haired, cowering creatures in the dock dressed in bright satin shirts, red trousers (in the case of one of the defendants), and small rectangular sunglasses (in the case of the other), both with various scarves, bells and badges and smelling strongly of patchouli oil) - are guilty of criminally abusing the English language in a way which is likely to cause criminal distress to all right thinking Englishmen

Defense Lawyer: But look at them. They're nowt but young lads. They didn't mean any harm your honour, they were just having a bit of fun. Alright, it got out of hand, that joke about Her Majesty the Queen was definitely a bit much. But they're good lads even though you can't tell if they're boys or girls.

Judge: This is one of the worst crimes against decency and the British way of life I have come across in many a long year. To send out a message to the rest of these long-haired louts with their drugs and their free love I sentence them to one hundred and twenty hours of Max Bygraves. Take them away and play them the music!

So how do The Beatles fit into this rambling soliloquy? Well, I was still working at the Co-op (remember Heysham Village and torturing the delivery boy in a previous post?) I'd moved around a few times since then and was based at the big Co-op, Centenary House in Regent Road in Morecambe. It's long gone; the building's still there but it's probably flats or a cash convertor now. I was a Beatles fanatic, I had all of their records (including the Beatles with Tony Sheridan EP, which wasn't much cop) plus I was in The Beatles fan club so had all their fan club Christmas Records - in fact I still have a couple. Sadly, I think I can still remember the name of one of the women who ran the fan club - Bettina Rose - that shows how fanatical I was! At that time the release of a new Beatles LP was a big deal, especially after the records they had released over the previous couple of years - Rubber Soul, Revolver, Strawberry Fields Forever - so I was very excited about this. I had ordered my copy of Sergeant Peppers in the record department at Centenary House and seem to remember getting it the day before it was officially released (this may of course be total fantasy but I do remember it this way). Just holding it in my hands and looking at the sleeve was almost overwhelming -  nothing like this had ever been released before - gatefold sleeve, brilliants colours and to top it all off, an insert with cutout badges and things. I couldn't wait to get home and play it.

There is something magical about LPs that doesn't happen to the same extent with CDs (and of course is totally missing from downloads). It's the tactile pleasure of holding it, taking it out of the cardboard sleeve, sliding it from the inner sleeve and looking at the label and that shiny black vinyl in which is imprinted all that (hopefully) fantastic music.

No time for tea when I got home, it was straight to THE SHED! to give it a first listen (of course with a cup of tea (three sugars) my mum had made for me). Then the ritual, open record player lid, lift and slide the arm which holds the records in place on the spindle, carefully place LP on deck - being careful to hold it by the edges so as not to damage the grooves - select correct speed, place stylus on run-in groove (wonderful sound of stylus hitting groove and straight into the first track. I LOVED IT!! I couldn't believe the complexity and variety of the sounds. I thought it was the best thing I had ever heard and made everything else sound ordinary. Of course when it finished I played it again...... and again.... and again. I don't know how many times I played it that evening, probably five or six. And I continued playing it every night for about six months. My family must have been sick of it; the neighbours must have been sick of it; even the shetland ponies in the back field must have been sick of it. But I LOVED IT!! (I think I've already said that).

So what about now? How do I feel about Sergeant Peppers in 2012. I still think there are some great songs on it - A Day in the Life (of course), Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, Sergeant Peppers (both versions), but I certainly don't think it's the best thing I've ever heard, or even the best album by The Beatles. I would rather listen to Rubber Soul or A Hard Day's Night (I think that one's my favourite). But, whatever I think, Sergeant Peppers did change things. Music after it became more elaborate, more orchestral. There were more concept albums (not that there hadn't been concept albums before but there were certainly more after) and even a cheeky parody in We're Only in it for the Money by The Mothers of Invention (another album I really like). They opened up the possibilities for recorded music.

 And it certainly had a huge influence on my life in the shed!

2000 - Yellow, Coldplay

'And the stars look very different today'

I'm not sure where this is going so bear with me. It seems to me that there's an honesty about 'good' art. I'm not talking about factual honesty, the actual correctness of what is being stated. Nobody really believes that there are four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire (and I should know as I work in Blackburn). It's not even about whether the singer is telling the truth; when Michael Stipe sings that 'this one goes out to the one I love' we know that this isn't factually true and that the last thing the singer feels for this person is love. What I'm trying to say is that, for a song to work you have to believe it. I believe Michael Stipe; I believe John Lennon. But I don't believe Chris Martin. Why is that?

It's the lyrics, and particularly that first verse;

     Look at the stars  

     Look how they shine for you 

     And everything you do 

     Yeah, they were all yellow

Now either Chris Martin has never actually looked at the stars (and that's possible; I'm sure rich and famous rock stars have more important things to do than look at things. He probably has someone to do it for him) or he just needed a word that fitted and yellow seemed as good as any. There is a third possibility, that I'm just stupid and so I'm missing the deeper metaphorical meaning behind the lyrics. So maybe, metaphorically, the stars are all yellow. But I don't think so. Because honestly, categorically, and even to someone like me who is colour blind, stars are not all yellow - some of them are, in fact many of them are, but others are red, or blue, or white.

And they were all yellow?

"So what?" you cry. "Who cares? I never really listen to the lyrics anyway. All I'm bothered about is the sound. Do I like the sound?" I used to be in a band with a bass player who was into a lot of lates seventies and early eighties post-punk bands (The Pop Group, Public Image, Magazine, Young Marble Giants) and we would sometimes get into arguments about a particular song. He would love it because of the overall sound while I would be complaining that the song didn't work, the lyrics didn't make sense. I once read that Paul McCartney, when he was writing Yesterday, before he came up with the final lyrics he would sing 'scrambled egg' to the tune. It was a sort of placeholder for the eventual words. I wonder how many copies it would have sold if he left the original lyric?

There was another song around the same time that also got me going (the boy's on a bit of a rant here, maybe a bucket of water over the head would cool him down). I think it was called something like Secret Smile and the line that wound me up went something like this;

    

    'Nobody knows it but you've got a secret smile and you use it only for me'

What can you say? Is this man so arrogant, or so naive, that he believes he knows his significant other so well that he can guarantee that they only employ that smile when he's around? I bet they're flashing it all over the place; in McDonalds, Next, at the pub, everywhere. Or possibly the song is meant to show that the singer is arrogant and naive..... possibly.

By the way, I looked up some of the history of Yellow and, seemingly, Chris Martin was looking for a word that fit the song he was writing and noticed a copy of Yellow Pages. Bingo!

1964 - You Really Got Me, The Kinks

The Drugs Don't Work

That Riff!

In 1964 I was fifteen and had been playing guitar, or rather trying to play guitar, for about a year. I had an old arch top acoustic guitar (I think it was a Hofner but I’m not sure) which my parents had bought for about £15 from our next door neighbours and had recently persuaded my mum and dad to buy me my first electric guitar. It was called a Caravelle Top Twenty and had, I think, three pickups and was a similar shape to a strat. I was very light and cheaply made but it was an Electric Guitar!!!, the first one I had ever owned and, as far as I can remember, the first one I had ever touched. I loved it, even though I had nothing to plug it into. It was either light blue or a sort of purple colour (I’m not sure on the colour as I am colour blind), but it had six strings and a tremolo arm and looked a bit like the guitars the bands I was watching on TV were playing. Oh, and the action wasn’t too good, probably nearly half an inch at the twelfth fret but as the only guitars I had played had been as bad and my playing was fairly rudimentary this didn’t bother me too much. (I've just checked with Steve and it was actually pink). The shop where we got it was at Strawberry Gardens, a little music shop where I also bought my records. I’ve just realised that one of the records I bought there was ‘You Don’t Have to be a Baby to Cry’ by The Caravelles,      

               http://www.45-rpm.org.uk/dirc/caravelles.htm a female duo from London (which was probably not  

played on a Caravelle Top Twenty). It wasn’t the sort of record I was really into but when I had my six shillings and eight pence in my hand (the price of a single then), I had to go home with something, and I thought my mum might like it. I think she did but I don’t remember her ever putting a record on to listen to; she probably only heard it once when I got home and played it to her. In fact I don't remember anyone in my family ever listening to music. We were a television family; in the evening we would gather in the front room and watch TV, although there wasn't much choice in 1964 as there were only two television channels, the BBC and ITV and, now I was fifteen, I had started to spend more time either out with my friends or in my room listening to records and trying to work out how to play them on guitar. 

I can remember when I first got the guitar I stood it at the end of my bed so that I could lie there and look at it. The knowledge of possession has always been a big part of the pleasure of owning something new, the pleasure of being able to look at something, imagine holding it and using it, and knowing that it is yours. It’s as though the object takes up a mental space and just thinking about it triggers those feelings of satisfaction and enjoyment. I was thinking about this in relation to my life generally, about how I get a great deal of pleasure from thinking about something I am planning to do, sometimes more than the pleasure of actually doing the thing. For instance, I write and record songs and, when I get a new piece of recording software, what I really enjoy doing is thinking about how I will use it and also reading about it – manuals, tutorials, tips and tricks – in fact anything rather than actually getting down to using the stuff! You could say that it's a sort of fairly guilt-free procrastination; "when I finish reading this tutorial I'll be able to do what I was going to do better than I would have if I hadn't read it" . Or at least that's the theory. 

Anyway, back to the ostensible subject of this post. Occasionally I hear a song for the first time and it’s an almost overwhelming experience. It’s a bit hard to describe but there’s a sense of breathless excitement, a dizziness, a feeling as though new possibilities have just opened up. Sadly it doesn't happen much nowadays, and I don't think that this has much to do with the quality of the music but is more to do with its ubiquity - music is everywhere, we are surrounded by it, it's in shops, in lifts and on adverts (and I don't want to go into the use of my favourite songs in adverts! If advertising is such a creative medium, why do they have to rely so much on the creativity of others to get their message across? Not to mention the artists who will prostitute their creations for the sake of a few quid!) It's a bit

like with drugs (a subject I know a little about), regular exposure leads to a build up of tolerance so that you need a bigger dose to get the same effect - or at least that's my theory. 

You Really Got Me was one of those songs; I wanted to rush out and tell everybody about it but, most of all, I wanted to hear it again – that raw, brutal guitar sound and sneering vocal. But of course I couldn’t listen to it again, it had been on some TV programme and, in the mid-sixties, there was no internet, no pause and rewind TV, no way of replaying something you had just heard unless you went out and bought the record, which of course I did as soon as I had the six and eightpence I needed to buy a copy. Thinking about it now it was very difficult then to hear the music you wanted to listen to - I don't think that Radio Caroline had started broadcasting from the Isle of Man at this time and, apart from that  

there was just the Light Programme on the radio (which had a policy of only playing a certain percentage of recorded music, the rest having to be played live). On television there was Top of the Pops, which had started broadcasting earlier that year, and the occasional variety show featuring a pop performer.  Finally there was Radio Luxembourg, but the reception was terrible, with programmes fading 

in and out  and lots of crosstalk from other stations. But this also meant that the music had a greater meaning; each new song was a new relationship which had to be worked at. You had to physically go out and get a copy of the record, take it home, remove it from the sleeve and place it on the record player. When I bought a new record, whether that was a single, an EP (extended play, usually with four tracks) or an LP (long player, what we now call an album), I would play it over and over, placing the stylus on the run-in groove, then the crackly anticipation, waiting for the song to start and then the thrill of once again entering that new and exciting world (when I first got a copy of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band I played it every night for about six months - but I'll be writing about that in a future post). 

So what was it about You Really Got Me that made it so new and exciting? Well you have to remember that it wasn't so long before this that the singles chart was dominated by middle-of-the-road acts such as Cliff Richard and the Shadows and Frank Ifield. It was a bit like the explosion of punk in the late seventies, a sudden eruption of loud, aggressive, musically unsophisticated bands (although of course The Kinks were anything but unsophisticated, as later records would show) who were playing music for us, for teenagers. As far as I can remember, You Really Got Me had the most aggressive sound I had ever heard on a record up to then. I couldn't believe how dirty and distorted that guitar sounded; it was many years later that I discovered it was done by Dave Davies, the guitarist, cutting the cardboard cone of the speaker to make it distort. If Louie Louie was the first punk record then You Really Got Me is not far behind. 

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Really_Got_Me  

1962 - 32 Minutes and 17 Seconds with Cliff Richard, Cliff Richard

Down into the Magic Kingdom (I've dropped the 'Dive one' and 'Dive two' stuff because I think it's a bit naff)

I have to confess right at the start that I've never heard this album; I've seen the sleeve many times but never had anything to do with the record inside it. Not that there was a record inside it in Steve's cellar, it was just one of the album sleeves decorating the walls. But this was The Cellar, full of electronic gadgets and tape recorders, microphones and dalek voice machines (or at least that's how I remember it).

As I said in a previous post, Steve and I reconnected at the Co-op where, in between serving customers (and in Steve's case adding up their bill wrong so that they either got their order very cheaply or paid too much), we spent our time:

Gatehouse, Heysham Head

• reading Mad Magazine - especially anything illustrated by Don Martin
• talking about music - we were both big Beatles fans and had just started to discover bands such as The Velvet Underground, The Mothers of Invention, Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band and The Incredible String Band (so, middle of the road stuff then)
• trying to think of ways to embarass the temporary manager, Edwin, by sending notes supposedly written by him to the girl in the Post Office who we knew he fancied, asking her to meet him at a certain place and time. I don't think he appreciated this! As far as I remember we did get into some trouble from the people at the Post Office, but I can't remember what the outcome was but I do know that the meeting between them never happened. Wonder why.
• thinking of ways to torture the delivery boy who lived across the road in a gatehouse to Heysham Head with an archway (see photo)

While working at the Co-op Steve mentioned that he was into electronics and recording and that he'd been recording a songwriter called Dave Wynne (see previous post). I was very excited about this and Steve said I could visit his cellar and see what he was up to.

Well, over the next few years Steve's cellar became my second home - actually more like first home as I think I spent more time there than I did at my mum and dad's. You know how places have their own particular feel and smell; well the cellar, or 'The Cellar' as I think of it now, had the damp, cellary smell of creativity and invention. I loved it! I think if Steve's mum and dad had said that I could put a bed in there and live in it I would have jumped at the chance.

So what did we do there? Well, we recorded stuff, and when I say stuff I mean all kinds of things - songs and sound effects and take-offs of things we saw on TV. I have a cd of recordings from thecellar, naturally called 'The Cellar Tapes' and I've just spent the last half hour looking everywhere for a copy and, when I find it, I'll put some stuff up for you to listen to. Of course it was Steve who did all the recording (as he continues to do). He's a born recording engineer and producer, always full of ideas on how to make something more interesting, whether that's through adding some effects or a little backwards guitar, or even using loops (and I mean loops, loops of tape which could be several feet long and take quite a lot of controlling. He now uses a laptop and pro-tools, but I always see him in front of an old reel-to-reel, adjusting the gain and pressing 'record' and 'play' to set the tape rolling. On one occasion he managed to borrow a state-or-the-art Revox reel-to-reel and we recorded to songs of mine, 'Gardens' and 'Morning into..' in Steve's mum's shop (it was in the evening so the shop was closed). We took them to a studio in Hest Bank (I think it was called 'De Lane Lea' to be made into an acetate. They sounded great the first couple of times we played them but, after a few plays, the just got more and more distorted - shame really, I'd like to have a decent copy to listen to now. Funny thing is, I think 'Gardens' is the best song I've written, and I was seventeen when I wrote it.  Over time Steve progressed from two-tracks to better two-tracks (Ferrograph and Revox) until he eventually ended up with an eight-track Tascam through a sixteen channel deck at his proper studio at The Mill, but the approach was always the same, 'let's try this and see what happens'. I'll talk more about The Mill in a future post.

Although I never heard '32 Minutes and 17 Seconds with Cliff Richard', I had been a Cliff and the Shadows fan in my younger days, even seeing them at, I think, Blackpool Opera House in about 1961. But whenever I see a picture of the record sleeve, I think back to The Cellar and all the fantastic, crazy, inventive times we had there.

 WD8AHJ82C9FZ

1967? - Memories and Regret, Dave Wynne

Dive Four - 'You haven't got a little bit of butter to go with that?'

Heysham Village Co-op (the one with the blind)

In 1966/7 I was working for the Co-op and I was sent to work in the Co-op grocery shop in Heysham Village for a couple of weeks while the manager was on holiday. Steve, someone I'd know at primary school, was working there and we soon found that we had a lot in common (Mad magazine, music, torturing the delivery boy). But I mainly remembered him from the bus to school - he went to Balmoral Road, I went to Morecambe Grammar but we caught the same bus - where he had gained a bit of a reputation as a mad professor, inventing electric shock machines and devices to make dalek voices. He was also known as an expert bogey builder (bogeys are what we called carts made using old pram wheels with a rope for steering). Anyway, he invited me down to his cellar (all mad professors have to have a cellar, it's one of the rules). This is where he played around with electronics and recording equipment and, as I was a fairly mediocre guitarist with aspirations and an occasional songwriter, the idea of being able to record my music was an exciting idea. He played me some of the things he'd been recording with someone called Dave Wynne.

What was exciting was that he was doing multitrack recording, this at a time when most albums were being recorded on just four tracks. As far as I remember he did it by having two tape recorders - recording a track onto one machine then playing this back and recording it onto the other machine while, at the same time, adding another live track. I'm sure he'll correct me if this is wrong. The problem with writing about something that happened so long ago is that memories fade and get distorted (a bit like old tapes) and when, like me, you only have about seven brain cells left for one reason or another, they end up more faded and distorted than ever.

I eventually met Dave Wynne; he was a fairly peculiar looking person with a very pronounced chin and badly fitting false teeth which tended to slip when he was talking (or singing), meaning that his words were punctuated by clicks and clacks (reminds me of a Beefheart song). Sometimes, when he was singing, he'd take them out which added a certain gumminess to his singing. By the way, he's not going to get upset about this description as he died quite a few years ago. He was a very accomplished guitarist and drummer and he had written hundreds of songs. I have to say that the quality varied wildly, from really good, well structured love songs (the one in the title of this post) to songs that made you cringe with embarrassment when he played them:

                     Lisa Rayne, Lisa Rayne

                     When will I ever see you again

                     Tomorrow won't be soon enough for me.

This about a girl we knew at the local teachers' training college with whom he was in love. He fell in love regularly, always to no avail.

By the way, in case you're wondering why I headed this posts 'You haven't got a little bit of butter to go with that?' is because Dave never had any money, or food, or cigarettes; we had a regular ritual in the late sixties of all gathering at my mum's on a Thursday evening (I think it was) to watch Monty Python. Dave was always hungry and, after we had been there for a while, he would say to my mum, 'I don't suppose you've got a dry crust have bread I could have?' Then, a little later, 'You haven't got a little bit of butter to go with that, have you?', and so on until he would generally end up with a plate of egg and chips with bread and butter and a mug of tea. He was a born cadger but generally managed to get what he wanted.

So, to 'Memories and Regret'. Of all the songs he wrote this was the best; it was well structured with a lovely melody, interesting chords and simple but affecting lyrics, reproduced here from memory:

                There's a sweet little garden,

                Looking oh so neat,

                With little fountains playing

                Where we used to meet,

                We would walk together

                Through our private wonderland

                We'd also walk along the shore 

                And picnic in the sand.

                But things have changed between us now

                We seldom ever meet,

                I might pass you in a crowd

                Or walking in the street,

                And as I sit alone

                Smoking my last cigarette

                All I have is memories and regret.

The thing is, this song captures Dave Wynne perfectly; he was a sad, lonely man and the songs he wrote were, I think, his way of dealing with his life, a life of memories and regret.

1969 - Trout Mask Replica, Captain Beefheart

Dive Three - Drunk in charge of a masterpiece?

In 1969 I was working for Storey's of Lancaster, a firm which manufactured wall coverings (anyone remember Contact and Decorene?). I had started working in the bonus office with the intention being that I would study to become a Work Study Engineer; these are the people who stand around with stopwatches measuring how long it takes you to complete a particular job so that they can tell you how to do it more efficiently. Anyway, I didn't do the training; it involved going off to Nottingham University for a week and, as I had never been away from home on my own for that length of time and I was of a rather nervous and shy disposition, I told my boss I didn't want to go. So I ended up staying on as a bonus clerk, working out the weekly bonuses for the people who worked in the factory.

It was just before Christmas 1969 and we'd had a Christmas party at work where I managed to get fairly drunk. The rest of the group were going into Lancaster to carry on drinking so I cadged a lift with them and wandered off into town looking for something to buy with my Christmas bonus. I'm not sure how much it was but it probably came to about £10 or so. At this time I had three great loves in my life - girls, books and music - so I headed for the local record shop. I can't remember the name of it but it was upstairs somewhere around where WH Smiths is now and you could listen to records in booths before buying them. Well, one thing I've always liked is something different and when I came across a copy of Trout Mask Replica I had to hear it! Who could resist?? Remember I was fairly drunk and looking to spend my money so I took it to the counter and asked to listen. I probably got some strange looks from the person behind the counter but, as I had had a few drinks, I didn't notice, just straight into the booth and waited for them to put the record on. One thing I don't like about CDs is that you don't get that sense of excitement when the stylus hits the record and there's a few seconds of slightly crackly silence before the music starts. Well the music started (Frownland) and I didn't know if I loved it or hated it. I wanted to love it, it was Beefheart and the cover was the strangest thing I had ever seen. I probably listened for about 10 minutes and decided that, though I didn't love it then, after I'd played it a few times it would all make sense.

It's forty three years later and I'm still not sure what to make of Trout Mask Replica. I've played it, probably hundreds of times, and read all about Beefheart locking the band in a cabin for months until they had every song note perfect. John Peel said, "If there has been anything in the history of popular music which could be described as a work of art in a way that people who are involved in other areas of art would understand, then Trout Mask Replica is probably that work." Whatever I think of it now, and my opinion changes depending on how long it is since I last heard it, I know that I will listen to it many more times. It still sounds better with the crackles and pops.

The Seahorse Bar is the circular building at the near end 

I never got to see Beefheart play live. About nine or ten years after this a bunch of people I knew who were regulars in the Seahorse bar at the Midland Hotel in Morecambe (now there was a bar! There was a disco! An hour and a half of Can anyone?) arranged a trip to see him play in Liverpool. And for some reason I didn't go. Ahh well! The dust blows forward and the dust blows back.

1974 - Sweet Thing, David Bowie

Second Dive - 'When it's good, it's really good'
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_Dogs 

In the mid to late seventies I was married to my first wife and living in a tiny little cottage at the top of a hill in Lancaster, an area called Golgotha Village. I was going through a tough time; anxiety, panic attacks, drinking too much (far too much). There was a pub in Lancaster called The Farmer's Arms run by a couple called Eddie and Peggy where the local misfits, tokers and bikers used to congregate and I spent a lot of time there. My habit was to drink too much, smoke too much then sit at home listening to music, usually on headphones as the house was so small that it was impossible to listen over speakers without bringing the neighbours knocking on the door and complaining. I've just remembered that I had my stereo housed in an old upright 78rpm cabinet, with the record deck where the 78 deck would have been and the amplifier and tuner etc. in the bit below where the doors are. I thought it was really cool as, when it was all closed up it just looked like an antique record cabinet.

Anyway, one of the albums I listened to constantly was Diamond Dogs and, in particular, the track 'Sweet Thing'. It seemed to echo the way I was feeling much of the time.
We had a friend called Dave (Devo) who visited us regularly on his Triumph Bonneville to help us roll cigarettes and listen to music. One day we were listening to 'Sweet Thing' when he suddenly said;
"The lyrics are wrong, it's not 'When it's good it's really good and when it's bad I go to pieces', it's 'When it's good it's really good and when it's bad I go to't Farmer's'.
Not a great joke in itself but what he was really commenting on was the fact that I was pretty much falling to pieces and that alcohol was the way I was dealing with my breakdown. Not longer after this my wife divorced me; thank god she didn't stay around for more misery and heartbreak. I lost touch with Devo and wonder what he's up to now; whether he's still riding around on his beloved Bonneville or, like the rest of us, settled down and become normal.
I still listen to Diamond Dogs occasionally and still think it's one of Bowie's better albums. Sweet Thing is still a great track but I'm not going to pieces now and haven't been in the Farmer's Arms for probably thirty years.
I wonder what happened to the 78 cabinet. It might be worth a bit of money now.

1983 - Cattle and Cane, The Go-Betweens

You might recognise the title of this blog, it's a song by The Go-Betweens from the album '16 Lovers Lane' from 1988. I love the Go-Betweens and wish I'd come across them years earlier than I did. The first time I heard them (and heard of them), was when my sister's Australian penfriend sent her a compilation tape of Australian bands some time in the mid to late eighties which contained the glorious 'Cattle and Cane' as well as songs by Gondwanaland Project and The Birthday Party. Hearing 'Cattle and Cane' gave me that feeling, the emotional hit you get occasionally (sadly all too occasionally nowadays) when you first hear a song that you know is going to become part of your life.

Anyway, that 's what this blog is going to be about, the songs that, over the years, have become part of my life. I need to make it clear at the beginning that this won't be a series of reviews of songs looking at such things as chord structures, lyrics and arrangements. Instead I intend to write about the memories associated with particular songs; where I was, what I was doing, who I was with etc. It will be songs as memories, focusing on individual songs (and sometimes albums) from my first memories up to today and, as I'm in my sixties, that means going right back to the 1950s. I don't intend to make it chronological; I'll talk about whichever song grabs me when I sit down to write.
I've never done anything like this before so, at worst, it will be a short-lived experiment. But, and I hope this is the case, it might be a lot of fun and point people towards songs and artists that they may never have heard of. I also hope that anyone out there reading this will get in touch to share their favourite music 'dives'.
And, by the way, the doll in the photo isn't mine in case you were wondering. I was looking after it for my daughter while she did something important.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_Betweens