My Pop Life #245 : Double Barrel – Dave & Ansel Collins

Double Barrel – Dave & Ansel Collins

I am the magnificent  W   O   O   O

*

This blog is stretching my memory to breaking point.  A few weeks ago (September 2020) I was trying to recall one of the surrogate family experiences I had as a teenager, sheltering at a friend’s house while mum had a rest, or became homeless, or in this particular case, had a termination.  I’d spent a few weeks – maybe just a week I can’t remember – with Simon Lester’s family in Chiddingly in deepest Sussex in this instance and had vivid memories of learning to drive a battered car in the field behind the house.

I contacted Simon to see how much he remembered, in particular about when it occurred.  I sent him a blurry Polaroid of him at school in the hope that it would jog his memory.

Simon Lester at Lewes Priory with Jenny Yewlett – but when?

I also sent the picture to Simon Korner because he has specialised in his writing in remembering this intense period of our schooldays.  Controversy ensued.  I thought it was around 1973, last year of Middle School because of the fence.  (Wrong – Middle School was 3rd & 4th years) Simon K. thought that the fence was where we smoked in Upper School – 5th, 6th forms.  And Jenny T. didn’t arrive at the school until the 5th year apparently.  So why were we smoking in Middle school?  It went on.  Simon Lester and I have another mutual friend, John Hawkins who was imaginatively nicknamed Billy at school and who was a regular at the Goldstone Ground on Saturdays along with Sherlock, Crod, Simon Lester and I.  It was a football ground in Hove where Brighton & Hove Albion played.   Last time I saw John was at an away game at Bolton Wanderers when we had some pints and watched legend Bobby Zamora’s first game for us for 12 years.  It was 2-2 final score.   John lives up that way, in Lancashire, and I was working in Liverpool.  Turns out that John has a better memory than all of us and confirmed that it was indeed the Middle School fence.  See the picture below of me on the same day

This doesn’t show the tunnel in the background that ran from Middle School to Upper School past the Chapel.  But you can just see Mountfield Road behind that.  All very fascinating I’m sure if you’re not from Lewes Priory in the 1970s.  So the photo appeared to be from 1973 – I was right about the date.  Maybe the School Festival.  But but but.  I asked my sister Rebecca what she could tell me about this mysterious sanctuary moment of mine – and why did I do that? She would have been one year old at the time.  But amazingly enough, she remembers a conversation that she’d had with Mum (whom I wasn’t talking to this summer otherwise I might have asked her) when Mum said that yes, a year before Becky was born she’d had a termination.  We did the sums.  Becky was born in April 1972 so my moment driving around the field with Simon Lester was perhaps spring 1971.  That did seem very early.  I’d be thirteen years old.

Meanwhile Simon Lester was asking his sisters Katie and Gill if they could remember anything, and blow me down, Katie remembers their mum picking me up from Hailsham and finding the house really hard to find.  We had just been rehoused on this new-build council estate on the freshly-dug outskirts of Hailsham after spending nine months apart, discussed in various posts such as My Pop Life #84 All Along The Watchtower.  I was 13 years old, Paul was eleven, Andrew six.  We’d all been in different locations for most of 1970, and moved into Salternes Drive, later called Town Farm Estate, and known as Sin City to all the locals in the early weeks of 1971.  I cannot be more precise than that because I suspect time fogs the memory, and trauma sometimes wipes it completely.  At some point in the spring of 1971 I’d taken a record into my Music class – discussed in My Pop Life #141 Jig-A-Jig which takes place largely in the pre-fab classroom just behind that fence.

And at some other indiscernible point that spring, Simon Lester’s mum had somehow found her way to our new house and picked me up with my schoolbag and some spare clothes and taken me back to Chiddingly.

532 Salternes Drive, Hailsham in 1973

Simon Lester’s sister Katie reckoned it was 1971, before their father left.  Simon’s version of this detail would mean that he would drive to work in Hove every morning where he was a dentist, and drop Simon and I off in Lewes High Street to walk to school.  Before the bypass was built.  Sounds about right.  Simon’s mother was very kind to me – that I do remember very clearly.  She asked me what I wanted to eat one day and I said “a peanut butter sandwich please” because that was my favourite, and she then asked me how I would like the peanut butter on the bread, separated alongside the butter or all mushed together, an extraordinary detail which has stuck with me to this day.  How shall I make your sandwich.  I don’t think anyone had asked me that before or indeed since.  Very special lady.  When she showed me “my” bedroom and I thanked her she then said that if she found any of my clothes on the floor while I was at school, she would wash them, so if I didn’t want something washed not to leave it on the floor.  It was the only rule I can remember, also because I hadn’t come across it before !!  A kind way of encouraging tidyness.

The Lester’s house in Chiddingly

I had my own bedroom which was amazing because I shared with Paul at home.  Incidentally I do not remember where Paul or Andrew went during this period, it is one of the shadier corners of our family history, by which I mean “not remembered” rather than shameful.  Abortion shouldn’t be shameful at all, it is part of the human story.  But it was whispered about at the time as I recall, and discussed as termination, the word I’ve used in this blog.  This episode as a teenager was the closest I’ve ever been to an abortion, as far as I know, none of my girlfriends or friends ever talked to me about it, if indeed any of them experienced it.  I’d imagine some of them did.   But there’s no moral high ground in bringing unwanted children onto this planet.  I certainly knew the reason why I was at Simon Lester’s house at the time, although he didn’t.  It all felt reasonably normal to be honest.  I vaguely remember watching TV with the family, 1971 style, it would have been It’s A Knockout!, The Golden Shot, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Blue Peter and Banana Splits.  Grandstand on Saturday.  The Big Match on Sunday.  Simon and I would have kicked a ball around his garden too because we both played football for the school team – Simon had a better touch than me, a more cultured right foot I should say, more accurate, capable of stroking the ball wherever he wanted it to go.  Football is where we’d bonded, and it was in 1971 that I went to my first Brighton & Hove Albion game, but I cannot recall the opposition I’m afraid.  Maybe Bury?  I remember the Brighton team which included brothers John & Kit Napier, John Templeman, Eddie Spearrit, Alan Duffy, Norman Gall, Peter O’Sullivan, Willie Irvine, Nobby Lawton, because after that first visit I was hooked.  We used to go after we’d played on a Saturday morning, you could just pay on the turnstile and then stand behind the goal in the North Stand Shoreham Road, singing songs, strolling down the Shoreham Roooooaad… to see Pat Saward’s Aces, bouncing up and down on the stone terraces, waves of bodies plunging forward during moments of excitement then heaving back to more or less your original spot as the moment passed.  Extraordinarily exciting.  Cameraderie.  Togetherness.  Family.  Playing at home.  I was an instant convert to Saturday afternoon football, and am still addicted now some fifty years later.  The anticipation, the scarf tied around your wrist, in later years the replica shirt, the pub, the singing, the laughing, the fear of opposition fans, the hatred of the referee, the wit, the profound primal eruption of triumph when the ball hits the back of the net, the staggering gutless mortification as we concede.  Football has taught me many things – loyalty, defeat, acumen, singing pour encourager les autres, grace in victory.  Thirteen was a good age to start finding some of that.

We played Reading and Aston Villa on successive days at home over Easter – extraordinary really – in front of sell-out crowds of 35,000 – in the Third Division !  Our PE teacher Tony Alexander (whom we all loved) was a Villa fan, and managed the school football team. We ragged each other but happily both teams went up that season and my lifelong love of Brighton & Hove Albion was sealed: win, lose or draw, sunshine or rain, in sickness and in health, til death us do part. The other lads at football were essentially the ones from the school team – Conrad Ryle (Crod), Andy Holmes (Sherlock), Martin Cooper (Coops), plus John Hawkins (Billy) and Simon Lester who never had a nickname plus me snap.  We’d lose each other in the mayhem of the North Stand and rediscover each other amid the bouncing bodies.

Knock Knock  –  Who’s there?

Ivor

Ivor Who?

I’ve a knock kneed chicken and a bow-legged hen

We ain’t lost a fight since we don’t know when

We don’t give a widdle and we don’t give a wank

WE ARE THE BRIGHTON 

NORTH STAND

Lalalalalalalalala Lalalalalalala lalalalalalalaaaa

WE ARE THE BRIGHTON

NORTH STAND

I can’t pin down the date exactly and photos from this era seem non-existent but was it around this time when I flirted with the skinhead look?  It was certainly fashionable by then thanks to the rude boy culture imported from Jamaica – the ska beat, pork-pie hats, sta-prest trousers, button-down collars, braces and boots.  Short hair obviously, but not shaved.  More Suedehead to be honest, the name of a book which was passed round too.   Kind of sex and violence and fashion YA stuff.  I saved up for my first Ben Sherman shirt, precious status symbol of the early 70s.  White socks were cheaper.  Braces too.  Didn’t own a Fred Perry til I was in my 20s.  It was about being smart rather than scruffy and grew out of mod culture, Tamla Motown, bluebeat.  A year or so later I was wearing make-up and blouses as glam rock took over, proving that for me it was another uniform, I was a pop tart, a dedicated follower of whatever took my fancy that year.

A truly awful song called Johnny Reggae pins the era down to 1971 – that was a Jonathon King cash-in turd, but at the other end of the scale was the real deal – Jamaican ska and reggae.  Reggae was a new word (Do The Reggay by The Maytals was released in 1968).  The music had slowed down from the choppy ska beat by the late sixties when rocksteady ruled the Jamaican charts and made an impression on the UK.  Desmond Dekker had charted in 1967 with 007 (Shanty Town) then made number one with Israelites (See My Pop Life #102) in 1969 when the Kingston sounds really tickled the UK charts with some classic stuff : The Liquidator, Long Shot Kick De Bucket, Return of Django and yes Skinhead Moonstomp the latter from a local act Symarip (Pyramids backwards!! almost!!!).  And being the UK, it was the fashion as much as the sounds – totally against the hippie look as the 1960s spun to their disillusioned finish with Altamont, Vietnam and the student uprisings forming a TV backdrop to heroin, cynicism about selling out and the break-up of The Beatles.  1970 brought us Young Gifted & Black (written by Nina Simone) by Bob & Marcia who would also hit with Pied Piper and The Maytals released Pressure Drop. Then in 1971 the Year of Our Lord brought us, and me, the mighty Double Barrel by Dave & Ansel Collins.

I. Am the magnificent.  I’m beg for the sheck of a so bose, most turmeric, story, sound of soul!

Thus begins the mightiest number one hit of 1971….

I am W O O O.  And I’m certain here again. OW!

Good god.  Too much I like it!  Huh? 

I still have no idea what the lyrics are.  The mystery of it is powerful to be honest, like a mantra chanted for secret power.  Where did I hear it?  On the radio of course, it reached number one in March 1971 and Radio One played it regularly.  It was a revelation.  It still sounds immense.  Dave did the vocals, with Ansel (spelled Ansil on the single) on the keyboards. After one LP and another hit single called Monkey Spanner (the heavy heavy monster sound!) they split up.

Oh yes, and the car in the field.  The highlight of this era perhaps (although the football and the reggae are gonna run it close).  There it was in the field behind the house in Chiddingly – a battered old motor car.  Simon, perhaps 14 by now (I was young for my school year) had the key, and he would drive round in circles mainly – big circles I mean – around the field.  Then he taught me how to do it.  How to turn the key, depress the clutch, rev the engine, release the handbrake and whoooosh power speed thrills.  We devised a kind of Escape From Alcatraz scene which involved us running to the car which had two open doors then jumpin in and each having two jobs, Simon turned the key and did the clutch, I released the handbrake and maybe pulled the choke out, so we could achieve lift-off in seconds flat.

The house is bang centre behind the white tree, the field is the great swoop of green to the right

I didn’t stay at the Lester’s house for very long but that became a vivid memory burned through me.  A few years later Simon left school and started work, and on weekends would go to the Arlington Speedway track near Hailsham and drive in Stock Car Races with his souped up and painted old banger.  Not sure if it was the same car.  Stock Car racing is like racing around a dirt track 30 laps (?) with no rules. Simon would skid and drive his Stock Car around the track, bashing into the other drivers, backending them, sideswiping them, skidding through the dirt and exhaust smoke in his reinforced old banger.  I went a couple of times to watch, and it was of course completely thrilling.  Cars deliberately driving into each other to gain an advantage in a race.  Yup.  I should stress this is completely separate from NASCAR or any American style car racing.  This was more down and dirty for one.  More local.  There’s some footage of this fabulous phenomenon here:

We lost touch after I moved to London, but we would see each other now and again at Brighton games, and we have kept the lines of communication open.  I was back in England in late summer 2019 to fix up the house, and went to see the Albion twice, meeting friends in The Swan in Falmer – Crod, Sherlock and Simon Lester along with my sister and her boyfriend Lee another huge Albion fan.  Now old geezers reminiscing about the days gone by, survivors of cancer and other scares, still friends drinking Harvey’s finest on the way to the game.

Andy Holmes, Simon Lester, Ralph Brown, Conrad Ryle 2019 The Swan

I wasn’t very reflexive at 13 – I didn’t think about what kind of person Simon Lester was for example, he was just there, a companion, easy-going, enjoyed a chuckle.  In retrospect now I see him as shy, gentle, bright and very kind with none of the edge that I imagine I had.  But back in those days I was still growing, as was he.   I’m hugely grateful for his help in piecing this memory together.  

So from the age of ten to 18 I had at least six surrogate Parenting experiences that I can recall.   Philip and Mya in Brighton aged 10, Sheila Smurthwaite in Ringmer aged 11, then again in Lewes aged 13, Mrs Lester in Chiddingly aged 13, Mrs Korner in Lewes aged 14/15, Mrs Ryle in Kingston ages 16/17/18.   Then I was grown up and found my own way, went back many times to the Ryles and the Korners over the years.   All have now sadly passed.  I’m forever grateful to all of these generous beautiful big-hearted people for if not for thee and thine, I would certainly have spent some years in foster care or worse.  They made my physical and psychic survival possible.  The rest was up to me. 

the original single:

The Top of The Pops appearance with Dave extemporising because he is the magnificent

My Pop Life #231 : Dancing Queen – ABBA

Dancing Queen – ABBA

You can dance, you can jive
Having the time of your life
Ooh, see that girl, watch that scene
Digging the dancing queen

My favourite memory of my younger sister Becky was her practising ‘majorettes’ routines in our front room in East Sussex to Dancing Queen, when she must have been around 7 years old.   It was her joy.  Her enthusiasm and excellence got her on the front page of a local paper which I cannot reproduce for you here, but:

Becky standing on the right in majorette’s costume 1979. Mum in front of her

On June 18th 1986 I had reached 29 years old and panicked – I hadn’t written a play yet!   I actually envisioned my life at that point as a shape – literally – a kind of warped triangle with a steep slope up to the top (30 years old) and a gentle declining slope going back down to the base (death around 75?).  So at 29 I was a few steps away from my peak.  I should explain – I thought of my peak as a physical thing, like an athlete or a footballer.  The decline was gentle and should include other peaks within it of course, of wisdom, happiness, success blah blah.  But thirty 30 thirty was a Big Deal.  Be honest, it was for you too wasn’t it?  The end of fucking about.  The start of being responsible for your own life and its trajectory.  The start of the end of blaming your parents for your life.   Proper grown-up, middle-class white western privilege style.  I had an old typewriter and sat down and punched out a play,  vomited up the family history based around an Easter weekend from hell.  It was, to all intents and purposes, my family’s version of Eugene O’Neill’s A Long Day’s Journey Into Night.   Which was my favourite play when I was 29.  Steal from the best !!

Christmas 1980 perhaps – Mumtaz, Becky, Andrew, me, Paul and Mum – but who is taking it? Alan!

In the play, Easter visitors to the family home are Mumtaz and I who are having problems, and brother Paul, who will announce to the single parent that he is gay.  Mother is having both a nervous breakdown and a bad reaction to new tablets at the time of the visit.  Rebecca is a seven-year old Dancing Queen and Andrew is present via a series of letters which my character reads aloud.   I cannot remember how this happened but I seem to recall slimming the thing down from three hours to two and presenting it as a radio play at one point.  So the slender version was some how sent to The National Theatre Studio under the wing of Peter Gill and got a week’s rehearsal for a rehearsed reading.  This was exciting !  I think I thought that I’d made it. Ha.  I cannot remember anyone in the cast except Stephanie Fayerman who played Mum.  She was extraordinary and instinctively knew how to play the part I’d written.  Without comment.  Deeply sympathetic yet unsentimental.

Drive Away The Darkness is set in the house on the left

Gill and Nicholas Wright summoned me into a room after the reading was done and asked me “what I wanted to do with it?”  I wasn’t entirely sure why they were asking me that, so I answered, truthfully : “Get it produced?”   They smiled somewhat condescendingly “no, we meant what do you want to do with the material?”   I didn’t know what they were talking about.    “Go away and have a think about it”.   No clues, no notes, no help was offered.  I wondered what the point of it all was.  Encouragement ?  There isn’t a course for playwriting that I was aware of, and I had no idea what they thought was wrong with it as it was.  Maybe – in retrospect – they wanted the structure to be clever.  Flashbacks.  These kinds of things go in and out of fashion, but there are no flashbacks in Pinter (ooh, yes there are – Betrayal!) , and Shakespeare’s plays all start at the beginning and go forward in time.  Most plays do this to be fair.   I don’t know.  Anyway, I don’t think I was a better playwright at the end of that week than I was before.  It was a famous Missed Opportunity.

teenage rampage!

But the flame had been lit, and the following year I applied to Joint Stock Theatre Company with my friend Paulette Randall for their annual playwriting job, based on a workshop which we would do with six actors and a designer.  I got lucky and we got the gig.  The result was Sanctuary, a hip-hop musical about homeless teenagers which toured the UK in 1987 (see My Pop Life #86).

Rebecca and her looky-likey Martine ‘matinee’ McCutcheon

I digress somewhat.  My sister Rebecca who opened my first play as a seven-year old has had a long eventful fecund life, three marriages, three children all from the second, and a wonderful sense of humour.  I wrote about her 40th birthday and her children Mollie and Ellie in My Pop Life #120 and again went back to that party for a different angle in My Pop Life #161.  Since I wrote those chapters things have changed – Becky fell out with some finality with mother, who had been abusing her for years, both mentally and physically.  We’ve all taken it in turns to make a final break with mother – she is very difficult and as well as being mentally ill is also not a very nice woman.  It’s difficult to find the line sometimes, but we have all found it in our own way and drawn it distinctively around ourselves for protection.  I don’t hate my mother but she wants to hurt us, and does so consistently.  She isn’t stupid, she knows where our weak points are and pokes them until she can see blood.  It’s just what she’s like.  She has a gift for seeing people all the way through but she abuses it.  Becky held out longer than any of us.  We’ve all supported her though, even though the four of us – me, Paul, Andrew and Becky – are in different corners of the earth – we have a family What’s App group for sentient adults which Jenny is included on where we share the news both triumphant and tragic.

Alan, Mum, Becky early 80s

Early last year Mum started to fall over in her bungalow back on the estate in Hailsham where we all moved in 1971.  She has a garden on three sides and it is quiet, best place she’s lived in I think.  She has a small dog called Trisha and walks with a Zimmer frame, support workers and health visitors come in every day.  She fell over and hurt herself and went into hospital.  I was in England to officiate at my niece’s wedding in Hampshire but I had time to visit her in hospital, with Andrew (who was frankly shocked at seeing her in that condition).  I’d done it so many times I didn’t realise it was new to him.  Above the bed it said “Bedbound”. Now all this time, Becky is having nothing to do with her.  Tired of the abuse and needs to get on with her own life, to heal, to stop going back for more abuse and pain.  So Andrew steps up and does the admin – talking to the hospital, the social workers, the carers, with Becky giving him a bit of help without having to speak to anyone.  Mum is taken to a Nursing Home which she hates.  I call her there on her birthday and she is in a rage of self-pity and pleads with me to get her out “I’m surrounded by dying people”.    Within weeks she is home but not because of anything I did.  Paul and I go to see her in August at home, reunited with the dog.  As visits go it is up there with the best.  No hallucinations, no abuse, no paranoia just a few reminiscences and a chat and a laugh.  Becky still isn’t speaking to her.

Mum and Trish, August 2019 aged 84

Cut to 22nd November 2019.  Two months ago.  Becky has a row with live-in boyfriend Lee, goes outside and gets into her car and drives.  Even though she hasn’t spoken to mother for over two years, she finds herself driving across Hailsham to Town Farm Estate where she went to primary school and where mother now lives.  As she parks the car and walks towards the house she can hear a beeping noise than sees smoke pouring out of a window.  The place is on fire.  The door isn’t locked so she runs in and grabs Mother who is screaming “I’m not leaving!” and gets her outside somehow, grabbing the zimmer frame as she goes, calls 999 and waits for the Fire Brigade while mother continues to abuse her and the neighbour comes out and Mum goes to wait in there.  She’s never spoken to the neighbour until this point.  The Fireman asks where is Heather (mum) going to live – by this time Becky’s best friend Jan has turned up who is herself a miracle social worker and she intervenes, Becky has just had a stroke she can’t look after her mother.  Jan and Becky leave and Mum gets taken to a nursing home because the kitchen is destroyed.

What are the chances of Becky arriving at that very moment?

Debbie, Mark, Bex & Peter, Andrew, Paul and Colin 1987?

There are stranger things happening than you or I know about.

I called mum a few days later to see how she was.  We spoke for a bit about Jenny’s sister Dee who died suddenly last summer after an operation which knocked us all for six.  At which point my mum said “You care more about Jenny and those black people than you do about me“.   Pretty soon after that the phone got cut off and I decided not to call back.  Andrew is still in loco parentis there, fielding the admin.

*

Thinking back to that period of time after I left home, really anywhere between 1976 to 1981 it’s ABBA who dominate the musical landscape.  Mum and Becky shared a mutual love for I Have A Dream, Chiquita, Lay All Your Love On Me, The Winner Takes It All, Thank You For The Music.   No wonder I started my play with ABBA.   Watching them live on Youtube is strange though.  They are so antiseptic and stiff.  Amazing music, arrangements, melodies, chord changes.  Great pop music.  If you listen to the albums (rather than the greatest LP of all time ABBA Gold), you’ll hear hit after hit after hit.  Every song is a hit.  Benny on the keys, Bjorn on the guitar, a songwriting hit factory to match Lennon & McCartney. I’ve had a weird relationship with Dancing Queen.  I think it was so ubiquitous in the 1980s/90s, being wheeled out at every party disco club and rave that I got sick of it.  Jenny loves it – she was one of the DJs who wheeled it out in fact!  Then the band decided to play it for a party and I got to play the violin parts on my keyboard – quite a good sample as it goes – but I got the chance to crawl inside the song and examine its mechanics.  What a joy.  The harmonies.  The clever way it loops back into the verse each time, the chorus chords which flip over depending on which part of the song you’re in.   But that was just an introduction.  Recently I re-discovered it as a piano piece – got the chords, and started to learn it properly.  And have completely fallen in love with what is probably the finest pop song ever written and recorded.  The way it all fits together so effortlessly but the wonderful architecture that makes that possible is just incredibly impressive.  Listen to the counter melody beneath “having the time of your life” for a glorious thrill that is unmatched in popular music…

Took a while, but I got there in the end.

E                           C#7                 F#m                                   B7

You can dance, you can jive, having the time of your life

                         D                    Bm                                                A

See that girl, watch that scene, digging the dancing queen

My Pop Life #206 : Summertime In My Heart – Electric Soft Parade

Summertime In My Heart – Electric Soft Parade

I gotta say that it often feels
There’s someone watching over me
I don’t pray and I certainly don’t preach
Maybe it’s just wishful thinking
You gotta take the rough with the smooth
If you’re prepared to tell your own truth
It certainly don’t make me look cool
And maybe it’s just all this drinking 

Alex and Tom White.  Tom has the tie.

I have to write a post on the White brothers.   It was, of course, music that brought us together.  Dear Kit Ashton, when he lived in Brighton, used to do a songwriter’s evening once a year, and I suspect it was Julian Deane – once of Toploader and now running Raygun Records – who suggested he contact me.  Kit emailed probably and said he was doing a David Bowie night, and which song would I like to sing?

Wow.

I said, without any hesitation, ‘Station To Station’ which rhymes, and the resulting rehearsals and live gig were among the highlights of my musical life.  Honest – I will write about the lowlights too at some point, but my favourites are the highlights.  They just are.  Call me old-fashioned.   I missed the earlier incarnations of Kit’s annual event, but they included Rufus Wainwright which is a show I’d have loved to have been involved in.  The following year we’d done Elvis Costello (or was it the previous year?) and that was brilliant too, mainly doing backing vocals and some sax, and singing a couple of leads.  Worth its own post.

Anyway the band on the Bowie gig included some folk I knew : killer guitarist Rachel Wood I’d seen in Paul Steel’s band, some special guests : Herbie Flowers, Glen Richardson, and some folk I didn’t really know, Joe on keyboards and Alex White on drums.  He was outstanding.  Was it the same night of the gig when we went back up Abbey Road to our house and got high and compared notes on depression and strategies for dealing with it?  And then Alex made me a CD with some cracking songs I’d never heard of – including: Ambrosia’s Running Away ; a blast from my own past which he’d somehow unearthed: Deaf School’s What A Way To End It All; a shared joy: Van Dyke Parks & Brian Wilson’s Orange Crate Art;  and most astoundingly, a cover that Alex had made by himself of a Todd Rundgren song All The Children Sing.  This blew my tiny mind, because it is a multi-layered exquisite piece of work in the original and Alex had somehow re-created its vibe note-perfectly.

I undoubtedly made him some kind of CD too, but lacking the cover version moment with me playing all the parts and singing all the harmonies.  I jest.  As any fule kno.  At this point I suspect I went back to listen to Electric Soft Parade all over again.

Electric Soft Parade were Alex and his brother Tom White, previously members of Feltro Media, a Brighton band who’d recorded three (!) self-released albums in the late 90s.  I’ve not heard any of these.   Electric Soft Parade’s first album Holes In The Wall came out in 2002 and was nominated for a Mercury prize, two other great albums followed which I won’t go into here, but from around 2007 everything they’ve done together or singly has been self-produced.   When I met Alex, the band was on an extended hiatus, the two brothers being busy with their own projects as well as playing with Brakes – another Brighton outfit formed with members of British Seapower & Tenderfoot.

Alex and Tom as youngers

I bumped into Tom White one day in the framing shop in The Lanes and said ‘hi, I’m a friend of Alex‘.   I went to see Clowwns at the Prince Albert one night, Miles Heathfield‘s excellent band, Tom was on drums.   The brothers kept popping up at gigs around town.  Then, suddenly, their Mum died.  In their grief, a benefit concert was arranged down at The Concorde on the seafront, almost directly below our house.  I went along and saw the cream of the Brighton musical establishment playing for the brothers, including Field Music and Electric Soft Parade themselves, playing their first gig for some time.

What was great for me about discovering further musical riches in my home town was that sense of things being joined together.  Pretty much any musician I talked to knew them.  Among my joyous memories of local bands (or bands who’d based themselves in Brighton) were Mike Lord‘s tremendous outfit Stars & Sons in which Paul Steel played bass and Luke Sital-Singh played guitar – both now incandescent solo acts with Julian’s Raygun Records along with ace punk-rock group The Xcerts.  My friend Tim Lewis was now dating a beautiful young lady named Beth Hannah. Her father is Ian Hannah of this parish, a massive music fan who enjoys going to local gigs (like me) and would always be seen at anything involving the White brothers.  He is their biggest fan I reckon!  So  often the crowd would be me, Tim and Ian with maybe Andy or Will or Keith or whoever we can rustle up.  The live scene there is ace.

Tom White, Alex White : The Electric Soft Parade : “Idiots”

The following year or maybe the year after that they released their fourth album “Idiots” which was on the Helium label and had a rather brilliant front cover (see above).  One of the songs on this album caught my ear and never let go.   Summertime in My Heart is a wonderful piece of songwriting & playing by the brothers White, conjuring up endless sunny days, carefree afternoons and long lazy evenings with people you love and bottles of cider.  It references sounds like The Byrds jangly guitar pop, The Las from Liverpool and the fresh punk-pop of The Undertones.  But really it sounds just like them.  My wife Jenny adores the song with its sibling harmonies mixed high in the production, and references to catching “the first bus into town“.  Perfect pop.

I don’t know if “Idiots” got much traction, had good reviews or sales, but it seems not which is one of the many crimes against perfect pop that have been perpetrated over the years.  I reference here one of Brighton’s other fine musicians, Paul Steel, and his 2nd album Moon Rock which was released in Japan and is now available on iTunes, but very few people know about it.  Such a shame.

Disheartened they may have been but it didn’t dent their confidence, as evidenced by the next move.  Around this time they both produced albums on their own – Alex made a perfect copy of Steely Dan’s Katy Lied :

https://theelectricsoftparade.bandcamp.com/album/katy-lied

while Tom made an equally perfect copy of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours :

https://theelectricsoftparade.bandcamp.com/album/rumours

Because why not? !!

Alex was also making an album inspired by his mother called Interlocutor at The Levellers‘ studio near Brighton College playing-fields with mates and wanted some of my alto saxophone on it.  The dates never quite worked and I’ve never heard the finished product, if indeed it was ever finished.

Tom made a handful of solo LPs, including Yalla recorded in Egypt (all his stuff is great by the way) and then formed a new band called The Fiction Aisle.  I love this band too.  Their first album was a stunner, called Heart Map Rubric. To date they have produced four albums – three studio releases and a live LP  which came out last month (April 2018) with Alex playing guitar which was welcome news since every time I’d seen Alex recently he hasn’t been buoyant.  The previous last time (I think) was at a Fiction Aisle gig in Brighton in December 2016 where Alex was on DJ duties and we went back to his mate’s flat for a few beers and smokes afterward.  It was nice to see him again.

Earlier Tom had spied me on the pavement smoking eternal cigarettes as ever & I’d congratulated him on the gig and yet expressed disappointment that it didn’t sound like my favourite album of theirs Fuchsia Days.  Different line-up, instruments, energy.  Tom was full of joy and told me that he and Alex had been hanging out at Preston Park earlier in the year listening outside the perimeter fence to Brian Wilson & his band playing Pet Sounds and melting into their musical boots.  I was inside with Paul Steel & his partner Hollie & Martin his dad (see My Pop Life #1 and #2) and wondering why Brian was singing like Frank Sinatra and breaking up the rhythm of the phrases.  There is a school that believes that Brian can do whatever he wants and there is a smaller group of devotees like myself who want to hear the song, not the singer’s experimentation.  Ah fuck it, he can do whatever he wants, course he can!  He’s a living savant.

Brian Wilson at Together The People, Preston Park Brighton 2016

So Tom says “we loved Brian Wilson and we’d like to play in your band if there’s space“.  My band being The Brighton Beach Boys who started out playing the music of Brian Wilson then The Beatles, now Bowie, John Barry and everyone you like (see My Pop Life #111,  My Pop Life #154,  My Pop Life #169  and others…)   There was a little bit of band politics to follow, but in the end we needed a new drummer who lived in Brighton for we were at that time rehearsing The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour LP for its 50th Anniversary to play alongside Sgt Pepper and… well, our regular Ringo the reverend Thomas Arnold was out in Macau and other exotic loci with a Michael Jackson show entitled Thriller.  Early in 2017 I flew back to the UK for a rehearsal and there was Tom White on the kit.  Very happy to see this fresh injection of talent and energy.   And a new generation.  Good for the band I thought.  And he loved the lack of stress, as he put it, playing other people’s music.   Not sure if all the band felt that way!  The following months were a joy for me, and all of us, he gobbled up everything we threw at him, including, of course, backing vocals by the score.  And fake animal heads of course.

Tom at rehearsal playing er…I Am The Walrus

(the walrus was Paul : see  My Pop Life#118)

That summer (time in my heart) of 2017 we happy few played Brighton Festival, Windsor, Liverpool (!) and London together.  Enjoying those two mighty albums. For another post no doubt, it will remain one of the highlights of my life.

Alex meanwhile had retreated into not really wanting to play music.   Until he turned up on the 4th Fiction Aisle (live) album sounding quite amazing.

I really should mention the drummer Damo Waters too who is a monster player and who spreads himself among the high end Brighton music scene like caviar on Armenian toast – I’ve seen him with Clowwns, Field Music, ESP and others, always outstanding.

*

 I really wanted the brothers to play Summertime In My Heart at my 60th birthday concert in the summer of 2017 (see My Pop Life #200) but Alex was in the slough of despond and didn’t like being in rooms full of people, or even know if he wanted to play music any longer.  I think he’s better now.   I hope so.  I know that struggle.   Tom sang Simon & Garfunkel’s America with Kit Ashton, closing the circle of karma with which we started 1932 words ago and we all ended up on the beach at dawn Tom White & Paul Brown my dear brother, dawn, June 19th 2017

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you : the White brothers as the magnificent Electric Soft Parade :

My Pop Life #183 : Rocket Man – Elton John

Rocket Man   –   Elton John

She packed my bags last night pre-flight
Zero hour nine AM
And I’m gonna be high as a kite by then
I miss the earth so much I miss my wife
It’s lonely out in space
On such a timeless flight

And I think it’s gonna be a long long time
‘Till touch down brings me round again to find
I’m not the man they think I am at home
Oh no no no I’m a rocket man
Rocket man burning out his fuse up here alone

*

You’re not supposed to post the lyrics of a song in their entirety on the internet because copyright but if that’s the case why are there all those lyrics sites, all with the same mistake ?  As I gently age, with spurts of buckling and recovery, I find my mind grows dim, for things seem more mysterious to me now than they were forty five years ago when I was fourteen years old and grooving to Elton John in my bedroom, in particular this classic and the B-side which was, brilliantly enough, two songs :  Goodbye, and Holiday Inn.  Swoon.  The magic year of 1971, when my ears suddenly opened further, deeper, stronger and every tune held different mysterious beauty, had just passed and now we were in the spring of 1972 and I was on a musical jam roll.

We were in Hailsham.  I had a record player in my bedroom.  It was a luxury, like the view over the fields, and the broom-handle thumps on the kitchen ceiling reminded me of this privilege from time to time.  Rocket Man of course was a masterpiece, a song so perfect that I couldn’t stop burbling about it to my Nan, up visiting from Portsmouth, playing it to her downstairs on the record player while she looked at me with a mixture of suspicion and curiosity.  She’d looked at me before like that, an old-fashioned look perhaps it’s called, but this time I noticed and felt my power.  I was fourteen after all, bursting out all over the place.

“Listen to this bit Nan –

‘ and all this science I don’t understand, it’s just my job five days a week…’

and of course by then I had done two and a half years of fucking science at school and found it baffling, like the smoke signal from the Vatican.  Talk about mysterious.  Perhaps it was the teachers, but perhaps MORE it was me.  Science ?  Nah.

Not for me.  Not my bag.  Not clever enough to understand it and perhaps it was never explained to me properly.  It is the basis of our civilisation after all – engineers and builders, along with medicine and war.    And in the song, when he sings all this science I don’t understand, the music goes all weird and synthesised and jagged suddenly with a staccato chord on the piano to punctuate the oddness.  Like science that you don’t understand, I explained to my Nan.  She looked at me.

Now I understand that it’s the producer’s job to do that sort of thing.  Like the two lines before that :

“Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids,

in fact it’s cold as hell” 

when the song empties out (like Mars, he added unnecessarily) and it’s just Elton and the piano – no drums  – then one slide guitar note on cold as hell to emphasise the emptiness.  It’s completely brilliant, very simple, like brushstrokes on canvas, the effect is concise and emotional.  Modern art is thus made.  And Gus Dudgeon, who produced this song was a genius in the studio, whatever he touched turned to gold around this time : John Kongos’  He’s Gonna Step On You Again, Audience’s House On The Hill, much of the Bonzos output, but he was known best for his work with Elton John, which started with Your Song.

And on the B-side was this stunning song Goodbye which haunted me then and still haunts me now.   Elton of course is a genius, his singing voice is quite superb and his music is exquisite, especially in the 1970s.   I’ve always loved piano pop more than any other kind of music, so Elton is on the high end of a list which includes Fats Domino, Ben Folds, Paul McCartney, Todd Rundgren, Marvin Gaye, Gilbert O’Sullivan, Dr John, Ray Charles, Billy Joel, Brian Wilson, Fats Waller, Little Richard, Randy Newman, Georgie Fame, Alan Price, Harry Nillsson, Rufus Wainwright and so on and so forth.  But it’s the lyrics on this one folks.  I’m not a big on lyrics kind of guy.  Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen.  I’m a music kind of guy.  Chord changes and harmonies.  Some people are both, I know.  Maybe I am both, but I’m mainly musical, not lyrical.

But Bernie Taupin though.  What a lyricist.  Check this –

And if you want a drink, just squeeze my hand and wine will flow into my land and feed my lambs

He’s gone all William Blake there.  He’s young, they both are, they’re trying stuff. What’s he on about ?  Post-nuclear holocaust ?  Jesus Christ on the cross ?

And now it’s all over the birds can nest again

But by the end of the song, a mere one minute 40 seconds after it started, Elton’s singing I’ll Waste Away over and over again.  Meaning ?  Who knows ?  Allow it to be mysterious.  Not everything is to be named numbered and explained. Categorized. Collected.  Scored.  Understood. Filed, Forgotten.  I am the poem that doesn’t rhyme.

Sorry I took your time.

The innate drama of the lyrics appealed to me greatly as a 14-year old glam-rock softy.  Sometime I wish I was back in 1972 with my poor Mum banging around the house either with or without her 2nd husband John Daignault, listening to records up in my bedroom. (My and Paul’s bedroom I should say.  We would turn out the light and talk for about an hour every night, both lying down talking at the ceiling.  About everything.  Precious moments.  Healing hours.  We’d play football outside, watch TinTin and Blue Peter, Crackerjack and Morecambe and Wise.  Top of The Pops.  Match of the Day.  The Big Match on Sundays with Brian Moore.  Chart countdown  with Alan Freeman at 4pm.  Took the bus to Polegate every morning, then the train to Lewes for school.  No important exams.  Just lessons, football, girls, friends. Simple.

Oh well.

Rocket Man though jeez what a song.  It’s the twin brother of Space Oddity of course with the lead astronaut figure singing the song, both songs about loneliness in the end and space, too much space.   Both songs produced by Gus Dudgeon, a few years apart .  Fantastic melody, and fade out :

And I think it’s gonna be a long long time

Many many years later – let’s say 2009 when I was living off Mulholland Drive with my brer Eamonn Walker, a stupid big view of Warner Brothers, Universal and Studio City and the San Fernando Valley (The Valley) stretching down to the ocean beyond.  A local member of the wide Beach Boys family circle aka Adam Marsland announced that he was hosting an Elton John night on Lincoln Boulevard in Venice Beach with his band.  Did anyone want to sing a song?  I jumped down his throat and picked Rocket Man and was lucky enough to get the nod.  I sang it at home a couple of times then drove down there.  No rehearsal as I recall or maybe there was a run-through?  The rather fantastic Evie Sands was in the band on guitar.    Other mates turned up : Stevie Kalinich (see My Pop Life 169), Alan Boyd,  Tracy Landecker and some people I recognised a bit.  I delivered the song as straight as I could, just down the line, no interpretation, as Elton as possible.  People clapped.  It was an honour.

Then in 2005 Jenny had been performing in Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues in the West End and on tour with Sharon Osbourne & Lisa Riley.  She had a laugh with them, and Sharon liked her and thus we got invited to the Osbourne’s Christmas Party that year, somewhere behind Harrods.  Ozzie was shuffling around being rude to people and at one point I passed Elton John on the staircase.   I was so utterly nervous/selfconscious and tongue-tied that I completely ignored him, and as I walked up I could hear him going “Well, Really !” as if he was used to people going ahhhh I love you.  Which is pretty much what I should have done. <sigh>  Later on, upstairs I hooked up with David Walliams again (see My Pop Life #7) after many years, but never got to speak with Elton John.  My loss.  Jenny had met him earlier that evening before I arrived and had a nice chat…

Elton at Hove Cricket Ground

We saw him live a couple of times – Wembley in the 90s and Hove Cricket Ground in the noughties.  Brilliant both times.  The real deal.  Such a roster of great great songs.  He wheels them out time after time, knowing that we want to hear Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and Bennie & The Jets.  I often think about success and what it means.  For an actor it means no privacy in public, but plenty of choices in work, new stuff all the time.  For a musician there is also no privacy but the work is essentially playing those 20 songs every night, with a few new ones.  When we saw Elton in Hove after about an hour he announced that he was playing a handful of new songs and that to pre-empt the inevitable rush for the toilets he actually suggested that we could all get up and go to the toilet or get a drink – and literally hundreds of people did just that.  “Sorry” said Elton, “We have to play some new stuff otherwise we’d all go completely mad“.   He had two of The Family Stone (as in Sly & The) as his backing singers – Lisa and Rose Stone.  They covered the high notes on the rearranged hits.  It was a fantastic show.

Late September 2012 a small crew – me, Jono Smith (who shot Sus) and Chris Williams with Diane Frangi on stills are shooting a promo for my documentary idea ‘Unsung Heroes’ about the session musicians of the UK Hit Factory 1963 – 1975, inspired by the film Standing In The Shadows Of Motown.  Probably emotionally echoing my own feelings as a character actor, out of the limelight, yet integral to the production I felt like I wanted to lift some of these musicians into a visible place, if only for 90 minutes.  One of the characters I’d lined up was Ray Cooper, legendary percussionist with Elton and others, and one of the producers on Withnail & I at Handmade Films. Spoken to Ray on the phone about it – he was out of the country for the promo dates.  Anyway.  By the time we’d shot five or six days worth of stuff the film was called Red Light Fever, after the nerves which afflicted those musicians who couldn’t take the stress of studio work, being handed sheet music and told to play a solo over bar 36 and so on.  None of the living legends of the studio I interviewed – drummer Clem Cattini, bass player Herbie Flowers, guitarist Chris Spedding, guitarist Alan Parker, singer and arranger Barbara Moore – suffered from Red Light Fever, but it was still a good title.  I wanted to get these interviews before they all died – James Jamerson the Motown bass player is not in the Motown film for example.

Barbara Moore in 2012

Barbara Moore lives in Bognor Regis, just down the road from us in Brighton and we ended up filming her twice because the fellas fell in love with her.  She’ll appear in another post but for now, the story she tells me that first afternoon in her beautiful conservatory is of meeting Elton John in Olympic Studios in Barnes in the late 1960s.  She’d walked past an open door and heard this beautiful piano and vocal coming out – and there was this scruffy fella playing something.  She popped her head in the door and said “That sounds nice” or something similar.  Reg said thanks (for it was he) and said that he was going in to try and sell some of his songs to a producer and get a deal.  “Good luck”  she said. At lunchtime that day in the local pub she asked him how it had gone – he wasn’t too confident, but she then asked if he could join her choir for the afternoon because she was a voice short, someone had let her down.  He said OK, because that’s how he was earning money in those days.

1972

 It was probably two years later that her phone rang.  “Is this Barbara?” said the voice.  “I need some help with a song, would you come down to the studio tomorrow?”   She agreed, and then arranged and led the choir on Border Song which appeared on Elton John’s 2nd LP, entitled simply ‘Elton John‘.  A standout track which Aretha Franklin covered – adding (Holy Moses) to the title – to greater success than the original, although it is now seen as an Elton classic.  The backing singers were Madeline Bell, Tony Burrows and Roger Cook, all of whom were slated to be interviewed for Red Light Fever  – Jenny and I met Madeline Bell for lunch the following Christmas in London (she lives in Spain).  She had been co-lead singer with Roger Cook of Blue Mink, a band created by session musicians including Alan Parker and Herbie Flowers ! with hit singles – Melting Pot, Banner Man, Good Morning Freedom.  Roger Cook was the songwriter behind I’d Like To Teach The World To Sing and many others – some of which Tony Burrows sang on – the session voice of Edison Lighthouse, White Plains, The Pipkins, The Flowerpot Men and The Ivy League and who infamously got banned from Top Of The Pops for appearing three times in one show with three different bands.  “People will think it’s a fix” said the BBC.  But he was the singer on all three songs!  As you can see already, it was a very tight, very small world, and a film exploring it all would be such fun.

Addison Cresswell

What eventually happened after editing the footage forever on my laptop was that Luke Cresswell’s brother Addison Cresswell took my five minute promo, (paid for by Latest TV, a new venture in Brighton run by Bill Smith) and made various people in TV Land watch it.  Addison I knew through Luke and we’d met a number of times, in pubs, at Luke & Jo’s Boxing Day parties, New Year’s Eve parties and he’d invited me to his office one day for a meeting to discuss this doc.  Addison had immense power in UK TV world because he managed all of the main comedians in the UK, including Jack Dee, Lee Evans, Michael McIntyre, Jonathan Ross and Kevin Bridges and had the ear of all the producers.  His style was all swagger and front, larger than life, a Rocket Man indeed and he was very good at his job.  Only BBC4 came back with an offer of £10k, all in for the show once it was complete – they’d buy it, but they wouldn’t fund it.  I couldn’t possibly make it for no money, so we waited for other responses over Christmas 2013, still planning and lining up interviews such as Madeline Bell and Ray Cooper.   Then Addison died at home of a heart attack on December 23rd, a death which shocked me to my bones, causing devastation to his family and shock throughout Brighton, his friends and colleagues, his clients and the TV industry as a whole.  He was 53 years old.   So so sad.  The Boxing Day social was cancelled and a giant hole filled the landscape where Addison had stood.  He was an extremely warm and generous man underneath his bark and laddish flex.  Something that perhaps I appreciate having had a few laddish years myself in my youth.  Addison’s love of his brother Luke, my friend, was also visible and echoed my own feelings for Paul and was the reason why he gave me so much of his time.  He is hugely missed.

And now that it’s all over
The birds can nest again
I’ll only snow when the sun comes out
I’ll shine only when it starts to rain

And if you want a drink
Just squeeze my hand
And wine will flow into the land
And feed my lambs

For I am a mirror
I can reflect the moon
I will write songs for you
I’ll be your silver spoon

I’m sorry I took your time
I am the poem that doesn’t rhyme
Just turn back a page
I’ll waste away, I’ll waste away
I’ll waste away, I’ll waste away
I’ll waste away, I’ll waste away

Video directed by Majid Adin, with Elton John’s blessing :

B-side : Goodbye

My Pop Life #175 : One Better Day – Madness

One Better Day   –   Madness

Further down, a photo booth, a million plastic bags
And an old woman filling out a million baggage tags
But when she gets thrown out, three bags at a time
She spies the old chap in the road to share her bags with
She has bags of time
Surrounded by his past, on a short white line
He sits while cars pass either side, takes his time
Trying to remember one better day
A while ago when people stopped to hear him say
Walking round you sometimes hear the sunshine
Beating down in time with the rhythm of your shoes

Was there ever a more disappointing year for pop music than 1984?  Looking back at the album releases and the top singles I am staggered by the unifying theme – great artists releasing substandard material, and very few inspirational youngsters filling the huge gap. Exception and the big album of the year was Purple Rain by Prince, while Frankie Goes To Hollywood dominated the UK radio and singles charts but I bought very little current music in 1984.  I was filling gaps, discovering genres, crate-digging, conducting archeological excavations and sometimes realising that people I’d scorned as a teenager were actually pretty good.  The albums I did buy from 1984, in 1984 :

Goodbye Cruel World  –  Elvis Costello & The Attractions

The Pearl  –  Harold Budd & Brian Eno

Mister Heartbreak  –  Laurie Anderson

Diamond Life  –  Sade

Best of ‘The Poet’ Trilogy  –  Bobby Womack

Keep Moving  –  Madness

Not as many as usual.  Later I would buy Prince, The Bangles, Luther Vandross, Dr John, Franco & TPOK Jazz, Van Dyke Parks, Gilberto Gil, The Judds, Prefab Sprout, Youssou N’Dour, The Style Council, Steve Reich, Run DMC and Pat Metheny, but even with those additions I think you can see how thin on the ground 1984 was musically.  Springsteen made Born In The USA the title track of which became a republican anthem (he didn’t sing it live this year 2016).  Perhaps the date was casting shade.  1984.  Throughout my life we’d all lived under the spectre of George Orwell‘s chilling and prescient novel.   That collection of numbers, that date had loomed like the monolith in 2001 A Space Odyssey – the other magical sentient date..in The Future.  It always presaged doom, totalitarianism, a jackboot stamping on a human face into infinity.  Now we were here and…well, life went on, like it does.  Like it did in 2001.  And like it will next year.

The big singles were Relax, Two Tribes, The Power Of Love, When Doves Cry, Purple Rain, the others were What’s Love Got To Do With It, I Feel For You, Ghostbusters, Any Love, It’s A Miracle, Careless Whisper, Smalltown Boy, Solid, Like A Virgin, I Just Called To Say I Love You, Hello, Take A Look At Me Now, Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, Do They Know It’s Christmas.

I liked very little of it.  Disappointing : Bowie with Blue Jean, Stevie Wonder (sigh), Elvis Costello’s worst LP to date, ditto McCartney, ditto Paul Weller.

And then Haircut 100 split up. ( Joke. )

And then Jerry Dammers and Special AKA released Free Nelson Mandela. (Not Joke)

Flying the flag for musical growth, and one step beyond their previous work The Rise and Fall (1982) was the Madness LP Keep Moving, in particular the song One Better Day, which haunts me even now and can move me to tears.  I’d loved the band since their first single The Prince,  multi-cultural British ska birthed in Camden Town via Jamaica. In those early days their skinhead fans and their whiteness made me feel a little uncomfortable at some of the gigs, although the majority of fans were not skins.  Then, aware of this stain on their pop life, the Madness videos started to include black people and the band rose above it all – for example Embarrassment is about a girl who’s going to have a baby with her black boyfriend.  The other groups who’d come up on the ska-revival Two-Tone wave The Specials, The Beat and The Selecter were all multi-racial anyway, but by 1984 they’d all split up.  Madness were on Stiff Records and this was their last LP with the maverick punk label.  It was their finest record to date – I’d bought them all, and they’d just got better and better.  So had The Undertones, but they’d stopped, so had The Jam and they’d split, so had Elvis Costello and he’d gone a bit over-produced, his songs weren’t to his impossibly high standard.   I’d also bought the collected videos of Madness which we watched endlessly, because they were so full of joy and nuttiness. I’m not sure there are a better collection of videos in pop history.  They made me want to be in the band.  Playing the saxophone.  Doing slightly robotic dancing.  Having a laugh with a gang.  

I’ve always wanted to be in a gang, but never really surrendered to it.  I don’t surrender very easily.  I’ve been in some gangs, but always felt like an outsider in there.  Either a council-estate kid in a middle class environment as a teenager, or an educated kid in a working-class environment.  Or an actor in a football team.  Or an actor in a band.  Or just a weirdo who doesn’t fit in enough.  Must be a choice.  I resist surrender.  Because I do not seek oblivion I will never be an alcoholic or a junkie.  I’m scared of oblivion, of disappearing.  Most of the music I like is controlled.  It’s not messy, it’s not people losing control.  It’s beautiful, melodic, harmonic, sweet.  But I wanted to be in Madness so much.  They influenced the band I was in, Birds Of Tin, but not enough. See My Pop Life #149.

Mike Barson was the musical genius on the piano, but his influence infused every musician, from bass player Mark Bedford (who later guested on Robert Wyatt’s cover of Costello’s Shipbuilding) to gimmick side monkey Chas Smash who went from rude boy dancer to trumpet player, from Chris Foreman on guitar and songwriting to Lee Thompson on saxophone (who I wished I was), from Woody on the kit to Suggs on the lead vocals.  They were tight, musical, lyrically interesting and wonderfully arranged pop songs,  vignettes of British life from Baggy Trousers to Embarrassment, My Girl to House Of Fun. They were probably my favourite band in the early 80s – them and Costello and Talking Heads.

Sloane Square, Chelsea

But if 1984 was a meagre year musically for me,  theatrically it was promising.   Armed with a law degree 😉 – I’d been to Edinburgh three times, got my Equity Card,  played the Donmar in Steven Berkoff’s WEST.    Then in early 84 I’d worked at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs with Danny Boyle (directing an incredible play called Panic! by Alan Brown).   It was an extraordinary piece of work which ran for all of two and half weeks as I recall.  Worthy of a post of its own.   Then in the late summer the 3rd director in the building a brilliant young Simon Curtis invited me to be part of his first production which was to be a play for Joint Stock Theatre Company called Deadlines.  I was thrilled, and it turned out to be one of my most satisfying and rewarding theatrical adventures.  Simon was extremely encouraging, open, intelligent and funny.  I ended up playing six parts and getting a new agent out of it : Michael Foster.   Also cast : Kathryn Pogson, Paul Jesson, Shirin Taylor, Tricia Kelly, Paul Mooney.   Writer :  Stephen Wakelam.  Play : unwritten.

A young Simon Curtis in 1985, one year after Deadlines

Joint Stock was a unique theatre company.  Formed by Max Stafford-Clark and others in the early 1970s, it had become a collective in 1974 while they produced David Hare’s play about China ‘Fanshen‘, co-directed by Max and Bill Gaskell.  This meant that every member who had ever worked for the company could attend company meetings and AGMs and vote.  In practice people deferred to Max and Caryl Churchill, both of whom were enthusiastic enough to actually attend meetings.  There was an administrator, but no Artistic Director – each big decision eg – what play shall we do next ? directed by who ? written by who ? was decided on a collective vote.  Some were already plays, but more often the show would be devised by the company.

This is now a forgotten way of life.  All of those Arts Council-funded theatre companies have gone :  7:84, Shared Experience, Joint Stock, Paines Plough.  Slashed by Thatcher’s reduction of the State.  1984 was the year of the miner’s strike, Coal Not Dole stickers, and the rise of cardboard city in Waterloo as new regulations on signing on created a new wave of homelessness, particularly of those between 16 and 20.  Suddenly there were people sleeping in shop doorways in London on The Strand.  Then there was an IRA bomb at the Tory Party conference in Brighton at The Grand Hotel.

*

one of the greatest band shots of all time: the cover of ‘7’ the 3rd Madness LP

Keep Moving was Mike Barson’s last album with Madness, and he left the band once they recorded a couple of videos – Michael Caine and One Better Day, which was their last for Stiff Records, and funded by the band themselves including Barson, seen playing the vibraphone, who flew in from Amsterdam for the shoot.

Arlington house, address: no fixed abode
An old man in a three-piece suit sits in the road
He stares across the water, he sees right through the lock
But on and up like outstretched hands
His mumbled words, his fumbled words, mock

Arlington House is behind Camden High Street.  It housed – and still houses among it’s more commercial premises – homeless men, and has since 1905.  It was the last of the Victorian workhouses, built by politician and philanthropist Lord Rowton in the 1890s to house London’s working poor.

Camden Lock

I used to shop for music shoes and clothes in Camden Town, whether in Dingwalls (‘The Lock’ in the lyrics) or the Record and Tape Exchange on the High St, or one of the many independent stores in that square mile of post-punk grubbiness.  Over the years I’ve been to many gigs in Camden Palace (Culture Club), The Electric Ballroom (The Vibrators) or Dingwalls (X-Ray Spex).  The Dublin Castle.   More recently at the re-opened Roundhouse or the Jazz Cafe.

When I started acting in Moving Parts Theatre Company in 1981 two of the company’s founders – Ruth MacKenzie and Rachel Feldberg – lived in Oval Road just behind Arlington House with the young director Roger Michell who would later go on to direct The Buddha Of Suburbia, Notting Hill and many other successful films.  I would see him years and years later at Michael Foster’s 50th birthday party and he hailed me “Haven’t you done well !”  I looked behind me.  No, he meant me. I smiled.  “Me?  What about you !!” I realised that seen from the outside, my journey looks good and fine, but what about the invisible thrashing through the undergrowth with a blunt machete to reach a small ledge of safety that no one ever sees ?  Eh ?!?  WHAT ABOUT THAT?

Gentrified many times Camden still retains its scruffy down-at-heel ambience, partly due to scruffy down-at-heel junkies, and partly due to people who want to look scruffy and down-at-heel.  But there have always been homeless people there – see Waterloo, see Soho, see Bayswater. And having been homeless myself for a period of time as a teenager (see My Pop Life #84 All Along The Watchtower) I always felt moved by this song, describing a couple walking the streets of NW1.  Street people.  Nowhere to store their stuff, carrying it all around.  Nowhere to wash apart from the hostel, who close their doors at 8am.  I would be interviewing some of these people for my first play Sanctuary in 2 years’ time, using The Joint Stock Method.  And later, some of them would be invited to The Drill Hall to see the play.

The woman in the video is Betty Bright – Sugg’s wife.  Graham McPherson – Suggs – who wrote the song with Mark ‘Bedders’ Bedford – looks impossibly young in the video, but wears the kind of clothes that I used to try and find, and still do to be fair.  Checks.  Tartans. Doc Martens.  There’s a DM shop on Kentish Town Road next to Camden tube which makes an appearance in The Sun & The Rain video.  I had a pair of red patent leather DMs.  In fact I still have them.  I owe some of my so-called style to Madness Suggs chic, (some to Bryan Ferry chic, some to rock’n’roll and some to Laurel & Hardy).

The chorus is unbearably sweet, given the subject :

She’s trying to remember one better day
A while ago when people stopped to hear her say

‘Walking round you sometimes hear the sunshine
Beating down in time with the rhythm of your shoes
The feeling of arriving when you’ve nothing left to lose…’