Dick Jones' Patteran Pages

[5.] LOOSE CHANGE/DANGEROUS RHYTHM.

The job change took us to a village just outside the town of Farnham in opulent West Surrey, on the borders of Hampshire.  Moving from an anonymous semi-detached in the post-war London overflow town of Watford to a cottage in a wood was something of a culture shock. The bosky lanes & neatly manicured lawns surrounded houses that suggested garden party & tea dance rather than rock and roll.

So when I met up with Andy Fernbach, who was looking for a bass player, it was no great surprise to find that he lived in a small mansion called The Dower House on the other side of Farnham.  However, as we discussed the blues & beyond, the ivy-clad walls & mullioned windows became an irrelevancy & I began to see the musical future coming into focus.

Andy’s particular area was the crossover point between small band jazz & rhythm-&-blues. I’d long been a fan of the likes of Louis Jordan & Bill Doggett & the 5 & 6-piece combos whose raucous, swing-beat sounds from the late ‘40s & into the ‘50s laid down the foundations for R&B & then rock’n’roll.  In 1969 Andy had recorded a highly praised album of acoustic guitar-based blues & now, with family help, was setting up a small recording studio above his converted garage. He’d moved on to piano & planned to put together a four-piece to play a mixture of bluesy favourites & original material.

This was an idea whose time had come. For me a year with The Everglades had blown away completely the dust that lay deep on musical forms that, in the late ‘60s were vital & inspiring but had now evolved into the overblown posturings of ‘progressive rock’. I had long wanted to break away from the murmurous noodlings & breakneck improvisations in unfeasible time signatures that underpinned the vapid, Tolkein-lite lyrics typical of the genre. With Steve & Keith the emphasis had been almost entirely on the songs. But now with Andy Fernbach the priority was short, sharp numbers with their roots buried deep in the blues & jazz.

The 18 months with Andy & guitarist John Clark produced little in the way of gigs for Loose Change, but much in the way of personal musical development. Having first picked up a bass guitar only 8 years earlier, I was now faced with chord charts for tunes of considerable sophistication.  As well as tackling Andy’s own excellent songs, I had to lay bass lines down for material by the likes of Hoagy Carmichael, Harold Arlen & Randy Newman.  I was a thousand miles removed from familiar territory & excited by playing playing music all over again.

In 1976 the mode of the music changed & the walls of the city, entirely appropriately, shook. The Sex Pistols & The Clash threw up the barricades & the revolution began.  I was delighted by the punk explosion &, whilst at the age of 30, I was a candidate for extinction, I auditioned for a West London band called Dangerous Rhythm. 

Coincidentally, Bob Salmons’ band – already up & running – was exploring very much the same territory as Loose Change.  The audition was in the upper room of a pub in Twickenham & after we completed a storming version of Fleecie Moore’s Caldonia, I slipped out for a pee. Bob joined me &, as we faced the great white ceramic wall together, offered me the position.

It was an exciting time to be fielding an outfit that had some credibility with the new audiences & it was my good fortune nearly ten years on to have swung up onto the next bandwagon at just the right moment. We were a long way from sharing the three-chord thrash characteristics of the new punk bands. But we played our repertoire of ‘40s, ‘50s & ‘60s R&B classics & obscurities mixed in with pre-Two Tone ska & originals with mighty clout & at great speed & the ‘pub rock’ phenomenon of bluesy/country-tinged bands that prefigured punk still had some momentum. There was plenty of work around West London & with new drummer Andy Knight in place, we were soon gigging two or three nights a week.

This time around, more by luck than judgement, I seemed to have located something of a combination of the creative satisfaction of my earlier bands & the steady work of The Everglades. I started writing again, this time somewhat self-conscious parodies of the good-time-charlie lyrics of Louis Jordan, rendered into decidedly British mode & Bob gave them tunes. 

We recorded a 6-track EP – Just A Little Drink - at Andy Fernbach’s studio (now fully operational) & Bob blagged it around the various indie labels proliferating everywhere at that time.  Sadly, none of them picked it up: two band members sporting beards & a suspicious degree of actual playing ability were probably significant disincentives. However, I’d remained in touch with John Peel, now the BBC’s resident patron & disseminator of the musical zeitgeist, & I sent him a copy, which he played several times on his show Top Gear.  London listings magazine & clearing house for all things radical Time Out ran an alternative Top Ten, comprising almost entirely indie label material & to our delight the EP slipped in at number 7, one above Gang of Four’s debut release.

We were on a roll.  Once again I found myself in the semi-finals of the annual Melody Maker Rock/Folk competition & we graduated to the inner core of London clubs, playing regularly at the Marquee (whose dressing room still had the same graffiti on walls & doors that I had read 9 years earlier) & the Rock Garden (just around the corner from the site of Middle Earth from the same distant era.)

We still played regularly around West London, getting repeat bookings at a number of pubs.  One of them – the Hamborough Tavern – always brought out a large, supportive crowd for us.  Although we played it many times & appreciated the fact the audience came for our filtered version of black American music, Bob & I always felt distinctly uneasy about our relationship with the place.  Looking back 30 years, for me that uneasiness has long since transmogrified into shame. It was Bob & I who shoehorned Dangerous Rhythm into the Hamborough in the first place. We visited it on one of our crawls around the music pubs, carrying a tape of the band & some excellent comic book-style publicity material done by Jon Riley, our lead guitarist. 

The Hamborough Tavern was a large, ‘30s-style pub set back from The Broadway in Southall. Bob & I strolled up to the bar & looked around. The pub was empty apart from three Sikh men gathered in a tight group in a far corner.  As we spun round on our stools spinning coins on the bar top, a chunky barman emerged from the back & we ordered a couple of pints of lager.  We presented our credentials & the barman took them out to the landlord for scrutiny. On his return, Bob asked him about the evening & weekend clientele.  The barman jerked a stumpy thumb in the direction of the Sikhs.
  “Daytime, that lot”, he grunted.  “Evenings we get skinheads & on band nights, students”.
  “Do you get much trouble?” Bob asked, clearly envisaging skinheads giving our natural constituency a good kicking of a Friday night. Seeing us as fellow Aryans in a world gone wrong, the barman misunderstood.
  “Nah!” he snorted scornfully, glancing over at the Sikhs. “If they kick up, we give them some of this”.  He reached beneath the bar & placed an object wrapped in three tea towels before us. With a conjurer’s flourish he whipped the towels away revealing a three-foot length of inch-thick iron.

Bob got a call a couple of days later offering us three gigs. We took them & all the repeat bookings that followed. The odd skinhead might have been seen amongst the pogo-ing crowds of students in from Richmond & Ealing on a weekend, but never again did we see Asians in the pub. On July 3rd 1981 the Hamborough Tavern was burned to the ground during the Southall Riots.

By 1979 Dangerous Rhythm had run its course.  After our brief ascendance, we settled down into the broad mainstream with the multitude of 3rd division bands orbiting month by month around the same circuit of pubs & clubs.  Bob had grander plans & I tired of the long trek up & down the A3.  It had been a good 3 years, refreshing & invigorating: clearly there was to be musical life after 30. I played my last gig & withdrew to rural Surrey to consider my options.

(Continued)

.o0o.

PS For those of you for whom this an excess of old man's memories, we're nearly there now, I promise...

DICK, KEITH, STEVE, ROBIN

[4.] BIG SUR/TINTAGEL 2., WINDOWS & THE EVERGLADES.

Robin & I met in 1969 as F-stream remedial teachers at ‘Skinhead Central’ – Creek Road Boys’ Technical Secondary School in Deptford, South-East London.  Within our first term at the school I’d had to relieve Franny Smith of half a brick seconds before he rearranged the face of the boy on whose arms he was kneeling & Robin had been forced to knock senseless a six foot thirteen-year-old assailant with a knife with the plaster cast on his newly broken arm.

But even these blips in the daily processes of riot control seemed as little more than brief agitations in the quotidian dream.  In breaks, in free periods & from the moment that we clambered into Robin’s rusty car at 4.00 p.m., the music came rolling in like a tide.

Initially the band was called Big Sur, this supposedly redolent of Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac & the wide-open spaces of our mythical America. The music was airy & expansive, strummed & plucked on acoustic guitars with contact mics fitted & a bowl-backed Greek bouzouki that I’d brought back from Cyprus. Musicians came & went as ever, particularly drummers. But the core of the band comprised Robin on ‘string-driven things’ (guitar, mandolin, bouzouki & a home-made xither), Keith on 12-string guitar & vocals, PJ on 4-string guitar & lead vocals, latterly Steve on stinging Richard Thompson-esque electric guitar & vocals, & myself on bass.

Points of musical reference were many & various, ranging from Robin’s strange serpentine melodies & surreal lyrics, part Incredible String Band whimsy, part degree-level high-brow, through Keith’s romantic ballads to Steve’s & my odd synthesis of funk & folk, me writing the lyrics & Steve the music.

By now the tight circuit of the London & provincial underground clubs had largely unravelled.  Amiable hippy management had given way in a cloud of patchouli & pot smoke to the hardheaded promoters, now back on their feet after a brief flower-strewn hiatus, & the bigger venues were back on the map. 

But arising from the diaspora of the diggers & levellers who had got it all together in the first place there emerged a new territory of tiny clubs & ‘arts labs’, free of ‘breadheads’ & ‘straights’, wherein the square peg bands might locate their audience. We made our initial base at the Oval House just off Camberwell Green, essentially an experimental theatre complex housed in a single story brick building resembling an air-raid shelter.  Here we rehearsed & performed in happy obscurity (under the revived name of Tintagel), eschewing fame & fortune whilst forever courting the elusive management & record deal.

Patrons came & went with the same brief passion & commitment of our short-stay musicians. For nearly a year a songwriting contract with Lindisfarne’s publisher looked full of promise. Then, through Radio One DJ Pete Drummond’s interest in the band, we recorded a number of Sounds of the Seventies & Nightride sessions for the BBC. Gigs were few & far between & when we did pull in the prestigious ones, technical problems caused by terminal equipment decay compounded by narcotic confusion generally rendered them patchy, to say the least.  We were unable to draw a pragmatic distinction between the cheerful, hazy, fume-filled chaos of our daily lives & the disciplines of practise & performance. Rehearsals in Robin’s tiny bedroom in Goblin City, the shabby Victorian villa he shared with his two brothers, descended all too often into giggling cacophony within which only we could hear the sound of the lost chord.

By the end of 1970 the elusive charms of 30-minute acoustic jams began to elude even the musicians stuck inside them.  So we recruited Vern, an American drummer with his own kit, a van & shoulder-length curly hair plus a full beard & cranked up the volume on our tired old amps.  For a while it worked & with a few powerchords & pneumatic Zoe & sinuous Jenny on backing vocals, we actually got a few audiences onto their feet.  We got through to the semi-finals of the national annual Melody Maker Rock & Folk contest twice & for a while it seemed as though we might be insinuating our way back into the commercial-but-with-credibility stakes.

Sadly, the sum total of the disparate parts didn’t gel for long & the band didn’t survive house moves for Steve & I, both of us relocating respectively to the north-east & north-west of London. The two of us maintained contact, driving back & forth along the top of the infamous M25 motorway – Britain’s biggest car park - to each other’s new homes to write together.

Some of our best material came from these sessions &, for a few months, Steve, Keith & I managed to gig a drummer-less trio – called, whimsically, Windows - with a residency in the heart of Soho. But the logistics of maintaining a band whose members lived at three of the four points of the compass proved too difficult &, with considerable reluctance, we parted company.

There followed for me a period in the musical wilderness. I played bass in a few scratch bands around Watford for a while before joining, for financial reasons alone, my first purely commercial outfit.

The Everglades was a country-&-western trio run by a stage Irishman from County Cork called John Reardon. John was a stocky, perma-tanned, Elvis-haired con man of great charm & humour. He sat behind the most disreputable drum kit I had ever stood beside & drove the band along with a metronomic four-on-the-floor from the bass drum & a bizarre but curiously effective synthesis of ceilidh band press rolls & rockabilly flourishes.

Wild-eyed Paul played versatile guitar & the band rattled around a circuit of Hertfordshire & Bedfordshire working men’s clubs, playing 45-minute sets either side of a lengthy bingo or raffle session. During these interludes the three of us would work our way diligently & with speed through pints of Guinness supplied by the management, the eventual tally depending on the length of the break. Then, with audience & band in an advanced state of refreshment for the second half, we would gallop through colourful renditions of the likes of Honky Tonk Angels, Blanket On The Ground & Four In The Morning plus the obligatory Jim Reeves medley & the closing sequence of rock’n’roll favourites. 

If boredom set in, Paul would deliver a swift nod & a wink to me & in the middle of a song the two of us would slide up (nod-wink) or down (wink-nod) a semi-tone, leaving John to yodel his way north or south until he got onto our wavelength. But John was no slouch & he could hurl a pair of drumsticks with great accuracy & grab two fresh ones without losing a beat. A favourite routine of his, performed for a packet of ciggies from each band member, was to work the phrase ‘fuck off’ into his announcements. That he managed to do this each time entirely audibly to us but never to the audience was a matter of ceaseless (& expensive) wonder.

In 1975, after over a year of solid gigging with The Everglades, we moved from Watford to Surrey & a new job. I left the band with a deal of regret, recognising that, for all the tackiness of the material & its continental distance from all that had constituted credible musical engagement previously, I had been for the first time a jobbing musician playing to universally appreciative audiences.  I learned much in that time, not least a degree of musical humility in a time of overweening snobbery & elitism. And I have retained a shameless & abiding love for country-&-western music ever since.

(Continued).

.o0o.

[3.] TINTAGEL

We entered 1968 with just Pete, Phil the drummer & myself as original members. By now Pete had augmented his 12-string guitar with a sitar. With all due respect to the mighty Ravi Shankar, whose claim it is that even after several turns around the karmic block the most dedicated practitioner would still be a mere novice on the sitar, it takes only 20 minutes to make it sound as if you know what you’re doing. This is helped greatly if your audience has never seen one before, or if they are comprehensively stoned. Or both.

Out front we had two flautists – Iain Cameron, who subsequently went on to record with posthumous wunderkind Nick Drake, & Ian Macdonald, who subsequently went on to co-found King Crimson. So our cache was high & our credibility sound & we were regulars on the now burgeoning underground circuit, working through an agency & getting re-bookings. All we lacked was management & a record deal.

In the early spring of 1968, we peaked.  For some time American singer Dorris Henderson had been looking for a band. She’d recorded with guitarist John Renbourne (an album recently re-released to much, very late acclaim) & was touring the folk clubs with a repertoire of gospel & blues.

She had been a de facto resident in the UK for some time & with the first visits from touring American gospel & blues artists still fresh in memory from only 10 years before, she had been accorded somewhat iconic status. Dorris wanted to break free from what she saw as an increasingly stifling set of musical expectations on the part of her audiences. She was tired of being the authentic voice of black American music & wanted to explore the very musical roots & shoots that were exciting us so much. So Tintagel now hit the clubs with what we billed – with the insouciance of the age – as our ‘chick singer’. 

Three gigs took us to the bottom of the next flight of stairs. Two of them were engagements that Dorris had had in her diary for months &, because of her musical clout & strength of personality, she was able to re-negotiate both to include ‘her’ band. The first was at a prestigious folk club, the Troubador, then situated in a huge pub at the top of the Tottenham Court Road.  We played to a sizeable crowd & it went down well. Dorris’ deep, powerful voice sat comfortably on top of our 12-string arpeggios, the woodwind & the running bass lines.

Several members of the audience hung around with us as we slipped down a quick after-hours beer before shifting the gear into the van & heading south of the river.  Dorris brought over a small, dark, solemn-faced New Yorker & a pale, rather diffident Scot & we found ourselves being thanked for our efforts & praised for our originality by Paul Simon & Bert Jansch.

A few weeks later we fulfilled one of our bookings at the Marquee in Wardour Street (a club whose minute, unsanitary dressing room has accommodated every band of subsequent note in the land.) After a storming set we adjourned to The Ship, a nearby pub. Clinging to Dorris’ arm & talking urgently as we walked the few yards up Wardour Street was a fierce lady with thick blonde hair & dark eyes. In the pub she ignored the band completely, leaning conspiratorially towards its singer & telling her – as if at that high point she needed persuading – that the future for the female vocalist was in front of a shit hot band. Within a few months Sandy Denny was fronting Fairport Convention.

In May we played the Albert Hall.  Dorris had a support spot on a packed bill for the farewell concert of folk’s first family The Watersons, splitting after relentless touring since the early ‘60s.  After a nightmare soundcheck with Phil’s drums echoing back off the circular galleries a half-beat late (“The night they invented ska”, muttered a miserable Phil), I paced the ornate corridors, dry-mouthed with terror as post-Dylan balladeer Roy Harper overran his set massively. We hurtled onto stage 40 minutes late, but Dorris seduced the audience within seconds & we played our full programme impeccably. Numbers I remember from that extraordinary night included the folk song Watch the Stars, Love’s Message To Pretty, Donovan’s Season Of The Witch (featuring Pete on bravura sitar) & our own White Morning.

Dorris returned to Los Angeles for a family visit & on her return she joined the fast rising Eclection, who had management & a recording deal.  We wobbled, recovered, lost members, auditioned, gained members & then sundered at the end of the year.  Pete’s departure to join the protagonists of the revolution in the offices of hippy broadsheet International Times pulled out the last threads of the old lineup & I took a deep breath & leaped into the unknown.

(Continued)

.o0o.