We became friends and bandmates in about 1997/8, and he was the frontman of the band that played at my wedding in 2006. Well, he died on the evening of 6th January 2010, aged 35, in the company of his close family.

All my friends who met him; my wife; both of my brothers; my mum; my nephew; even my nan – they all liked Duncan. He had this authentic public schoolish charm, undermined deliciously by his capacity for outrageous naughtiness, topped off with a grin and a twinkle.

I first got to know him when I went with my friend (his girlfriend and later wife) Catrina, to see him in a gig at a hostile Racehorse pub in Northampton. It was just Duncan – and a drummer who couldn’t count – desperately fighting to engage the Sunday night drinkers with his songs. It goes down as one of the most inspired and energetic performances I’ve seen; his acoustic guitar was spattered with blood by the end of the night.

I straightaway offered my services as a bassist until he could find a more permanent solution. Our first rehearsal together was up in his flat, where he taught me the bassline to his song ‘Something Covered’. We sat on the floor because his only chair had a sheet of cellophane taped over the seat to produce a ’snare’ drum for the purposes of recording.

We began a weekly 50-mile pilgrimage to St Neots, where we would meet up with his old schoolmate (and new drummer) Trussy. There, for a couple of hours, the three of us would patiently work up ideas from the most obscure corners of Duncan’s mind into crackling punkish songs.

A solid core of about ten or fifteen of us in Northampton had musical ambitions, but you don’t have to don your rose-tinted spectacles to see that Duncan was head and shoulders above all of us. His artistic aesthetic, his standards, were far and away the highest, most developed and most original. More than that, he could actually sing! He had presence! He had the energy, the volatility, the charisma, the fearlessness, the unselfconsciousness to front a band. It was effortless.

Everyone could see it.

Most unusually, however, he was a man who genuinely cared for everyone else’s ideas. If you had an idea, he would leap on it and nurture it, and get everything he could out of it. He’s the only person I’ve known who’s ever really done that: he knew that the idea was king.

Two years on, and shortly before my temporary position in the band was permanently filled by good friend Dave, we marched into the Lodge Studios in Northampton to make a record of where we’d got to. Rather than the standard four tracks, we managed to record and mix a full thirteen in a single day. That session goes down as being among the most fondly remembered days of my life.

My favourite of Dunc’s songs from this time is linked here.

It’s not at all representative of the band’s restless, high-energy, melodic eccentricity, and I highly recommend you have a listen to them here.

These couple of years weren’t easy lifewise, but they were hugely creative. You can pack a lot of talking into 50 miles of driving every week, and we would enthuse about Dunc’s hopes for Orwell Music, and memories of his former bands Rudder and Strange New Creation, and about my hopes for my writing. Those years also form the basis of a large slice of who I am now, my creative thinking, my musical tastes: the Dirty Three, Mark Kozelek, Tindersticks, the Breeders, the Amps, Ride, PJ Harvey, Pixies – artists from the core of my tastes, many introduced to me by Dunc, and all of whom keep his influence alive and thriving.

I built the wedding band around the hope that the ten or fifteen of us from Northampton would play, and that Duncan would front it. I always felt it was a big ask for someone like Duncan – a man of particular tastes – but he showed nothing but warmth and enthusiasm for the whole enterprise. This is the main memory of Duncan that will stay with me, although I could just as well bask in the glory of the volatile, snarling, laughing frontman of Orwell Music.

These memories also provide the overriding feeling of the moment: here we are, all of us family or friends or bandmates – and we’ve lost our frontman.

Macmillan Cancer Support

Catrina’s blog

• ‘I have won a Princess Nova caravan‘, 17 Sep 2009, in which the news breaks.
• ‘Meet the Princess Nova‘, 21 Sep 2009, in which the caravan is described.
• ‘What will I do with the Princess Nova?‘, 22 Sep 2009, in which I realise I have no idea about caravans.
• ‘The song that won a million hearts‘, 25 Sep 2009, in which I give the lowdown on how the song came about.
• ‘The Princess and the answers to unasked questions‘, 25 Sep 2009, an update on practical preparations for the caravan.
• ‘Fit for a Princess‘, 4 Oct 2009, totally impractical preparations for the caravan handover and photoshoot.
• ‘Rolling out the red carpet‘, 13 October 2009, I get a towbar.
• ‘She’s our princess now…‘, 19 October 2009, in which we are given the caravan.
• ‘Be a man: tow a caravan‘, 21 October 2009, in which I am thrown in at the caravanular deep end.
• ‘The Princess photo shoot‘, 23 October 2009, in which I tell the tale of the promotional photo shoot.
• ‘Judgement day revelations‘, 26 October 2009, in which I crow at the people who didn’t win.

One final thing occurs to me to tell you about our acquisition of the Princess Nova caravan.

The judging of the limerick/song/rap competition to win the Princess was, apparently, very involving. White Stuff’s Georgie and one colleague trawled through all 3,500 entries one by one.

They divided the entries up into ‘Yes’, ‘No’ and ‘Maybe’ piles. Then they realised that the ‘Maybe’ pile might as well be the ‘No’ pile too, if there were any ‘Yes’s.

The ‘Yes’ pile was then whittled down into a Top 10, which was wrapped up and delivered with a reverential hush to the CEO of White Stuff.

A winner and a runner-up were duly chosen.

And get this: this decision was reached on words alone. Only after they had decided on the winner did they listen to my masterly recording of the rap. This revelation was catnip to Christine, whose work most of the words were.

What I find most brilliant about the whole process is that, when the winner was announced on the White Stuff website, they received complaints.

Apparently, people wrote in to White Stuff saying that, had they known that it was not just limericks, but poems, songs or raps that were allowed, they would have tried harder. The beauty of this to me is that, it was made perfectly clear all the way along.

But that sadsacky brand of huffy shoulda-woulda-coulda is just so brilliant when you’re on the winning team.

This is one in the eye for all those customers who came up to me when I was working at MVC and told me it was “against the law” to advertise a sale as being “From” £4.99.

But fear not, losers. I shall not crow. After all, Jols and I spent hours and hours coming up with a winning phrase to score something inane from Fentimans soft drinks company a few years back. Our best effort? “Fentimans? Fermentimans!”

I still think we should have won that. You wouldn’t belieeeve the one that did.

Well, that’s about all.

jx

We didn’t enter the caravan competition to win it. Well, I didn’t, anyway. I entered it so that Jols and I could plough a disproportionate amount of time and energy into writing some lyrics that would easily be the greatest ever written, and so we could then indulge in a hearty dessert of outrage that the prize had been given to same lame-arsed ‘optimised’ effort constructed by a professional competition enterer.

This was the amount of psychological commitment I invested in the ‘Princess and the P-Reg’ project.

I was not prepared to find myself sitting in front of a chintzy pimped caravan in  the middle of a rain-swept Worcester High Street at school home-time, sipping champagne and mugging for the camera. But if I have learned anything in the last decade or so, it’s to mask a lack of preparedness with gusto.

As mentioned previously, the White Stuff people had generously towed the caravan to Worcester and decked us out in free clothes in order to get a bit of PR out of the whole thing. Who were we to object?

I haven’t seen the photos – they are apparently going to be touted round the high-circulation caravan magazines, of which there are many – but I imagine my amazing ‘trap’ double-chin will put in a solid cameo, and my ’stress eye’ (an unknown characteristic prior to our wedding photos being developed) will do its very best Captain Darling impression.

During the shoot, the good folk of Worcester trudged by more or less without comment, but one or two schoolkids milled around and pronounced our new acquisition “well good”. I managed to blank everything that was going on around me, and just act as stupidly as possible, which I’m sure to the White Stuff crowd just looked like I was acting like a normal human being.

The only bit of control I managed to retain over the proceedings was the growing of a couple of mil’s worth of beard, which should have the effect of making me look tired and/or homeless. Certainly it led people at work to give me a wide berth, assuming I’d got divorced or lost a relative or something.

Luck was on my side for one aspect of the event. The White Stuff contingent let slip that one of my work colleagues had found a moment in his busy schedule to contact the White Stuff press office and ask for the photos. After mulling this point for a while, I vetoed the suggestion (ever the fun suck hole), and we came up with the compromise of taking a ’special’ photo to send him.

As ever,

jx

PS. I withdraw my scorn at Catherine for letting the Birmingham Mail photographer snap her in a happy-go-lucky ‘elbow on pile of books’ pose – a shot which has yet to surface.

One of the steepest learning curves of my driving life was learned in reverse last Thursday, when we picked up our prize of a Princess Nova caravan from the Worcester White Stuff store.

Decked out in brand new clobber (for the attendant photo shoot), I listened as the ever-industrious Mick, who had been towing the Princess from Cornwall to Scotland and back all summer, gave me the skinny on how to tow a caravan.

“Have you ever towed a caravan before?”
“Urr, no.”
“Have you ever towed anything before?”
“Umm…”

He smiled, picked the thinnest roll-up in the world from between his lips, and exhaled smoke.

“It’s a piece of cake,” he said.

Turns out it’s a fairly large piece of sherry trifle cheesecake with whipped cream and a cherry on top.

When your speed limit’s 70, go at 60; when it’s 60, go at 50. If you’re on the motorway and the van starts to veer, then speed up, don’t slow down, or it’ll jack-knife and you’ll all be dead (or something).

To connect it to the back of the car, reverse the car close, manhandle the caravan into place, lift that and crank that, then when it’s married, drop that. Then hoist that, and clip the emergency braking wire in place. Your caravan’s on. Then you can connect your two plug things, black-to-black and grey-to-grey — don’t get it wrong or you’ll blow the lot — and check your car lights are working through the caravan.

I nodded throughout this explanation, employing what I like to describe as my bullshit nod, which has seen me through university and many jobs besides. I arched my eyebrow through how to connect the wheel clamp and the hitchlock, and I hmmed and ahhed about how the gas bottle is connected.

Pulling away after the media circus (of which more anon) I was relieved and alarmed to find the Princess dutifully following. It was pissing it down, so I drove pretty slowly, and pulled some wiiiide turns. Jols and I winced and groaned as the satellite navigation dragged us over every speed hump in Kidderminster, and it was really only after this trial that we started to engage with the fact that we had nowhere to go.

The place where we had arranged to stow the Princess had long since shut for the day, and so Jols had made some enquiries at local caravan parks as to whether we could keep the Princess there for a night. One such park had “plenty of space”, but after we’d answered a few questions (“we don’t know exactly how long the caravan is”, “we won’t be staying in it overnight”), they suddenly found that they “didn’t have any space”.

Not only are caravan owners lepers to society, it seems that clueless competition-winning caravan owners are lepers-with-swine-flu to the lepers.

The day was saved (and not for the first time) by deeply generous and tolerant pals Lou and Mike, who lent us their driveway for the night, and kept a cheery outlook even after seeing the Princess.

Arrival at Lou and Mike’s driveway brought roll-up-touting-Mick’s final bit of advice back to me:

“The only real problem is reversing.”

As a queue of traffic began to form beside me, I struggled to recall:

“See, if you want it to go left, you turn right as you reverse. But not too hard, or it’ll jack-knife. You have to turn right, and then turn left to follow it on the arc. You’ll get the hang of it.”

That, my old son, is pressure parking.

jx

Well, what you’ve been asking about all this time has finally come to pass: the Princess is ours.

On Thursday Jols and I headed off to White Stuff’s new Worcester branch, where we were met by the very accommodating Georgie and co (up from London!), who were responsible for the whole ‘caravan’ promo. Georgie has, she told us with what you might classify an edgy laugh, carted the Princess from festival to festival, from Cornwall to the Isle of Wight, to Edinburgh and everywhere in between throughout the summer.

Life, she admitted, will be odd without the Princess. But Georgie’s made of strong stuff. After all, the White Stuff winter collection’s in, and she’s all about garden gnomes now. And it doesn’t stop there; apparently the campaign for summer 2010 is well under development, but no amount of prodding and pouting from Jols and me could tease a hint out of her as to what it’s all about – or what competitions they might be running.

What an odd job.

For all our don’t-know-what-to-do-with-a-caravan-ness, the White Stuff people have been very good to us; the Princess has been decked out inside and out by the woman who designs the stores, and so the wallpapered exterior has been matched by a wallpapered interior, a wallpapered picnic table, gilt-edged shelving and chintzy lampshades. Cushions have been specially made, a picnic hamper provided, but the pièce de résistance is an astroturfed step.

Quite against their Ts and Cs they carted the caravan from London to Worcester, and decked us out in White Stuff clobber so we would look the part for a few photos.

I shall do my best over the next few days to pen you a note about how all of this went.

The result of all this oddness is: the Princess is ours, and she now resides in a Secret Location in Deepest Shropshire.

Your pal

j

So we’ve been making the final preparations for the arrival of the Princess on Thursday. Jols has been researching into places we can keep it, and there’s a good looking storage depot only about 10 minutes away.

I sook out a place where I could get a towbar, and the lovely people at Copthorne Services carried out the following minor surgery on Lenny:

Quite natty, no?

And who knew it was so easy to get a number plate? A tenner to the local garage, a flutter of paperwork, and they’d got it within a couple of hours…

Now all we need is a pair of those crazy wing mirror extensions, and just a tiny idea of how on earth to drive while towing a caravan – and, more importantly, reverse – and we’ll be set.

Roll on thursday!

jx

In the continuing saga of the caravan, Jols and I have landed on a date of 15 October to meet up with White Stuff to take delivery of our Princess Nova and pose for some promotional photographs. The beard is coming along well, after a slight setback when I had to shave it off for the Roads Ahead book launch.

While working out the finer points, Georgie from White Stuff mentioned: “Of course, we’ll want you dressed head-to-toe in White Stuff clothes. Head off to the nearest store and get some ideas about what you’d like to wear…”

It will come as no surprise to you that it takes a situation of the gravest seriousness for me to hazard even a foot towards the changing rooms. I found myself in the Shrewsbury store, loaded up with a full five items to try on. Jols, for her part, flung herself into the task, and staggered up after me practically buckling under half a hundred-weight of White Stuff’s autumn collection.

“Oh my god,” the assistant actually muttered.

One quick explanation later, and by now ensconced in a packed-to-capacity changing room, Jols was subsequently referred to in hushed, reverential tones as “the caravan lady”.

It didn’t take me long to decide on my choice (by which I mean: I’m a man; we’re all the same shape; we’ll wear anything), and I settled into a nearby chair while Jols busied herself behind the curtain conjuring up some White Stuff magic.

We felt a bit bad departing the store having bought nothing, and leaving the staff to put the place back together – but the real work is yet to come: my wedding photos remind me it’ll take more than magic to wedge a comfortable smile into my face.

“Cheeeeeese…”

j

So I suppose we’d better start learning quickly about this caravan-ownership thing.

Where are we going to put it? As you know, we don’t have a driveway. Our house is not next to the road. It’s packed in amongst a bunch of other houses, and you can only get to it via a steep path, which narrows to maybe 80cm in places. No place for towing caravans.

There’s a car park down the hill — but the annual rent for a parking space is around £100, and, erm, the caravan is covered in chintzy yellow wallpaper. Given past experiences, the amount of grumbles-cum-complaints-cum-lawsuits we would have to endure in the first week make this completely unfeasible.

So, perhaps we could fall back on some kind friends to help us out.

Whichever way you carve this, we’re asking for someone to semi-permanently set aside 10 sq m of real-estate for a garish and quickly mildewing caravan that (history indicates) we’ll quickly forget all about. What we need here is some landed, generous friends who we don’t mind falling out with.

Which brings me to: family.

When Jols excitedly rang her dad to tell him the wonderful news, he said, ‘Oh, love, that’s great news! You’re not putting it on my driveway’.

I toyed with the idea of loading it with my childhood detritus and parking it across the road from my mum’s house, or maybe asking my dad to host it in the vast tracts of Ireland that currently surround him, but manners preclude.

So the answer to this question is still running wild. We’ll catch it in the end. Or it’ll catch us in the end.

Meanwhile, there are some other questions. For example, How make fit caravan on brum brum?

We’re going to have to get a towbar, and then — what — brakelights and all that? And a numberplate? Well, I’ve booked my poor car in to get a towbar fitted this coming Monday. The man at Copthorne Services was very understanding.

‘Do you want a single or a twin supply?’
‘Urrr…’
‘A single’s for if you want the battery charging and the fridge running while you’re driving.’
(Has it got a battery? Or a fridge?)
‘Urrr…’
‘Do you want a bag on your head?’
‘Urrr…’
‘We’ll see you on Monday’ [click]

Jols received an answer to another question we hadn’t yet asked: an insurance man phoned up and told her we’ve a year’s free insurance on the caravan. Who knew you had to get these things insured? Makes sense, I suppose. However, his friendly, uncomprehensive investigations turned up a few truths.

He: ‘So, where will the caravan be kept?’
She: ‘Urrr…’
He: ‘Ahh.’

The good thing about his phonecall is that he wants to borrow the Princess off us for a few days for the upcoming Camping & Caravanning Show at the NEC in Birmingham.

It’s like: sure thing! Give us a chance to find out what on earth we’re supposed to do with it…

Laters

jx

You were wondering about the song that won the caravan competition.

The history is this. Back in June 2008 I was reworking a novel; it was a very intense period. You know better than most that, faced with an intense period of work, I will apply myself doggedly to doing absolutely anything else.

After spending a leisurely Saturday morning with Jols seeking out all the theme tunes to kids’ TV shows from the 1970s and 80s on YouTube, I set about creating an electro pop opera in Garageband. I’d been listening to how Tim De Laughter of the Polyphonic Spree put his operatic pop together, and so I used that as a fulcrum to create The Adventures of Snoffler and the Wobbledog: a popera lasting about six minutes.

Jols locked this piece of information away in her little stove of ideas.

When White Stuff launched a competition to win a caravan by writing a limerick (‘or a rap or something’), Jols leapt on the opportunity. She spent the next several weeks reminding me that we ‘needed’ to get right on down to rewriting the lyrics of ’Are You The Wobbledog’ – a Tribe Called Quest-tinged rap from my popera.

I kept forgetting, for some reason.

So, cutting to the chase, we spent two sessions of several hours each writing new lyrics. Unlike myself, Jols is a stickler for standards – she really is excellent at this. I, faced with an intense period of work, will apply myself doggedly to doing absolutely anything else.

It was at this stage that I got my novel rewrites done.

So anyway, I sped the existing music up; cut it down to around a minute or so; and we rewrote and rewrote and rewrote the lyrics until Jols deemed every word a winner. I can’t remember who wrote what, but ‘ladythrone’ and ’sassy little chassis’ are definite Jollisms, whereas ‘big end’ and ‘vehicular’ and general rhythmic choices tended to be mine.

Then I spent an hour or so recording the vocals, with old George Martin burying her head in a pillow for every take to stop herself giggling at my mockney accent.

Take after take after take was required to make the ‘car’ character ’sound grateful enough’ at the end of the song. But we got there in the end, and popped an email off to White Stuff.

The rest, as they say, is a mystery.

your pal

jx

PS: I’ve also just made a video for the song. This wasn’t used to try and twist White Stuff’s arm, but if I’d known I could have submitted this, I would have done! Click here.

So have you got any idea what I’m going to do with this caravan?

I’ve had lots of suggestions from people.

Jonathan thought I should turn it into a mobile recording studio. I thought this was a great idea. Kris suggested a writing retreat. Even better. But both of these ideas mean I would have to leave the house and drive to the caravan to do it. It’s just not going to happen.

Dickon, ever the editor, thought I should try to get some capital out of it by doing something PR-able, or asking the high-circulation caravanning magazines if they wanted to feature it in any way. Then he suggested I try selling it to BBC’s Top Gear, as an excellent candidate for destruction. “You’d get some money for it, and White Stuff would get another round of publicity, so they’d be happy.”

Jols would never go for that.

Jon suggested I drive it slowly through London. It would be sure to get pilfered, piece by piece. It’d be gone by the time I got to the M1.

The one thing Jols and I have concluded between us is that we need to have a party. Matt suggested taking it to some caravan park and inviting loads of people over to camp.

Sounds like a plan.

You up for it?

jx

So: you were asking what I know about the caravan. Well, here’s a description lifted from some promo material, to whet your appetite:

Called ‘Princess Nova’ the caravan was extensively renovated before being decorated with vintage wallpaper and yellow paint for the panelling. A mini bar has been added alongside upgraded cooking facilities and a double bed.

White Stuff toured the caravan throughout the summer, starting at Henley Regatta, and taking in Cornbury Festival, Chagstock, the Limetree Festival and the Edinburgh Fringe before a grand finish at the Isle of Wight’s Bestival.

A well travelled princess indeed – I’m growing intimidated…

j

I have just won a caravan.

Not just any caravan, but Jols and my ‘winning’ song has bagged a Princess Nova that has been pimped, with retro wallpaper on the outside, and a mini-bar and a chemical toilet.

I know what you’re thinking: ‘But you hate caravans’.

Mm.

So what this leaves is a series of questions to which I don’t know the answer. I’m now going to try to answer those questions, for my own sake.

1) Where are you going to put it? You haven’t even got a driveway or a guaranteed parking space. Yeah… I suppose if Jols and I really thought about this, we wouldn’t have entered the competition. Perhaps it’s best we didn’t, eh?

2) Why did you enter the competition? The whole point of entering the competition was to create something really good that was going to make the people at White Stuff laugh. So literally: for a laugh. But we did want to win (without ever really entertaining the idea that we actually would).

3) Won’t the wallpaper come off in the rain? I have absolutely no idea if they’ve accounted for this at all. We’ll find out when we see it…

4) Are you going to keep the caravan? Now, I thought Jols and I had agreed between ourselves that if we won it we’d sell it. But winning seemed so unlikely we didn’t really have to firm that agreement up. When we did win, it became apparent we had agreed no such thing.

Believe it or not, I do actually enjoy (read: have grown accustomed to) being plunged into such things. Like, say, finding out I’m suddenly and unexpectedly a cat owner. That was a great opportunity to tackle my chronic cat allergy. This is merely the opportunity to figure out what it is that makes caravan lovers… well… love caravans.

After all, what else am I going to do with my time? Watch DVD box-sets? Become a high-class alcoholic?

On 29 September we’re due to go to Worcester to pick up the caravan. We’re going to meet the White Stuff people who organised the competition, who seem very nice, and very fond of the Princess, and we’re going to be photographed.

I know what you’re thinking.

‘But you hate going to places you’ve never been to, meeting people you’ve never met and, more than anything, having your photograph taken in an official capacity.’

Mm.

It’s an existential quandary, all right. Better meet it head-on or I might disappear all together. The only constructive thing I can think to do is grow a beard. For the photoshoot, like.

Watch this space.

jx

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You, I know, will not get excited about the following: I went to Leeds last night to see The Specials on their 30th Anniversary Tour.

I think we think the same on reunions. Like: what’s the point? You’ll remember my letter about The Stone Roses from a while back.

Well, my sister got tickets and whomever she was going with dropped out. So I thought, well, why not? I didn’t get to see them back in 1978-81.

You will, of course, point to the obvious reason ‘why not’: keyboardist Jerry Dammers is not a part of the reunion line-up, and acrimoniously so.

An early review of this tour concluded that no one really minded who had been playing keyboards. This is clearly and entirely missing the point: here is a case where it really does matter. Jerry Dammers was the founder of the band, it was his sound, he wrote most of the songs, he created the record label, he provided the band’s iconic look – whether because of his signature dentistry or because he created all of the iconic black and white chequered artwork. Certainly, and most importantly, his political outlook provided the foundations for the music.

The Specials were a deeply important band – more political and vital than scene-mates Madness (though less accomplished and adaptable). They lashed together a punk singer, a rasta-ish MC-type, a reggae guitarist, a roackabilly guitarist, a lounge keyboardist, and more besides. Alluringly, they were here and then they were gone, a sparkling, spitting match that flared up in the oxygen of the time, lit the cultural wick and then burned out, leaving an enduring flame behind to light up the ensuing years.

So probably the thing to wonder about is this: why would they reunite? Aside from conjuring teary-eyed nostalgia from a lot of overweight skinheads, what could they actually generate afresh on the night? Well.

What they created for me was the first crowd I think I have ever been in where the mix of black and white faces was significant. No ethnic group owns The Specials. The whole crowd enjoys the same music for the same reason, and that is that The Specials weren’t just white kids performing black music, like so many R&B or rap artists. They were black and white kids performing a unified music. No one dominated or imitated anyone, it was a strength in unity: a new sound (1978).

The Two-Tone name and design is no mistake: it’s not grey, “it’s black and white (don’t try to hide it)”, to quote Madness’s own pre-lucrative-phoenix-from-the-ashes swansong.

So that was new to me: a realisation that something so positive and realistic could have existed at such a time of flux in the UK.

The Leeds gig I went to made headlines because fans started throwing coins at lead singer Terry Hall, after he crowed about Manchester United’s European Champions’ League final spot. This was the cause of another realisation to me. Here was a man, faced with thousands of people, and he was prepared to face them down. “One more coin,” he said, “and I’m leaving this stage – I’m not joking” – instantly followed by “and I’ll be right behind him” from Lynval Golding. Another show of strength and unity in front of a 21st century crowd more used to abusing the star turn. It felt good to hear this – and it worked.

Of course, these things are not quite new creations. Well, they are new to the kids who didn’t know the Specials the first time around — the Leeds teenagers who were dressed up in the kind of immaculate two-tone retro clobber that never existed at the time. To the rest of us they are reminders. Reminders of the grey, dilute message we have grown accustomed to, and reminders of the punch packed by someone on stage with a microphone, an attitude and something worth saying.

It would have been all the more powerful if the unity of The Specials had been total, and they’d been able to practise what they preach. But, hey, you don’t know what goes on behind closed doors, do you? Who knows what intraband politics have gusted through the last 30 years?

The reunion conundrum is: these people shaped a generation, and their creativity was a real force for good. Am I prepared to permit them to earn a pension off the back of that?

Actually, yes.

j

Let me tell you where education gets you.

This morning I set off from home in my car; it was ten to six, and I was just after a little something easy on the ears. Scrolling through my tracks, I landed on an album I haven’t listened to for many years: ‘Mad Not Mad’ by Madness. It’s not, if I recall, a great album. Bit of a dying ember. Good cover (an early Anton Corbijn effort, no less), aimless music. But all that’s not a reason to shun an album; the intervening years may have been kind to it, or my opinions may have softened.

I put it on.

Opening track ‘Burning the Boats’ kicked in. It sounded distantly familiar – memories wafting through from Christmas 1986, when I first put the needle on my new vinyl copy – with a blandish chord progression struck through with a set of wacky saxophone/synthesizer jabs.

Then Suggs’s first lyric came in.

“The government… have announced…”

And that’s it. Songwrong. Three words in.

A songwrong is a phenomenon that occurs in a song that initially sounds good, so your mind is open to the possibility of liking it, but which then wrongs it, snuffing the possibility out, leaving only the charred and smoking remains of your enthusiasm.

The lyric should be, I need hardly tell you, “The government has announced”. Has, HAS announced.

Let the record show that, in deference to my 11-year old self, I continued to listen to the album. It’s still not great, but it does have its moments: ‘Tears You Can’t Hide’ is quite lovely, ‘Yesterday’s Men’ is a fitting swansong of sorts, ‘Uncle Sam’ is maybe Madness-by-numbers, but if it’s Madness playing it, then, well, who’s complaining? Not me. Not even me.

But it got me on to the concept of songwrongs.

The songwrong that works hardest for its money, coming in as the last significant sound, thereby undermining the entire song that precedes it occurs at the end of ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ by Joni Mitchell. Ms Mitchell’s final vocal gymnastics are followed by the most unconvincing fake laugh ever to be committed to acetate. A thoroughbred classic, taken round the back of the stables and shot by a moment of cod-spontaneous studio indulgence.

Madness would be hard to beat for the quickest songwrong – three words in is pretty snappy. The only earlier one I can think of doesn’t really count, because it doesn’t snuff the song totally, but merely imperils the flame before the song takes hold. It is, of course, Morrissey’s much sniggered-over ‘Punctured bicycle’ opening gambit in The Smiths’ breakthrough ‘This Charming Man’. You could say this was, as far as the wider public is concerned, effectively two words into a career, which makes it more resonant. “Have you heard his mispronunciation of ‘plagiarise’ in ‘Cemetry Gates’, not to mention the moronic mis-spelling of ‘cemetery’… Ill-educated buffoon!”

However, as I negotiated the traffic on the M6, filleting The Smiths’ entire back-catalogue for songwrongs, it was Morrissey who had the last laugh. After all, I cannot name another lyricist who might contemplate starting a song – starting an album – with the word ‘belligerent’, as in “Belligerent ghouls run Manchester schools, spineless swines, cemented minds”.

This, then, is education’s end. Belligerent ghouls, spineless swine (to use the correct plural of swine), cemented minds, wronging some of the century’s finest work for a ha’peth of grammatical cloth. This is the kind of rule-straightening that kills artistic spontaneity. [Please note, I used this machine's spell-checker to spell 'spontaneity' right – and again just then.]

I drew into the car park at work to the sound of Morrissey bouncily singing “exetera, exetera”. I got out of my car and approached the building. I was preceded by a woman who has sat at the desk opposite mine for six years. I actually don’t know her name. She didn’t hold the door open for me.

Move along now. There’s nothing to read here.

j

Here’s a thing:

What do the founding members of The Stone Roses have to do to shoot down speculation of a reunion?

I was struck by John Squire’s medium-hopping attempt to quell the latest rash of stories. The man who has for years tried to distance himself from his musical past and reinvent himself as an artist-not-musician finally faced the question head-on by taking a piece of his art, and scrawling on it a statement apparently about the future (or the lack of it) of the Roses.

I was impressed by the imaginative way that this targeted the central problem. The public (prompted by the press), or the press (patronised by the public) already has its story: the resurrection of The Stone Roses. It’s a done deal. It just hasn’t happened yet. And anything John Squire says is viewed through the prism of “the reunion”. It’s “John Squire’s latest word on the reunion”.

The rub: he hasn’t done himself any favours with the wording of his response. ”I have no desire whatsoever,” he wrote, “to desecrate the grave of seminal Manchester pop group The Stone Roses.”

Now, I genuinely hope and believe that he means: “I am never, ever going to take part in a reunion of The Stone Roses”.

But let me interpret what Squire has said: “I would willingly reform The Stone Roses, and bring them back better than ever, and enhance their legacy further”. Or: “don’t worry, I won’t desecrate the grave”. Or: “I don’t want to do this, but that doesn’t mean I won’t”.

Whether it’s a pernickety point or not, it just doesn’t dampen any suspicions that he might be leaving the way open for some future lucrative rift-healing. The speculation won’t stop coming round.

And it leads me to wonder what — if he really wanted to cease the whispers forever ‘n’ ever — John Squire would have to do. Words won’t do the trick. Too many artists — musicians in particular — have gone back on their ‘never again’ for it ever to be an effective response. The Specials, Pixies, Cream, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, just in the last couple of years.

So what else would Squire have to do? Burn his guitars? He could always get more guitars, at the expense of some starry-eyed record company.

No no. The only way I can think of him doing it is to take a meat cleaver to his right hand: “say goodbye to the opposable thumb that clutches the plectrum that plays the opening notes of ‘I Wanna Be Adored’” [/slice/].

It’d be very Van Gogh.

I am not, I feel it polite to clarify, suggesting that John Squire should actually do this. But it is the only gesture I can think of that would convince me that he is fully in control of the non-resurrection of The Stone Roses. It would be a commitment to say, what’s done is done, and I will never have a change of heart. Or if I have a change of heart, I’m prepared to not be able to act on it.

Only now of course do I remember the one-armed drummer from Def Leppard, and realise that even a thumbectomy wouldn’t guarantee a result.

Ah well, back to the drawing board. Maybe they should reform. Maybe that’s the only thing that would quell the desire for a reformation.

Social networking has become like, with apologies to Bill Watterson, Calvinball. Players invent their own rules. And, when someone comes along and starts imposing rules to ‘improve’ the game, players simply relocate and create a totally different game, and one that probably doesn’t even involve a ball.

This was all brought home to me with the news today that ITV is in financial trouble, and came hand-in-hand with the curiously unsettling feeling of my having successfully predicted something. I don’t have by any means an impressive track record as a futurologist.

A couple of years back, ITV bought the Friends Reunited social networking site. My instant first thought, and doubtless countless other people’s instant first thought, was: “Why?”

What a dim-witted acquisition. It really seemed like the network had missed the boat. Several boats.

Friends Reunited was exciting nearly a decade ago, but it had a once-only function: everyone quickly got in touch with anyone they want to be in touch with, and then ITV bought it. Even writing it here, it seems redundant to discuss: it’s so obviously wrong.

Compare too News International: no sooner had Rupert Murdoch snapped up MySpace than the public appetite evaporated. These days it seems so clunky and inconvenient.

But why did it seem so obvious that Friends Reunited was the wrong thing for ITV to invest in? Well, it seems to me that people have a fundamental desire not be sold things. Perhaps more accurately, they don’t want to feel like they’re being sold things. It’s self-respect, isn’t it?

And we’ve seen what’s happened with that other News International-related corporation BSkyB. Someone’s come along, half-inched the football, pimped it, and sold it back to us. Now it’s a weird-looking surgically enhanced bimbo swaying around and behaving ever more erratically in an effort to feed its money addiction. Meanwhile its vital organs are rotting away.

It comforts me to imagine that the latest generation of media consumers has got wise to this cynical pimping, and has rejected it.

Twitter is the more convenient Facebook is the more convenient MySpace is the more convenient Friends Reunited.

It’s Calvinball: the general public is relocating to something else, somewhere else, anywhere well away from the corporations. And, until the corporations come up with a new formula, the public is in the lead, Q points to 12.

j

I am signed up to Amazon Vine. Amazon customers belonging to this initiative are given the opportunity to select two products per month to review. As I write, the programme is ‘invitation only’. I think I was invited because I wrote a clutch of reviews of Alfred Hitchcock movies several years ago, and I had clocked up enough reviews to gain an invitation.

There are plusses and minuses. You get to keep the review products for free – and that’s a big plus, especially if you’re on the ball enough to bag some pricey loot. A big plus too for the Cancer Research shop at the top of Cartway, if the loot isn’t the kind of thing I’d like to own long-term.

Minus: I wouldn’t know how to construct a good review if I could craft a witty end to this sentence.

Genuinely worthwhile reviewing is a formidable skill, and one I don’t naturally possess. It goes without saying that hardly any reviews on the Amazon site achieve anything like my definition of success, but most particularly not those by people who have been invited to review. Democratic reviewing means a deluge of ill-informed bile and unchecked opinion. I’ve read in numerous places the opinions of web-savvy writers and artists who say they’ve had to develop a hugely thick skin to the acid bile of Internet opinion.

Now, as a reviewer, I’m not a ‘flamer’. I try to keep it balanced. (I’m embarrassed by the sheer number of three-star reviews I give out.) Paul Morley once said that the worst thing to happen at the now-ailing NME was the introduction of star ratings. Reviewing is so much more subtle than that.

Stars are fine for those snappy first reactions: “I didn’t much like this; not as poppy as their first album”, and for technical specs: “The transfer to high-definition is flawless…”, but be honest, who has this amount of snap or the technical gumption to comment?

I don’t.

So every review I write becomes a battle with myself to understand quite why I’m reviewing what I’m reviewing. Those Hitchcock reviews were from a perspective of how successful I felt the movie was, in terms of its storytelling and construction. ‘0 out of 7 people found my review helpful.’

“Listen mate,” came one user’s review of my review, “we don’t care what you think about the film, what’re the extras like? What’s the transfer to DVD like? Is it in 7.1 surround sound or 5.1?”

You know, I have no idea. And nowhere near enough enthusiasm for such things to look at the back of the DVD case. I just concern myself with the creative aspect. I’m a 1D reviewer.

The inevitable outcome of such a democratic approach to reviewing is a total devaluation of critical points of view. I don’t take on board what Amazon reviews say. Do you? Unless I really have no idea which – I don’t know, ADSL router – to buy, because they’re all much of a muchness to me.

The latest review I am cobbling together in my mind is on Graham Swift’s Making An Elephant – a collection of short pieces and ephemera about “Writing from within”, so the subtitle says. I’d already decided what I was going to write after the first ten pages. What sort of a review is that? It’s based on what I think of Graham Swift, and what someone else wrote about him once in Private Eye.

I have come to my keyboard now, typing these words, to discard this initial decision about what I am going to write, and hopefully come up with a response worth reading.

Perhaps I should be suspicious about why Amazon Vine is feeding me through this particular mangle: what does Amazon want? A bunch of mouthy freeloaders who are desperate to crow for the reward of a free item (and who simultaneously are unclogging Amazon’s Ridgemont storage facility).

I’m spinning in ever-decreasing circles here, aren’t I? I’d better go an take it out on Graham Swift.

j

Look: it takes a lot, when you’re the average teenage boy.

First off, it takes a lot to ask a girl out. Weeks of summoning up the courage, days of shimmying past suspicious friends, hours of trying to find her on her own in just the right situation, just to pop a question that might reduce to ashes the entire foundation of your position in playground society.

This has been documented comprehensively over the generations, and I think it is well understood: it takes a lot.

But that is just the start of it. Where, when the question has been asked and consent finally secured, is ‘out’?

‘Out’ to me, as an adult, is somewhere comfortable to pass time with like-minded people (say, having a chat and a laugh); somewhere to indulge in whatever sensual stimulation is on offer (say, a hearty meal with fine wine).

‘Out’ to me, as a teenager, was somewhere comfortable to pass time with like-minded people (say, kicking a football around and lighting small fires); somewhere to indulge in whatever sensual stimulation was on offer (say, a quarter of rhubarb & custard and a can of cider).

So ‘going out’ — like, with a girl — is the first step on the process of making the subtle switch from one version of ‘out’ to another.

You must find a place you’re not familiar with, to which you can escort your intended (and she’s not familiar with it either, having spent her ‘out’ time round a friend’s house, leafing through magazines and carrying out leftfield cosmetic experiments), and you can get on with the business of, well, ‘going out’.

My mind flits briefly to the evening when I escorted – let’s call her Miss Smith (because that was her name) – across an October-sodden Abington Park in a shortcut to the pub. Her expensively embroidered trousers were quickly reduced to a mud-caked write-off below the knee. What can I say? It was a shortcut. What else were we going to do? Walk round, adding pointless minutes to our journey?

It certainly cut a few minutes off the length of our relationship.

But, shoving my experiences firmly to one side, I was witness to the horrors of someone else’s fledgling relationship last week, as my wife and I investigated our waki udon noodles with chopsticks at Birmingham’s Wagamama.

Wagamama is the kind of restaurant that obliges you to suspend any lingering Englishness, because, first off, it’s ‘pan-Asian’ food (i.e. Asian food you can cook in a pan), and secondly you are sat on a bench opposite your dining companion, and next to a complete stranger. There is no physical divide between you and the stranger whatsoever. I should imagine one of the best things about being a Wagamama waitster is observing the psychological divides people conjure up. I myself never glance outside the -10°/+10° angle of my companion.

Our enjoyment of the noodles and casual conversation were infiltrated about halfway through by a strong scent, as a roughly 18-year-old couple were installed beside us and handed their menus.

Olfactorily speaking, the girl was obviously some way short of being able to judge the precise period of depression of the button on her atomiser. The consequent nasal assault brought right back to me the sheer complexity of the journey those kids were on – the journey that had brought my wife and I to precisely where we were, chatting and having a laugh, enjoying the good food and wine.

Here’s the breakdown of experience of what he had to do after having secured her consent to go ‘out’:

• Think of somewhere to go (“Why don’t you take her out to a restaurant, love? She’ll be very impressed.”)
• Find out what a good restaurant is (McDonalds <—> The Savoy)
• Phone up
• Book a table (or become resigned to the risk of taking her there and finding it full)
• Get dressed up (how dressed up? trip to town? what shops are good shops? TK Maxx <—> Harvey Nichols)
• Find her house; call for her three minutes late
• Wait at the bus stop, while sustaining conversation
• Endure a bus ride, while sustaining conversation
• Find the restaurant, while sustaining conversation
• Know what to do when you get in the door (i.e. queue up to be seated)
• Sit right next to some 30/40 year old couple who obviously know what they’re doing
• Sustain conversation while deciding when to engage with the menu
• Interpret the menu
• Sustain conversation while the food is prepared
• Know how to use chopsticks, and not succumb to picking up the fork that has been placed discreetly to one side by the charitable waitster.

What complete and unutterable misery. How can anybody look appealing in the face of such complexity?

By hook or by crook, our lad negotiated all this. “He was trying really hard,” my wife noted, “but she wasn’t giving him anything to work with.”

The girl was, let it be recorded, eating her noodles with a spoon.

Well, there we are. I managed to attract the waitster’s attention to ask for the bill (oh – add that dark art to the above list), and as I thumbed in my PIN, I heard the lad beside me pitch one last-ditch attempt to stoke up the completely stalled conversation.

“What’s your favourite meat, then?”

I wonder how we survive as a species at all.

As ever,

j

We played an hour-long launch gig at Wellingborough’s excellent Castle venue, and happily sold out the hundred-ish tickets. Sara Spade kindly supported us, and I think she was really surprised by the über quiet audience – you could literally have heard a pin drop between her songs.

I can’t remember so much about the gig, except for the fact that we got a proper backstage dressing room, and Jon managed to, um, wow the crowd with some break-dancing, in a bid to sledgehammer the crowd into dancing.

We also indulged ourselves in a mid-set acoustic section, and I came forward to harmonise over a couple of Ian’s Sunface-era songs, and the band-schisming ‘Fix a Broken Heart’. This all went down particularly well.

True to form we totally screwed up ‘Mistake of Old Time’s Sake’. We have never played it well since recording it, but I suppose that’s okay.

Feel-good factor was in full flow, and many albums and t-shirts were sold on the night to loyal and supportive friends and family. The fact is, getting up there and doing it, whoever cares, is what it’s all been about.

Thank you to everyone who has supported us to date.

I’m not sure this means anything to anyone who wasn’t involved, but the following dynamics were at play: A former much-lauded indie artist was playing his first gig in a number of years,with a band of people he had never met before until that night. He was playing to that rare thing an audience of 100 attentive and enthusiastic listeners. He was happily reintroduced to former label mate the Jazz Butcher, Pat Fish, who also played a set. He was playing some of his most popular songs for the first time in 20 years; he had written and previously only played these songs at what must have been a heightened and life-defining time: the time of the first artistic output, of much promise and much subsequently denied potential. Add to that the fact that Jon was playing in a band with a musician whose work he had loved for many years, and whose songs had been era-defining. And this was Jon who, long before Chimpanman drifted together, had definitively abandoned the idea of being in a band, and had sold his bass guitar.

He sold it to me.

We played four or five songs with Jim Shepherd, and Jim also played a few songs solo. As mentioned, Pat Fish, the Jazz Butcher, played a set. Jim, having walked fairly reticently into the room at the start of the night, was overcome with enthusiasm for the songs we’d played, the efforts Chimpanman had put in to make it a good night, and the experience of the evening.

I am not expressly a fan, and not enthusiastic for playing live. But I would change nothing about having given Jon back his bass guitar, learned a few indie pop classics, and witnessed the whole thing from my place, behind the drums.

Many’s the time in a job like mine when you are called upon to skip across the shop floor in the wee small hours for some small reason, dressed perhaps in nothing more than a nightshirt.

At such times, lesser people than I have been startled by the way in which the pairs of eyes on the faces of the magazine covers follow you.

This, the old wives’ tales will have it, is spooky, but I’ve always been very scornful about people who are spooked by this.

The photographer (or, in earlier days, the painter) hasn’t rendered the side of the eyes, right? The side image of the eye does not exist. It has not been printed or painted. There’s simply no choice – the front-on view is all there is, right?

Right. So staring pairs of eyes are inescapable. It is not a reason for guilt.

Unless of course you’re looking at the top shelf. Then it’s not staring pairs of eyes that are inescapable… And it’s certainly a reason for guilt.

jx

Right. Fox hunting. At a recent Invocal performance, a gentleman stood up and recited a little poem about a fox hunt he had been on. “It’ll be controversial, this,” he warned.

So it turned out. I listened with some discomfort to his descriptions of a friend of his called Colin writhing and pumping and pulsing and sweating and heaving beneath him.

If this is what fox hunting’s all about, no wonder middle England is upping arms over it, I thought.

(Up in arms or upping arms – I prefer the latter. It makes more sense.)

To take my mind off whatever proclamations our poetic gentleman saw fit to make in a public place, I got to pondering the rights and wrongs of fox hunting. My workings are shown below:

Do I agree with fox hunting?
Do I agree with the unnecessary suffering of animals? [yes/no]
Are economic reasons good enough to curtail natural order? [yes/no]
If yes: Must fox numbers be kept down for economic reasons? [yes/no] (though I don’t have evidence)
If yes: Is hunting the method that causes least suffering in dispatching foxes? [yes/no] (I assume not)
If no: Is sport a good reason to use anything other than the ‘least suffering’ method? [yes/no]
Result: I don’t agree with fox hunting.

As you can see, there are several areas that need watertight evidence, but I’ve carried it through to my current conclusion. Anyone could disagree with the idea that suffering in animals is a bad thing, I suppose, or that the economy should overrule the natural order of things.

By the way, I needn’t have gone green at the gills at the poetry reading. Colin, it turns out, was our poet’s trusty steed. I wish he’d said that in the first place.

And I’m still not altogether sure that’s not worse…

jx

Does the writer write the song, or does the song write the writer? I dunno…

How many musical epiphanies is one person allowed? Thinking about it, I have had very few, because, in all honesty, my musical tastes are narrow. I’ve never really been out looking for new musical experiences. But those that I have experienced have probably dictated the kinds of songs I write. And these trajectories were sometimes set very early.

The Specials: It Doesn’t Make It All Right;
Adam Ant: Here Comes The Grump.
This ephiphany occurred at the age of 7. Maybe 8. There is something very alluring about artists that go against type. These two very upbeat artists produced album tracks that I always stopped dancing to, just to listen. They would give me shivers. It Doesn’t Make It All Right was off The Specials’ The Specials album. It was my first example of a melancholy song, without being sad. These are the most beautiful kinds of songs, and they inform my musical choice up to now, and probably forever. Here Comes The Grump has exactly the same feel about it, under the greasepaint and the yodelling, I felt, was the real man. Later years proved this instinct to be true. Neither of these are great songs, but they certainly shoved me out here.

The Stone Roses: I Am The Resurrection.
There’re probably a lot of people in the world who claim an epiphany to this song, but I’m not embarrassed. One summer our mum and dad wanted shot of us, so we were obliged to take tennis lessons with a Mr Blenco in Northampton. And I definitely put that tennis racket to good use, strumming in a workmanlike fashion though the whole of Pete’s Stone Roses album. I really enjoyed it. The guitar in Resurrection, the final track, dropped out at the apparent end of the song, leaving me plucking away at my racket with some really clean final notes, and I was getting them just right. Sweet. But then the song just started coming back and back, and I was having to use more and more strings. By the end of it I was using the whole racket, up and down and from side to side, just to get all those guitar sounds to come out of it. I was, what, 14? 15? To this day, 15 years later, I can still feel the same about that song. When it hits me right. Though I know now it’s the drums that make it so good.

PJ Harvey: Hair.
In his younger days, Pete would spend months worth of wages on stupid luxury items. One of these was a horrible jacket, long since lost. One of these was a stereo, which he still has. I think it cost that 18 year-old about 700 quid or something. But the bass on that stereo was the most brilliant thing I’d ever heard. And it first came home to me when I was playing (again, Pete’s) PJ Harvey album, Dry. After the brilliant Sheela-na-gig, which is all I’d really aimed to listen to, there came this strange song with a weird off-beat drum shuffle thing going on. Of course, it stopped for the chorus, so I had to wait for it to come back, but then suddenly, at the height of the chorus, these incredible right-in-the-belly doof doof things just boomed out of the speakers. I could not believe that something so amazing might happen. PJ Harvey’s drummer Rob Ellis never again did anything quite like this album, and I imagine a good many fans of PJ long for more of the same. But of course, artists move on, which is sometimes a melancholy thing.

Mark Kozelek: Find Me, Ruben Olivares.
I didn’t initially put this in, but, being the most recent epiphany (a mere five years ago), it was harder to spot. Orwell Music’s Duncan and I were around Dave Kirby’s house in Northampton, mixing a couple of Orwell Music tracks, and Dave happened to put this on. Acoustic music for me up until then was the realm of Richard Digence and Christopher Lillicrap, and I thought The Beatles’s Blackbird the exception to the rule. But when this came on, I thought it among the most perfect things I’d ever heard. It was like being told there was another Blackbird, just as good, and that there was depth in this direction, with the exact blend of gentle acoustics to grit and grime, and none of the folky awfulness about it. The album also contains some of the much-discussed Kozelek AC/DC acoustic covers, which to me are also very near to perfect. It’s unusual to hear lyrics-meant-loud played soft. To add to the wonder, I didn’t remember who the track was by, not having been a Red House Painters fan (or ever having heard of them). It was another three years before I accidentally strayed upon it again — and I feel very lucky I did, because you don’t stray upon Mark Kozelek all that often. And when I strayed on it again, it was exactly as good as I’d remembered it, which I think is the only time that’s ever happened to me.

And you know, I think that’s it for epiphanies. Four.

And these four inform the kinds of sweeping directions I choose when writing songs. Not to sound like them, but to cause the same effect. But then ask yourself: do you always write the kinds of songs you like to hear? That’s for another post, maybe.

What troubles me about this post is the number of songs that can’t be described as epiphanies for me, even though they are absolute perfection as songs. They sit on my conscience. To appease myself, I’ll list these for no reason, as they come to me, just in case anyone reads this who is looking for something: Stone Roses: Fool’s Gold, Shoot You Down, Waterfall, Something’s Burning; dEUS: Theme From Turnpike, Serpentine; PJ Harvey: Sheela-na-gig, Electric Light, Water; Nick Drake: Things Behind The Sun, Black Eyed Dog; Lush: Deluxe; Ride: Vapour Trail; The Beatles: Blackbird; The Soggy Bottom Boys: Man of Constant Sorrow; The Beach Boys: God Only Knows; Belle & Sebastian: If You’re Feeling Sinister, Rollercoaster; The Breeders: Cannonball; The Pixies: Here Comes Your Man, Gigantic, Cactus, Debaser, Where is my Mind; The Smiths: That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore, This Charming Man, Cemetry Gates; Simon & Garfunkel: Sounds of Silence, Mrs Robinson, So Long Frank Lloyd Wright; Pavement: Shady Lane.

I won’t go on. There are too many.

jx

After extensive research, Jols landed upon a stay in the Lake District, in a cottage beside a disused slate mine, near Coniston.

Now, one experience that is common to everyone as we grow independent in life is that of the ‘treacherous last mile’ that must be negotiated before being able to settle into any kind of pleasant weekend away. Any destination worth stopping at is by necessity tucked away off the beaten track, down a labyrinth of narrow lanes.

To be fair to the owner of the cottage (which is something I am very much disinclined to be), the literature did mutter something about ‘arriving in the daylight’ and ‘not having a low-slung sports car’, as the approach to the cottages was a little bit uneven. Fortunately, I didn’t have a low-slung sports car. I had a 1990 Volkswagen Polo. (Was it green? Was it blue? Nobody has ever given me a satisfactory answer. It was this colour.)

So it was that I found myself squinting through a rain-slashed windscreen at a narrow vista of dimly illumined shale tack as the car bounced and lurched up a steep incline at about 9pm.

‘Is this,’ I enquired of Jols, ‘definitely the right way to go?’

‘I don’t know. I can’t see the map.’

It was all academic, really, because there was no way we were going to be able to turn round; a steep bank rose up into the darkness to the right of the track, and to the left, there was just blackness.

I kept the revs up as much as I could, but any real speed meant the car would bounce alarmingly over potholes, and I didn’t want to break the suspension, especially not out here, and especially not in the pitch dark.

Of course, the loud thunk and dragging sound that followed one particularly hefty bounce was a worry. I stopped the car on the steep incline and squeezed out of the driver’s door to see what had happened. From my position, semi-trapped against the steep bank, I could hear a torrent of surging water coming from the blackness beyond. I didn’t have a light, so I used the dim glow of my mobile phone’s face to try to look under the car. Thankfully the light didn’t need a mobile phone signal to work, as there were no signal bars to be coaxed, however wildly I wielded my handset.

The exhaust was lying on the ground at the back, but was still attached at the front, so my suspicions were aroused that there may have been something wrong with the exhaust. Why — I have had three separate occasions to wonder — is your average car exhaust held on essentially by two or three rubber bands? No matter.

After a couple of abortive attempts to string the thing up (without any string), the solution Jols and I arrived at was to attach my jump leads to the exhaust, and for Jols to hold it clear of the ground as I executed the necessary series of tricky hill starts on loose shale.

The upshot of all this was that Jols ended up running along behind the car in the rain and laughing and inhaling exhaust fumes as I kept up enough speed to advance along the potholed track. Several times the exhaust fell away and clunked to the ground, and several times I stopped the car for Jols to retie it before we could start again.

Some people have protested the ungentlmanliness of this solution. I would point to the quality of Jols’s shale-based hill starts at the time, and at how dead I would have been given a role reversal (or, more literally, a roll reversal).

Anyway: in this fashion we limped onwards to our holiday cottage.

Positives: we were on the right road. And I am a member of the AA.

I abandoned the car more or less in the right place, and we retrieved our bags of clothes and boots and milk and teabags and Pringles — all the sundry things you need for a relaxing weekend — and found the front door.

It was, let’s just pause to establish, quite lovely. It had a stone floor, and a fireplace for a real fire. Jols hung up our wet-through coats on the coat hooks in the kitchen — admittedly, hers was rather more wet-through than mine — and we flopped on to the sofa in the front room. After a naive and completely unsuccessful attempt to get the fire going with a copy of Heat magazine, we retired to bed. Enough is enough.

Evening passed and morning came, and a very lovely morning it was too. Looking out of the bedroom window was enough to banish the ghosts of the previous evening. The lovely blue sky and crisp sunlight revealed the expansive mountainous scenery which had previously been shrouded in the dark, and it all even diminished the task of having to get the AA out to this place-with-no-postcode-and-no-phone signal.

And there was the scent, of course. It was tangible. There is something about the scent of an old cottage in winter, the wooden beams, the stonework, the tang of hot soot from freshly burnt coal. Drawing deep of this evocative fragrance I descended the stairs in my pyjamas and went to put the kettle on for a morning cuppa.

It’s amazing, I registered, how much mess — and smell — you can make with a copy of Heat magazine and some matches, without actually creating a sustainable conflagration.

I needn’t have been amazed.

Having filled the kettle with swirling soft Lake District water, I gazed around the kitchen to find where we’d dumped the milk and teabags. I really hoped we’d not left the milk in the shopping bags by the storage heater — that would have been fairly typical, and the ‘country cottage’ smell was suspiciously strong from over there. Thankfully I didn’t find any milk when I hunted in the shopping bags.

I did find that both of our coats had dried remarkably well — the coat hooks were, after all, situated above the storage heater. So well had they dried, in fact, that a large smouldering hole was working its way through the back of my coat, and Jols’s was now a good few inches shorter. It was from the smouldering of 80 per cent wool and 20 per cent polyamide that our ‘country cottage’ scent was sourced.

How best to describe the dimensions and data relating to the hole in my coat? Well, the diameter was just a little bit bigger than the diameter of my backside, and, ironically, the positioning of the hole on my coat was exactly where the coat would normally have been covering my backside.

As an extra added bonus, the heat had been enough to rise through the coat and char my wallet, fusing together all of my bank cards, library card, national insurance card and sundry membership cards into one colourful but useless lump of brittle plastic. You could make out my AA card as a little sliver of characteristically bright and reassuring yellow somewhere in the middle.

Positive: we weren’t dead from noxious fumes.

The upshot of our exploits thus far meant that we would have to walk, without coats, back along the labyrinthine roads, down to the village to find a payphone and the number of the AA in order to phone them to convince them in the absence of my card that I was a member, and that they should come to an off-road destination with no postcode, and roads wide enough only for a hatchback vehicle. We would also, being by now quite grown up and assertive, visit the owner of the holiday cottage and show him our coats, at which point he would surely see the error of situating a coathook above a storage heater, and gladly part with some funds by way of apology and compensation.

It would be better of course to get this out of the way before we could start our holiday. By the time we had dressed and gathered ourselves, the blue skies had turned as grey as the slate mountainsides, and the rain had started to fall. Winter getaways: you’ve got to accept it. Only, there was the whole ‘coats’ situation. There was really only one decision. We would wear what was left of them down to the village. That would keep the rain off our shoulders at least.

So, having laughed all the way up the shale track as she bore the exhaust pipe on the way to the cottage, Jols now got her revenge by laughing all the way back as my coat gave a charred frame to my revolving buttocks as I stumped back down the shale track. She laughed all the more heartily as I insisted she get close behind me whenever a car approached us. Note that there were several of these, and none of them stopped to offer us a lift.

We got to the village, and I found a phonebox and phoned the AA.

‘What’s your membership number?’

‘I don’t know’

‘It’s the long number across the middle of your card.’

‘Yeah… um…’

We landed on some alternative details, and that seemed to suffice.

‘And where is the car?’

‘It’s in a slate mine.’

‘Right. What’s the name of the road?’

‘Um, it’s a shale track.’

‘Do you have a postcode?’

‘No…’

I finally managed to give them the intersection of two roads where I would meet their mechanic. He would be with us in an hour or so.

While we waited, we popped over to see the owner of the cottage. An initially bright welcome quickly grew frosty (“Well, I can’t do anything about your coats, what do you want me to do?”), and then downright hostile (“Well, sue me then. See how far you get.”) I’ll leave you to make up your own mind whether putting a coat hook over a storage heater and then blaming us for hanging our coats on it is a reasonable conclusion. We didn’t sue him.

The AA man was much more pleasant, and he — like most of the many AA mechanics I have encountered — was very helpful, and found the whole situation very funny. He vanned us back to our car, skilfully negotiating the tight squeezes, and then spent a good half an hour fixing the exhaust back to the underside of the car with wire. He warned me to get it fixed properly (i.e. with rubber bands) at my earliest opportunity — a warning I entirely ignored, leading the exhaust to fall off in a car park in Stevenage some three months later. Deserved.

So now we were able to enjoy our holiday, taking very little care of any of the host’s furniture or belongings, and having a lovely big raging (intentional) fire, which we started with his Christmas tree. We headed off to Preston on the Monday morning, and settled in the much more comfortable surroundings of Jols’s mum and dad’s house, and watched the telly.

The one news story that struck us that Christmas time was of a discovery ‘off the beaten track’, near a disused slate mine near Coniston. The TV news reporter stood in front of the very same cottage situated just by the edge of that very same mine.

Positives: Our experience on this holiday could, let’s conclude, have been worse.

“It was our turn,” pondered guitarist Adam Devlin over the recent lukewarm reception. “We can’t complain because we know that fifty percent of the coverage of ‘Slight Return’ was due to us being around at the tail-end of Britpop. At that stage we could have released something duff and it would have been praised.”

Whatever the case, the Bluetones have never slumped to the duff, and for all the criticism, one would not compare their second album to The Stone Roses. So with the addition of a keyboardist as a permanent band member, are we to see a whole new side to the band for the third album? Record Mart & Buyer got together with singer Mark Morriss and sifted through a few of those stylistic gurus.

The Stone Roses

The Roses started life more or less as an antidote to the Smiths. Otis Redding was Ian Brown’s touchstone in an effort to make music that people could move to. Guitarist John Squire brought in the clean sound of The Byrds and coupled it with a dirty wah-wah, tapping into the central rhythm of drummer Reni. This rhythmic sound provides the root to a lot of pop/rock music to this day, and The Bluetones are fine exponents of that essential dynamic.

The Bluetones’ first release on their own Superior Quality label was a double-sided seven-inch featuring ‘Slight Return’ and ‘The Fountainhead’. ‘Slight Return’ employed the big sounding jangle of the 60s, plus a lively organic-sounding rhythm section, echoing the Roses’ efforts on ‘Mersey Paradise’ and ‘Elephant Stone’. The result of this was a hit single and a tag tied to the band’s toe saying that they sounded like the Roses.

A re-release down the line, ‘Slight Return’ is the track that the neutral fan can invariably cite and, as is the case with so many bands, it provides the benchmark for all subsequent releases. Perhaps a strengthening reference in the public psyche was James’s 1989 offering ‘Come Home’, with its parallel chorus and Mark Morriss’s vocal similarity to Tim Booth.

Having had to dodge such comparisons for the last four years, Mark indulges in no specifics. “I just love guitars, I think they’re the most effective emotional tool. I love the sound of guitars played in a certain way. We all loved the Stone Roses. At first everyone was comparing us to them, but we were confident that, given enough reference points, people would know where we were really coming from. If you know eight tracks by a band, you don’t really know them. But if you know twenty tracks, that’s a more accurate depiction of where they’re coming from.”

So what about the once-burning question: was the Roses’ ‘Second Coming’ a let down for you?

“No, no. I think there are some moments of absolute genius on it. It probably could have been trimmed a bit…” — and into Morriss’s voice creeps the wry confidence of an artist on the rise over his forbears — “…A couple of the long tracks off the second side could have gone. ‘Tears’ I could live without, and ‘Good Times’. That would have made a great album…”

Fellow Contemporaries.

In a genetically modified debate of 1995, the record buying public was asked if they preferred Oasis or Blur. The Bluetones themselves went organic and considered Supergrass to outrank both.

“I’m a big fan of Supergrass,” says Mark. “They have a chemistry about them and they’re really lucky. They can play anything and make it sound funky. They could play the ‘Millennium Prayer’ and we’d all rush out and buy it. I think we have the same chemistry as that, you know? In a band it’s either the chemistry of everyone pulling together or the noise of everyone pulling apart that can make great music.”

In a way Supergrass and the Bluetones have a good deal in common. Their first albums were struck through with unshakeable pop, and were followed up with a much darker sound for their second.

“Yeah, I think their second album’s fantastic. We supported Supergrass early on, and it was a really good place to be. Very fertile. Two of the best bands around on the same bill, and the tickets were seven quid!”

The Britpop idea is almost universally looked back on as contemptible. No bands wanted to be lumped under that little umbrella: a lot of trumpet blowing about guitar music of a merely healthy quality. The danger is not being able to see the new little England that pushed through, with the bands interwoven through fair means or foul. Blur vs Oasis was entirely manufactured, whereas the Blur/Elastica/Suede dynamic had the common element of Justine Frischmann, creating an interesting stir. The Bluetones and Dodgy lived more or less together, honing their harmonies in the same garage in Hounslow.

“There was one gig especially. Supergrass, then us in the middle, and Ash, and by the end of that year we’d all had number one albums. It was a big turning point. Well, not at the time really, you just keep your head down and get on with it, but on reflection it was an important time.”

The Beatles

After a lull in the Electronic Eighties, the career of The Beatles is now about as prosperous as it ever has been. However bad or good you consider the money-spinning reunions or the Britpop rip-offs, there really is no getting away from it: The Beatles’ career is example enough to even the most confident (nay, arrogant) of guitar-based bands in the early 21st century. They are currently more potent than any other band, and their art is definitive in the small field of popular music. The Bluetones bow down, deep down, to them.

“We all love the Beatles,” says Mark. “I would have to say my favourites of their albums are ‘Revolver’, ‘The White Album’ and ‘Rubber Soul’. Those three have been the most influential to me.

“‘The White Album’ is like a perfect antidote to ‘Sergeant Pepper’. I’m not of the school that thinks a reduced, single ‘White Album’ would make it a better record. It just shows a really different side of the band that people didn’t realise existed before. They’re working at a different way of putting the tracks down, a different way of editing it together. They’re going against all the other stuff; it’s not intricate and well thought-out. It’s Jackson Pollock as compared to Leonardo da Vinci.

“‘Revolver’ I think was an innovative jump. It proved that pop tunes could be lasting works of art at the same time as being palatable. It has that really strong guitar with a lovely crisp and clean sound, and then there’s a new aggressive delivery from John Lennon.”

Like the Boo Radleys before them and Dodgy along side, the Bluetones consider this accessible pop sound to be all-important. “The Beatles made the template for pop music, and pop is very important to us. When I was at school I was buying the pure pop stuff, like Duran Duran and Frankie Goes To Hollywood. It’s like, a painter has to have the picture frame to stop working by. The frame we use is pop. It’s a discipline to work to, a challenge when you’re writing interesting new songs.”

Buffalo Springfield

The popular idea of US/Canadian hybrid Buffalo Springfield is as a supergroup in reverse. They consisted of Neil Young, Stephen Stills (later sandwiched by Crosby and Nash), Richey Furay, Bruce Palmer and Dewey Martin. They toured with The Byrds before signing to Atlantic and releasing their first album. This contained the ever present ‘For What It’s Worth’ single, which remains their best-known moment, although the band is more generally credited for having paved the way for country rock.

Mark hops to an explanation. “They were so creative for a brief period between 1966-69. They were the first band containing three main songwriters in Stills, Young and Foray. They made about two and a half albums of the most wonderful, beautiful, positive eclectic music. They’ve got to be absolutely my favourite band ever, and the biggest influence.”

There were turbulent times for Buffalo Springfield; Bruce Palmer was deported and Neil Young and Stephen Stills were constantly at each other’s throats, resulting in Young’s temporary resignation from the band. Does that reflect the average day in the Bluetones, who are by all accounts a band of three song-writing guitarists?

“We’ve got five guitarists actually. We can all play. But no, there’s no ego problem. The only time there might be a problem is if someone stops bringing material to the band. We’ve got very much an equal split with song writing and money. The last thing you want to have problems about is money. It’s the first thing you sort out: you make sure everyone gets the same. It’s a Marxist Utopia in the Bluetones.”

Talking Heads

Nobody really pays attention to the 80s when discussing guitar bands. It’s all 60s and Love and The Byrds and The Stones. A less vaunted influence on the Bluetones therefore is Talking Heads. True enough, the parallels are there. Their rhythm-based experiments built them into a success in the latter half of the 70s, and their collaboration with producer Brian Eno helped bring out a filmic element to their work and side-projects. Eno himself is a widescreen maestro, and enjoyed a fertile time with Derek Jarman towards the end of the British filmmaker’s life.

“When my brother was sixteen at school,” says Mark, “he and this mate of his really got into Talking Heads. So he brought the influence home, and we would sit in the bedroom listening to all these Talking Heads records. I was mesmerised with this persona that David Verne built up around himself. He was like a character in a Talking Heads movie.” Verne himself got into movie direction with 1986’s ‘True Stories’, for which Talking Heads recorded some songs.

“I think it’s Verne’s sort of humour and foolishness that I try to incorporate in our own stuff. I mean you’ve got to be light with what you do. It’s like Captain Beefheart as well, there’s a humour in there that I think is really important.”

The Smiths

Thankfully enough, the last decade has seen significant British bands celebrate the legacy of both the Smiths and the Stone Roses, rather than dividing the bands into rival camps. Whereas the latter concentrated on developing the right vibe, the former wielded a heady brew of melody and lyrical wit. Mixed together in the 1990s, those two ideologies created a high standard for bands to follow.

As a result The Smiths, like so many other much-loved bands, owe a percentage point to posterity. “It’s the legend,” says Mark. “The legend of The Smiths is what makes them so great now. But if music is good enough, it doesn’t date. It is a work of serious art, remaining as relevant today as it was when it was written. That’s what has happened to The Smiths.”

“The whole reason Adam picked up a guitar in the first place was because of Johnny Marr. It was the same with me, I was very driven by Johnny Marr, and Morrissey too when I thrust myself up into the limelight as the frontman.”

REM

One critic in The Guardian described The Bluetones’ songs as being about ‘aloof alienation’, and this struck Mark as a well-observed expression. There are no surprises then when he is asked about overseas music.

“REM are a big influence. I’m not what you’d call a massive fan of ‘Up’, although I thought ‘New Adventures in Hi-Fi’ was a masterstroke. It was like a band that had found its muse again. They have been hugely successful in retaining their integrity through a lot of popularity, and I’d like to emulate that. I’d like us to retain integrity in the way they have. That’s one of the reasons we will never, ever, have any of our material on adverts or anything like that.”

Are there any other US influences you think the band has?

“Well, They Might Be Giants. They’re great. I was watching a video of their greatest hits a while back, and ‘Ana Ng’ came on and it sounded just like one of the songs off our new album. I spoke to my brother about it and he said, ‘Yeah, I know what you mean…’ I wish we were more like them. We’ve had meetings about what we can do to sound more like them.”

Really?

“No.”

Oh.

“But they’re not fucking Barenaked Ladies, are they?”

The Comedy B-side

There aren’t many bands who can justify the CD1-of-a-2CD-set swindle when it comes to selling singles. But the Bluetones have always been about good customer service. Superior Quality, to quote their label imprint. All the singles are in thick cases with nice booklets, and all the b-sides are new tracks.

“It’s got to look good,” explains Mark. “You put them in thick cases and they look nice. You give them all new tracks on the b-sides and people move them up from their Ordinary CD shelf to their Good CD shelf. And you can’t start putting live tracks on the b-sides. Why would anyone want to do that? And I don’t think we’ve ever done anything that would benefit from a remix. I don’t like the idea of handing over creative control to someone else. You’ve still got to pay them even if you don’t like it, so you might as well put it out. No, that stuff’s not our bag.”

The first offering from the ‘Science & Nature’ LP was ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’, released in February. For a glimpse at the Bluetones’ ‘bag’ check out the track ‘Armageddon (Outta Here)’. It features Vic Reeves cohort Matt Lucas and the Bluetones in a sketch outlining life in university Halls of Residence, and gently mocking the band for their Biggest Hit, ‘Slight Return’ (“Oh, I just thought it was called ‘You Don’t Have to Have the Solution You’ve Got to Understand the Problem’”). If you are reading this in a University Halls of Residence, it will sound exactly like the guys in the room next door (though not yourself, of course).

So anyway, how did it come about?

“Well, Matt’s a mate of mine. We’ve got this sort of mutual admiration. I initially had this idea for an instrumental, and I wanted to sample some bits of this dialogue he’d done for the Paramount Comedy Channel. So I phoned him up and asked him where I had to get permission for this and he said I could either go to Paramount, or we could record it again. Then he said that he’d quite like to write something new for it, and I liked that idea even better. I gave him the track and some ideas, goalposts to aim at really, and he wrote it and then performed it for us in the studio. We went around the place with a DAT tape recording all the sound effects and we recorded it Goon Show style, really. It was great, a real nice break from the drudgery of recording an album.”

Film

Films play a large role in the life of Mark Morriss. He claims to have nine hundred on video, so surely they have some kind of influence on the way he presents himself creatively?

“Well, I think Woody Allen films are inspirational to me for the way I express myself in songs. He will make the odd flippant remark that throws a curve ball to make you think differently. He gives you a skewed perspective on things and it reveals truths, and it’s nice to go away with these truths. It’s very comforting to think that perhaps you’re not alone in thinking in such a way.

“Throughout his whole career he has always approached his films as a young, fresh person. He’s never been old and doddery, and his films all have the same sort of Woody Allen pace. I love that, and I identify with that kind of pace and emotional tone.”

Second Bluetones album ‘Return to the Last Chance Saloon’ is steeped in Spaghetti Western imagery, with Scott Morriss’s artwork all John Ford landscapes and cacti and sombrero-hidden Mexicans.

“There was certainly a Western thing going on there,” explains Mark. “I was really into Westerns, and there was this general curiosity going on about Latino culture and the Tex-Mex thing. We immersed ourselves in the culture and the food and the music, listening to all these Ennio Morricone soundtracks and Tito & Tarantula, and drinking lots of tequila.”

So it was a conscious thing?

“Well, I was just into it, and I think if you’re in a band then these things bleed through and everybody starts to get a bit involved with it.”

The ‘4-Day Weekend’ single is lifted from ‘Last Chance Saloon’, but dispenses with the Western imagery in favour of stills from a manga video that was made for the song by a Japanese animation company. How did that come about?

“Oh, I was so flattered when that came back. We are quite popular in the Far East anyway, and this company had approached us with an interest to do a video for one of the songs, so we sent ‘4-Day Weekend’ to them and they just gave it their own interpretation. It cost us virtually nothing, because the company figured that they would do this video and it would get picked up by MTV which would be good publicity for them and for us. But in the end MTV wouldn’t play it. The official explanation was that it didn’t fit in with their line, but it was just some chicken-shit bloke sitting behind a desk who made a chicken-shit decision. You know a lot of people suffer from one man’s decision like that.”

THE NEW ALBUM

‘Science & Nature’ will be unleashed on the public on 15th May on (“our little Anderson Shelter”) the Superior Quality Recordings imprint of Mercury Records. The first album was really accessible, and the second was much darker. What are we to expect from the third?

“I have great ambition for this record,” says Mark. “I think it could really do well. We’ve gone out of our way really to make this one the most accessible yet, after the heavy sound of the last one.”

So that makes your last album the proverbial Dark Second Act, a sort of ‘Empire Strikes Back’ of the Bluetones’ career?

“Ha, yeah! That’s exactly right. I’ll definitely have to use that. It was because we were all touring and playing live all the time. Our second album is born out of touring. It’s much beefier with the heavy live sound coming through. That’s what we had metamorphosed into. When you’re in a band it’s like a constant metamorphosis. Albums are like Polaroids of the band at a particular time. I mean, we finished this album in October, and we’re a different band now.”

Rather more thought has been put into the impact of different instruments with the new album. Adam Devlin gave an insight into the new sound recently: “[Keyboardist Richard Payne] is a multi-instrumentalist, but he’s not a muso. There’s a lot of natural instruments, like a banjo and a mandolin in there.”

From the tracks that have sneaked out for a preview, a new less-is-more vibe seems to have struck the band through after the expansive sound of ‘Last Chance Saloon’. ‘Tiger Lily’ lends a Simon & Garfunkel edge, and displays a much more pared down sound, with the suggestion that Richard Payne’s keyboards have been planted right at the centre of the Bluetones’ sound. ‘Zorrro’ was aired on Radio 1’s Evening Session at the end of last year, and has become something of a live favourite.

There is still plenty of the complex song-structure, and a new space carved for the harmonies to gain extra subtlety and impact. With the demise of Dodgy and the Boo Radleys, the Bluetones have a new territory to explore in their own carefully foolish way.

With two major Beck releases on his CV and an ansaphone unable to cope with requests for his services, things are looking pretty good for Justin Meldal-Johnsen. The departure of most of the band upon completion of Beck’s ‘Midnite Vultures’ album means that Beck, Justin and keyboardist Roger Joseph Manning Jr make up the core of the Beck project.

Meldal-Johnsen has been working with Beck since 1996 when the ‘Odelay’ album went on tour. The record marks the point at which Beck completes his jump from straight(ish) folk to hip hop and funk. Here we strike on the reason why music’s latest bravura boy wanted to secure himself a bassist.

“That’s a good question. I think really with ‘Odelay’ Beck wanted to pass on the responsibility so he could concentrate on the other stuff. He was really looking for an instigator for the live performances, someone who would just take his idea and go with it. He needed someone who comfortable with all the styles he was using. It was much the same with me and Roger on keyboards. He wanted to leave it to us and for us really to carry it off.”

“I’m a real fan of the way he plays bass anyway. He absolutely goes for it and does all these really unnatural bends that appeal to me. I mean he’s doing stuff on bass that I haven’t heard since these really bad ’60s Italian soundtracks.”

With such a multitude of styles – and that’s even before the hyper-everything ‘Midnite Vultures’ hits the road – you’re going to need a pretty sharp collection of instruments.

Justin says, “I’ve got six basses that I take out on tour with me. My very favourite is this 1967 Fender Coronado. I play that a lot. It’s got this weird hollow body and has a nice 1960s soundtracky flavour. It’s good live.”

“Then I’ve got this Guild Starfire, which is my favourite to play when I’m recording. There’s a couple of others – a 1964 Jazz bass and a 1962 Precision. I use those a lot. For some of the more folky songs I’ve got a Schecter 8-string Hellcat. It’s very resilient. With a lot of eight-strings you have to put all your energy in just to get a sound, but this one’s almost totally opposite to that. There’s not much playing to it, it’s very easy.”

“Beck likes me to use the basses to the way he operates. I’ve got a Roland G77 and he makes me use it a lot. It’s this really hideous looking ’80s thing, you know, with an arm across the top. It’s like you have to be strapped right into it. I didn’t record with it, but Beck likes it partly because he’s got one, and another guy in the band’s got one, so at one point there’s three of us playing them at the same time. I think you can see the effect he’s after.”

It seems then that the band is required to get into Beck’s singular groove. On a recent Top of the Popsappearance you could have caught Justin decked out like Sid Vicious, throwing himself around like a madman while picking out the intricacies of the single ‘Sexxlaws’. What was that all about?

“You know, that shirt was the exact same shirt that Sid Vicious was weraing when the Sex Pistols swore live on air on that TV show? Yes, we have this enormous box there in the middle of the dressing room, full of these really awful awful fantastic clothes, and Beck dishes them out every night. It’s like ‘You can be the punk rocker tonight’. I love that – I mean the night before I was a school custodian in a jumpsuit. These characters are great and they never last more than a night or two.”

“I feel really privileged to be working with Beck because, you know, you’re really not sure what he’s going to say or do next. I really get a sense of that, and we’ve been working together for three years.”

So what about effects? Beck’s set is so varied you’d imagine there to be quite a few…

“Oh yeah, God. I could just reel off a list. I’ve got this custom-made pedal board an old associate of mine made years ago. It’s starts off with Electro-Harmonix Bassballs, and goes into a Bass Synth. I’ve got a Japanese-made Guyatone Phaser and a Guyatone Analogue Delay.”

“An Australian friend of mine gace me an effect called Prunes and Custard which delivers a sort of controlled fuzz weirdness.”

“I’ve also got this Boss OD1 Overdrive and an HM2 Heavy Metal and I step on both of those if I want some really explosive feedback. There’s a Boss Octover and a Sansamp GT2 for a nice warm bass distortion.”

So what about the new stuff. ‘Sexxlaws’ has this really intricate and funky bassline – it was pretty strange seeing ‘Sid Vicious’ playing black ’70s funk on Top of the Pops.

“We like to call it Boogaloo rather than funk. It’s inspired by the ’60s British TV style, you know where you have this really over-active bassline like some guy’s popped a couple of pills and just really gone for it. There is a black ’70s element, but it’s not quite laid back enough. Oh there’s nothing laid back about ‘Sexxlaws’.”

What about the other stuff on ‘Midnite Vultures’? Are there any stand-out moments for you?

“Well, there’s ‘Mixed Bizness’ which is I suppose similar to ‘Sexxlaws’ in style. ‘Pressure Zone’ exploits that sort of angular Brit artrock thing. It’s got lots of noise explosions all done on bass, where we overlaid quite a few tracks.”

“I think my favourite moment is on ‘Milk & Honey’. The middle section of that is like the deepest sex disco ever rendered. I think it’s my best-played thing on the album. I tend to spaz it on stage a bit, and being the studio was a good exercise in toning it down.”

So what else is going on apart from the Beck material? Are there any other irons in the fire?

“Roger and I are going to France shortly to work with Air. I toured their ‘Moon Safari’ album, so we’re looking forward to that. I’ve worked with Mark Eitzel, and I’m about to start some new stuff with him. He’s fantastic – that really is where I’m at musically. What else? I’ve worked with Sasha, who are big on trance, and I’ve done a remix of Jamiroquai’s ‘Black Capricorn Day’. Stuff on the Mel C record, Moby… Oh, there’s been quite a lot lately.”

The Charlatans sold 15,000 copies of their first single, ‘Indian Rope’, which worked its way to the top of the Indie charts. The next thing to do was record an album, and the situation continued in its flagrant disregard for reality when it too went straight to number one. 

Thinking back to these days, Jon says: “We got together quite quickly as a band. A lot of groups get together and craft their first album, and then just go on to rewrite that first album over and over. ‘Some Friendly’ is very bright and bubbly, and it was put together quite quickly. It wasn’t crafted over a long period of time-I think you can hear that on it.” 

If there is anything that makes the Charlatans stand amongst the quality bands at the turn of the decade it is the drums. Amidst all the ego it’s easy to forget that association with the best bands in the land can be a very good thing. In 1990 The Charlatans stood in the same field as The Stone Roses when it came to a sorted rhythm section, and Brookes considers the Roses’ drummer Reni as one of the best ever. 

The Charlatans’ own talent is best heard in ‘Then’-the second single from ‘Some Friendly’. Brookes’ solid beats shape the song into a striking stop-start rhythm, pinning down and kicking up the melancholy air that fills out the body of the song. ‘Sonic’ also relies on its technically immaculate drumming, before the beautiful bashing of the ‘Sproston Green’ finale. 

“Martin Blunt [Charlatans' bassist] has had a big effect on my playing,” admits Jon. “I mean he’s always going on about drums.” 

The only songs from the first album that get a regular airing in the current set are the beat-heavy ‘Then’ and ‘Sproston Green’, and Jon believes that tracks can look after themselves. “There are certain songs that just stay rooted. They don’t move however much you change yourself. You can still refer back to them and they are still right.” 

There is however something blurred about The Charlatans around the time of ‘Some Friendly’. Of course it was the era of blurred. It meant something then that we don’t understand now. Blurred album covers, blurred backdrops at gigs, and one blurred track on every album. The Stone Roses’ ‘Don’t Stop’, the Inspiral Carpets’ ‘Memories of You’, and the Charlatans’ ‘109 pt2′. (Wisely, Blur consigned their early experiments in sound to their b-sides.) 

But the whole of ‘Some Friendly’ has a blurred quality about it. Jon Baker’s guitar is all soundscapes, and blends in with the Rob Collins’ drifting Hammond technique, making the overall effect monotone. At times it washes together to excellent effect, as in ‘Opportunity’ where it couples with an inevitably looping bassline and relentlessly long-worded lyrics. But too often there is a lack of contrast, and the star tracks suffer by being up to their hips in similar-sounding music. 

After the furore over the new major label material has died down (“probably late 2000″), Indie label Beggars Banquet is proposing another between-albums album. It will be another harvesting of the band’s nine years at Beggars’, comprising of all the non-album material recorded up to 1997. Amongst over thirty tracks under this category are two that didn’t make last year’s ‘Melting Pot’ compilation. ‘Happen to Die’ and ‘Me. In Time’ are two of the most interesting tracks to come from the Charlatans fold. 

They hark from two EPs sandwiched between the first and second albums, and hopping from one to another is to hop from a monotone era to a much more exciting, fluctuating, challenging era. Hard as it was for the band, you cannot look at the 1992 Charlatans through Stone Roses tinted spectacles. ‘Happen to Die’ is a gem of a track (relegated to track 3 on the ‘Over Rising’ EP due to Gulf War sensitivity), and it constitutes a logical progression from ‘Some Friendly’, all I-Shot-The-Sheriff Hammondy with that bass line, a beautiful chorus, a beautiful song. And, retrospectively, ever-so slightly dull. 

Compare then with ‘Me. In Time’-a track that has been fairly well dismissed by the band, who call it “really hesitant and unsure”. The opening gamut is a crystal clear guitar, quickly backed up by beautiful clarity, a piano sound cutting the Hammond cliché and a lovely pop song all round. This last offering announced a real change for the band, with Mark Collins taking over from Jon Baker as guitarist, presenting a much-needed change of dynamic. 

The “really hesitant and unsure” feel is certainly encapsulated in the next album title. ‘Between 10th and 11th’ arrived at a nervous time for UK music. Lead-weighted hopes were hung on the Charlatans and Oxford’s Ride to progress and maintain some kind of Indie scene after the creative burst of Madchester. Ride rebelled, refusing to cut their songs down from seven minutes, although the album they produced, ‘Going Blank Again’, contains quality material. The Charlatans’ second album is a similarly awkward affair, with its sullenly non-co-operative title and its bunch-of-bananas cover contradicting the clear, direct, pop style of a number of the songs. 

Tim Burgess once recalled, “Lyrically it was weird, it was like ‘Please get me out of this place…What am I up here singing for? I only wanted to play the tambourine anyway’.” 

The whole album does have a faintly apocalyptic feel, with ‘The End of Everything’ an attempt at something like a protest song. It doesn’t sit right, with the lyric ‘They only want a “yes-man”/they will tell you what to believe and no (erm…)/Yes I do I only want to be strong’ standing out as being out of kilter with the band’s personality. 

Jon Brookes recalls the mood: “I think we were concerned-not that the bubble had burst exactly, but that we were there at the top and we were starting to question if it was what we really wanted. It really shook us. A certain panic started to set in.” 

‘Weirdo’ was the first single (Tim: “We were going to scrap it because we thought it was crap”), and the contrast with earlier material is great. There is the rebellious mashing of the Hammond’s keyboard, which really does lend a weird, dangerous sound. Again, the drums signal a change. The organics of ‘Some Friendly’ are replaced with the Genetically Modified sequencer that was prevalent at the time. After all the Baggy Music, producers like Flood and Robin Guthrie were cleaning up music. Unfortunately the rest of the world was going Grunge, leaving hitherto promising bands like James, Lush, Chapterhouse and Curve trying with little success to reverse out of the cul-de-sac of UK music. 

It was too soon to go all Eighties again, although ‘Between 10th and 11th’ has dated better than ‘Some Friendly’. The vast effects work foretells the work with the Chemical Brothers and tells much about the band’s interest in dance. If the album didn’t produce their best singles, the sequence of tracks drifting through ‘Subtitle’, popping through ‘Can’t Even Be Bothered’, crunching through ‘Weirdo’, chewing through ‘Chewing Gum Weekend’ and finally breathing through ‘(No one) Not Even The Rain’ is some of the deftest album-work around. The last track quotes e e cummings’ poem-’not even the rain has such small hands’. No one, not even the Stone Roses had done this. 

By the time the realisation was made that drum pads were not the way to go, the UK had no music industry to speak of. Blur were going to be the next big thing, but were still circling for landing with ‘Modern Life is Rubbish’. The best thing happening was in America. The Black Crowes’ ‘Southern Harmony and Musical Companion’ was providing a healthy foil for Grunge, and was certainly doing great things with keyboards. If anywhere was going to provide inspiration for a UK band it was there, hence Primal Scream’s blues/gospel incarnation. 

“Something was said about us recently,” says Jon, “That really struck a chord. We were described as the closest thing to white soul. I wish that had been said about us earlier, because I think we’ve had that for a long time. It comes out on the third album, ‘Up to Our Hips’. We’d had such a tough time, and that album has like a ‘phoenix rising’ vibe.” 

The greatness of the opening track on ‘Up To Our Hips’ comes in its maracas, harmonica and blues piano. The reaction against ‘Between 10th and 11th’ is huge, and with it came a return of the blurredness, only this time it was an anti-technology blurredness. Blurredness with intent, if you will. 

Jon says, “We used a lot of handheld percussion with really raw production. The most technological thing we used on that album was a torch, because we used to go out fishing in the pitch dark after a day in the studio!” 

There is certainly a new soul shining through what sounds now like a fairly dark album. The opening track is a real high point, and ‘Jesus Hairdo’ provides a poppy relief, again drawing confidently on the blues piano, with lyrics suggesting a sympathy for America: “If everything you say is true it’s bad TV”. 

But, contrary to the general tide, there are tracks which utilise a more complex production value. In ‘Feel Flows’ it is as if the house culture is struck through with techno/indie sensibilities. An absolutely filthy keyboard, links up with a frosted glass guitar over very cymbal-driven percussion. It is definitely a fine moment for the Charlatans, and their best instrumental by a long stretch. More greatness follows on the title track, with a similarly organic dance feel. The soul is high, although as an album ‘Up To Our Hips’ doesn’t quite gel, with the dance and blues influences seeming to pull in contradictory directions. 

One important move towards the Charlatans of today is in the lyrics, which start to shed the hesitancy that characterises previous albums. On ‘I Never Want and Easy Life if Me and He Were Ever to Get There’, the words are much more direct: ‘Save me I wanna slip with the slide/Shoot it up and go for a ride’. The choice of this as a single shows the intent of the band to get much more randy, but the whole album can probably be considered transitional. The album scored well, although the singles performed worse than any others, barely cracking the top 40, with ‘Jesus Hairdo’ peaking at 48. 

But The Charlatans knew what they wanted to do, and they went ahead and did it. The change of direction to come is evident in ‘Up To Our Hips’, and with the release of ‘The Charlatans’ the change was thrust into position. A high-profile vocal slot for Tim Burgess on the Chemical Brothers’ single “Life Is Sweet” helped both bands at this point, helping the Chemicals achieve debut success and thrusting the Charlatans back up to the fore. 

Oddly enough for an eponymous album, ‘The Charlatans’ sits awkwardly in The Charlatans’ output as being somehow unlike them. You might say it was their American Rawk album, if it would benefit you to do so. It is certainly very loud and very trebly. It sits there as a statement of intent: a more expansive sound, with flat-out qualities rather than the (comparative) plinky-plinky gentleness of before. 

So what made the difference? “That was when Tim and Mark Collins [guitarist] really clicked,” recalls Jon. “It was their honeymoon period. Tim was looking for someone to write with and they came together at that point.” It certainly shows. The blurred Hammond sound is mixed low to allow for big fat wedges of guitar and thrusting lyrics, although Rob Collins turns up trumps on ‘Just When You’re Thinkin’ Things Over’ with some inspired piano work. 

Jon remembers: “Everything going on in music at the time was self-destructive. Nirvana were really big, and everyone was talking about taking heroin, and we were like ‘No, no, no-that’s not what we want’. Mark especially was adamant that what we did socially should work in the band’s favour. It was quite a conscious decision to behave positively. We ended up with a massive clutch of really upbeat tracks, each one fighting to get on to the album.” 

For a band who are constantly fending off comparisons-and The Charlatans’ career has virtually been defined by accusations of sounding like other bands-it is very dangerous to radically change direction. Of course these are the days when bands can duplicate their heroes and it passes unnoticed in a wave of adoration. But anyone taking the trouble to play ‘Here Comes a Soul Saver’ beside Pink Floyd’s ‘Fearless’ will see every reason not to take the material as The Charlatans. The Rolling Stones’ ‘Exile On Main Street’ also leaps readily to mind. 

Tim concurs about the lifting of material: “With ‘Just When You’re Thinkin’ Things Over’ we were thinking of ripping off ‘Ramble On’ by Led Zeppelin. ‘Toothache’ was us trying to capture the spirit of ‘When The Levee Breaks’.” 

Undoubtedly this was a very silly time for the UK bigshots. Suddenly it was okay to sound like someone-and I mean exactly like someone. For all the quality there were little indulgences that sank entire ships. Oasis have consistently flirted with pop writing excellence before trampling all over their strawberries with irrelevant Beatles references. Ian Brown must sorely lament allowing The Stone Roses to screw up a perfectly good start to an album with Led Zeppelin licks. 

But the fact of the matter is The Charlatans have always been able to maintain a high standard of musicianship. That was what put them up there with the best of the Baggy lot, and that is what keeps them there through thick and thin. ‘The Charlatans’, when it comes down to it, is an excellent album. It is tight, focused and confident. 

Lyrics like ‘Feeling good, feeling high, it’s a rush’, and ‘I can go for miles and miles and miles and miles and miles’ leave no doubt as to where the band are coming from. They mark a new phase for Tim Burgess who sings with a spitty brashness, withering the former timidity. 

‘Tellin’ Stories’ is immediate. Opener ‘With No Shoes’ is massive, and single-handedly makes the album “What the Stone Roses’ ‘Second Coming’ should have been™”. The lyrics (“Stone me”/”I’ve been walkin’ with no shoes”/”I could hardly wait to shoot you down”) is all Roses, head on, without a care. ‘One To Another’ becomes so packed with energy it is almost unbearable, almost breaking the Charlatans’ careful shape-it is a real favourite moment. 

‘You’re A Big Girl Now’ is firmly driven, denying the pause for breath that most acoustic tracks afford. ‘Area 51′ breaks the album just past the centre before the trump card of ‘How High’, which sums up the relentlessness of the set. Burgess’s vocal melody is a one-noter, repeatedly battering the listeners up high and keeping them there: “Yeah too right I’m gonna pledge my time ’til the day I die.” The crescendo is reached with another glance at the old adversaries, with ‘Get On It’ bearing a structural resemblance to the Stone Roses’ first album-closer. 

‘Tellin’ Stories’-according to Martin Blunt-”sounds like a big bag of spanners”. It is another huge leap forward for the band. But it is so great, so confident, so emotionally charged (coming as it does on the back of keyboardist Rob Collins’ untimely death), one doesn’t-can’t-stop to see the reality of it. 

Jon Brookes, inescapably tangled in its making, cannot hear what the fan hears. “I’ve listened to the album a million times just to try and figure out what mood Rob was in, if he was unhappy,” he told RMB. “And I can hear certain conflicts on there between us all. I think the ascent made us dizzy again. I still haven’t quite digested the songs-there are a few ghosts on that album. In time it might make some sense.” 

One track that will provide a great selling point for the proposed Beggars Banquet non-album tracks compilation is the b-side to the ‘How High’ single. ‘Title Fight’ was reputedly recorded too late for inclusion on ‘Tellin’ Stories’, and it certainly makes for a class-A b-side, pausing marvellously before its conclusion to get all dirty with some superloops supplied by Bentley Rhythm Ace’s Richard March. As it turns out, it’s a pointer for things to come… 

THE NEW ALBUM 

‘Us & Us Only’. What a title. Only, thinking about it, it’s like calling it ‘The Charlatans’, except there’s already an album called ‘The Charlatans’. And now is the time for The Charlatans to make a definitive mark. UK music desperately needs a pickup, with all the thunder-stealing acts like the Manics, Oasis and Blur on something of a back foot. What The Charlatans can do is establish themselves once and for all as mainstays, unaffected by the flitterings and nonsenses of fashion and fad. ‘Us & Us Only’ it is then. 

According to Jon Brookes, opening track ‘Forever’ is a touchstone of stability: “It’s a great starting song. It’s the first track and the first single to come from the album. Tim took the music with him to Japan and wrote the lyrics in an afternoon. We thought it was the perfect way to start an album, and it remains so even now. It has stayed exactly where it is as a track.” 

Clocking in at over seven and a half minutes, ‘Forever’ represents a new direction for The Charlatans. Now safely in the Universal/Island fold, they can afford the time to experiment on the album as a whole. Here we are introduced to a distorted vocal and a choppy drum loop which, together with a classic dub bass line, keep the song throbbing under a Hammond/strings haze. 

The track to really flip out with new form is ‘Good Witch, Bad Witch 2′. A double bass and keyboard repeat a dreamy handprint, providing crystal clarity over the filthy failing drum. Burgess’s lyrics switch from exorcism to bluster to Simpsons-style drunken maniac and back, making for an unhinged feel. It occupies the penultimate spot on the album, but the positioning of a minute-long taster at track two means that it suffuses the whole set, skewering it with a dark tension. 

‘The Blond Waltz’ starts a little canter of tracks that display a supreme relaxation and self-assurance with the material at hand. (It’s the band’s first ever foray into a three-four time signature, music fans!) Martin Blunt has described the new album as “Bob Dylan and The Band on Ecstasy playing at the last night of the Heavenly Social”, and Tim Burgess’s tendency to imitate Dylan reaches its extreme in ‘A House Is Not A Home’. To be honest the vocal sounds like a digitally remastered Shane MacGowan over a relaxed rush of a song that is musically all smiles. 

‘Senses’ is said by Blunt to lay late keyboardist Rob Collins’ ghost to rest. It brings the mood right down, starting with a solemn piano chime accompanied by harmonica before bursting into an impassioned valediction from Tim Burgess. Once again it is unlike anything heard from the band before-not a familiar song structure or sound, but rather a flat-out emotional expression. 

Of the other tracks, ‘Impossible’ carries on the Charlatans’ tendency to write the most buzzing acoustic tracks, as does ‘I Don’t Care Where You Live’ (Their second foray into a three-four time signature, music fans!). ‘The Blind Stagger’ is based around a paper bag of a bass drum, with some John Squire-ish guitar licks (one track only, John old son), and ‘Watching You’ is another perfect end to a Charlatans album-making it a 100% record in every sense. 

With drum loops high on the agenda, one would forgive Jon Brookes for feeling a little aggrieved, but the Charlatans’ sticksman has been instrumental in the new ideas: “We didn’t want to just lift the middle of some old soul track and use that. I thought, ‘Well I can do that’, so we looped me. I really like it, because when you hear it over and over, you start to hear new things. The brain and ears become comfortable and rearrange the beat into something new.”

The new release is aimed at bringing together material from nearly forty albums recorded in the thirty years of the band’s existence. Founder member Albert Mazibuko took some time out from the group’s recent UK tour to explain. 

“We wanted to take the opportunity to bring together some of our very favourite songs,” he said. “We have gained new members with different singing styles, and of course there is all this new technology, so we thought we would rerecord some of our songs dating back to the early Seventies.” 

Ladysmith formed in South Africa in the mid-1960s from a number of bands singing in the Zulu-chanting ‘isicathamiya’ style. But it wasn’t until group leader Joseph Shabalala co-wrote ‘Homeless’ for Paul Simon’s ‘Graceland’ album in 1986 that the band made an impact overseas. 

Albert explains: “The music has changed very much in the last fifteen years, because we have written about what we were experiencing at the time. Our original aim with these songs from the Seventies was to bring hope to the people of South Africa, to encourage them not to lose touch with their culture. There is a great threat to that culture because of the flood of radio and TV.” 

As well as revisiting familiar turf, ‘In Harmony’ contains versions of ‘Ain’t No Sunshine’ and ‘Amazing Grace’ with Des’ree, and ‘Beautiful Vision’ with Van Morrison. A collaboration with The Lighthouse Family is also promised. 

“We met Des’ree when we sang at the Concert for Linda McCartney,” explains Albert. “We needed a little time to adjust, but the result was very good. The work with Van Morrison was just perfect. He is very easy to sing with.” 

“We are also hoping to set up a school in South Africa to teach students singing, and to help them celebrate Zulu culture. We want to learn as much as possible in our collaborations with other artists so we can bring this back to the school and teach properly to the students.” 

The new album also sees Ladysmith tread new ground with a remix of old standard ‘Abezizwe’ by British producers D’Influence. Albert laughs: “We approved it, yes. Those people have honoured our music. I don’t know how they did it, but it works wonderfully. I thought it might mix the song’s story up [the remix divides the chorus with a section of verse] but it goes very well.” 

As well as promoting ‘In Harmony’, Ladysmith will be appearing at the MOBO awards with Des’ree, and providing backing on the new album from Irish popstrels B*witched. Does Albert know who they are? “Well, we had seen them a lot on television in the UK,” he laughs, “but we never thought they would want to work with us!” 

‘In Harmony’ is due out on 18th October on Wrasse Records.

I’m a bit nervous about next year, because it’s supposed to be the year of nuclear war.

I went to big school today, and I went on a lorry that my dad drove. He doesn’t normally drive a lorry. My teacher is called Mrs Carbass, which sounds like ‘car bus’ when you say it, and I tried to tell her that I’d come in on a lorry, but she was too busy talking to somebody else, and didn’t hear me when I called her.

That’s all

j

What makes for a memory? My first memory has chopped and changed over the years, as I’ve grown less and less confident about its veracity as fact. Perhaps what I thought was my first memory was a dream, for example. Recently, though, I uncovered the fact that my ‘real’ first memory occurred a good deal earlier than any of the potentially fake ones, and is pleasingly solid in my history, as it has a witness.

My mum recalls the events as follows: ‘It was Mother’s Day. You were two years old. [My brothers were five and seven] I woke up, and I didn’t have a card; your dad hadn’t got a card for me from you boys. Anyway, I took you all off to church [dad always stayed at home], and they handed out daffodils like they always did on Mothering Sunday, and I remember getting home and preparing the dinner, and I was thinking, ooh, maybe I’ll get a nice surprise at dinner or something, but dinner came and went, and no, nothing. So I was washing up and wiping the table down in the kitchen. We had a white table with flowers painted on it. And I was wiping it down, and I was crying. And you happened to come in at that exact moment, and you said, “mummy, why are you pretending to cry? So I was, you know, “I’m not pretending to cry, lovey, I’ve just got something in my eye. It’ll soon be better, run along now…” you know?’

What I remember about this is a vague image, which may or may not be a false recollection, but most particularly the fuss that was made over the fact that I had thought adults didn’t cry. The mental chemistry that will have been created is what I remember: perhaps people were laughing at me, perhaps they were sympathising, or perhaps they were being just generally loud. But the strength of the memory is in the fact that there was a reaction based solely on something I had said, and I will have reacted to that. Maybe I felt stupid, or maybe I just clocked it and moved on.

Yes, I clocked it and moved on, certainly.

best

j