All Speeds Ahead

In the early 90s there was a band from somewhere in South London who had some moderate chart success, under the improbable name of Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine (later shortened to Carter USM).

(Suddenly Christians on Mega Acid doesn’t sound quite so silly, right? Err, well anyway…)

One of their songs - After The Watershed  -  came to the attention of The Rolling Stones because they’d adapted the chorus from Ruby Tuesday. It was a brief, half-joking reference within their song. But The Rolling Stones turned out not to have a sense of humour – or more precisely it seems, their manager didn’t have a sense of humour. Legal action ensued. The single was banned from radio play and any chance of chart success was scuppered.

Neither myself nor my brother were devotees of Carter USM, but the story was making news in the music press and we certainly saw the irony of a band who’d forged a whole career off the back of impoverished blues musicians, suing someone else for plagiarism. During what was to be one of our last recording sessions together, out in that now familiar house in Ponders End, we recorded our own song in support of Carter USM.

It opened with a brief refrain from the Stones’ Hey You Get Off Of My Cloud and then across a 1.5 minute piledriver guitar riff, Tim sang a snarky riposte to the Stones actions. There were some suitable four to the floor drums as backing, courtesy of that £20 Argos drum machine.

We had the notion to send it to Carter USM, thinking it might amuse them and even gain us some attention, but back then that required more effort than we were prepared to put in. First we would need to find an address for their record label, then copy the song to tape, mail it out and at the end of the process hope this package got passed on to the band.

(Today you’d just upload it to YouTube, find them on social media and tag them with a link. A tenth of the work and ten times more likely to reach them.)

That last session also produced one other song. This one was more carefully crafted. It featured the quiet/ loud guitar stylings that were prevalent of the time. Think Nirvana or The Pixies or a hundred other more derivative exponents of that decade. We were living in a post C.O.M.A. world. Things were winding down on all fronts. After the break in which had cost us all our equipment, we’d bought a range of new and second hand gear to replace it. At this stage we had a bulky 8 track Tascam reel to reel tape machine to record on to. It was great in theory, but in practice it never fully worked and was eventually returned to where we’d bought it from and replaced with a newer upscaled 4 track cassette portastudio.

But we had ideas. That session could’ve been the start of something fresh, but times were changing. I’d wound up the record label, book ending the six years with a final compilation to mirror the one I’d started out with. So now there was nowhere to release any new music. And the C.O.M.A. record (successful in its own small way) had been a happy accident – a weekend deadline, minimal equipment, some small measure of alchemy and luck. Planning something longer, acquiring additional time and equipment, all seem in retrospect to be recipes for disaster. It was clearly time to move on.

Which is what happened, sort of. We didn’t move on, but time did.

Tim became a father. I finally left home for good. Circumstances simply meant those days of casually taking the train to London and messing around making music with my brother were over. Those last few recordings never went anywhere. And looking back now, I don’t think they ever would have. Fizzling out is sometimes just a fact of life.

*

In the spring of 1995 I moved to Bristol. I found a small bedsit to rent in Sommerville Road next to St Andrew’s Park in Bedminster. The landlord must’ve been renting out properties on an industrial scale, because one of his assistants arranged to escort me to the local benefits office to make sure I signed all the right forms to claim housing benefit and the like. It’s probably changed now, but back then the landlord could get the money processed and put straight into their bank account.

The bedsit was a disaster. Located at the rear of the house, at ground level in what might have been an extension, it was overrun with bugs that would crawl in from the garden. Millepedes I think they were. I tried to put something down to discourage them, but this had the reverse effect as it revealed just how many of them there were as they crawled out from hiding and died in profusion across the kitchen floor.

If that wasn’t bad enough, I had been saddled with an eccentric neighbour. On sunny days he would open wide his bedroom window, put a recording of the Jimmy Nail song Crocodile Shoes on repeat at full volume and sit out in the back garden listening to it. With only a paper thin wall between us, I could literally feel my room vibrating such was the noise level. I was getting painful flashbacks to SJ and Stairway to Heaven, but at least there he’d been a polite guy who played his music at a reasonable volume.

I don’t think I could’ve lasted long in that place. Thankfully I didn’t have to. At Easter I’d met up with various members of my family in the countryside near Southampton. (There’s a picture somewhere of me trying to help my young niece to fly a kite.) My elder sister had recently split up with her husband. He was now running a pub in the centre of Southampton and she was living in Bournemouth. The house they’d lived in out near the New Forest was up for sale, but they needed someone to look after it – and the two cats who still resided there – until it could be sold. The only catch was that it was mostly now unfurnished and depending on how quickly it sold, I might only be able to stay there for a month or two.

However temporary, I honestly didn’t care. If it got me out the bug house, I was all in.

*

Marchwood is a village on the edge of the New Forest. It’s about eight miles from Southampton. A forty minute bus ride away. I moved there as soon as I could. I’d not been in Bristol long and most of my belongings were still back home in my parents' house in Southend. Paul came to the rescue and offered to drive me and my gear in his van all the way from Southend to Marchwood. He seemed to like the idea of a road trip.

Before his current position as ad hoc nightwatchman, studio owner, dealer in second hand goods and whatever else he had going on, Paul had been a chauffeur for a while. He’d been a chauffeur for Motown legend Edwin Starr.

Edwin Starr had hits with Motown (War is the one most people will remember), but a lot of his success came not in his home country but over here in the UK. In 1983 he moved to England permanently. Paul had nothing but good words to say about his time with Edwin Starr. The main requirement of his job had been to dress smart at all times and be reliable. It seemed somewhat at odds with the unorthodox lifestyle he had now carved out for himself, but I didn’t question it too deeply. I did think shepherding a small time music enthusiast and a few bits and bobs of recording equipment around the suburban parts of South East England in a battered old white van must’ve been quite the comedown after chauffeuring a genuine soul legend in a smart limousine. But that’s rock ‘n’ roll for you.

We didn’t M25 it – Paul preferred to scoot through London, taking us around backroads and various anonymous parts of South London and its suburbs that I’d never seen before. I like urban geography, so I was more than happy to take this route. It was way more interesting than endless miles of motorway.

When we eventually turned into our destination, a cul-de-sac of neatly spaced detached houses, Paul’s immediate reaction was to shout out, “It’s Brookside!”

He wasn’t wrong, it did have the same feel and arrangement as the then prime time C4 soap opera. We lugged all the gear from the van inside and then ate the food that I’d brought along for the trip. Paul didn’t stay long. He had the return trip to make. But it seemed like he’d enjoyed the day out, the change of scene. I have a feeling he had someone he knew in South London that he was going to visit or do business with on the return trip. All I’d had to do was pay for the petrol and the food.

I was left sitting on what remained of the furnishings, revelling in the space; the lack of bugs and crazy people. The cats seemed pleased to see me. I’d fallen on my feet - and even if it was only to be for a short time, as usual I was very good at not looking too far ahead. Life seemed grand.

*

I lived in Marchwood for about six weeks. The house sold pretty much as soon as I’d moved in. A stuck up couple who looked disapprovingly at the two cats and made very firm enquiries to ascertain that I was not some sort of sitting tenant that would need to be evicted. Luckily there’s plenty of paper work and legal stuff involved in house sales, so I did have some breathing space.

I got to sign on. Not like in Bristol where I’d witnessed an inner city office where long queues of people were processed every two weeks and all you had to do was sign your name and confirm you’d been looking for work. Here it turned out my local job centre was in Hythe, a pretty waterside town situated across from Southampton. The staff were super eager to find jobs for their clients. On my first visit they’d found me a potential position with a local newspaper and had me ringing up to acquire an interview before they’d let me leave the building. I wasn’t keen, but I didn’t have much choice.

The interview turned into a farce. I arrived at the offices of the grandly named Totton Times and was interviewed by a very nice middle aged woman who began by asking what experience I had of selling advertising space. This was followed up by questions about how confident I felt gaining leads for potential clients. I’d nodded or muttered my way through nearly five minutes of this before I finally had to ask if she was interviewing the right person.

It turned out that they had two candidates they were interviewing that day. Mine was for an admin position, the other was for a job in sales. The other candidate was either running very late or never turned up. I guess I then had to be re-interviewed, this time by someone else, for the correct position. I don’t recall that part. Either way, I didn’t get the job. Either of them.

What I mostly did during my six weeks was make music. I’d been given the chance to release a 12” ep by a guy in Scotland who’d liked a demo I’d sent him. He was launching his new label and was keen to have me (under my Ghostword imprint, this being the name I’d settled upon for my first truly solo project) as his first release. I’d already completed the songs back at Paul’s before heading to Bristol. A date had been set for when I would go to London with the master tapes and the record would be cut, prior to the pressing process.

But I had a couple of weeks ahead of that deadline and in that time I was able to refine what had been agreed on as the A-side - and I also came up with a new track that was added to the B-side. It was a good working environment for me. There were minimal distractions out on my own in a small village that, aside from an hourly bus service to more cosmopolitan locations, didn’t have a lot going for it.

Eventually I got to make the trip to London. I’ve written elsewhere about my experience with Porkies: the original studio of George ‘Porky’ Peckham was a delightful but chaotic and slightly dilapidated affair. His new studio in central London was cold and clinical. I don’t remember the name of the place I went to this time – but I’d classify it as somewhere between those two extremes. There was a cheerful receptionist listening to Kiss FM or whatever the hip dance station of the time was. ("Can you handle the Randall?" was the tagline to Kiss FM's Wednesday night show hosted by the legendary DJ Randall)

The cutting room itself was neat and professional, but it looked lived in rather than sterile. The guy doing the job was pleasant enough. He was also keen to gain my permission to make an additional master of the lead song, at 78rpm. I think they had a future project that involved re-issuing some old recordings as 78s, so they needed to do some test pressings in advance of this. I wish in hindsight I could’ve asked for a 78 copy for myself. That would’ve been a collectors item. Here’s my ‘hit’ record – the one John Peel played, the one that shifted 300 copies in Eastern Europe – and by the way, would you like to hear the 78rpm version?

*

So I left Marchwood somewhere in the mid to late summer of 1995. I almost moved into a flat in Southampton. Life would have turned out a whole lot differently if I had. The flat was nicely furnished, modern. It was located near the main train station, close to the football ground. I’d spent some time in Southampton during those six weeks. It was a tempting option. But in the end I guess I remembered why I’d originally plumped for Bristol. It was where my other sister lived. I’d visited there over the years before I left Southend and I knew some of the people. I didn’t know anyone in Southampton. I didn’t have a job to go to. It could’ve come down to a toss of a coin at that point. It wasn’t far off that.

But in the end, the west was calling me and the west was where I headed.

 

 

Running order for the John Peel Show, BBC Radio One - 1st March, 1996