The Weather Prophets

I started writing this blog in winter and I’m reaching the conclusion in late spring. If the story it tells has not been linear, then neither has the weather. Winter 2026 was cold and extraordinarily wet. Spring signified itself by a change to drier and more temperate conditions. April days were often bright and warm. May is different. Temperatures regressed. Wind has aided in modifying how warm it’s felt. Rain has, to a lesser degree, returned.

Weather is a mood signifier for me. I hate the cold. Therefore I hate the wind. I’m not a fan of rain. I thrive in the warmth and the sun, in the longer daylight hours of summer. I connect on a primeval level to our ancestors, getting up when the sun comes up. I choose to read outside, utilising the natural light.

Talk of the weather is a cliché for the British, but the truth is simply that we experience more of it. It’s a fact of geography, our position as a small island surrounded by sea on all sides. In Montreal the weather is more extreme – the temperatures at the depths of winter and the height of summer – but weather patterns are more predictable. Long, dry summers with days filled by clear blue skies are the norm in my experience.

Talk of the weather is also a conversational short cut for me. It’s benign small talk, for a shy person who struggles with small talk (with any talk).

At school I was the quiet one in class. (Later Cath christened me as a quiet corner guy). Even if I knew the answer to a question, I’d be reluctant to put my hand up in case I made a fool of myself. Teachers rarely called on me, as if I’d given myself a cloak of invisibility that meant they’d look past me. If I was asked, I’d inevitably struggle to answer – my mind would go blank even for topics I knew the answer to.

Despite my reticence, I was once selected to be part of a geography experiment. A select few students were tasked with recording daily temperatures and rainfall amounts across a one month period. We already had a thermometer attached to the outside of an outbuilding in our garden, so taking the daily temperature readings was simple enough. For rainfall it required an additional device buried in the ground in to which the rain would collect and then could be measured each evening before being emptied again.

The selected period encompassed the Christmas holidays and so I imagine temperatures would’ve been low, rainfall plentiful and even perhaps some recordings of snow. As a young boy and young man, I didn’t give much thought to the weather. If it rained, you still had to make your way to school or work. The same held true for snow, except in extreme circumstances. Cold or warm, calm or stormy, you just got on with your day. It’s only later in life that the weather has exerted its forces so strongly upon me.

As an adult, post a troubled eighteen months at university, I started my own record label and mail order business. To gain some funding I had applied and been accepted on the Enterprise Allowance Scheme. This was a government backed scheme to reduce unemployment numbers (and promote small businesses and enterprise), launched by Margaret Thatcher’s government. Before I could start claiming any money I had to go to an induction session held in Colchester, across in the far north of the county for me. This took place a day after the great storm of 1987.

The storm entered national mythology after a BBC forecaster reassured a viewer who’d contacted the station with concerns about an approaching storm. Michael Fish was the unfortunate man and his words of reassurance came back to haunt him when the south of the country was battered by the worst winds for a generation. Where I lived many trees in our road were felled by those winds. I was woken at around 4am by the sounds of the storm. Our house lost slates from the roof. The horse chestnut tree in the street outside my bedroom window was toppled from its roots and neatly crushed a neighbour’s car across the middle of its frame.

In Colchester I walked through parks that had been decimated by the storm. The induction session itself passed without incident.  The whole scheme was largely a box ticking exercise to bring down the number of registered unemployed. I was in a room of assorted people, with doubtless a mix of big and small ambitions, of which mine were definitely small. Each of us had to speak briefly about what our business was, and that was the hard part for me. How did I try to sell myself as a potential entrepreneur? (And if I could go back now and see how all those other people got on, that might be interesting.)

I can’t recall if there was any longer term support (aside from the funding) that went with the EAS – if there was, I didn’t avail myself of it. Given I had to make a three - four hour journey just for that induction, suggests to me there probably wasn’t. A day earlier and I wouldn’t have even made that, the train lines would still have been closed as engineers dealt with the clearance of fallen trees and other storm damage.

But that’s the way of the weather here, the unpredictability of it when so open to the elements on all sides.

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The Weather Prophets were a London based indie band who started life at much the same time as I started my record label. They were formed from the ashes of another cult indie band called The Loft. For a brief period they could name Alan McGee (best known for running Creation records) among their number, although shortly after he moved on to become their manager. I knew them via the 1988 Creation compilation Doing It for the Kids. This was another of those cut price albums (see also Cherry Red’s Pillows and Prayers), designed to entice people to sample the roster of a label and then hopefully buy more of their records.

Alan McGee was everything I was not. Personable, outgoing, and with a strong character, well suited to making his way in the music business. Creation supported and released a lot of music that I loved, so I bare him no ill will. In the latter stages of the label’s existence, the music became less diverse, less interesting, and ultimately Oasis became the focal point for much of what they did. But it was not always that way. The subtler tones of The Weather Prophets were one of many interesting artists that blossomed under McGee. Momus (a Scottish singer/ songwriter in the Jacques Brel mold) released several of his greatest  (and my favourite) works via Creation.

I would align my personality much more with that of Sarah Records co-owner Matt Haynes. Sarah Records were Bristol-based but very much in their own world. If you watch the excellent documentary film about the label’s story, My Secret World, Matt Haynes comes across as what he is (and was), a man with a passion and love for music, but also a painfully shy individual. He gained much from having a partner in the business - Clare Wadd was the more outgoing foil to his introvert personality. The label was often mocked in the music press of the time, but history has shown them to be quietly revolutionary in the way they operated – and the music they put out was more diverse than the critics acknowledged.

I could’ve benefited from a similar partnership in running my own label, but that’s old history now.

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I am the weather vane. But I am not weather, I am not vain. Writing can be therapy on a cold or wet day when there is sometimes nothing else to do. I am not a weather prophet. I am subject to its whims. Its influence is in my writing, but then so are hundreds of other equally tenable and untenable things.