A Lot of Wind

Dave played the clarinet. It was a post DFTND era. Trevor had set off to buy milk and never returned. We’d lost touch with Fiona. There was just me and Tim and Dave, in the small upstairs back bedroom of that narrow house in Ponders End.

It was probably the last time I saw Dave.

Adding clarinet to the palette of sounds was great. It added life, urgency. It was an imprecise sound, captured imprecisely with our limited recording equipment. I think maybe Dave was playing out in the hallway so it didn’t outbalance all the other sounds we were recording.

I still have a tape with those tracks. It doesn’t amount to much and I don’t credit much value to what there is. But I like its promise. It was the reverse of when Trevor first turned up with his violin but was already desperate to jettison it and acquire the role of a cliché lead guitarist.

We lost a lot once Dave moved away, to where exactly I forget, but working somewhere as a speech therapist. But that last session, the unexpected (to me) arrival of new sounds, was the biggest what if.

Without Dave, one half of the remaining musically talented members had departed. We could briefly have numbered ourselves at six. And now there were two.

And Tim was only there out of fraternal loyalty.

But the rest is history, ground covered elsewhere.

In later life I was lucky to add strings to a couple of my songs, courtesy of my niece. But I never had wind. Or a brass section. Horns. What a joy, surely able to perk up the most basic of songs.

Tim contemplated taking up the clarinet once. But let’s face it, we dreamt up a lot of things when we reconvened in the current century, planned so much that never came off. Talk was cheap in the Skype era.

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It’s nice to escape the trappings of traditional rock and roll. Reading a collected oral history of the post-war German music scene, there’s a lot of talk about how The Beatles and other sixties bands came over and excited the country’s youth. Germany had no musical heritage to call on, because the Nazis had silenced everything.

For a while there were bands that mimicked the music coming from Britain and the US. It was the commercial thing to do. But others saw the potential in the blank canvas the war had left them with. They wanted something different. Neither to copy the sounds from overseas or to lose themselves in the difficult experimentalism of Stockhausen and others.

Bands like Can and Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream and Ash Ra Tempel and others sought a middle ground between these two extremes. Thus came the 'Neu Klang' (Krautrock as the British press clumsily coined it). Different sounds to those you heard elsewhere. A lot of improvisation. Music that could only be recorded once, warts and all, because you couldn’t go back and play it again.

Similar in its way to jazz, which had also been banned by the Nazis.

There’s plenty in my musical collection that steps beyond the narrow constrictions of the traditional rock band.  King of the Slums and their fantastic use of amplified violin to add a shrieking intensity to their dark and twisted northern tales. The Band of Holy Joy and their junkyard soundscape of horns, accordions and toy instruments. Pram – music from somewhere out in space, that could provide the score for children’s fairytales. Or Blurt – 70s/80s new wavers from a forgotten part of Gloucester where manic saxophone squeals undercut the basic drum and bass rhythm as the singer barked out surreal phrases before turning his attention back to his wind instrument.

There’s plenty more I could list, from the tasteful to the terrorising.

There’s a lot of wind.