15 Apr 2012
Ok bit of a pause in posts, to represent the time after
illinois, finishing my degree.
After my degree then, I stayed in Manchester, moved into a damp
flat with Dave on Palatine Road in 'leafy' West Didsbury ok alright
Withington then.
I had a third class honors degree in Mathematics, so naturally I
got a cleaning job in a city centre pub along with more hours
behind the bar at The Square Albert in the evenings and odd
lunchtimes. I had no great plan for life, I just didn't want
to grow up and find myself in a proper job.
Now Scott was the assistant manager at the Square Albert, he'd
played bass in a few bands, liked Nine Inch Nails, and importantly
had keys to the pub out of hours. On quiet shifts we'd while away
hours talking about music, tackling the Manchester Evening News
Crossword and trying to recycle Lothenbrau slops to appease brewery
reps.
Scott had a really strange relationship with a girl from the
North East called Alison. She didn't trust him and I'm not sure if
I ever knew why. Whether it was just extreme paranoia, or whether
Scott had previous for waywardness, it puzzled me though because as
far as I could tell he was just a really sound bloke. I suppose he
drank cider, in halves, so maybe he was an alcoholic at heart, or
the type to wee in the wardrobe when drunk, or maybe he snogged a
girl once; either way he was permanently in the wrong; and their
normal conversational setting was 'argumentative'.
Alison trusted me though because she had been working at the pub
when I started and thought I was nice and sensible (and presumably
didn't wee in wardrobes), so Scott was allowed out of her sight as
long as I was present.
So 'Daub' kind of span out of these 'bail conditions' as a way
to regularly spring Scott out of Alison's clutches on Saturday
mornings, to practice in the vaulted cellar of the pub, have
breakfast and a few beers then start work on the evening shift when
the pub opened at six, (because in those days pubs didn't open all
day every day, imagine that)
Mike, the extremely laid back/stoned weekend pot collector was
in on it; and played drums, although he was a much better guitarist
than me; but I had an amp and a Melos DE1 Analog Echo Delay chamber
and he had his brothers drum kit.
We came up with the name Daub, because pretentiously we were
painting with 'noise', and it was a play on 'dub' and 'The Orb'. It
was less about the music though and more about the escape. We may
have only recorded these 'sessions' in order to prove to Alison
that's what we were doing.
I guess If illinois had been all about crafted 2 and a half
minute pop songs, daub was about epic meandering repetitive 12
minute soundscapes and I'd like to apologise now for anyone who has
listened in entirety to any of these recordings; which I am now
posthumously naming as 'Sorry, I cannot reimburse you for the time
you have taken to listen to this'
06 May 2012
So we stopped doing 'daub' we somehow had it in our heads that
we only needed a violinist and a singer, when probably we just
needed songs, only one person answered our ads and then they didn't
show up for the rehearsal, and the pub manager stopped us from
using the cellar. So I went solo, or at least I would try to write
some songs before being in a band again.
I managed to borrow a 4-track recorder off of Paul who had just
started work in the Square Albert pub, later I found out it was
actually his dads, and I had it for a few months longer than the
weekend I'd asked to borrow it for.
Flatmate Dave was starting to gig quite a bit as a Stand-Up
across the country, and so I had time to myself, and could make
noise. I really tried to learn how to play the guitar and
experiment, and write songs; but with limited success. Think I
wanted to try and create something that felt better than Illinois,
to prove something to myself.
Although it was just me, I have written the band as 'How to
spell Happy' on the tape, which was the title of a Headbirths song,
so I was never really comfortable with the idea of trying to be a
singer songwriter, and I probably wasn't earnest enough either.
The cartoon, is of me, it was drawn by a girlfriend of Dave H's;
I don't have that big a nose, but I copied it onto a t-shirt, and
people liked it alot, although they thought it was Billy Bragg.
Around this time, I put together a pamphlet of my poetry called
'This Coming Monday' and my sister's boyfriend at the time took
some photos of me being twee for the cover in a closed down
hospital somewhere in Liverpool. I found some of these in a wallet
amongst the tapes and have added them to the gallery as they are
hilarious.
26 May 2012
I loved the Monkees, growing up, the show was a staple of the
summer holiday morning tv schedules for kids in the late seventies
early eighties - and then again as a student I really got into the
music again; they seem to embody just the right blend of cool and
silliness; and 'Head' is a great film and I was really sad when
Davy Jones passed away recently because he was forever young, in my
mind, and I guess he'll stay young forever in the reruns, but it's
still sort of sad and marks the passing of time, the disappearance
of youth.
His story and the audaciousness of the experiment to create a
beatlesesque boy band just for the american TV market is
breathtaking in it's conception and success - I am in awe of
the songwriting talent they managed to pull together to make it
work.
If you look at the early Colgems Monkees albums, and this is
fairly true of most sixties LP's I guess, they contain the 2 or 3
tracks released as singles which are the ones you know, and then a
succession of hastily written awful filler tracks, but sometimes
these vinyl filling fodder contains a really great song, and I
became a bit obsessed with trying to find them.
I discovered this Boyce Hart song track on the first Monkees LP,
and I loved it's simplicity, although listening to the lyrics now,
they are not quite as sweet as they may seem; basically Davy Jones
just wants to shag around and not go steady the loveable
heartbreaking rogue.
I'm not sure I relate to some of the similes used ie 'Like the
Bluebirds flying by me' or 'Like the warm September wind, babe'
Anyway the simplicity of the chords meant it was one of the
first songs I 'worked out' just from listening to it, so I used to
play it on the guitar quite a bit, and out of respect to Davy
Jones, I've waited for him to die before I've released this version
to the world. Imagine him turning in his grave like the rotating
head from The Head movie promo.
05 Jun 2012
I Have just watched the John Cooper Clarke documentary that was
on the BBC4 last week, and one of the 'Talking Heads' was the poet
and tv producer Henry Normal, whom I had got to know through
performing poetry in Manchester.
It reminded me that there was a reading that I had done with
Henry at a bookshop in Manchester, that was recorded, and at the
time of having the 4-track machine in Palatine Road, I'd put the
recording of his poem 'Travelling 2nd Class Through Hope' to
music.
Hmm like some kind of second class Martin Hannett.
I am even trying to play the guitar through the delay a bit like
Vini Reilly. Anyway I've just rediscovered it in the plastic
bag and voila!
NB: Hope is a village in Derbyshire and you do travel through it
from Manchester to Sheffield.
'Travelling 2nd Class Through Hope' the poem is available in
Henry Normal's collection: Nude Modelling for the afterlife
available here.
17 Jun 2012
I'm not sure when Blur's Modern Life Is Rubbish was released,
but I'm guessing it must have been about three weeks before I
recorded this, if I remember rightly the chords to the songs were
included on the back of the sleeve, and these chord progressions
are reflected in this song along with the terrible mockney
accent.
I'm aware that there isn't much rememberings around the songs
going on at the moment; I'd ended up managing The Bank pub on
Moseley street in Manchester which was fun and probably was the
most well off I've ever been, not having to pay for food or alcohol
and not having any free time except outside of pub hours; my only
outgoings were bus rides into town; (Housing Benefit took care of
the rent (you could claim that then) - The head of Manchester
Housing Benefit use to drink every lunchtime in the Square Albert,
and we used to do the Manchester Evening News Crossword and he
insisted I pulled his pints of Tetley - because apparently only I
did it properly; effectively I gave good head.
In the end though I left to sign on the dole (you could do that
then) as being in a pub was taking up all my time; I'd been helping
Henry and Dave with a play they'd written called 'Road to
Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch' for the
Green Room in Manchester, and I was backstage assisting during
scene changes, and I contributed two actual jokes. Henry had a date
organised for the show in Nottingham, but I couldn't do it because
of pub work, so I kind of just thought what's the point.
Dave was being a comedian on the Enterprise Allowance scheme
(you could do that then) and we spent much of our days, mulling
round the flat, eating tuna and pasta, playing scrabble, drinking
tea, drinking tea, watching rubbish telly, throwing a ping pong
ball across the room with the aim of landing it in the other
persons mug of tea and stealing things from the property companies
skip on the drive outside that they kept permanently stacked with
intriguing junk garnered from whenever they cleared out one of
their properties.
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