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| Being my philharmonic narrative: a salmagundi of salient episodes and adventitious excursions whereby diverse matters are properly arranged to the ready convenience of all and sundry. |
I was born the same year as the charts.
Today they sing their kids to sleep with Smells Like Teen Spirit; Dad sang Ragtime Cowboy Joe, Don’t Fence Me In and The Sunny Side Of The Street. The post-war record format upheaval was over but my parents still had a lot of pop and classical 78s. Their vinyl was mainly show tunes like South Pacific. Pat Boone’s 45 For A Penny (1959) was popular with the children for its B side: Wang Dang Taffy-Apple Tango. We were already flipping the hits over to find the cult tracks.
I lusted after the blue pearl snare drums in the percussion cupboard at school but most often I got a tambourine, maracas or worst of all a triangle. Music lessons were mainly BBC radio and I remember Aiken Drum and Bill Bones’ Hornpipe about a sailor who danced round the world. We also practised what would later become idiot dancing in the Music And Movement class.
We learned The Walrus and the Carpenter set to music for a school concert but I was dropped before the gig for singing flat.
As primary school finished The Animals released House Of The Rising Sun. I was hooked when I saw them on Top Of The Pops (or perhaps Ready Steady Go). It shot to number one. I was aware of The Beatles but bands often played covers on TV and any four lads in suits looked the same. Chewing gum cards told me George played lead and John played rhythm but I didn’t know what that meant. I liked the La Bamba riff on Twist and Shout but until The Animals I was indifferent. Under the influence of The Animals, schoolfriend Paul and I formed a group. He painted our logo on a bass drum, but that was as far as The Reptiles went. Paul had a wicked groove and a penchant for soul.
My secondary education was a golden age. Pirate radio played great music from 1964 to 1967 when it was outlawed. Transistor radios were banned at school, but so was smoking, long hair (“It’s over your collar, boy!”) and of course, short hair, Doc Martins and anything unconventional.
In Spring 1965 I had a minor operation and spent some time at home recovering, listening to the radio. That chart is etched in my brain: Roger Miller King Of The Road, Donovan Catch The Wind, Unit 4 Plus 2 Concrete and Clay, The Seekers I’ll Never Find Another You, Bob Dylan Times They Are A-Changin’…
On March 1 1966 the BBC showed The Beatles at Shea Stadium (filmed in 1965). We were invited to watch the concert by a neighbour who had a television and it dawned on me they were exceptionally famous. By that time we had seen Help! at the cinema and I’d got the joke in Rubber Soul from the sleeve hanging in Soundtrack’s window. For a long time the earliest Beatles’ single I liked was Ticket To Ride. Incredibly, Revolver was released in August just a few months after the Shea Stadium concert was shown.
As if provoked by The Animals, hits by The Kinks You Really Got Me, The Stones (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction, The Beach Boys Good Vibrations, Procol Harum A Whiter Shade Of Pale, Spencer Davis Somebody Help Me, The Byrds Mr Tambourine Man, The Monkees I’m A Believer, and The Beatles Day Tripper and Paperback Writer punctuated the pirate radio years. I taped Johnny Walker breaking the law at midnight on the night of August 14 1967 with All You Need Is Love.
An old classmate from primary school Steve and I bunked off extramural Latin and he showed me the chords to Nowhere Man on his Spanish guitar (a decade later I found him gigging around Essex in a decent band called Crossbreed). At one time or another I had piano and violin lessons but I didn’t learn much that way. I picked up my piano from Go Now, Lady Madonna and Hey Jude, and classmate Pete gave me his old Winfield acoustic guitar. We wrote a couple of wistful songs. Another friend Mark and I were caned for playing The Moody Blues Go Now on the school piano. Perhaps there were too many bum notes.
I had always written poetry to pass the hours I had to spend in church. It was something you could do in your head—strong rhythms and rhymes were easy to remember. I always had a few poems in the school magazine. My friend Chris and I were the English swots. He was Syd Barrett and I was Paul McCartney, but I wanted to be Syd.
Dad and I stopped at a motorway café on an overnight coach trip to Durham in 1966. He put Frank Sinatra Strangers in the Night and Acker Bilk Stranger on the Shore on the jukebox. Those tracks were the last echoes of his kind of music. There was a bike gang at another table looking dangerous. They chose rock ‘n’ roll. One Saturday afternoon in August I played The Troggs With A Girl Like You—the autochanger arm up so it would repeat. After about twenty plays he made a joke about it. The single belonged to my mod sister Liz and she introduced me to the Small Faces All Or Nothing and other club hits including Stax and Atlantic soul. In December I bought my first record The Who Happy Jack (6/9d) which Mum frisbee’d into the wall after one too many repeats on the autochanger. It didn’t survive—Keith Moon would have been proud.
In 1967 I saved 10 guineas on my paper round (5 months at 10/6d week) to buy a portable transistor record player/radio. I was glued to the radio and made home ‘radio programmes’ on Mum’s Fidelity reel-to-reel recorder with the two Marks and Pete from school. Some were a tribute to I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again; others a homage to Radio Caroline. All my money seemed to go on records and The Beatles double was a stretch at nearly £3.
I put a Schaller pick-up on the Winfield guitar and played it through a Dansette record player. The Dansette had an EL84 valve amp and sounded great. I wrote some songs with Chris and he did a good imitation of Jimi Hendrix with maximum feedback through three record players. Dad had worked in radar during the war and taught me about valve circuits. I interfered with anything that had a radio or amplifier in it. I scrounged obsolete valve radios for free as people upgraded to modern transistors. One big cabinet radio came from a friend of Dad’s who was making ornate chairs for an African parliament building—his shed was full of incredible carvings.
Chris and I listened to Zappa, Pink Floyd and Curved Air on his parents’ Philips stereogram at full volume with the French doors wide open. The picture of the roadies with all the band’s gear on the cover of Ummagumma made me want a van full of amps, guitars and drums. It was another step down the road that started with The Animals. Straight after my driving test we drove up to see Woodstock at The Empire, Leicester Square. That summer we made an expedition to the Isle Of Wight festival with Anthony from school, and sometime around then saw Curved Air at the Royal Festival Hall. By that time I was at college, avoiding work and wondering how to get a job in music.
The Cream farewell film was an awesome experience in spite of the dreadful sound and overblown solos. My brother Sid played me Blind Faith on a trip to Rome in 1970 and Ginger Baker has been a favourite ever since. (I nearly broke my ankle in 1992 dancing to Ants In The Kitchen.)
I saw The Who again in 1971 at the Oval headlining a memorable all-day gig (America, Cochise, The Faces, Mott The Hoople, Atomic Rooster, and others). As I left to get the last train home Won’t Get Fooled Again echoed around the streets of SE11. At college I was writing songs in earnest and swapped notes with Phil who also wrote and played blues harp. He introduced me to Uriah Heep, Yes and Gentle Giant and would talk through a whole prog rock album describing the tracks and production. His description of Fragile was so good I had to buy it.
I played guitar and sang in a church group where Sid wrote music. It was good fun although I’m not religious. Rehearsal night was best; I was still playing the Winfield and we swapped T. Rex riffs in the break. With my increasing armoury of valve amplification and homemade speaker cabs I entertained at a church hall disco for my sister’s bemused Girl Guide troop. They expected pop singles but got Who’s Next, Jeff Beck and Led Zepellin II until the vicar intervened. Black Sabbath was probably the last straw.
The best gig of 1972 was Mott The Hoople on 25 June. Ian Hunter autographed my girlfriend’s arm in lipstick and climbed into a truck much bigger than Pink Floyd’s. “Never forget Mott,” he urged. “Er, no,” I replied weakly, but I never did.
College ended and I got a job on the buses where a number of errant musos took refuge. I needed money for proper gear to join a band. Putting an unwieldy cart before a feeble horse I didn’t realise my songwriting wasn’t up to the job. But with an Eko Ranger 6 and 12, a CSL Les Paul copy, a Center 4x12 cab, a home-made 2x15 and Sound City 50, Triumph 100 and HH amps, I nearly had a van-load. The band I formed with Kev (bass) and Bob (drums) from the buses ran into a brick wall of inconsequence and petered out. History has forgotten we were called Wombat and sometimes Earshot. Syracuse Flagday, an abandoned follow-up with Alex from the buses on drums, was notable only for my decision to write better material before trying again.
Bob Banasiak, another friend from the buses, formed a band that was everything we weren’t. Fancy were the best local band before the Feelgoods and put out an indie single Starlord b/w Brother John (Sticky STY3, 1973). Bob cautioned me in the ways of label points and territory deals. He made demos at home on a Revox, which looked like a good idea. He was (and probably still is, playing with Cherry and the Bulldogs on the West Coast somewhere) an extraordinary natural guitarist.
In Summer 1973 Dr Feelgood had a residency at the Cloud Nine disco on Canvey. Wilco still had long hair and wore jeans. Their amps were pristine cabaret Vox on chrome stands. I saw them once or twice most weeks—they were terrifyingly good. Elsewhere, in December I joined several hundred assorted hippies and greasers to see Mott The Hoople with support band Queen. All we knew was the guitarist had made his axe from an oak fireplace. Prepared for the gentle irony of Ian Hunter, we were unprepared for rampant frontman Freddie to upstage Mott in a zebra leotard (and costume changes!). It was a virtuoso tour de force. Queen were in their prime between Queen II and Sheer Heart Attack. Their encore was a Led Zep meets Mozart caricature* of the tired rock ‘n’ roll medley (normally Johnny B. Goode and Route 66). Utterly priceless.
After various jobs including a stint at a fun fair in the style of That’ll Be The Day I finally cracked and got a proper day job in 1975. I sold my stage gear and left home, settling for Earshot Kev’s homemade electric guitar and a Leo combo. We put together a covers band called The Anticlimax Blues Band with Ken from the fun fair and did a half hour set of 13 numbers (including Dylan’s Hurricane) but our old school Spencer Davis and Animals tunes were no longer fashionable when punk hit town.
To my astonishment the day job was OK and I went to work into computer systems. I couldn’t afford studio time, £10k for an 8-track Studer or even a couple of grand for a Revox, so I recorded at home on an Akai GX 4000D reel-to-reel with left/right over-dubbing. A Maxxon bass booster and Maplin Drumsette (a £67 preset drum machine kit) completed the lineup. Brother Hugh wielded the occasional bass, pen and soldering iron. I thought my songs were ready for the big time. AVO with Hugh on bass, and Baz Bravado (solo) pestered Rough Trade and Stiff with demos. The songs were pretty good but the new wave had already peaked and I started an impressive collection of rejection letters. Geoff Travis wrote the best: “Sorry Rob, I don’t like your stuff” on a torn off scrap of paper. It almost made the effort worthwhile.
My songs were more popular at work and I formed what was supposed to be a band with Roger and Kevin, but ended up as a long term collaboration with Kevin. With better gear—a Les Paul, Rickenbacker bass, Portastudio, and a series of drum machines and synths—we badgered the majors, indies and local press with more demos. Our covering letters were sometimes better than the songs. “We can’t compromise, our music won’t let us,” wrote Kevin. “Competent but unmemorable,” wrote the local paper who couldn’t tell if we were serious or not. How we laughed. When our combined arsenal of machines was wired up and running we’d switch off the lights just to watch the displays flashing in the dark while the sequencers played a helicopter in a rainstorm manned by mutant jazz robots. It was very cool but history failed to even register that we were called The Waste Band, Screw The Tap and many other names. A series of much cuter bedsit synth players beat us into the charts.
In 1985 I did something almost commercial. Back in the day, patches for synths were printed in music technology magazines. Spotting a niche in the market I wrote a type-entry DX7 editor for the Commodore 64 called Vole. A good typist could enter a patch sheet in about 30 seconds—on other editors it would take all afternoon. On the DX7’s lavish 32 character screen it took all day. I sold a few and still use the library of DX patches stashed in my TX802. The voice editor machine code is the most satisfying thing I ever did with computers.
The inward stream of rejection letters finally overwhelmed the outward flow of demos but I carried on writing and recording at home.
I upgraded my Commodore 64 Steinberg to Atari C-Lab Notator synched to tape with Unitor. The Atari was the best computer music workstation I ever used. I later tried the Macintosh packages—Logic, Opcode and Performer—but abandoned music computers completely in the early Nineties. In that lifeless, lumbering software it was as though tedium and bewilderment had been automated and packaged for home use.
I spent the 1990s writing songs and music, and got quite good at it. I also got the hang of recording audio and explored how the music business worked in more detail.
I discovered the Internet and ended up working in e-Commerce and management consultancy. The web economy changed business forever until the two-fingered riposte of the Dot Com Crash changed it all back again. In a fit of pre-Millennial tension I made another attempt to get my songs used commercially. ISA, SWG, GISC and Bandit offered to smooth the way to success. I joined up, then bailed out rapidly as I discovered I knew more than they did. Planning a renewed assault on the world of publishing I organised what I had learned about the business. My nephew Steve worked at BMG in the 1990s and later ran his own record label and managed a truculent megastar. He helped me fill in the gaps and I began to think about a DIY release.
Soon after 2000 I suddenly got very ill. Lying in bed week after week the idea of Bemuso took shape. It would be a help site for the DIY community alongside my Alien Wireless (folk rock) and Austin Torpedo (country rock) recordings. As I recuperated in 2002 I built the site with help from nephew Tony and brother Mark. The success of the DIY pages was unexpected but after Napster and MP3.com the traditional music industry was sicker than I was. The site grew rapidly from half a dozen pages to well over a hundred. Things were changing fast and soon DIY downloads were as popular as homebrew CDs.
The music side didn’t go so smoothly. USA telecomms firm Alien brought out a product called Wireless and bagged the dot com address, and a group of Norwegian rockers cornered the Scandinavian market as Austin Torpedo... well, it is a good name. My next music project will probably be called something else. I have enough good songs to make quite a few CDs and I hope to put some extras online, and possibly podcast. But I found myself spending a lot more time on the site than I did on the music, discussing the changing music industry with new friends online.
Since Bemuso appeared on the web I’ve compared notes with many more musicians and writers in the same boat. Their wisdom and experience on a range of subjects has added to my observations from 30 years loitering in the foyer of success. I put the diagrams and text together over a 10 year period and they’re still growing as I discover more. There are several new sections in the wings that need some work before they go online.
Today, I live happily ever after with my wife and our cats in Essex. Bemuso is a great success and helps hundreds of people every day. Universities, colleges, the Musician’s Union, royalty societies and many other organisations use material from the site. I research the music biz and write full time and who knows, I might even get a record out this year.
| camdenterrorbulb | @ | bemuso | • | com |
(Sorry, I don’t have a clickable email address because the spambots always find it.)
*Google tells me the Queen rock ‘n’ roll medley included Jailhouse Rock, Stupid Cupid, Bama Lama Bama Loo, Be Bop A Lula, Shake Rattle And Roll, and Big Spender.
