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Boys Play Nicely: My first band was called The Marmites, and we got together at Primary school when I was eight. We only had one number, a comedy version of ‘Hey Hey We’re The Monkees’, which went ‘Hey Hey We’re The Marmites, people say we spread it around….’ By my reckoning, this means I’ve been playing in bands for more than forty years… At secondary school, Newhaven Tideway, I played in a band called Ruby Crystal and The Diamonds, but it was not until I went to university in Wales in the seventies that it started getting serious. Together with a few pals I formed a punk band called…. well, we went through a few name changes, but the only one I can admit to was ‘The Repeaters’. My pal Perry Venus was the bass player. In 1979 we moved down to Brighton, and renamed ourselves ‘The Airtight Garage’, but personal tensions pulled the thing apart after a couple of years. One of the main tensions was between me and the drummer. I like pop music, while he seemed to like dreary overblown post-prog twiddly nonsense. This didn’t stop us working together however; he and I recruited a pal from Ruby Crystal days, and in 1981 we moved to Manchester, which seemed at the time to be the most exciting place for music in Britain. Unfortunately, the tension between pop and dreary overblown post-prog twiddly nonsense boiled over, and after several fist fights, we decided to call it a day, and I moved back to Brighton. Back in Brighton, around 1982, I was recruited by some guys I knew vaguely from school to form Newhaven’s first (indeed only) super-group. The bass player hand picked all the musicians he liked the most from around the estates of my home town, and he picked me as the singer. I was flattered. We were called The National Game, and for three years or so we played all over the south-east. Radio Caroline described us as ‘the best unsigned band in Britain’, which was nice. I suspect that we wouldn’t have stayed unsigned for ever, except for one slight problem; I didn’t really like the music. Still; success loomed ever closer, and although our old friend ‘the musical difference’ was very much in evidence, I put up and tried to shut up. My day job was so unutterably horrible (I worked for Mecca Bookmakers in and around Brighton), that I would have cheerfully played dreary overblown post-prog nonsense for ever if I thought it would get me out of there. In 1984 I got a job running a thing called The Newhaven Music and Video Workshop, and I met a lot of new musicians. There was Paul Sanderson, a tenor sax player, Gary Cove, an alto sax player and relentless experimentalist, Sue Lynch, who had a voice like Astrid Gilberto, a die-hard thrash punk guitarist called Chris Doyle, Chis Page, a fine bass player, a drummer called Little Dave, Andy Trombo (who played trombone) and Rikki Patton, who I’d known since primary school, and who was quite simply the best guitarist in the world. (He still is, but he’s as mad as a tree. He appears as Mad Rikki in my novel ‘In Southern Waters’. He mostly plays with Arthur ‘Fire’ Brown these days.) But above all I met Pete French. Frenchy was 16, and I was 24. He played drums in a local reggae band called ‘Inspiration’, which was something of a misnomer, quite frankly. He played piano, too, quite brilliantly, and had just started a music course at Brighton Art College. We used to sit about arguing about music; he liked reggae and jazz, and I still thought pop music was the only authentic working class music; pop and country. We argued in a good way; the differences were creative; and we left our bands and recruited our pals for a new mad funky/poppy/jazzy/experimental outfit, We were called The Mood Index Continuum. Sorry, but we were. And we were brilliant. Utterly utterly brilliant. I wish I had some recordings to play you, but I don’t. You’ll just have to trust me on this. And then after a couple of years, we split up, in a horrible and ugly way. If you’ve read my book ‘Parallel Lines’ you may get some idea of some of our problems. I gave it up, and went off to the hills of Radnorshire. Frenchy kept The Mood Index going, with a new line-up, and recruited a new singer, called Katherine Wood, a diva goddess. A few times I went along to hear the new line-up, and it made me cry to hear Kath’s astounding voice singing my lyrics. She’s a marvel and a wonder; and she had a Number One hit back in the nineties with a band called Goldbug. In 1990 I moved to Lancaster to become a mature student, and I started another college band. We were called The Prime Movers, and we weren’t half bad. Lancaster is a good place for musicians to work, because there are plenty of gigs, and a thing called The Lancaster Musicians Co-Op, where you rehearse and record. In 1992 Frenchy reappeared in my life, and insisted that we write some new songs. Which we did; about 250 of them over 5 years by my estimate. We recorded some of them with a 15 piece band for an album which we released in 1997, called ‘Lino Women and Song; the Many Moods of The Mood Index’…. you can hear the first track on www.myspace.com/themoodindexcontinuum Rikki still plays guitar for us; and Katherine Wood sings back-up on the first track, though it’s something of an insult to have an extra-ordinary singer like her backing up an alright one like me! But I couldn’t stand Frenchy’s perfectionism, and his lack of enthusiasm for live work. In ten years, I think we’ve played one gig. He’s recorded more stuff since then, supposedly for another album, but I suspect that his slow work rate means that it will never really see the light of day. There are three tracks from this magnum opus on the myspace website, however, and I hope you enjoy them. You never know, he might get around to finishing it one day; to my ears it sounds great now, but he is still striving after something, though I know not what. Perfectionism is the enemy of art. After the album came out, Pete and I had another of our periodic fallings out (it’s a thing musicians do), and I longed to play live again. I was approached by a shady looking character called Chas Ambler, who seduced me by saying ‘You’re the only man in Lancaster who knows how to sing middle of the road properly.’ How could I resist? Thus was born Your Dad, which is… er… very hard to categorise. It’s a sort of music and comedy act, though the comedy has always been incidental to the music. Perfectionism never raises its ugly head. For ten happy years we’ve gigged all over the shop, most famously, I guess, at the Glastonbury Festival, where we keep getting booked for various mad events. You can see something of what we do by visiting Chas’s website, www.chasambler.com, and clicking on the Your Dad link. As you’ll see, Chas is up to all sorts of different things; one of his projects is a ska band called The Guns of Navarone, whose drummer is Pete French. What goes around comes around, I guess.These days, as well as playing with Chas, I sing for an occasional country pop band called Little Dolly Daydream; and I sing guest slots for whosover wants me. Singing is still one of my greatest pleasures; and I hope that if you go onto the websites, you’ll enjoy what you hear. |
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