Megadom’s Meanderin’

[Megadom]

I am inspired to create a bit of a blog thread as a small tribute to the fantastic Rathbone’s Ramblin’. Like many occasional visitors to Talk Porty I look forward to reading through every single post Mr Rathbone makes. I thought ‘Remember the days of the old school yard’ was hard to beat – but Mr Rathbone’s recent tales of his pals’ teenage adventures in sixties Edinburgh music and fashion are pitch perfect.

So… though a Porty resident for a decade plus – and an Edinburgh resident for a decade beyond that, I actually grew up in Yorkshire and my formative teenage years in the seventies were in Leeds. Perhaps my own tales could be a nice complement to Mr Rathbone’s, set in different times and with a slightly different cut of trouser.

I had no control over the fixed point in time when I first developed any interest in music of course. I would have loved to have been with Rathbone at that mysterious Who concert in 1965 – and even more so the Dylan concert the year after. But I was 14 in 1976 - so that’s where I have to start. I’m now in the last year of my fifth decade and really less interested in music than I’ve ever been I suppose. However, we did have some great times in those days negotiating our way through prog and rock, then punk, then Smiths student heaven and on to countless numbers of Fall gigs attended (how great to be able to go back in time and deselect the duff ones though). Later came reggae, jazz, a bit of avant garde and onwards, more recently, to a few sobering ‘anniversary tour of the album’ gigs. It’s unlikely that a tune would have me bouncing round the room with exhilaration these days, but back in the seventies it wasn’t. And I doubt I’ll forget what it felt like.

[Megadom]

Three of us hung around together back then; Dave, Andy and me. A couple of other characters drifted in and out but mainly it was the 3 of us. We’d all passed the 11+ and ended up at a typical northern grammar school; the last intake as it happened before the comprehensive education system was introduced in England the following year in 1975. I think a few old blowhards wanted to prove a point with us and we were duly ruthlessly streamed and segregated at the first opportunity. We ended up in the top ‘Latin’ stream and quickly started worrying that we weren’t quite like the rest of them there.

Unlike the rest of the flimsy specimens in the class, we could just about make it into the sports teams in our year which helped – as did meeting up with the girls from the nearby Secondary Modern – whilst also differentiating us a little more. But a shared enthusiasm for the music that it seemed like only the sixth formers at the school knew anything about at the time was what really set us apart.

Our first gig was in 1976. It would have been splendid if it had been the famous Sex Pistols performance at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester. But instead it was the strange and fairly obscure, but in many ways terrific Van der Graaf Generator. We knew nothing about the band and had heard not one note by them. We’d just started to read ‘Sounds’ music paper each week, saw an advert for their new album and that they were playing Leeds Grand Theatre the following week. So we were off. With a lift there and back from one of our mums.

[Megadom]

I can’t remember every detail of the night – but it was clear none of us could make much of what was going on at all. We’d heard nothing before like the wailing vocals, doomy organ and freeform parping and squeaking they were doing at the time – and in fact occasionally still do now. I spent a good deal of time watching the audience in fact - pretty much all male, hairy coats and hairy chins. But it was undeniably grown up stuff and we knew it wasn’t like anything our peers could ever have heard. I bought an Army greatcoat the next weekend. It was at least 4 sizes too big for me.

We became for a while obsessed with all things VDGG. You had to force yourself through each album about 6 times before you started to appreciate the tunes and the drama rather than just the cacophony. They were famously admired by John Lydon himself of course, and I’m still a little fond of them now. But in the car on the way back we were pretty much baffled. A couple of months later we made the same journey home from a concert by the fabulously tuneful Be Bop DeLuxe and argued about which end of the spectrum we should set up camp in. But that’s jumping forward over our second outing.

Next time… we head, straight from school and still in uniform, to see Hawkwind supported by the recently formed Motorhead at Bradford St Georges Hall and from the front stalls are confronted by the marvelously intimidating Stacia.

[Megadom]

Motorhead were the warm up for Lemmy’s old bandmates in Hawkwind. The main thing I can remember is that they made the loudest noise I’d ever heard. Hawkwind followed – just as loud but with added giant glowing mushrooms brought out onto the stage in the interval, possibly by Wilhelm Reich. Then Stacia materialised - six feet plus of furiously whirling topless Amazon dancer - Robert Crumb would have had an aneurism on the spot. What she made of the 3 uniformed and wide eyed schoolboys gazing up at her we’ll never know. It didn’t matter though - it felt to us like we’d arrived somewhere.

I suppose I had first started around the age of 9 or 10 listening to the more grown up stuff from my dad’s records – pulling out Beatles albums to begin with, then the Who’s early seventies material – selected from his worryingly large collection of James Last LPs. Then on to Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells (featuring Viv Stanshall) and Van Morrison’s terrific Too Late to Stop Now live album (see later on for both).

It also quickly became apparent to us aged 11 / 12 in the first 2 years of high school that the older lads had access to lots of bands we knew nothing about. They painted their favourite bands’ names in Arthurian fonts onto their knapsacks. ‘Sounds’ weekly music paper was still the only source of information on the music I wanted to hear at the time. Articles and adverts within its pages referenced similarly exotically named bands that you’d never hear on the radio or see on TOTP. So Andy, Dave and I also decided to transfer these band names using felt tip pens and sometimes poster paint to our own newly acquired Army Surplus rucksacks full of schoolbooks. Many of the bands I chose I still hadn’t yet heard a note of – that would come later. But if their name sounded good and the advert for their latest album looked exciting, that was enough. Simon Stokes & the Black Whip Thrill Band attracted a few comments I remember. One of the other lads in our class, Richard Kirk - I remember him having an endearingly dry, understated wit despite looking like a teenage Tommy Cooper – came to school one day with a load of completely made up band names all over his own knapsack. Many were much better than the real ones and his bag became widely admired – both by those in the know - and not. A nice gesture we agreed.

[Megadom]

I particularly looked forward each issue of Sounds to John Peel’s weekly column, which featured a photo of him sat in front of an incredibly scantily clad woman and seemed to me to be riskily unreconstructed even then. As well as the column, I’d just tracked town his Radio 1 show too and at the end of that year came John Peel’s 1976 Festive 50, which shaped my musical enthusiasms for decades to come – still does now to a degree. I listened to every minute of the whole thing running up to Christmas each night from 10 til midnight, with the 50 tracks saved for the 2nd hour of each show. I drank up everything I heard. Despite the tracks being voted for only by the listeners, there was thankfully very little twiddly ELP type rubbish. Yes got their one (marginally) acceptable effort And You and I in at #50 with a bit of a grump and I remember Peel was openly disparaging about Deep Purple’s hopeless Child in Time for instance. Most of the songs I thought sublime.

The following years’ Festive 50’s were completely different of course as everything changed with punk. 1977 saw forerunner bands like the wonderful Ramones and the Motors, with the Sex Pistols and the Clash dominating 1978 and Joy Division 1980 etc. My own tastes followed – I usually got there eventually a couple of years after the shows. But it’s the 1976 list that stayed with me – The Legendary Stardust Cowboy’s Paralysed got as high as #15 for instance – I mean, really. I still have the odd ‘70’s Peel show on tape / cracklingly transferred to CD now. My favourite is one with a dozen pieces from Ivor Cutler, including the fantastic Fremsley (better even than Life in a Scotch Sitting Room Vol 2? – discuss), which immediately precedes ‘a piece of music by the Led Zeppelins, called Kashmir.’

[Megadom]

And how about the great Viv Stanshall sessions only ever broadcast on Peel shows across the Seventies, although thankfully some of the material later appearing on his Rawlinson End CD. Writing rarely matched from then up until today - my 12 year old son’s as impressed now by ‘His eyebrows were like limp bats, his face a crumpled tissue upon which a lobster might well have wiped its bottom’ as I still am by ‘A pale sun poked impudent marmalade fingers through the grizzled lattice glass and sent the shadows scurrying, like convent girls menaced by a tramp’. I headed back to St Georges Hall Bradford in my last year at school in 1981 with a friend – the local vicar’s daughter Sarah Wood - to see Viv supporting Taj Mahal and due to come on stage after the opening act (a steel calypso band I seem to remember). After the inevitable shuffling and half hour delay, an announcer informed the audience that Viv had ‘gone missing, presumed ill disposed’ and so the headline act came straight on. Sarah had to get the last bus home so we left shortly afterwards, to find Viv on his own, helplessly rolling drunk and in floods of tears sat in the middle of the stairs outside the auditorium. A career-long alcoholic and crippled by stage fright – though genuinely on his day the sharpest wit in the land - he was completely off his face and beyond anything we could say or any help we could offer. A great shame.

But that was later, and meanwhile, Andy, Dave and I are still stuck in the mid - seventies.

Next time… erm, long album tracks.

[Megadom]

For the solipsistic teenager is there anything better than 15 serious, concentrated minutes alone in your bedroom with ‘the long track on the album’? - anticipating the thickness of the ring in the vinyl which announces 10 minutes plus rather than the normal 4 minutes - knowing that your parents and siblings just don’t get it like you do? Well actually yes, I can think of several other better things - but this particular one’s in the top 10. Number 6 maybe. Or 5. Mind you, my teenage self would probably have insisted that stumbling around the local misty graveyard in a long mac, failing to get the settings right on a 2nd hand SLR, made the top 10 too.

Anyhow, it’s not a not a great leap from ‘the long track’ up to the summit - the side-long album track. Ah, but which one’s the best then? I include in the following list the truly side long songs – but also the ‘nearly a whole side’ tracks, with a little tiddler song shoved on there as well of course.

Well, it has to be Pink Floyd’s Echoes for me – recorded before the band became the pompous and miserabilist shower they ended up as. Maybe the nearest rival for top spot might be Soft Machine’s Moon in June - not the Third album version (4 sides of a double album with each side one long track? – come on lads, really) - but the Peel Top Gear session version with Robert Wyatt singing beautifully about the philosophical nature of collaborative song writing, music consumption and the tea machine down the corridor. Glasgow’s Mark Boyle links both groups of course. I went to a Boyle Family retrospective at the Modern Art Gallery in 2003. It was great to see alongside the huge pieces from random sites around the world, an installation comprising the marvelous psychedelic light show he once projected onto the bands when they were both house groups at London’s UFO club in the sixties. And as Rathbone points out, it was the same Boyle light show that was also used at the legendary Technicolour Dream at Alexandra Palace.

[Megadom]

There are plenty of other long track contenders of course – Can’s Yoo Doo Right (edited down from a six-hour improvisation to a mere twenty minutes), Eno’s Evening Star, or maybe Dark Star from Live Dead - even the gothic broom cupboard that is Van der Graaf Generator’s Plague of Lighthouse Keepers. In fact I suspect there’s a decent top ten to be had from the tiddler tracks mentioned above as well - Horizons from Foxtrot in at 1 min 41 secs anyone? Much better than Supper’s Ready which fills the rest of the side (that is if you can bear any Genesis at all, of course).

Some of my favourite memories from these times are of our regular trips on the bus to Leeds Hyde Park cinema for post pub 11 pm double bill student screenings. As often as not we’d end up baffled by a Pasolini or a Fellini double bill. But sometimes it would be a pair of concert films eg Scorsese and The Band’s Last Waltz (terrific) with Zeppelin’s Song Remains the Same (oh dear) or D.A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back (wonderful) with the Monkees’ Head (hmm). Unlike most of the audience we were too young to have spent the last 5 hours downing pints, but we joined in with the generally raucous atmosphere. Best night of all – not because of the films (Live at Pompeii and Genesis – Live, I think) – was when one guy provided an accompaniment of sustained, echoing and musically appropriate belching throughout the entire 3 hours. The round of applause he received at the end was generous and, we thought, well earned.

Next time… eek, singer-songwriters.

[Porty]

Loving it-keep it up.

[Megadom]

An odd time I suppose to get into singer songwriters in my mid teens... But in hindsight in fact it wasn’t all prog followed by punk. I vividly remember seeing Bruce Springsteen the first time on an Old Grey Whistle Test ‘Pick of the Year’ - video footage of him doing Rosalita live and getting dragged into the crowd by young women in the front row. A young Annie Nightingale glanced with a smile down the camera at me and commented that ‘they got him in the end, didn’t they’. I sometimes struggle not find him slightly laughable now - how dreadful was Born in the USA for instance – but at the time Rosalita represented pure excitement for me. Whenever I hear The Smiths sing ‘So, in my bedroom in those ugly new houses - I danced my legs down to the knees’, it’s that song I think of. (hmm - best Smiths song? – The Headmaster Ritual!)

It was the 1976 Festive 50 that introduced me to the key songs in the genre though – and Jackson Browne’s Late for the Sky more than any other. This surely was proper grown up stuff - and even now I doubt whether a more accurate and personal song has been written before or since about adult relationships. And it goes without saying of course I was clearly the only person in the entire school who was mature enough to relate to it.

[Megadom]

Another revelation for me was Roy Harper’s When an Old Cricketer Leaves the Crease – I later spent a good few afternoons in the Headingley stands at county games revising for my exams because of it. And of course there was Neil Young. I was too slow and missed the Edinburgh tickets a couple of years back - but made sure I saw him a few days later in London – wonderful. Out On The Weekend never fails to bring me up short – but I can never settle on whether it’s that or Only Love Can Break Your Heart that’s the key song.

Appearing on the same stage in the Last Waltz film, shown at the Hyde Park cinema, I was pleased to see a slightly tubby Van Morrison enter stage left, attempt a high kick and nearly topple over backwards. I’d always take his follow up Veedon Fleece album over the more well known Astral Weeks and from it, I thought Linden Arden Stole the Highlights as concise and ambiguous a Chekhovian tale within a song as I’d ever heard. I have some sympathy with the argument that Ivan only ever actually wrote 5 original songs and then spent the rest of his career recycling them. Having said that, they were 5 pretty good efforts.

[Megadom]

Dylan loomed large of course, first with Desolation Row then Blood on the Tracks. I’ve always loved narrative songs - Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts perhaps going up against Richard Thompson’s 1952 Vincent Black Lightning for top spot. And I loved You’re Gonna Make me Lonesome When You Go on the album - rhyming Go with ‘Verlaine and Rimbaud’ did my teenage self very nicely thank you. The song was later covered by Ben Watt and Tracy Thorn during my student Smiths days – more of this later. And the same Ben Watt did a nice duet with Robert Wyatt.

I’m not sure whether it might be a bit odd to include Robert Wyatt in the singer songwriter section. However he’s certainly written and sung the songs that have meant more to me over the years than just about any others. There are many (O Caroline, At Last I’m Free etc), but possibly Sea Song is the one. Don Paterson described it as “an impossibly lovely, weird affair; half maritime eroticism (‘partly fish, partly porpoise, partly baby sperm whale / am I yours, are you mine to play with’ – ok, it loses something in print), half wry English demotic - ‘Joking apart, when you’re drunk you’re terrific / when you’re drunk, I like you mostly late at night; you’re quite alright…’ It closes with an ecstatic coda; an endlessly repeated rising chord sequence over which Wyatt improvises a beautiful wordless vocal”. For my wife.

Finally, much as I love the singer songwriter genre, it can often be a spoken word track that stands out for me particularly. Here are 3 more recent examples;
Mary Gauthier – March 11, 1962 (staggering).
James Yorkston - Woozy with Cider (exquisite).
Aidan Moffat and Bill Wells – The Copper Top (both of the above).

Back in the 70’s, it was clear that punk was about to change things but Dave and Andy and I still had to wave farewell to the decade properly.

Next time… Led Zeppelin at Knebworth, 1979.

[Megadom]

Back in Summer 1979 we’d finished our O grades and just about everyone had fallen off the end the conveyor belt with sackfulls of grade A’s. The next 2 years of sixth form were to be very different – it was up to us to organise our own approach to study. Some found this liberating and drove themselves on to dizzying academic success. Others of us would take the opportunity to take our foot off the pedal.

I celebrated my O grade results by getting a job for the whole summer hols stacking shelves at the local ASDA – at 75p an hour for a 40 hour week I came away with 30 quid. It felt odd pointing out the baked beans to my Latin teacher, Mr Walters who shopped there. Like some of Rathbone’s teachers, he was a great man unless you encountered him in the classroom. I can still remember desperately trying to keep down a spasm of laughter when he came out with one of his trademark barks and I happened to be sat behind Sarah Wood (see above) watching her shoulders at the time. I thought they were going to shoot up past her ears and just carry on going.

I cycled to and from ASDA on my Falcon drop handle bar bike. It was a real drag each morning, 3 miles relentlessly up hill, but the downhill return journey made it worthwhile. After several weeks in the job, I found myself cycling home as fast as I’d ever managed so far, since all the traffic lights for the first time were on green. Hurtling through the last set, the steering started to feel a little odd so I gave the handlebars a bit of a yank. The cheap welded joint with the steering column failed and they came away. Since they weren’t attached to the bike any more I panicked and let go of them – without pausing to think that the brake cables were still connected to them and would have worked. I grabbed hold of the steering post and looked ahead to where the road forked – I was heading straight towards the plate glass window of the tailors shop in the middle of the fork. Thinking that this was probably it for me – but that a road kill death might be preferable to being sliced up by shards of glass, I leaned over to fall off sideways. Somehow that was enough to keep the bike on the road, swerving off down one side of the fork. By now, 3 or 4 cars had spotted the handle bars still attached by the cables bouncing around behind the bike and followed me the last mile downhill until I slowed down and came to a halt. I was clutching the column so tightly I couldn’t let go of it and so fell over sideways, still sat on the bike, onto a grass verge at the side of the road. Several drivers got out to check that I was ok and I assured them I was – although jelly legs meant that it was another 5 minutes before I could stand up. For a few moments I had genuinely thought that I was going to die and everything had indeed gone into slow motion like it was supposed to. Later that evening with Dave and Andy however, I joked that in those moments I had actually caught a glimpse of rock Valhalla. There was only one band there of course - and they weren’t taking things too seriously.

[Megadom]

With Zeppelin I always loved that no matter how big the stage was, you never ever saw them standing more than a few feet away from each other. None of your Jagger and Richards stuff at the end of their own personal catwalks thirty feet out into the crowd. Dave, Andy and I decided that when we finally got our own band together then we’d likely be the same – the inevitable result of being the tightest band in the world. Despite their laughable excesses, deep down you knew the important thing was that they were all players. No other band could get away with plonking down 3 stools at the front of the Earls Court stage and wedging 30 minutes of their acoustic stuff into the running order.

Wiki reminds me that Knebworth in 1979 had ‘the largest stage ever constructed, 570 loo seats, 750 feet of urinals and the biggest rock band in the world - the end of an era. Both of the 2 concerts overran, noise complaints were received from 7 miles away. The rubbish team struggled to cope with clearing the arena between the shows. The Police believed that 200,000 people had turned up each night, Sainsburys lost 150 trolleys and Tesco's 75% of their stock’. We bought our tickets really only for the headliners of course, but we were quite happy to also take in The New Barbarians (featuring Ronnie Wood and Keith Richards), Todd Rundgren and Utopia, Southside Johnny, Fairport Convention, Marshall Tucker, Commander Cody and Chas & Dave.

I would love to be able to tell you we hitched all the way there and back that August. But Andy had arranged for his dad to drive us. Harry was an archetypal small town sole trader - Masonic lodge and local rugby club – but a truly lovely fella nevertheless. He did small scale wholesale food distribution to corner shops in the area from the back of a van - often catering packs. On a memorable week’s holiday once when 3 seventeen year old boys were somehow allowed to rent a leaky motor cruiser on the Norfolk Broads, we got through a catering tin of 100 hot dogs in a single sitting.

Andy’s dad dropped us off the night before somewhere near Stevenage and we walked the last few miles in amongst the hairies. Everyone was allowed to enter the site during the night and having got places pretty near the front we attempted a few hours’ sleep in bin liners before dawn broke. It was a great day. When it was over around 2 am we met up with Andy’s Dad again in his old second hand Jag, parked up in a lay by at a discrete distance. I think he’d visited with relatives during the day, but still he must have had to sit waiting for several hours in the car for us before we finally pitched up.

Next time… Punk!

[Megadom]

Around the same time as punk and new wave I perhaps ought to record for completeness that I did have a (very) brief flirtation with the New Romantics around 1980. I’m not convinced anything much of worth came out of that little movement except perhaps Heaven 17’s (We Don't Need This) Fascist Groove Thang and maybe some early Japan stuff? I was enamoured of a particular girl at school who had a thing for the bands. One evening I rode the bus into Leeds to meet her at a club wearing one of my mum’s blouses, voluminous silk trousers, full pancake and black eyeliner and lipstick. It never happened again.

The music heard at lunch time in the sixth form common room was no longer side long album tracks. I mainly played lots of Talking Heads – and pretty much stuck with David Byrne his whole career seeing him countless times. I also seem to remember being persistently enthusiastic about playing the Fatal Microbes’ Violence Grows (sorry) and Young Marble Giants’ Colossal Youth (I was right). It was most often the urgent stuff I really loved though – again at Bradford St Georges Hall an Undertones gig seemed to me the most engaging show I’d seen to date. Best song? - You've Got My Number (Why Don't You Use It)? And on a school ski holiday with a long coach trip involved, it was the songs on the other kids’ tapes I now enjoyed the most - Red Frame/White Light, the Only Ones’ Another Girl, Another Planet and Magazine’s Shot by Both Sides. In hindsight lots of the stuff from this period now sounds like terrible tripe but it’s difficult to ague that singles like these weren’t small masterpieces.

[Megadom]

By 1981 I was at Liverpool University and there were loads of gigs by combinations of Echo and the Bunnymen, The Mighty Wah and Teardrop Explodes. The last lot did a 5 night residency in a derelict warehouse going under the name of the Pyramid Club. We went every night and had requests played for us by name – a girl on my corridor went out with Troy Tate. They were supported by the terrific Ravishing Beauties, featuring Virginia Astley, who went on to make one of the most exquisite instrumental albums ever - From Gardens Where We Feel Secure. Many of the tracks were named for WH Auden poems which as a result were transformed for me from schoolboy-intimidating pieces to old friends. It’s probably unlikely the album could claim to contain any top 5 rated individual instrumental tracks though. Boards of Canada’s ROYGBIV? Deep Purple’s instrumental version of Fireball? Kraftwerk’s Ohm Sweet Ohm?

Siouxsie and the Banshees were the band we ending up seeing the most at the time. It was Andy mainly who organised us to go, but Dave and I were very nearly as keen. He had a particular thing for a song that wasn’t on any of the albums and they only played live – Pulled to Bits I think. Andy left school midway through the sixth form and trail-blazed ahead of the rest of us first on a step-through Honda C70 and later with an ancient Vauxhall Viva. Between these two he’d drive us around to countless Siouxsie gigs in his dad’s small delivery van. We went to one show in Scarborough I think it was – afterwards parking up on a campsite well after midnight. The next morning we woke to find muddy van tracks weaved in and around just about every tent on the site, missing some of them by inches.

Andy had started work as a journalist on the local paper and eventually ended up on the Yorkshire Evening Post and got married to his girlfriend whom we all liked from school. Later on, around the mid 80’s he and I did the 'Lyke Wake Walk' together across the North York Moors. My dad had done it a few times when I was a kid. It's a 40 - 45 mile walk, supposed to be done in under 24 hrs from the western border of the National Park directly east across the moor ending up at the coast. We set out at 4am as dawn broke and did 40 miles or so across empty landscapes – I had borrowed his boots and he wore his dad’s. It had been a warm summer and the ground was baked hard underfoot. Andy had terrible blisters but I felt fine until my knee just suddenly gave out completely and I couldn't stand on it at all. So Andy bless him, carried me on his back the last 3 miles until we eventually finished around midnight. A few years later unfortunately, he and Wendy went through a very messy divorce and for reasons we can’t fathom even now, he severed all contact with Dave and me, despite all our efforts to keep in touch. I still miss him.

Next time… Jazz…mmm…

[Megadom]

Back in 1980 in the sixth form, life at school seemed a lot less regimented – it didn’t even seem too much of a problem if you didn’t turn up sometimes. I spent a lot of time round at the house of my girlfriend, where the singer songwriter flame was still burning fiercely. Our favourite tracks were Little Feat’s Long Distance Love (still good), Jackson Browne’s Before the Deluge (maybe) and Springsteen’s Darkness at the Edge of Town (erm). But the other groove we wore out together that summer, ahem, was a 12” single that had been released 2 years earlier of Weather Report’s Birdland. I guess this was jazz-fusion lite but fantastic nevertheless. It was to be several years later, but it was this song that led me first to early 70’s Miles Davis (Bitches Brew etc) then to his 60’s albums including inevitably Kind of Blue. Alongside these I took in Coltrane, Dexter Gordon and Charles Mingus. I also loved the fact that is was Horace Silver’s Song for My Father where Steely Dan nicked Rikki Don’t Lose That Number from and that Ornette Coleman’s Change of the Century furnished Ian Dury with the riff for Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll. And it was starting from their jazz stuff in fact, that I then went backwards to Soft Machine’s classic first phase. It was nicely familiar reading how they’d started out as a group of lads playing records to one another round at Robert Wyatt’s parents’ house in Canterbury.

[Megadom]

The key jazz album for me – in fact maybe any type of album – became Art Pepper’s Blues for the Fisherman. After my first degree in Liverpool I’d started on a one year postgraduate teacher training course in York. I shared a house with a guy called Simon with Rabelaisian locks doing a Philosophy PhD, who although only 21 spent all his time smoking a pipe in front of the fire. Returning from the great local pubs, the John Bull and The Spreadeagle, we’d play Make a List, Make a Wish over and over. York also had many lively memories for Dave, Andy and me. A few years earlier – this was in the days when pubs were obliged to close in the afternoons – we’d often get the train to York to attempt to drink a pint in as many different pubs as we could when they were open between 11 and 3pm. (12).

I suppose Pepper was a good example of those many musicians who produced material of incredible beauty whilst leading pretty venal lives in reality – prison, heroin and gun crime in his case. I saw Arthur Lee in Edinburgh a few months before he died in 2006 – he also had spent a good many years of his career in chokey for firearms and drugs offences. Even at 61 he somehow managed to seem menacingly and worryingly unpredictable as he stumbled around the stage. And yet Love’s Forever Changes is often cited, quite rightly, as one of the most beautiful albums ever made.

[Megadom]

Dave had married an American woman in the second half of the 80’s and went on to forge a fantastically successful career for himself. In passing, his brother-in-law is one of the most affable and earnest blokes you could ever hope to meet - of course he shares Dave’s wife’s maiden name, Krutsch - but livens things up a bit with his forename, Randy. I like to think I persuaded Dave away from a bit of an obsession he had with collecting 20+ albums by erstwhile Tangerine Dream member Klaus Schulze and into the arms of jazz. Over more recent years I also got him to agree about how great a band called The Necks are – sort of jazz minimalist electronica, with each CD consisting of just one track lasting 60mins – take that, long track merchants. I failed to interest him in my later enthusiasms for Steve Reich and Terry Riley though – or Stockhausen, whom I saw at the Queens Hall shortly before he died and where the wooden pews tested my own enthusiasm over the course of 3 hours.

Dave eventually moved for good to the States some 3 years back. I’ve not seen him since his Dad’s funeral in Leeds back in the summer of last year – which is where, of course, many of these tales came from. It’s the longest we’ve gone without meeting up since we first sat together at grammar school in 1974.

I heard Neu’s Hallogallo on the radio yesterday. I was surprised that it sounded as fresh and up to date as anything being made today, or that has been made over the last 40 years. Because it occurred to me as I listened that it had actually been recorded in 1971, when I was 9, and shuffling through my dad’s record collection for the first time.

Next time… I’m away for a spell. So for the time being – Adieu!