Monthly Archives: January 2013

“Synaesthetic jumbles of sights and sounds: nursery rhymes and test card music refracted through the rainy daytime, off-school ennui of pre-Freeview Britain.” Broadcast, Pram, Plone and Novak in the 1990s.

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Pram were the first. I remembered Rosie and Matt from Birmingham indie gigs: Matt regularly turning up to Tuesday night indie hangout The Click Club, where Primal Scream, Talulah Gosh and Edwyn Collins all played. He always had a carrier bag, turned up alone and wore his fringe longer than any of us. He seemed painfully shy, but we finally got talking at a Chills gig at The Mermaid (we could hardly avoid each other – there were only about 10 other people there). Matt and Rosie had a band called Friends Of The Family who released one alright single and one absolutely stunning one called Lucibele Green. In 1988, they supported The Go-Betweens at Warwick University and shortly after that, I spoke to Matt for the last time in a decade. Waiting for the 63 bus on Bristol Road North, he told me that he and Rosie and formed a new band called Pram.

Moseley Scene 1987-2006 by Pete Paphides on Mixcloud

Pram signed to Too Pure (later moving to Domino) and finessed a dusty spook pop that occasionally veered into something approaching jazz territory – or at least the sort of jazz an attic room of Victorian toys might make when the hatch was closed and the humans were asleep. I’ve a hunch that if Oliver Postgate had made Bagpuss 25 years later, Pram would surely have been the group he would have called upon to provide the music. However, by the time they began to receive their first national reviews, I had left Birmingham. I didn’t know what was fermenting in the Moseley streets that once seemed so bohemian to an Acocks Green boy like me. In 1994 or 1995, my near-neighbour in London, Bob Stanley told me about Broadcast, using the language of test cards, Morricone and half-forgotten 70s children’s dramas to describe their first two singles on Duophonic. But when The Book Lovers EP appeared in 1996, my expectations emphatically trumped. To listen was to experience something like a Proustian landslide. I remember hearing both Pram’s The Legendary Band Of Venus and Broadcast’s Message From Home for the first time, feeling overwhelmed by these synaesthetic jumbles of sights and sounds: nursery rhymes and test card music refracted through the rainy daytime, off-school ennui of pre-Freeview Britain.

I don’t expect that this is what Pram and Broadcast intentionally set out to achieve with their early records. This is the sort of music that musicians of a certain generation and sensibility – with access to the same records and junk shops – would have made anyway. And, almost by way of proof, the streets spidering out from The Trafalgar pub yielded more bands who – whilst not all sounding like each other – all seemed to intersect with one another. Plone numbered just three. The instrumental analogue pop of their only album For Beginner Piano sometimes sounded like a playful half-brother to Kraftwerk’s Radio-Activity. Sounding a little like Pram, but with a greater emotional heft, Novak put out a string of superb singles – in particular Silver Seas and Blue Chinook – which portended exciting prospects. There were other groups too, many of them chronicled in the fanzine We Brought Our Friends. Back in 1988, I used to be in a band with Farfisa whizz Simon Vincent from L’Augmentation, whose Soleil seven-inch remains a masterpiece of deranged delirium. Back then, we called ourselves Maher Shalal Hash Baz, confident that there could never be another band on the planet who would ever give themselves such a preposterous name [sideways Eric Morecambe glance to camera].

By 1999, I was writing for Time Out. Despite being a London listings magazine, I somehow managed to persuade my editor to let me travel to Birmingham and write a piece on this burgeoning scene. I visited Broadcast in their unit at the city’s thriving arts hub The Custard Factory. They were hard at work on their second album The Noise Made By People. Trish Keenan played me a few songs being considered for inclusion on the record. They sounded incredible and, to the best of my recollection, poppier than anything that made it onto the record. That evening, my wife and I took Novak out for a balti in Balsall Heath, a few hundred yards down the road from Moseley, courtesy of Time Out. The following day, I visited Plone and Pram. I don’t remember too much about our conversations. The interviews were made more complicated by the fact that the odd member of one band was actually at the house of another. Most of the groups seemed to have members who subsidised their music by working at a local video rental shop. I felt tremendously fond of all of them. Proud too, although I had no right to be – I had played no part in their success. The picture with this piece was taken on the roof of The Custard Factory (sadly, I can’t remember who took it). I remember thinking it would be important to photograph all the bands together, because, when they all went on to become hugely successful, this would be an important piece of musical history.

Of course, there was no huge commercial success, although Broadcast amassed a modest global cult following for the four albums they made prior to Trish Keenan’s death in January 2011. Beyond the M42, the world went about its business oblivious to the storm of intense creativity that, for a time, gripped this tiny part of Birmingham. Which, of course, only serves to make the photograph even more priceless.

(Thanks to Kirsten from Novak for the jpeg of the Time Out photo)

Lost Albums: Vashti Bunyan: Just Another Diamond Day (2008 documentary)

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This is a documentary I made with producer Laura Parfitt for the second series of Lost Albums on Radio 4. The main interview in the show was conducted with Vashti on a spring Monday morning, after I travelled on the sleeper to Edinburgh from London to see her. It was and remains an incredible privilege to hear the story of one of my all-time favourite albums from the person who made it.

Vashti Bunyan: Just Another Diamond Day (2008 documentary) by Pete Paphides on Mixcloud

PS. I’m sorry my picture keeps appearing on these things. I’ve yet to work out how to replace it.

“After four years of Freudian analysis I realized I had written Solitary Man about myself.” Neil Diamond, 2006

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The American PR briefly surveys the space between the chair and the coffee table, then she shakes her head. “He’ll need to stretch his legs out,” she frets. Then she pulls it back a little. That’s much better. Neil Diamond’s legs now have at least a foot of clearance. Happy that the suite is ready, she calls up for him. Within a minute, he walks straight past the chair and installs himself beside the window for a sunny morning view of the yachts on Chelsea Harbour. Asked to autograph a CD for an actor friend, he stalls on the phrase “continued success”: “Is it one ‘c’?” he enquires, “Now, ‘failure’ – I learned that one a long time ago.”

We are in the process of updating our mental files on Neil Diamond. In our minds, he’s suspended in a flared, sequined jumpsuit belting out Sweet Caroline, Cherry Cherry and Forever In Blue Jeans to stadia of cosy couples. In spite or perhaps because of his popularity, respect and cool have always been hard to come by. Asked by Robbie Robertson to appear in The Band’s star-studded 1976 farewell concert The Last Waltz, he stuck out like a surfer at a convent among the likes of Bob Dylan, Neil Young and Van Morrison. Having completed his turn, Diamond was infamously said to have bounded off stage and defied a waiting and astonished Dylan to “follow that!” The apocryphal story says a lot about how the singer has always been perceived by rock fans. While his peers spent the late 1960s urging us to turn on, tune in and drop out, Diamond’s 1968 album Velvet Gloves And Spit saw him attacking the countercultural mores of the age with The Pot Smoker’s Song. By the mid-80s, it seemed wholly unsurprising to hear that Diamond was accepting invitations to sing for the Reagans at The White House.

But age is a great leveller – and, as the acclaimed Rick Rubin-produced new album 12 Songs attests, 65 suits Neil Diamond well. Strummed requiems to his dissolved second marriage sit alongside paeans to his current girlfriend of ten years. Others – Hell Yeah, Man Of God – depict an artist baldly confronting his own mortality. Congratulate him and he’s swift to deflect the credit. It was Rubin who suggested the two get together and, to use Diamond’s words, “analyse why my records changed.” Would it have ever occurred to Diamond to do the same? “I don’t know,” he says. “As a recording artist, it’s very insidious what happens to you. You’re allowed more money from the record company, so instead of two string parts you might have forty. Instead of one trumpet, you have a whole brass section. It’s very easy to slip into that, and you go along with it without even thinking or listening back to the early records.”

Rubin, however, had not stopped listening to the classic run of singles Diamond cut for New York’s Bang label. Gathering material for the last of Johnny Cash’s American albums, he set aside Diamond’s brooding 1965 single Solitary Man as the title track – a compliment that practically swung the deal. “The way it works with Rick is that you get together and play lots and lots of records – then you discuss why they work. I wanted to play lots of rock’n’roll – because that was what I had grown up with. And Rick? Rick wanted to play my records, because that’s what he had grown up listening to. The biggest observation for me was that I liked what I heard.”

The experience might have prompted Diamond to re-evaluate what he was doing, were it not for the fact that he was already doing so. Much of 2003 was spent unwinding after a fifteen month tour that began just days after the collapse of the World Trade Centre. In the liner notes to 12 Songs, he writes, “Rolling into cities filled with shocked and heartbroken people and coaxing scared CNN viewers away from their TV’s…suddenly became a really important thing for us to do.” No doubt it helped that, with America, he had one song which justified the lofty mission statement. How did it feel to sing about “freedom’s light burning warm” in a song about his grandparents’ migration to Brooklyn?

“Well, it was all in the reactions,” he says, “which were among the most powerful I’ve ever seen. It felt like some kind of force that could lift people up a little bit or remove them from the horrible pall that had been hanging over everyone. But I can’t deny that wasn’t also emotionally exhausting to go through that night after night. It took a lot out of me.” When the tour finished, Diamond decamped to his cabin in the Rocky Mountains with no immediate plans to return. “I just wanted to get my brain back and find out what it was like to sleep in the same bed. Chopping wood to get a fire going. A simple, physical existence.” Before long though, he was taking notes, circling chords above key phrases. As a series of blizzards swirled around his cabin, the bare bones of 12 Songs began to take shape. By the time Rubin made the call, the singer had no shortage of music to play him.

Diamond says it took him a long time to realize that he thrives in retreat. “After four years of Freudian analysis I realized I had written Solitary Man about myself,” he smiles as though recounting a puzzle he was the last person to deduce. And yet the clues are littered throughout his career. He dropped out of medical school in order to break into songwriting. Of all the aspiring popsmiths checking into legendary songwriting hothouse The Brill Building – Mann & Weil, Greenwich & Barry; Bacharach & David; Goffin & King – Diamond was the only one who preferred to work alone. “It was a lot of fun,” he insists, “There really was not much pressure, except for finding money to eat, and I worked out a way to do that for less than 30 cents a day. Lunch was the meal I would always have. I would go to the Woolworths store because you could get a hoagy for 20 cents and a Coke for five cents – which left you enough money to buy a piece of candy for two cents. So that’s what I did every day for maybe a couple of years.”

It’s ironic that – both then and now – it should take austerity and solitude to bring out the best in one of America’s hugest grossing entertainers. And yet it’s not altogether surprising. Away from the stage, Diamond seems uncomfortable being the centre of attention. He’s self-deprecating too, claiming to prefer UB40’s blithe annihilation of Red Red Wine over his achingly plaintive original. Asked if he enjoyed his sole acting foray in The Jazz Singer, he exclaims, “Me, a novice, alongside Olivier, the greatest actor of his generation? It couldn’t end soon enough as far as I was concerned.” The reputation for arrogance might, in fact, stem from an inability to refrain from awkward utterances. He says he’s still mortified by the episode in 1968 when he played The Winter Gardens in New York and told the audience, “Tonight I’m Neil Diamond and I intend to own you” – “although,” he adds, “when I saw their faces, I just about rescued it by adding, ‘Hey, maybe I’ll settle for a long-term lease.’”

And the much-rumoured exchange with Dylan during The Last Waltz? Did Diamond really tell him to “follow that”? “What do you think?” comes the response, “I remember standing on the side of the stage and all these great artists were hanging out, watching the whole show. I was talking to Bobby Dylan. While he was tuning up his guitar to go on stage, I told him he’d better be careful because that was my audience out there. What did he do? He looked at me a little quizzically and carried on. But of course, you only needed to look at the lineup to realize that it wasn’t my audience out there.” Things change however. Should The Band ever get around to assembling The Last Waltz II, he might find that it is now.

“I remember Paul McCartney staring at me all the way through Yellow Submarine, trying to see what I thought.” Chas & Dave, 2009

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Only two days have elapsed since Chas & Dave announced they would no longer be working together, but the news appears to have prompted an outpouring of affection that – in the dying London rush hour – extends to staff at a St Pancras sandwich shop. “Mr Dave? Mr Dave?” froths a youngish man of Middle Eastern extraction. “Excuse me to bother you, but can you take picture?” After more than three decades of Chas being mistaken for Dave and vice-versa, the duo’s 65 year-old pianist Chas Hodges is long past correcting people. Neither does he set his unlikely fan straight when he tells him how sad he was to hear of his retirement. Over in the far corner, Hodges’ publicist attempts to set the record straight. “That’s Chas! He’s not retiring! Dave’s the one who’s retiring!” But no-one seems to notice.

In fact, by the time the news emerged, Dave Peacock was already out of the picture. Unlike other high-profile dissolutions, there was no farewell tour for Britain’s venerable practitioners cockney boogie-woogie. Perhaps if they thought the news would attract this much attention, they may have considered it. But, then again – given that Peacock has even refused all interview requests at a time when his profile has never been higher – probably not. After his wife succumbed to lung cancer this summer, Peacock gingerly approached his foil of some four decades and told him he wanted out. Hodges remembers the look of relief on his friend’s face when the words finally came out. “He knows what makes him happy. He drives horses. He does up Romany caravans and there’s no-one better at it than he is.”

Having been playing in bands since 16, when Joe Meek enlisted him to play bass in his house band (that’s him you can hear on Telstar) the perennially tousled Hodges has seen fashions come and go and come back again, and long held firm in the face of them. Being repeatedly cited by Pete Doherty as an influence prompted some reappraisal of the duo’s late 70s-to-early 80s hitmaking run. “We supported [Doherty’s old band] The Libertines at Brixton Academy and The Forum and we absolutely stormed it,” recalls Hodges. Over at Sean Rowley’s legendary Guilty Pleasures club nights, Chas & Dave’s biggest hit Ain’t No Pleasing You had become a guaranteed floor-filler. When they performed the song at Glastonbury in 2005, Hodges could barely hear himself above the crowd.

To say they were back in fashion again though, was not strictly true. To a pop fan in the post-punk climate of 1979, ale-stained Joanna-rattlers such as Gertcha and Rabbit may as well have been beamed in from another planet. Young boys and old men liked them, but to everyone in between, Chas & Dave were at best a pub-rock throwback and, at worst, a novelty act. For Hodges, it was water off a duck’s back. “You’ve got to remember, we’d been around a while. We knew the importance of only doing songs that you really believed in. Because if one of them takes off, you’re going to have to sing it for the rest of your life. Poor old Jeff Beck – he hated Hi Ho Silver Lining from the moment he was asked to do it. Detests it. We didn’t want to get into that situation.”

Doing Top of the Pops for the first time, aged 35, was “boring”. Hodges remembers almost being thrown off the set when producer Michael Hurll’s mother informed him that Gertcha contained the word “cowson” – a long since disused cockney insult. “He told us to change it when we did the performance, but of course, once you’re in the song, habit takes over. So, after I did it again, he goes, ‘Stop! Stop! If you do that one more time, you’re off the show.’ If you look at the footage now, you see me stopping myself just in time, but unable to think of a word to put in its place.”

For a brief period in the 80s, they became the go-to guys for anyone in need of a catchy sports song. After a slow start in the studio, Hodges got the idea for Snooker Loopy by The Matchroom Mob – Chas, Dave and A-list ball-potters such as Steve Davis, Dennis Taylor and Tony Meo – by imagining the seven dwarves singing it. He says that he knew it was going to be a huge hit when his son returned home from school and reported that all the children were singing it. Of the two top ten hits they recorded with the great Glenn Hoddle-era Spurs team of the early 80s, Ossie’s Dream has accrued immortality – not just for the lines, “Ossie’s going to Wembley/His knees have gone all trembly”, but for Ossie Ardiles’ legendary vocal cameo: “In the cup for Tottingham”.

“We wrote that line especially for him,” laughs Hodges, “because we knew he couldn’t say it properly, and he came into the studio and said, ‘It’s ok! I’ve learned how to say ‘Tottenham!!’ And we was like, ‘No! You don’t understand! We want you to say ‘Tottingham’!”

If most of the ensuing years for Chas and Dave were spent away from TV and recording studios – they didn’t record an album for 15 years – Hodges says they stayed busy. “It really never bothered me whether most people liked or disliked what we did. There were certain people who, if they said we weren’t very good, it would have knocked me back a bit.” Like who? He mentions legendary Sun Records producer Jack Clement, with whom he has long struck up a friendship. “I went to his house. He even has a picture of us on his fridge!” Then, of course, there’s Jerry Lee Lewis. In 1963, Lewis mentored the young Hodges when the latter landed a job playing bass in his band. “He went from being this huge star to playing for a $100 a night [after he infamously married his 13 year-old cousin]. But he picked himself back up the only way he knew how – by playing his music. I would watch him night after night, just trying to learn from what he was doing.”

The longer you speak with Hodges, the greater the realization that the face rendered like a post-war comic strip character on the cover of 1981’s TV-advertised Christmas Jamboree Bag spans the history of rock’n’roll like some kind of Cockney pop Zelig. In 1966, playing with Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers, he supported The Beatles on their final European tour and became one of the first people in the world to hear the album that became Revolver. “It didn’t have a name then, but they played us the acetate. Even then, they still had the enthusiasm of a new band. They weren’t interested in acting all cool. I remember Paul McCartney staring at me all the way through Yellow Submarine, trying to see what I thought. And I was thinking, ‘Will you please stop staring at me?’ Imagine hearing, ‘We all live in a Yellow Submarine’ for the first time and thinking, ‘Is this a joke or what?’ Then, when Got To Get You Into My Life came on, he said, ‘You know what? This would be a great one for your band to do.’ We cut it in Abbey Rd. He produced it, and we scored a hit with it.”

Hodges’ platform has just been announced. In ten minutes, he’ll be on the train to Stevenage where his wife of 43 years – a former Playboy bunny girl called Joanie (see 1966 New Musical Express announcement below) – will be waiting for him. Next month he steps back out onto the road with his own band, honouring a series of dates he was originally booked to play with Chas & Dave. He gives me a new CD of solo recordings. As I put that away, I pull out a memento from another era of his pre-Chas & Dave life – an excellent 1972 album he made with early 70s rustic blues-rockers Heads Hands & Feet. Scribbling his autograph inside the gatefold sleeve, he says, “Some people spend the rest of their lives in bands, not because they like it, but because they don’t know what else to do.” He takes a good long look at his younger self. “But I’m not one of them. I don’t feel any different to how I did then.”

“A punch-drunk paean to the misfortunes that make us and the misfortunes we make.” Gene Clark: Roadmaster, 2012

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Compared to his fellow Byrds – in particular Roger McGuinn and David Crosby – Gene Clark wasn’t the most sophisticated of souls. McGuinn boasted the confident deportment of a child raised by best-selling authors. As the son of an Oscar-winning cinematographer, Crosby had enjoyed a Hollywood upbringing. By contrast, Clark’s childhood in rural Missouri as one of 13 siblings was anything but privileged. Having jumped ship from the clean-cut New Christy Minstrels to The Byrds, he was an easy figure of fun. Producer Jim Dickson remembered Crosby’s hostility towards Clark, “putting donkey ears behind his head, stuff like that, breaking him down, treating him as trivial and a square.”

Square as he seemed, it was also clear that Clark was the major songwriting talent in The Byrds. If Clark’s colleagues were lukewarm about his prodigious output, Bob Dylan was quick to recognise the source of exquisite folk-pop pearls such as Feel A Whole Lot Better and Here Without You. “Dylan understood the value of Gene Clark as a songwriter more profoundly than any of us,” recalled Dickson. Inter-Byrd relations were hardly improved when Clark turned up at the studio with the maroon Ferrari he bought with the proceeds of his first royalty cheque, triggering “serious resentment” in his fellow musicians.
Take a look at the sleeve of Clark’s “lost” 1972 solo album Roadmaster and you might feel envious too. There’s Clark in front of his Ferrari, the flop-haired dandy in matching maroon. In truth though, by that juncture, there wasn’t a whole lot to envy in Gene Clark’s life. In the years between his departure from The Byrds and his death in 1991, none of his records sold in significant quantities. In the decade Clark recorded it, Holland was the only country where Roadmaster even gained a release.

Perhaps the even greater impediment to Roadmaster’s standing as a classic album is the fact that Clark never finished it. Asked by A&M to honour his contract with one more album, the singer assembled a glittering array of LA country rockers, among them Spooner Oldham, Clarence White (The Byrds) and Sneaky Pete (Flying Burrito Brothers). This is the supergroup of sorts you can hear on most of Roadmaster. The depth of his songwriting chops is mirrored by the sensitivity his band bring to these songs. On In A Misty Morning he sounds every inch the Missouri ingenue struggling to keep a lid on his loneliness as the city goes about its business. Throughout his life, Clark held down relationships with about as much success as Su Pollard might hold down a polar bear. In that regard, his version of Flat & Scruggs’ Rough And Rocky somehow feels more like a Clark song than almost anything else on Roadmaster. “Don’t my baby look the sweetest when she’s in my arms asleep,” he sings. It’ll bring a tear to your eye, and yet this is the moment our protagonist packs his bags to leave her.

Byrds associations rear their heads in myriad ways on Roadmaster. Clark reclaims 1965’s She Don’t Care About Time and drapes it in exquisite back porch langour. Then there’s Full Circle Song: a year after Roadmaster, the reformed Byrds tackled it for their ill-fated Asylum album. But this is the version that lacerates the heartstrings, a punch-drunk paean to the misfortunes that make us and the misfortunes we make. Elsewhere, if Roadmaster’s first two tracks also sound possessed of a certain jingle-jangle mourning, that’s no accident. In 1970, Jim Dickson recorded a pair of stand-alone Clark singles which reunited the original lineup of The Byrds, albeit not at the same time. Latticed by ornate flute, She’s The Kind Of Girl is classic Clark fare: its protagonist bewitched by the unknowability of his muse. Better still is One In A Hundred, a hymnal synergy of crashing fills from Michael Clarke and a crunchy McGuinn fretwork. Also dating from around the same time is an aching homesickness lament Here Tonight recorded with The Flying Burrito Brothers.

An entire Gene Clark album (1971’s White Light) separates the trio of 1970 songs from the rest of Roadmaster. Aged 18, when I bought the 1986 maiden British pressing of the album, I had absolutely no idea Roadmaster wasn’t a “proper” album. And, after several years out of print, I don’t suppose anyone happening upon this Sundazed reissue without the backstory will spot the joins either. Clark connoisseurs will always hold up the chemical grandeur of 1974’s No Other as the apogee of his output. Would it be too perverse to make a case for its predecessor as its equal? Well, let’s make a checklist of all the qualities most synonymous with Clark’s genius. Melody. Melancholy. Poetic yearning. Copious use of E minor. Now let’s apply those qualities to Roadmaster. Settled.