TO WHERE I AM NOW

Today is preparation day for being in the studio with our drummer Ed who is driving down from Bristol tomorrow afternoon. All the amps have been sitting in the live room as we were recording guitars and bass on the Space Summit album. They all had to be moved into another spot which was taken up with other things, the Vocoder, guitars, bits and bobs. So all this stuff had to be moved to the archive room which in turn has records all over the place that need filing away. When you are too busy to put records away, you are really mad busy and after all, messing around with the records is in fact high on the list of my favourite things to do. It’s going to be a busy week as we start with the backing tracks for the Ahad album. I’ll still be doing evening sessions, early sessions with Australia, learning French, writing and looking at the sea. And now as the world seems more confused than ever with everything opening up as the virus spikes are being reported everywhere, we try to plan. We even have a Berlin show pencilled in for February 7th 2021, I have Anekdoten shows in September and November, but will we be able to do these shows, who knows? We are trying to find release dates for the finished MOAT and Space Summit albums whilst trying to figure out when we could start campaigns for preorders so we make back the investment and try and raise the manufacturing costs, but when should we do that? The future is a mystery.

It seems that this week de Pfeffel will be making the two metre rule a one metre rule. Today at the greengrocers (where I bought the most attractive cauliflower you have ever seen) I was asking the scared man behind the perspex shield if they will be taking all the tape off the floor and making the distance one instead of two metres. He told me he couldn’t see that working and that’s the reaction I have got from everybody. The pandemic has struck fear into the populace. The bakers, the co-op, the charity stores, everywhere has barricades and two meter distancing has been strictly enforced. There’s special mass-produced posters and signs in the chains that must have cost a fortune that will be no longer relevant, but they are partly relevant, so do they scrap them all and manufacture them again with the new rules? Or do they scrub out the two and make it a one?

Has anybody noticed that these days shops have their own private radio stations. Co-op radio? Really? What is going on with that? Even Barnardo’s, the charity store, has its own radio station complete with prerecorded announcements about the imminent defunct two metre rule. It must be something to do with the costs of playing music in a public place, it must be cheaper to get a package deal with the PRS (Performing Rights Society) than it is paying your yearly license fee. Of course the chains have found a way to pay less whilst the independent have to pay full whack. Why doesn’t anybody realize that it should be the other way ‘round. It’s this system that wiped out the corner store, supermarkets buy in bulk, get their wares cheaper and can undercut the independent store. It’s the independent stores that should get discounts or at least the same deal as the big stores so that they can compete. Isn’t it obvious?

I have to say that the streets were rather busy today on this cold, windy, rain threatening summer’s day. I was running into people I knew, nodding at people I knew and chatting in the street. The great black-backed gull stood on the wall outside the Acorn Theatre across from the studio/archive like it was guarding the place. The size of a small dog, they only fly away from you as a last resort, choosing to run away down the street on their land-unfriendly webbed feet, they’re confident. This regular visitor had a dirty head today like it had been hanging around its chimney nest and got a good dose of soot. I’ve stopped seeing the chicks, but that’s probably because they grow so fast that they are no longer recognizable as chicks. It reminds me of that Star Trek episode where the kid grows abnormally fast, then they twig, it’s an alien.

Music today sees me trying to catch up with some hard to find albums that were trying to get themselves into the shelves without being listened to. It seems in the case of Dreamin’ (1978) by Liverpool Express I now know why. It’s a hard to find album only released and available in Brazil. But first a little about the band. I’ve mentioned them before and played their first album Tracks from 1976 quite recently, it was this that inspired me to find the second hard to find album. They are a Liverpool band that sound very much like Paul McCartney. McCartney said of You Are My Love, a hit single from their first album, that it was his favourite song at the time.

They were formed by Billy Kinsley, Roger Scott Craig, Tony Coates, and Derek Cashin, who met at a football match. Billy Kinsley had been in The Merseybeats and later The Merseys (remember Sorrow?). Liverpool Express were initially having a lot of success, a hit in England, hits in Europe and then mega stardom in Brazil with number one singles. For some reason the second album Dreamin’ was only released there. It’s great, as good as their first album. Unfortunately the copy I bought from someone up north (someone who had bought it in Brazil and brought it back to England) has a problem with the roundness of the hole, so the tracks sound sour as the needle moves backwards, forwards and sideways on the spindle. Replacing it is expensive, so next trip to Brazil that is all I will be thinking about. Luckily I can listen to it on Spotify and hold the cover like it’s the real thing.

In 1979 they released L.E.X. which I recently bought from Germany. It has a track that is on the previous album, I guess they figured it needed another chance to grab the public’s attention. They cover a Dylan song (Is Your Love In Vain) and Joe South’s Games People Play. This record plays properly (phew) and follows that same effortless Liverpool talent path, but by 1979 New Wave was killing bands that sounded like this. There’s a dodgy picture of Jerry Hall on the cover and they sound a bit like later 10cc, out of step with the times but a success at their own game. It shows how much image matters. I remember when grunge wiped out the middle-sized eighties bands as another generation dismissed what the older kids liked as unhip, not turned on, and then it happened again to them, as it always does and always will ad infinitum.

When you listen back to the Liverpool sound of the early to mid sixties you can hear why it was the place to be, but isn’t it strange, it happened in Seattle, in San Francisco, Athens, Georgia, Minneapolis. A sound from a place can catch on. This Merseybeats album is a collection of songs from 1963-1965, three-minute Pop slices in the same style as The Beatles. You can hear the accents, something in that Liverpool vernacular that stands out. I Think Of You from 1963 could easily be The Beatles – it was a million seller.

Billy J. Kramer was managed by Brian Epstein and was given unreleased Beatles songs that propelled him into the charts as the Merseybeat sound became the sound of the day. He had many hits and this ‘Best Of’ album has five Lennon/McCartney songs, four of them unreleased by The Beatles. Do You Want To Know A Secret was released in 1963 on The Beatles’ Please Please Me album and sung by George Harrison. Kramer took it to No.2 in the charts as a single. Lennon and McCartney’s Bad To Me reached No.1 in the UK in the same year as did another Lennon and McCartney song, I’ll Keep You Satisfied, reaching No.4. In 1964 Little Children (Shuman/McFarland) also made it to No.1 and the last Lennon and McCartney penned hit, From A Window, reached No.10. Trains and Boats and Planes (Bacharach/David) reached No.12 and that was just about it as Merseybeat’s popularity waned.

Song Of The Day is She’s King. Although I wrote it in New Zealand, the seeds were planted in Liverpool.

 

She’s King

An unbelievable time
I would rush to find
Even if I thought
That it might threaten me

A thousand things to do
To follow them all through
Things to learn and see
And they will better me

I would rush to find
Thumping hard, banging in my mind
It’s so easy, so easy to fly
If you try, if you try

She’s king
She’s king

A throne of violent blue
And nothing to see through
Distant eyes to guide
And to enlighten me

An end to all our pain
An hour through her heart
Nothing there at least though
It encouraged me

I would rush to find
Thumping hard, banging in my mind
It’s so easy, so easy to fly
If you try, if you try

She’s king
She’s king

An unbelievable time
I would rush to find
Even if I thought
That it might threaten me

I would rush to find
Thumping hard, banging in my mind
It’s so easy, so easy to fly
If you try, if you try

She’s king

Ohhh

(Willson-Piper)
Art Attack (1988)