Dare and I walked down to the studio from his house. He was wearing long pants and a jacket, I was in shorts with a T-shirt slung over my shoulder. I was still too hot, he was obviously just right. If I’d had to walk down to the studio wearing a jacket I would have exploded. So how come my hands are always warm and other people’s are always cold? Women might often get colder quicker but sometimes I’d shake a man’s hand (like we did in the olden days) and his hand would be stone cold. My Mum hated the heat, so I’ve inherited it from her. Australia was just way too hot for me so I like the climate here in Penzance where it never gets too hot or too cold. Olivia reckons it’s generally somewhere between 3°C and 20°C throughout the year. Portugal will be interesting if we ever get there but after Texas and Australia, having an apartment in New York and experiencing Asian countries, Portugal might not be too hard to get used to. In Sweden where it’s never cold indoors and can be seriously life-threateningly cold outside, I always struggled with the indoor heat. In England, my Aunty Gwen used to consolidate the heat into a room because it was too expensive to heat the house. I stayed with her once years ago and when I woke up in the morning I could see my breath. But also English bathrooms are known to be cold, that’s why there’s sometimes carpets. My Swedish friend Anders Paulsson said to me once (or twice), “Why would you have a carpet in a bathroom?” – that’s why.

Dare and I were in the studio today, finishing off guitars on one of Ahad’s songs, singing some backing vocals and adding guitars onto a new track. I put a bed down of acoustic Takamine 6 string and doubled it with Takamine 12 string, Dare had an idea to run it back through a chorus pedal after I recorded it, which we did to give it a swimming feeling and blended it with the dry 6 string and with some panning there will be an interesting widespread blend. I then added an arpeggio on my Les Paul before finishing with a blistering long guitar solo. The idea is (if Ahad approves) that this will be the last track on the album.

We thought we’d go crazy today and eat hamburgers. So we bought Quorn burgers and some buns and Olivia went to buy chips – except there was a misunderstanding and she came back with cheesy chips for herself and no chips for me! Noooo! Can one be disappointed when one doesn’t get his chips? I got over it and I just ate loads of avocado and spinach leaves on the buns and that was fine. Perfect food for the football tonight – Bayern Munich vs Lyon. It was 3-0 to the favourites (Bayern) and us football fans are looking forward to a very exciting final on Sunday between Bayern Munich and Paris St Germain. One week’s salary and I’d be able to buy the building for the archive – silly, isn’t it?

At the end of the day, we’ve started work on sorting the archive out, it’s got out of control with me pulling records out every night, new records arriving and my ambitious plan to clean records as they come out of the shelves. Looks like that’s not going to happen. If the collection isn’t in order it’s just no good, you have to know where everything is and be able to access it and if a record gets misfiled, it could be gone for years. So tomorrow is filing day and later I have an interview for a French magazine with my friend Arno, the idea is that a musician asks questions that a journalist wouldn’t ask, like how wide is your guitar strap?

My Betty Davis documentary DVD didn’t arrive so I sent them a message. Today they sent me a message back saying my money has been refunded and they will send me the DVD when it’s available for free. Really? Have I missed something? Did I just experience a random act of kindness? I realised that I rarely come into contact with the haters but I suppose the haters live in a haters’ world and are in eternal conflict. I feel so sorry for them, can you imagine being so messed up inside that skin pigmentation makes you angry?

Music today was another forgotten classic band from the seventies, Atomic Rooster, formed by ex Crazy World Of Arthur Brown members Vincent Crane on keys (Crane co-wrote Fire) with Carl Palmer on drums, and Nick Graham on bass and lead vocal, with John Cann on guitar and oddly lead vocals on the US release of their debut album. Apparently Nick Graham left, so John Cann re-sung the vocals for the US release but the US release didn’t happen, so the second pressing of the original album had different vocals but it wasn’t declared on the sleeve. And guess what? This record seems to have gone missing in my record collection. You could lose an ox in here, hopefully, it will turn up.

This music lives somewhere between sixties and seventies Rock and Progressive, a crossover period which is just what I like about it, one foot in the glorious past and one foot in the glorious future. Lots of organ solos and instrumental sections but lots of songs too. It was Carl Palmer’s only album with Atomic Rooster before he left to form Emerson, Lake And Palmer.

The first album I ever heard by Atomic Rooster was Death Walks Behind You (both the US and UK cover included in the pics because I can’t find the first album). I always loved the UK cover art and the melodic riff of the first and title track, plus you can hear the long hair. With the departure of Carl Palmer and Nick Graham, the band decided to only replace the drummer and enlisted Paul Hammond into the fold with John Cann handling the bass and the guitars. This album included a hit, Tomorrow Night, written by Crane and released in January 1971 and reaching No. 11 on the UK chart. It was followed by a bigger hit, Devil’s Answer, written by Cann, a UK No. 4 and released as an independent single between albums, but beware, there’s different versions and some suck, the original UK single release is the ONLY one. If you are on Spotify, the best version is on the Heavy Soul album. Death Walks Behind You and the first album were both released in 1970.

In Hearing Of was released in 1971 and the band again went through a transition period where Cann and Hammond were gone but still played on the album with Leafhound singer Peter French taking over on vocals and with Steve Bolton on guitar and Ric Parnell on the drums on the album tour. One imagines that bass was handled by Crane on the keyboards live. It’s getting into some pretty standard Rock territory now, the seventies have arrived. I sometimes think that I’m not listening to songs, I’m listening to the seventies not for nostalgic reasons but because I like the sound of the period, the warmth of the instruments, how the drums don’t dominate and sound like, well, drums.

In 1972 they released Made In England that came in a sleeve made of denim. Singer Peter French was gone and sixties singer Chris Farlowe was in. Farlowe was most famous for taking Jagger/Richards’ Out Of Time to No. 1 in 1966. He was a proper singer and the Progressive and the Rock side of Atomic Rooster suddenly had another influence, Soul, but although it doesn’t sound like a good match the opening track Time Take My Life is pretty great. The second track is where it all goes wrong, empty Soul Funk. So you need patience for these albums because a great track will be followed by a not so great track but the good ones are worth it.

After Atomic Rooster, Cann (now John Du Cann) and Hammond formed Hard Stuff and later they found themselves in a short-lived Atomic Rooster reunion. Hammond died of an accidental drug overdose in 1992, he was 39. Du Cann died of a heart attack in 2011 aged 65. Vincent Crane committed suicide in 1989, he was just 45 years old.

Song Of The Day – Atomic Rooster on Top Of The Pops in 1971 with Devil’s Answer and Tomorrow Night. Love those dancers.

There have been some lovely trips through Morrab Gardens in recent days where there have been squirrels galore, exotic plants and trees and all kinds of VW campervans. Apparently they grow in warm damp places and you can see miniature versions of them driving around the flowerbeds. Some of them have grown into full-fledged vehicles and I have taken pictures of them whenever I can. Some are old and healthy and some have seen better days but they endure. People love them, sadly more than pigeons which are also worthy creatures from the gardens.

The squirrels too are incredible creatures that run up and down tree trunks at great speed and fly through the air jumping from tree to tree but they get a bad rap because they are not indigenous, they were introduced into England around 1870. Some people treat foreigners badly too because they are not originally from here, weird. Red squirrels do still exist in the British Isles but in far lesser numbers. One reason for this is that the grey squirrels carry a virus (Parapoxvirus) that kills red squirrels but not them, after some of the reports I’ve been reading about the pandemic this might be similar to the situation with the older and younger humans. Hopefully, this won’t make the older humans an endangered species like the red squirrel. Also unlike the situation with red and grey squirrels, an influx of different cultures make a country better, richer. What would the lager louts do without late-night Indian restaurants?

There’s a balance of things and in Australia, the rabbit arrived in 1788 and over time bred so prolifically that they became an official pest that decimates crops and threatens other species, kind of like fascists. One hopefully doesn’t go for the cliché of the survival of the fittest in a civilised society. We protect our sick and try to help them get the best out of life. But yesterday I saw a magpie on a wall eating a rather large green squirming caterpillar and thought about the violent world of the animal kingdom and realised it also includes us.

Germany has become a friend, I have a German wife. They gave us the VW Kombi in 1950, officially called ‘Type 2’ as the VW Beetle was ‘Type 1’. They come in all kinds of shapes and sizes and whenever I see one I get a euphoric feeling. They stand for something to do with freedom, a hippie lifestyle, a cheap convenience on the road, an opportunity. They come in different colours like people and like all vehicles and people some are good and some are bad. It’s hard to stand behind the idea that green VW Kombis are bad and red ones are good but some humans try to do that with people when we all know that it’s not what’s outside the Kombi that makes it a good or bad vehicle it’s what’s inside, mostly under the hood, under the bonnet, where the brains are, where the heart beats. You can’t judge the worth of it by just looking at it although there’s definitely some really good looking bad eggs out there. I don’t eat eggs unless they are carab, I rarely see a carab-coloured VW Kombi.

On another subject, what was it with the bands in the seventies that were against bootlegs? Fans have bought everything the band released anyway. So there’s quality control and the idea that someone else shouldn’t be making money out of your talent but you get something else on a bootleg apart from bad quality, something crucial that the band might not generally let go. I have a Roxy Music bootleg called Champagne And Novacaine that I love. I have some Gentle Giant, Dylan, Aerosmith, Led Zep, Todd Rundgren, CAN, Stones, Floyd, but then I also have every album that all those bands made – many times over. These days with the internet and mobile phones there’s so much crappy live footage that it seems as if the interesting bootleg has gone. Of course you can download lots of things on all kinds of sites but in the olden days there was also the artwork and like everything when there’s too much of it, it’s not interesting anymore – I hope you don’t think that about the blog!

Music today says farewell to ex UFO bassist Pete Way who has died. He’s the third member of UFO to die in 18 months. In the seventies, before Metal became what it is today, it was just Rock music and I like it. Whether it was Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath or what they called NWOBH (New Wave of British Heavy Metal like Def Leppard or UFO), it still just sounded like Rock music to me, like Thin Lizzy did or AC/DC did with Bon Scott. Then something happened and it became Metal. I’m not sure how or when it happened. I saw Judas Priest on what must have been their debut British tour at the St George Hall in Liverpool supporting Budgie (believe it or not). It was weird because the singer had short hair! At this point, they were just a Rock band but at some point, they became a Metal band. I never followed Iron Maiden in the seventies Rock days but it seems that along with Judas Priest they became two of the most successful bands of the Heavy Metal genre. Def Leppard became catchy but UFO remained a Rock band and there’s one or two albums by them that I really liked probably because Metal as such wasn’t their thing.

The first album I liked was Lights Out (1977), it featured Michael Schenker on guitar and really that’s what it was all about for me, his playing. Great tone, great solos. The songs were catchy, and it didn’t have that sound of a juggernaut crashing into planets. On this album there was a cover of Love’s Alone Again Or, it was just a Rock band but when you consider their choice of cover versions they had a varied taste in music. The lyrics weren’t exactly Shakespeare and the chords weren’t exactly Thelonious Monk but they had real songs. The band on this album was Schenker, Phil Mogg on vocals, Andy Parker on drums, Paul Raymond on keys and guitar and Pete Way on bass. Paul Raymond died of a heart attack on April 13th 2019 (guitarist Paul Chapman who replaced Schenker in the band, died on 9th June 2020). Pete Way died on August 14th after complications from a serious accident he had at home. I don’t know what the accident was but after all the dangers of being in a band, he died due to an accident at home. RIP Pete, condolences to friends and family.

Their next album, Obsession (1978), was more of the same, same band members and more great guitar from Michael Schenker and more of what I guess they call Pop Metal but it’s not really Metal, maybe they call it Hard Rock but by today’s standards it’s not hard at all. The guitars solo aren’t silly fast, they’re tastefully fast when they need to be but not fast all the time. There’s a clue as to why Schenker’s guitar sounds like it does apart from the Gibson Flying V he is playing (with no effects), here’s the article.

Strangers In The Night (1979), a double live album, was Schenker’s last album with the band (there was a very short reunion much later). All your favourite Rock guitarists cite this album as one of their favourites. It sounds well-recorded but you never know with these seventies live albums, how much of it is overdubs? Apparently Schenker refused to do any overdubs. But the inside stories we could tell about some of those ‘live’ albums from the seventies like Thin Lizzy’s Live And Dangerous for example…I always admired Jimmy Page because he never considered for a moment that there should be another guitarist to help him with the difficulties of playing live when the studio versions had multiple guitar overdubs, he just made it work.

Last album tonight is the earlier UFO album Phenomenon (1974) that I don’t know as well as the other two studio albums but it’s 19-year-old Michael Schenker’s first album with the band, produced by Leo Lyons from Ten Years After. By the way, there’s 22 studio albums, 14 live recordings, 16 compilation albums and one album of cover songs but the reason I picked Phenomenon isn’t just because Michael Schenker is playing on it, he also plays on Force It (1975) and No Heavy Petting (1976). It’s because of the cover art, designed by Hipgnosis as many of the great album covers of the seventies were. One last thing, UFO formed in 1969 and started as a Space Rock band with guitarist Mick Bolton, if all this is too Rock for you, go visit them in their earlier incarnation in another galaxy.

Songs Of The Daze

Simpler times – Don Kirshner’s Rock concert 1974:

 
Live At The Roundhouse 1976 and 1977:

I awoke to the rain with the same dull headache I went to bed with. I hadn’t noticed it before I put my head on the pillow, it was buried deep in my skull but it was there. It was like the noise of a fracas somewhere nearby, audible but unable to tell how it was escalating. I lay there thinking should I get up, take a couple of headache tablets, but my eyes were already closed and I thought, it’s not so bad, shouldn’t take tablets all the time and it will be gone by the time I wake up. But no, and it’s not as if it was terrible it was just annoyingly there, lingering, just out of reach but still present, hovering around, an unwanted distraction. “That was yesterday’s headache,” I thought. “How come I have yesterday’s headache today?”. So I got up, took two paracetamol and proceeded to get ready for the day. Olivia was still asleep, I always get up before her. So I had made a cup of my favourite Celestial Seasonings Tension Tamer Tea (TTT) with honey, ate some bran cereal, the cheaper Lidl store version that tastes less like fossilised cardboard than the 5 times more expensive Co-op version and then I went out to pasty land and the greengrocers. The streets were heaving, when I crossed Greenmarket (the road) there were queues of cars from Market Jew Street up to the traffic lights. The tourists were almost a crush, the rain hadn’t kept them indoors, one presumes it had kept them off the beach and driven them into town. So many people, so different from when the pandemic started and not a mask in sight.

The session today with Stefan in Germany was postponed till Friday (get better Stefan) so I had a surprise extra block of time which allowed us to get down to the supermarket by the sea. Earlier we’d taken all the studio recycling up to Dare’s house for tomorrow’s pick up as the beach recycling bins have now gone. We walked through the damp park with one of the guys I know from the swimming pool who was on his daily walk. (We are hoping for a reopening the beginning of next month.) The sea looked like metal today, a reflection of the clouds, the sea was so far in that there was no room for the seagulls and it seemed like they had all gathered together in the sky and were flying around in a huge swarm. They were screeching and diving and rising on the air currents going around in infinite circles in some kind of ancient ritual. At the edge of the water, the tide trickled in and even though the rain had gone the clouds still hung heavy in the sky. We walked past a family in wetsuits who were bobbing around in the water. The daughter was carrying their dog, some kind of longhaired dachshund but its legs were too short to swim to them and if they left it on the shore it would whine and bark, freaking out at the thought that they might have left him or at least not included him. The stones were tough underfoot so we walked off the beach to the supermarket. Olivia had forgotten her mask but I had two so it wasn’t just me going into the place that was also busy. When we finally got to the queue, Mel, one of the ladies that works there, told me there were only 5 of them in today, so the lines were long to pay. I know Mel because once I was struggling with heavy shopping by myself and she helped me take everything up to the studio before going back down to the beach road where she lived. Some people are just lovely.

We got back in time to watch the other Europa League semi-final. Inter Milan (Italy) beat Shakhtar Donetsk (Ukraine) 5-0, it wasn’t that good to watch despite the goals, but it’s getting near the end and it’s good to see how the teams get to the final. No more news on Harry.

Two albums arrived in the post today and one CD. The triple Jeff Beck at the Hollywood Bowl, nicely reduced to make it affordable and UFO (1969), the debut by the mysterious Jim Sullivan who disappeared in the desert one day in 1975 never to be seen again. This from the Light In The Attic website (the label):

In March 1975, Jim Sullivan mysteriously disappeared outside Santa Rosa, New Mexico. His VW bug was found abandoned, his motel room untouched. Some think he got lost in the desert. Some think he fell foul of a local family with alleged mafia ties. Some think he was abducted by aliens.

Also a CD of The Cure’s Three Imaginary Boys which reminded me of our new hoover.

Music today has been a tough choice because I want to play some newer records but as I explained a few days ago, they need more listening time to get a measure of them. So I put on a Spotify random ‘Made For You’ list which I suppose is based on what you’ve been playing and other music connected to the style. But it’s funny that Bobbie Gentry and The Who come up just because they are both sixties into the seventies. How different they seemed to each other then and how much closer they are to each other now, especially when you think of Iggy Azalea…not that many who are reading this probably do. So, Robin Trower came up, Donovan, Glen Campbell, Ten Years After, Pink Floyd and Traffic but this is just one of the ‘Made For You’ options. It seems there are six different ‘Daily Mixes’ and I like this. It means that I can have a New Wave mix, a Soul mix, a Prog mix and a contemporary mix, an eighties mix and I’m not sure what the other mix is (singer-songwriter?), but if I wanted I could have a Hip Hop mix, a Reggae mix, a Jazz mix and even a Classical mix.

Pink Floyd’s Apples and Oranges just came on from the Early Years box set that I have that is so vast I can’t get through it even though I’m totally interested. It’s funny, there’s so much amazing music and yet so much of it seems to be buried in obscurity. The enlightened people that read this often don’t know about the music I write about (Stephen Stills’ Manassas just came on). So think of the masses and what they are exposed to, the things they will never hear that they would love if they knew about it. For me and everybody, it’s simply time and with writing and teaching and making records, touring when we can, following the football, buying books and records, there’s not much time left. It’s as if we are too small for the world’s treasures. We can’t take it all in, we can’t store it, we can’t appreciate it all, there’s just too much of it.

Some great old Bee Gees, To Love Somebody, I Started A Joke (Olivia’s favourite). There was a Ry Cooder track from Bop Till You Drop that I didn’t feel like and Snowy White sounding very eighties and David Rhodes sounding disappointing when you look at how well he does as guitarist to the interesting stars. So on this ‘mix’, it keeps on coming back to artists, back on Bobbie Gentry now from The Delta Sweete (great) and Trower, I must listen to a lot of Trower.

Hm, but it keeps on going back to that Pink Floyd box set, this is great it’s actually getting me to listen to it, to delve into it, discover unreleased and rare tracks, live shows, radio shows, different takes, different mixes (Childhood’s End from Obscured By Clouds, 2016 remix) – great! Now it’s started repeating all the artists I’ve already heard a little too much…so choice time.

The reason I put on a ‘mix’ is to give myself a hint about what I want to hear. So it’s Pink Floyd – The Early Years but of course, Spotify has it all mixed up so when I punch it in, it just shows one album from the box. Spotify is amazing and terrible, there’s the royalties debacle of course but then there’s this really annoying thing where they’ll put the reissue date of an album as the release date instead of the date the album was originally released. How can they have staff in there that don’t know these things? Is it because they don’t have enough age spread in the offices? There should be people from every decade with their era’s knowledge, obviously.

What is it about sizeable chunks of different generations that don’t appreciate each other’s contributions?

Song Of The Day is A Saucerful Of Secrets at Kralingen Music Festival. Approximately 150,000 attended. Festival posters show that the festival was billed in Dutch as ‘Pop Paradijs’ and ‘Holland Pop Festival 70’.

Today was super sessions day, Sundays always are, so Tony from Sydney, Brian from Orlando, Joanne from Portland and Doug from Wappingers Falls near Woodstock shared their ideas and I listened and made suggestions, like drink more tea, breathe, buy a cat, eat more cereal. Sometimes I would suggest wearing different colours or making friends with someone that owns a yacht. My best advice is to not rob banks if you get caught. Otherwise, I always recommend a diet of blue oranges and backwards apples for songs about slimming and custard cakes if you need inspiration for a chorus. You can obviously see why my approximately 20 sessioneers are with me as I help them on a musical journey through small canyons and large dark passages on rainy afternoons in the morning light. Feel free to contact me if you think I can help and remember if you’d like to pick up that Noctorum – Offer The Light CD for just $5 plus postage, contact Olivia at olivia@martywillson-piper.com.

Let’s face it, I’m tired today! Phew! Looking forward to that wonderful slow-motion moment as your head descends towards the pillow. I actually find that when I do finally get to it, I’m more likely to throw myself down like a sack of potatoes being hurled into a cellar. I wonder if tiredness makes me madder. Have you heard about those people that attempt to stay awake for days to break records? Oh my, no thank you. When Olivia and I met we bonded on our love of sleep. I’m one of those people that goes to bed when I’m exhausted. I just find it so hard to say oh it’s midnight, I must go to bed. Even when I have to get up I go to bed late and this is the result. So Tony is in Sydney and our sesh is at midday my time because it’s getting late there. Midday could possibly be two hours earlier than when I would normally get up. So as I usually go to sleep around 5 or 6 it means only 6 hours of sleep, 2 hours less than normal (I wouldn’t change it for the world, the sessioneers are one of the great pleasures of my life). Olivia needs 9 hours a night and tries to get it and sometimes succeeds. One of the reasons she likes me is because I always tell her to go back to sleep and stay in bed as long as she wants. It’s the night hours when we are active and she contributes so much to everything we do in those waking hours – like playing the violin, booking tours, doing the driving, designing the artwork, proofreading the blog and getting it online as well as a million other things from deeply complex to domestic. I have an amazing wife.

The rest of the day eluded me today with the sessions and the football, Manchester United lost 2-1 to Sevilla who made it to the Europa League final next Friday. Ronnie O’Sullivan won the snooker and Harry the snail won the international slowness sprint in Prague. Oh, how much do I hate the adverts on the sports channels! Mostly ads for betting companies, terrible, they drive me nuts and you know how much money they are making out of the public by how many times you are seeing the ads. I wonder what the stats are for gamblers who lose and are addicted and continue to lose versus gamblers who got rich and lead playboy lifestyles?

The other day I was in a charity store and bought a book of Oscar Wilde’s prose poetry and in it was The Picture Of Dorian Gray (£1) written in 1890 and I thought that would be something to read again. But when I opened the book I found the print to be too small for me to read. It’s not like I was unable to read it at all, but it was a strain and even with my glasses, too hard, and of course, impossible without them. This reminded me of my Mum who used to read thrillers. There was a library van that used to come ‘round the houses and they had some books that she liked but she read books in the large print version. It’s so weird watching yourself turn into your parents. It’s fascinating to watch the incessant tumble towards oblivion whilst balancing it out with resignation.

Oh yeah, this is exciting – after I wrote that piece on Klaatu and posted the video of The Carpenter’s cover of their song Calling Occupants Of Interplanetary Craft, I got an email from Klaatu drummer and co-writer of the song, Terry Draper, thanking me for recognising the band. So if you are reading this Terry, thank you for the mail (my friend Biggles was so excited), I’ll respond when I get a minute, which is why I’m responding here, in case that minute takes a week.

Music today has me investigating Assagai, after Osibisa they were the only other known Afro-Rock band in the seventies – in England anyway. They made two albums in 1971, self-titled and Zimbabwe both on Vertigo. I have a Music For Pleasure (cheap label) reissue which is actually Zimbabwe renamed Afrorock and without the original Roger Dean cover. It was either a copyright issue or someone at the label’s bright idea. Lots of drums and horns, the original band had three members from South Africa, drummer Louis Moholo, trumpeter/flautist Mongezi Feza and alto saxophonist Dudu Pukwana, and two members from Nigeria, tenor saxophonist Bizo Mngqikana, and guitarist/bassist Fred Coker who eventually left to join, you guessed it, Osibisa. Keyboardist Alan Gowen from Gilgamesh and National Health was briefly in the band as was Jamie Muir who played percussion with King Crimson.

This led me to Alan Gowen’s band Gilgamesh and the first self-titled album released on Virgin’s other label Caroline in 1975. It’s Progressive Jazz Fusion with Phil Lee on guitars, Jeff Clyne on bass, Michael Travis on drums and Amanda Parsons on occasional voice. I won’t actually be going mad tonight and writing a tome about obscure bands after a long day and also because this is mainly territory that I’ve already explored and explained and if you like this kind of thing, then you’ll love this. They made two albums of which I just have the first. In between the two albums Gowen had joined Dave Stewart in National Health but returned for Another Fine Tune You’ve Got Me Into (1977). A rarities record, Arriving Twice, was released in 2000.

Hatfield and the North’s second album The Rotters’ Club released in 1975 is a classic in the genre. The usual suspects are involved, Dave Stewart on the keyboards, Phil Miller on guitar, Richard Sinclair on bass and vocals and Pip Pyle on the drums. Guests include Mont Campbell from Egg on french horn, Lindsay Cooper from Henry Cow on bassoon, Tim Hodgkinson from Henry Cow on clarinet, Jimmy Hastings on sax (Pye Hastings from Caravan’s brother), and The Northettes, Barbara Gaskin, Amanda Parsons and Ann Rosenthal on backing vocals. This music will either be totally uninteresting to you or completely blow your mind, the choice is yours.

Virgin Records released Afters in 1980, a compilation of tracks from the debut album and The Rotters’ Club and including the 1974 single Let’s Eat (Real Soon) and B-side Fitter Stoke Has A Bath, a different version than The Rotters’ Club version. There’s also two live tracks, the 2-minute Oh Len’s Nature! recorded in Lyon and Toulouse and edited together (the wonders of seventies technology). The other live track, Halfway Between Heaven And Earth, was recorded at the Rainbow Theatre in London in 1976.

Song Of The Day is in fact a short documentary about the Canterbury scene:

In the studio today revving up the guitars. We are on track 6 of Ahad’s record and today I was using different guitars to make different sounds for different parts and trying to tie them all together. I peeled notes off the Nash Telecaster that sparkled on a bridge and let the ’66 Rickenbacker (the Reptile guitar) loose on single notes and then some Pete Townshend-esque biting chords in the verses. I used Dare’s 1962 Gibson 345 to double some lines and his newly regenerated Fender Stratocaster to strum rhythm chords. Last but not least my own Fender Stratocaster (The Unguarded Moment guitar) to double, bolster, augment and bring other guitar parts to life in the choruses. That was the electrics, I also did a double track of the Takamine 6 string playing the fundamental chords, once through with the capo, once through without so you can play the same chords in different positions to get a different sound, we are song builders.

Also, the legendary Jerome Froese, son of Edgar, member of Loom and ex Tangerine Dream sent me back one of the tracks we have been working on together which I have to write an extra verse for and sing before sending it back to him to mix. Dare will be helping me with that. Usually when you say the track had been edited it means shortened but in this case it means lengthened as we consider the musical concept of the album we are working on. This one will be a big surprise.

Today is the 14th anniversary of the release of the second Noctorum album Offer The Light (2006). If you have seen Olivia and me live, this diverse album has the song Hopes And Fears with which we generally close our set. For those of you that might be interested in purchasing a CD, we have a stock of them in the US that we’d like to offer to you for $5 each until the end of the month (feel free to pay more if you have just robbed a bank). Postage will be assessed and added but if you would like one, send an email to olivia@martywillson-piper.com and she’ll organise it for you, you can pay with PayPal.

It was hot out there today and the tourists were swarming, usually I recognise the language they are speaking but not today. Three times I walked past a group of people that were speaking what sounded like something from Eastern Europe or was it the Balkans – which country has the package deal to Cornwall? Am I going mad or do I keep on hearing that the pandemic is getting worse and more things are opening up? I heard that venues here can open from the 20th August and kids are going back to school as British tourists rush back from France to avoid the reintroduction of quarantine rules. What is going on? Should we be pessimistic or optimistic, I just can’t make sense of the contradictory messages.

I told you to watch the football yesterday and I hope you did because Bayern beat Barcelona 8-2, their biggest defeat since 1946. I suppose none of this makes any sense if you don’t follow the teams. But believe me, the Champions League is an exciting competition for a football fan like me. I wish I could be watching the snooker too but I don’t get the BBC. Possibly the world’s most casually talented player Ronnie O’Sullivan is winning 10-7 against Kyren Wilson. If you follow tennis he’s the Federer of snooker, if you follow football he’s the Messi of snooker, if you follow guitarists he’s the Jeff Beck of snooker – effortless, natural, unbelievable.

I have to balance days between writing, French, teaching, studio and the archive. I wonder when we will get a chance to work on the already started next Noctorum album, finish the Jerome project and record Olivia and I for a CD of the songs we play in our live set. All this whilst planning to get to Portugal with the confusing pandemic, not knowing if it has finished with disrupting our lives or not. When will we know? Will it be true? Will the world ever be the same again? Has anybody actually learnt anything from all this? On reflection, I know I have – there’s good people and there’s bad people, love your neighbour, but look out!

Music today comes from Pram, Birmingham’s CAN. I’ve been a fan of this band from the beginning and have lots of albums and EPs by them (not all of them, there’s so many). They released their debut 6 track EP Gash on their own Howl Records in 1992 but found interest in Too Pure Records who had already signed Stereolab, PJ Harvey and Mouse On Mars (I have so many records by these bands too).

They released the 4 track Iron Lung EP in 1993, a great collection of Krautrock rhythms and electronic sounds with eerie vocals. I just had to hear 1 minute of the opening track, the 6-minute Cumulus, and I was a fan. I suppose it could also have been the gherkin with legs parading as a baby on the back cover or the slightly mad lyrics or possibly the relentless rhythm and the odd instrumentation. The second track, Water Toy, was also intriguing, a CAN-like rhythm with odd background noises and eerie keyboards. Here are the lyrics:

My ice boat won’t sail
All Around the rotting fish-heads lie
And it’s stricken in the green waves that oily slick slap at its sides
I set sail when she died
From her body came a bowlful of tumours
And the stink and the flies hang around my sore head like a halo
In this rusty shell I lie and the flies buzz
Buzz around the gauze on my head

The third track, Blue Singer, is noisy guitars with a Liebezeit influenced drum, angsty soft vocal and a buried background gurgling that gives the whole track the sense of people desperately trying to avoid all Rock clichés, Sonic Youth must have loved them.

Pram/Iron Lung is just great musical experimentation with ‘that’ beat coming in. The lyrics:

I’m a pregnant stick of chalk, my belly touches the floor
Dressed inside a parachute
Every morning I wake, I’m sick into a pan
Can’t get through the door anymore
I can’t dance and I can’t walk. I can’t dance and I’m alone
I just want to shed this weight, to feel free, afloat, a feather
She brought me a pram, patted my stomach and listened, said it was a monster
A big black hulk chariot, it stands in the hall
The cat’s already pissed in it

I won’t write out all the words but you get the idea. The last track, Iron Lung, is just keyboards and voice, a drone. At first, they might just seem noisy but they are just angular, scratchy and otherwise experimental, they have a special rhythm and an indistinct vocal that adds to the intrigue. There’s melody in there, there’s good playing too but instead of being a boring old Indie band, they press the ‘let’s keep it interesting’ button. 

They even managed to keep it interesting with the title of their first long-player: The Stars Are So Big The Earth Is So Small…Stay As You Are, released in 1993. Once you are past the first two tracks, Loco and Radio Freak In A Storm (that is, if you don’t like that kind of noisy and/or obscure thing), you may have better luck with the third track Loredo Venus which sounds like it was recorded by runaway children in a secret studio at the end of an imaginary garden. Perhaps the secret of their sound is the instrumentation and the attitude, Rosie Cuckston on vocals and keyboards with Matt Eaton and Samantha Owen sharing bass, guitar and more keyboards, and then there’s Max Simpson with even more keyboards and samples and new drummer Daren Garratt (replacing Andy Weir who left after the first EP). 

The songs are low key in as much as they appear before you out of a mist and disappear. If the songs were written under a table in a castle while the guests feasted, nobody would notice that they were there. It’s not exactly minimal either but it’s somehow mysterious, it’s full of ideas, the ordinary is expelled to the rich diners. Milky is followed by Dorothy that make the B52’s sound like Bon Jovi as it descends into a swirling pit of insane orphans, stirring oversized cauldrons of hair and bats. But then comes In Dreams You Too Can Fly which lasts for a glorious 16 minutes and includes an additional musician called The Mysterious Verdigris Horn who appears throughout the track that glides through the ruined buildings, looking down from above and documents the reality of being earthbound from sleep. It sounds like Soft Machine if they were all 7. Rosie starts singing around 8 minutes and then returns to the sandpit for the remaining 6 minutes.

The Ray sounds like it was recorded inside a long metal tube with Rosie at one end and the machine that takes your soul when you die at the other. The last track Cape St Vincent sounds like the toy box was just given consciousness. Experimental music like this might be hard going for some but you have to approach as you would approach any situation that you might not have experienced before – with interest. Hearing something different always pricks my ears up before something familiar.

In 1994 they released the Meshes EP, the opening track was Life In The Clouds which sounded like a strange madwoman had been found in the grounds but when they approached her – it was mother. In mother’s head was a beat that on recognition was immediately transferred to the children’s brains and they all began to dance, beckoning the gardener, the gamekeeper, the cook and the chambermaids to join them. Followed by Chrysalis which is what they all turned into as the dusk approached. This track was definitely composed in space and as the pods rose through the clouds you could see the stately home, the turrets and all its grounds and gardens designed by Capability Brown, fade back to Earth.

The last track, Legendary Band Of Venus, was the planet they were destined to reach wearing ultramarine and lavender suits, their eyelashes seared by the brightest points of the stars.

On Helium, their second full-length album released in 1994, they found themselves back in the insane asylum that they’d never left. A mixture of electronics, nineties style, real drum rhythms and space-age lounge music, it’s a lunatic’s vision of a future that never was. Rosie’s disquieting vocals have grown in confidence, like an assured ghost. The songs seem to be impeccably arranged, an organised chaos. Songs rise and fall, stop and start there’s evolution on their planet. It’s almost as if they’d been sent a new machine that did things that they couldn’t do before. Nightwatch has them trying different things (as if they hadn’t tried different things before, haha). It’s somehow cleverer and I like the way they put their rhythms and sounds together in the same way Holger Czukay did on his fantastic solo albums. Things Left On The Pavement has a repeating tom pattern and sounds African. It’s Afrobeat from Birmingham and one wonders if these experimental Indie kids know they’re doing it.

Windy wanders through the musical possibilities of the boxes they have recently purchased. My Father The Clown has the lunatic circus in town as they continue to look into instruments that you can’t easily name. Dark turns erupt in the middle of the song as if blackness had arrived greying out the primary colours like a descending beast. The Blue is somehow breezy with the Verdigris Horn that sounds like he sometimes doesn’t know what key he is in and does that old trick of repeating the line so people think you meant it. The sample man is in there listening to Bossa Nova chords rewritten for men that live in tunnels. There’s the underlying skill of the drummer that gives everyone else total freedom.

Little Angel, Little Monkey might drive you mad with the repeating woodwind. “And when you leave me terror darkens my mind like crows wings”. It’s something like an upbeat Residents in a tangle with guitars and keyboards and safe drum patterns that make sense despite the impossible sounds around them which they all willingly agree to.

Meshes In The Afternoon is an experiment in sound and the last track Shadows takes you to a sermon at the church of the unusual. Angels dressed as soldiers wander through the pews looking for answers. Staring into people’s eyes, removing their watches and putting them on other people’s wrists, suspending themselves from the rafters and casting down tunes and organ chords for the day’s hymn. No one can read the words, no one can spell out the solutions, all they can do is close their eyes, dim the lights and lie prostrate with hope. 

Song Of The Day is Shimmer And Disappear from Across The Meridian (2018), Pram’s latest release. Rosie is gone but their ideas are still intact all these years later.

WATCH THE VIDEO HERE