Record Play Pause

by Stephen Morris

  By doing a bit of rough calculating, we worked out it would have about six minutes a side. Now I was pretty sure that EPs went on for longer than that. I flicked through my records for confirmation and, sure enough, Nick Lowe’s Bowi EP had a side longer than 6 minutes, Spiral Scratch had one side about five minutes, as did the Albertos’ Snuff Rock EP. A minute couldn’t make that much difference could it? We’d be fine, of course, we would. The guy at Pennine who sorted out the pressing as part of the deal told us it’d be OK and he should know. What I hadn’t spotted was that most EPs played at 33 not 45 RPM. Having spent nearly all our (Ian’s) money, there wasn’t much we could do about it anyway.

  Then to make matters worse I discovered that there was already a record company called Enigma – the name we’d given to our nonexistent label.

  Could it get any worse? Now we’d got a bunch of crap-sounding records with another record company’s name plastered all over them.

  Thankfully Enigma were a classical label so the chances of them getting wind of it were slight but with our luck . . .

  We still hadn’t sorted out what we might do with the records once we had them. I’d spoken to Bob Last, Terry had tried Richard Boon and Ian was daily pestering Derek at RCA and T. J. Davidson. But no one was interested. My hints to Virgin had gone nowhere. Maybe things would change once we had the sleeves done.

  Bernard did the designing of the, er, slightly ‘controversial’ sleeve (a member of the Hitler Youth banging a drum), and I figured that a 14 x 14 inch sheet of paper folded into quarters would get rid of the need of any gluing – all it would need was a little origami. I arranged for the sleeves to be printed at a little shop in Macclesfield. One Saturday afternoon, everyone came to Ivy Lane and, to a soundtrack of Neil Young’s Zuma, we set to work paper folding and record inserting. All that work and for what? A pile of shit-sounding records in slightly controversial sleeves.

  I went round the record shops in Macc to see if anyone would take a few copies off our hands, but with no success. I tried selling them to mates, who naturally expected not to be charged. This usually ended up with a bit of bartering – only Phil Swindells (my drummer friend of cabaret fame) coughed up the full amount and later collared me to say he thought it was really good. Most demanded a refund. I tried selling them down the pub, resulting in even more bartering.

  ‘How much without the sleeve then?’

  ‘I’ll give you 50p and a pint now but if I don’t like it you’ll owe me.’

  Somehow I didn’t think David Bowie did much of this.

  Once again it was us versus the rest of the world. Through no fault of our own (obviously), we were doomed.

  Then one day Ian came up trumps. His persistence and charm had paid off. Richard Searling and Derek Brandwood at RCA’s Manchester office had a friend, John Anderson, who ran a northern soul label, Grapevine, which was thinking of branching out into new wave.

  The plan was that John would pay for the recording of an album, and then Richard would put it out through RCA with a licence deal, or something of that nature. This was brilliant. An album was better than an EP. When do we start? There was one small catch, however: as part of the deal they would like us to do a cover of a northern soul hit in a new wave/punk rock styling.

  First, we would have to meet with John Anderson and hear, from the horse’s mouth as it were, what exactly the deal was going to involve. So one sunny morning, Ian and I set off in the Cortina bound for King’s Lynn.

  An odd place for a northern soul label to be based, I thought, surely Wigan would have been more like it?

  I knew a bit about northern soul thanks to Geoff, the youngest recruit to Cliff’s office staff. He was a Wigan Casino regular and explained that northern hits were frequently extremely obscure or extremely rare old American tracks whose true identity and origins were masked by the DJs. They were given new names and lineages, or sometimes rerecorded to disguise their pedigree. Well, that’s the way I understood it anyway. It seemed a bit murky but . . . in the light of what Richard and John were proposing it made some sort of sense.

  Basking in another nefariously gained day off, we journeyed east to Norfolk. The Cortina’s unpredictable radio was behaving for once and Dee D. Jackson’s ‘Automatic Lover’ got frequent plays on Radio 1 to the approval of the east-bound travellers.

  ‘Good this, innit?’

  ‘Yeah, she sounds a bit dirty.’

  ‘This synth bit’s good.’

  The radio packed up just outside Grantham.

  We were two lads off to the seaside. We smoked and talked about the future of the band, what we should be doing.

  Ian’s old mate Toz was doing Art at college, ‘Really good, weird stuff. We should get him to do something.’ I’d thought about art school once but an unfortunate glue-related incident had rendered me an undesirable pupil.

  Other bands, of course, we invariably talked about bands – that was always the meat of the long-drive conversation. Ian had been reading about Genesis P-Orridge and Throbbing Gristle and their industrial experimental approach to sound. Reports of the Throbbing Gristle live experience seemed to intrigue him, particularly the bit he’d read about them charging over a thousand pounds to play.

  ‘That’s what we should be doing.’

  We talked of the old jobs we’d both had in the mills of Macclesfield, Ian’s salvaging of balls at Prestbury golf club, the current plight of our ‘day jobs’, the time-off wrangles; we talked about writing songs and books we’d read and films we’d seen. Happy-go-lucky driver and navigator fare.

  John Anderson was welcoming. We got sandwiches, but really should have pushed for fish and chips. He gave us some of his records, northern soul 12-inchers mostly, and some Casablanca singles, which had been done by John’s US partner, Bernie.

  That went down well, free stuff always did, and he told us a bit about his plan for the record/label.

  He was thinking of calling it ‘Sourgrapes’. What did we think?

  ‘Yeah, that sounds great,’ I lied nervously as Ian choked on his third or fourth sandwich.

  The track John and Richard wanted us to cover was by N. F. Porter and called ‘Keep On Keeping On’. We listened to it a couple of times – it had a driving beat and a cool guitar riff. How could I not have heard it before? It was really good! But it didn’t sound much like us. That didn’t matter, apparently, if we just stuck to the bare bones of it. I think John was unaware of the exact level of our musical competence but we nodded and enquired about further sandwiches. Ooh and any crisps? We were easily bought. I doubt we played the free records more than once.

  Most musicians can, after hearing a tune once or twice, knock off a pretty good version of it. Well, if not good, then something that bears a passing resemblance to the original.

  None of those musicians were members of Joy Division.

  Our few attempts at covers were notable for the way they sounded nothing like the song that they were supposed to be.

  There was ‘Riders on the Storm’ by the Doors – that one got a public airing once to the sound of Jim Morrison’s remains rotating in a Paris graveyard.

  ‘7 and 7 Is’ by Love – that one never got out of the rehearsal room. In fact, we only got as far as the first chorus before we knew we were facing defeat.

  ‘Louie Louie’ by the Kingsmen wasn’t that bad. It helped that John the Postman, with whom we mostly jammed it, knew nearly all of the words and at least two of the three chords.

  ‘Sister Ray’ by the Velvets was something that sounded a bit like a rambling jam anyway and so long as we got somewhere close with the riff, artistic licence could justify the rest.

  Much, much later there would be ‘Wooden Heart’ and ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?’ by Elvis (the King) Presley, and ‘When I’m with You’ by Sparks, but I’m getting a bit ahead of myself there.

  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying this failing was a bad thing. No, not at all, quite the opposite in fact. It showed imagination, if anything.
Creativity, you know?

  We set to trying to cover N. F. Porter’s track, but the one thing that stuck out was the guitar riff. In trying (and failing) to copy the feel of the track’s rhythm, we ended up speeding it up a fair bit. Ian wrote some new lyrics, nicked a title from William Burroughs (or from a Manc sci-fi fanzine, which had nicked it earlier), and after a couple of evenings work at T. J.’s ‘Interzone’ was born. Pretty good, we thought.

  It was more than that really. With the benefit of hindsight, perhaps this was the beginning of a style. Ian’s Ballard-like lyrics evoked some decaying cityscape of the near future or the recent past. Cold like a foreign film, it almost sounded like it had subtitles. It didn’t have a chorus (not much of our stuff did), just a kind of refrain that relieved the wound-up tension of the verses. We may have had different backgrounds but the one thing we did all have in common was that we wanted to get out, to escape, and music seemed to offer a potential route.

  It was the first of our songs that I could see as existing in an unreal place, like a scene in a movie, or a landscape passing by a windscreen. A world that Ian described, Bernard punctuated, Hooky steered and I propelled us through. A world from inside our collective heads, not really real, not thought out, just bits of stuff, made up and let out.

  Whether this was the sort of thing Richard and John were expecting was something else. If it wasn’t, there wasn’t much we could or would do about it.

  We had a couple more meetings with John and Richard in Manchester. Did we have enough songs for an album when our live sets just shaved twenty minutes? Course we did. Anyway, we weren’t going to let a little thing like that stop us.

  Great things were promised over a drink. The then legendary EMI Paris was mentioned as a possible recording studio.

  ‘Fantastic-sounding room,’ said John.

  ‘Paris?’ I spluttered in a funny high-pitched voice, much to the amusement of the rest of the band, especially Hooky, who still finds it funny to this day. In my head I was picturing myself being asked (in French of course), ‘Are you going to hit all those drums?’ ‘Mais oui, mon ami,’ I would reply, ‘mais oui!’ as I lit up another Gitanes.

  It was, of course, the beer talking and, strange to say, we ended up in Arrow Studios, Jackson’s Row, Manchester, in May 1978 for a couple of days. Not the more upmarket Parisian equivalent for ‘as long as it takes’.

  I must admit that I found it an interesting experience. I was learning what mics got used on the drums and the way that different sorts of rooms affected the sound of them. You could read all you wanted about this studio stuff, but until you started actually doing it . . .

  John and Richard were nominally producing and Bob Augur was doing the engineering. Things started off swimmingly enough, but pretty soon it all went a little bit pear-shaped. I think John and Richard wanted a mutant soul record but getting Ian pissed on Scotch and John urging him to ‘sing like James Brown’ was like throwing petrol on a barbecue. It did not end well. To say there were musical differences would be an understatement. Transporting the pissed and enraged singer home and explaining to Debbie how he got in that state was challenging too.

  That we went along with this deal – only Hooky had reservations – just shows how mad for a record contract we were. RCA was especially attractive: being on the same label as Bowie, Iggy and Lou Reed said something, carried a bit of weight. Ian was convinced that RCA proper (rather than Grapevine) would pick up the album once they heard how good we were.

  Looking back, we must have been crazy.

  You don’t need a lawyer to tell you it’s there in Black and White.

  ‘We want all the publishing on their tunes.’

  We weren’t totally ignorant of what a contract meant. But one area where we were completely in the dark was music publishing. Rather than asking John and Richard what exactly publishing was, we guessed that what this meant was the world of sheet music. Who bought sheet music in this day and age? Can’t be much money in that, can there? The fools! Let John’s company have the music publishing. Ignorance is bliss.

  Music publishing, as it turns out, has very little to do with sheet music. It’s about assigning copyright and is in fact a complicated business. Even more complicated now in the twenty-first century with new technology, making downloads and music streaming as important as the sales of physical records.

  We would also, in giving away the publishing, be giving away the right to exploit the songs (not the recordings we had made, but the rights to the actual songs themselves). We would potentially be giving away ownership of our music.

  The actual royalties rate for the record (the amount we would make on sales of the record) is kind of straightforward: 4 per cent of 90 per cent of record sales after recouping (i.e. paying back) the cost of actually making the record in the UK, and 4 per cent of 90 per cent of 50 per cent overseas.

  That’s not too bad is it? we thought.

  Ignorance is not only bliss, it is also very dangerous.

  The record we made for Grapevine/RCA was never officially released but it is generally available these days on a bootleg with various names – ‘The Warsaw Album’ is the most common but we were actually thinking of calling it ‘Abstract Music’ – and it’s OK at best. Mostly it sounds rough and unfinished. Most likely this was because we ran out of time. That’s not to say we didn’t have a plan as to how we were going to go about recording the songs and how we wanted them to sound. We’d put a lot of thought into it as these notes from the time show.

  The notes will probably intrigue and confuse the trainspotters among you – myself included – for a couple of reasons, which I’ll do my best to explain.

  The song called ‘Conditioned’ is, I think, an alternative title for ‘Novelty’ hence ‘(Nov.)’. We did have another song called ‘Conditioned’ from July 1977 and were probably recycling the title, having binned the song for some reason.

  ‘Soundtrack’ in this case refers to the song aka ‘No Love Lost’, which had been recorded for the An Ideal for Living EP but not yet widely released.

  ‘Bob, Bob, Bob, there’s people in the studio. Bob! I can’t possibly work with this sort of pressure. Get them out right this minute, if you please,’ the little jingle songster pleaded.

  I can still remember every word of that jingle, unfortunately.

  All of us, but Hooky and Ian especially, were easily irked. Any little setback quickly became disaster. More proof that our group paranoia was justified.

  We felt we were outsiders. I liked that idea. I wanted to be outside. Inside was being controlled and suffocated, starved. That’s what we thought they were doing to us. The bastards. We felt collectively persecuted and that is not a good way to make friends – people will think you moody bastards. Quite a few did. Quite a few still do.

  In our world, we were not moody bastards. Far from it. We were easy-going, happy-go-lucky, practical-joke-loving types – looking for a life of fun and frolics, but thwarted at every turn.

  * * *

  The two memories that stay with me from those sessions are getting the keyboard player from Sad Café to come down with his Minimoog and add a synth bass line to ‘No Love Lost’, and asking him if it could make other noises apart from the one he was playing. He took it well, though. I just liked the noises. We probably wanted some noise as a substitute for the ‘background tapes’ we wanted to try. Contrary to popular belief, I don’t think we were averse to using the Moog (well, I wasn’t) but somehow our dissatisfaction with the production of the record seemed to muddy the waters a bit. Were we ever satisfied? Will we ever be?

  The other was arriving slightly early one day to find a small, ever-so-camp chap recording a jingle for a football pools company.

  ‘Who the fuck are you?’ Ian probably thought this was John’s idea of getting some backing vocals on the record.

  If you do anything often enough you will either get better at it or realise that it’s not for you and never will be, but at least you tried. Either
way, you will have learned something important about yourself.

  By dint of repetition, I was making progress in the art of persuading people I had never met (and largely never would) to give us gigs. These were mostly in the pubs and clubs of West Yorkshire and took place, without fail, on those dead nights in the middle of the week. So they weren’t the best-attended events, but the theory was that, by word-of-mouth, things would get better. Sometimes, though, there didn’t seem to be any words coming out of any mouths.

  At one gig in Oldham there was literally no one there, just the caretaker, Hooky’s girlfriend Iris and her chum Pauline – making a surprise hanky-panky inspection to check up what mischief went on with this earth-shattering band. Oh, and there were two punks who interrupted our set to ask, ‘Are the Prefects on here tonight?’

  A slightly bitter press release.

  On hearing our negative reply the pair then enquired, ‘Do you know where they are on then?’

  Then they were gone, and the wind continued whistling and the tumbleweed blew across the empty hall.

  You would have thought that we could have managed to get ourselves a gig in Macclesfield. I mean, we’d played in Manchester so Macclesfield should have been a shoe-in. But getting anything done in my home town is never easy.

  In the spirit of the times, bands had started playing live music nights at the Travellers’ Rest pub and Moreton Hall community centre. There’d even been a bit of a festival on at the Moss Rose football ground featuring local rock legends Orphan and Silverwing. But phone call after phone call trying to get us a gig anywhere in town drew a blank. So one Friday night I decided to take the bull by the horns and set off with Ian to corner a promoter in person and persuade him that it would be a good idea to give us a gig.

  ‘Thee don’t like that punk rock, new wave or whatevreet’s called business in Macc. Come back when yuv dun a few more shows, got a bit more experience like, and I’ll ’ave a see abowt getting yer on or sommat’ was his response.