Flicker

After enlisting the considerable versatility and talent of Dave, they decided to continue from where they had left off in The Ug Brothers – with Farsight. From there grew a set of strange shanties and curious ditties which formed the first Flicker album, At Least 1000 Words.

A drummer called Adi joined the band and they contemplated changing their name to Firehorse as all three members at this stage were born under that particular Chinese astrological sign. There were a few rehearsals in Adi’s basement which showed great potential.

After a few more sessions there was an extraordinary audition involving two blokes completely off their faces on vodka. There was one who had a bluesy gravelly voice who was able to mumble in time and in tune something that sounded like words but were actually ones he was making up. Meanwhile, his mate blundered drunkly around the place trying to fiddle with things, attempting to play drums at the same time as Adi and making ludicrous suggestions. After a period of general confusion the two were thrown out and the band carried on as before.

Several new tunes were now starting to be written. Then, one day, Adi just disappeared. He stopped answering the phone, stopped answering the door. Gone! As it became more and more apparent that the disappearing drummer had truly disappeared – there were other people living his flat – Dave and George felt it would be great to make an album of their music anyway. Dave was getting his head stuck into the computer at this time. He could play drums and they could both record the bass parts for things. If another drummer or bassist appeared then there could be more work done on the live set.

On a slightly more successful note, Lucy and her buddy Emma joined the throng. Lucy and George had met through the Live Stage where Lucy played beautiful bass for her band Klay and George was on the desk there. Lucy played a 150-year-old cello that shook the whole room and Emma blew sweet things from her magical silvery lovepipe. They both had outbursts of keyboarding as well.

Adam from the band Murdock had a brief fling with the band on bass with Dave moving to drums, but alas he was too busy to keep at it. Dave also found another drummer from somewhere, so this time Dave moved to bass. After a relatively short while it became apparent that this situation was not going to work. Tony also stood in on drums for a while but he was far too busy with numerous other bands to be able to devote much time to the project.

In early 2001 George visited Prague to sell some early tunes from the At Least 1000 Words to Czech TV. Later in the year, as the album was being finalised, he began studying Music Industry Management at BCUC in High Wycombe. This slowed the progress of Flicker although the album was finished, new tunes were written and various jam sessions with other musicians took place.

Then at around Easter of 2002, Dave left Exeter and the two agreed to put the band on hold for the time being.

As time went by, George decided to produce sketches of the latest Flicker compositions on an old Tascam 244 4-track. It was state-of-the-art in 1985 and still produces a lovely rich tone. These were gradually compiled as time permitted with the plan being to record them properly with Emma, Lucy and a new team of helpers.

Finally, in 2008, the second album (HappySad) began being recorded. It is hoped to be finished in 2009.

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During a 2002 interview, George describes a day in the field recording sounds to use on the album:

“One of the most eventful days in the recording of the album came when we recorded the rocks. It was May Bank Holiday 2001 and a beautiful sunny day full of promise.

First we drove to Martin’s house in Uffculme to borrow his portable minidisk player. [Martin was the frontman of Pyg, the folk-rock band in which Dave also played drums and George played bass and balalaika.] Due to a frightfully severe balls-up, Dave accidently erased the disk Martin had just spent the last three days compiling from archive material. He was gutted. We all felt gutted. So Dave’s penance was to get three gigs for the band, which we did that very day as it happens.

We wanted the sound of a plane taking off for Aeroplane, so we sat in Dave’s van in the car park at Exeter airport and waited for a time that felt as if it could only be measured in geological terms. Maybe the planes were too tired or something, airport activity was minimal to say the least. So we gave up on that plan and headed for Sidmouth.

After parking, we headed for the beach and recorded the sea and the seagulls, who enjoyed some chips from Sambatti’s cafe – in fact you can hear the rustlage of the chip bag on Beautiful Wings! And of course we recorded the stones.

We tried several permutations; like dropping large rocks on top of other large rocks, dropping large rocks onto small stones, throwing handfuls of gravel generally around the place – and they kept hitting the microphone and making bad sounds – lobbing large rocks into a concrete corner… (laughs) and missing several times, and dropping large rocks onto other large rocks again, but this time from higher up. I did the dropping, Dave wore some ludicrously outsized headphones and boldly pointed microphones about at arms length. The whole kerfuffle was exceedingly preposterous.

Unfortunately we had switched off the recorder when, during this process, an elderly woman dressed like the Queen approached and enquired in a Surrey public school accent: “Excuse me, but would you mind telling me exactly what it is you are doing?”

Dave goes: “We’re recording the rocks. We’re a rock band.”

So, next we carried many large rocks around the corner to where the river Sid flows into the stony beach, and there we built a small rockery of some sort on the riverside. A gang of four elderly people eyed us with great suspicion as we struggled along with our armfuls of rocks and mics and things. They then saw fit to come right over and stand next to us. They looked at the water and at us and the whole scene and embarked upon a vastly prolonged and uninteresting conversation about nothing for about fifteen minutes while we stood with rocks and mics poised, but we couldn’t record anything with all this inane chatter going on in the background.

When those ridiculous people finally wandered purposelessly away, I lobbed the first rock without really looking. By this time several ducks had approached in the water thinking we had bread for them. The first rock missed a duck by a couple of inches. It would have had heavier pants at that moment were it wearing any. There was a great outburst of disgruntled squawking and flapping.

Having frightened the poor ducks away, the other rocks were tossed and recorded successfully. Which is why it is said ‘no ducks were harmed in the making of this track’ on the inner sleeve. Could have been messy.”

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