Volume I Side A

Volume I Side A of the Band of Georges.

These are songs composed by George between December 1981 and July 1982. They were recorded in his bedroom at 31 Cowick Lane, Exeter, in 1986.

We did not wish to fiddle with these recordings too much. The audio was lifted straight from cassette and simply normalised to 0 dB.

Having written these songs more than four decades ago, and having not heard these recordings for at least the last three, we asked George to make a comment on each of the songs.

Here is what he had to say regarding Volume I Side A of the Band of Georges.

“We used to listen to a lot of music on vinyl albums at this time. A whole vinyl album would – nearly always – fit onto a single side of a 90-minute cassette. When you were recording it, you’d flip the record over at the end of Side 1 then carry on with Side 2. I always thought of these cassettes I made as being like one whole album per side, rather than being a double album. The first half or so of the tape would be Side 1 of the LP, so that would begin right here.”

Kiestevsanval Lady: I remember this! I rather like it! It’s kinda quirky. I wonder if it could be Flickerised somehow? I remember recording the fingerpicking part and making something of a pig’s ear out of it. I could play that part better when I’d only been playing guitar for a couple of months, rather than a few years. Seriously! How strange. Is there a bass on this? I think there wasn’t a bass, just three guitars and the Dr Rhythm. Maybe I hadn’t managed to borrow Excalibur from Marc, and I hadn’t bought the Plank quite yet. I seem to remember making this quite late at night on the day the 4-track arrived. It was my very first recording!

Nothing: Now that’s Excalibur! Marc’s short-scale Kay bass. It had a rather unique tone, rough sounding. It’s great on this, gives it a punky edge. Tom was this guy from Amersham near London I used to know. The lyrics for this were changed not long before the recording was done. The chorus is the same as the original, but I think a lot of the lyrics in the verses were re-written. The new lyrics might have been about Ken.

Not as Grey: Oh no. No, no, no. Just… no. Turn it off. If you really have to play this ever again, please wait until I’ve left the premises. Yes, it has got a surprising G7 in it. I think I wrote this wretched thing around the same time that Simon and me were figuring out our version of California Dreaming for the school House Music competition, when I defected to Coleridge house and wore a red bobble hat pulled right down over my face so nobody would recognise me and launch a protest. But I can’t be hearing this ghastly twaddle! It might be OK as an instrumental of sorts, perhaps. But don’t. Just… don’t.

Turquoise Rubber Band: I don’t believe this… ‘song’… has a single redeeming characteristic. I mean, really, what on earth was I thinking? Was I even thinking at all? Did I not have something more important to do that day? Next!

Time Will Tell: Really? Do you have to? This is just horrible. The musical equivalent of a dirty protest. More cheese than a… cheese warehouse. A really big, full one. Gruesome. Please turn it off.

“This would end Side 1 of the vinyl LP Volume I Side B of the Band of Georges, and Side 2 would begin from here.”

The Distance: Ah, now this is much better! Yes – I wrote this around the time of Project Week in 1982 when we were doing Everyone. I think the movie The Man Who Fell To Earth starring David Bowie had just been on the TV. This whole thing came from the guitar, and then I wrote some words that went something like “He came down to earth but he looked just like a normal man…” – what does a normal man even ‘look just like’ anyway? So I abandoned the lyrics fairly quickly. This track could perhaps be revived by Flicker, it’s not all that bad. The glissando was made by scraping my Dad’s long thin screwdriver with the transluscent yellow handle against the strings. Lots of A minor chords of different hues. I think there was another song I wrote that week called Confusion. No clear memories of it now other than it was in Drower tuning. It was for a girl I rather liked called Carolyn, who was in the fourth year. She read the lyrics and was… indifferent? Disinterested? She just didn’t react at all, not at all. Haha!

The Cowboy’s Blues: This one I’ve used teaching guitar beginners a little about chords and finger picking. The chords are all pretty basic and the whole tune is fairly simple really. This version is two tracks of me playing the Hokada classical guitar. The idea for it came from something I heard on a schools’ radio programme at Littletown School in Honiton in about 1974.

She Was Here: Haha! I’d forgetten how the end went. For some reason, I woke up in the dead of night and sneaked downstairs into my Dad’s study, trying not to wake anyone up, and wrote this on unplugged electric guitar and using minimal lighting. It took a while and it all came in one lump, as it were. There was a girl called Naomi in the sixth form who was very sweet, she had a lovely sense of humour and the longest swishiest hair, and this was for her. Perhaps I had just been dreaming of her before waking up that night and then suddenly dream was gone? Anyway, the next day I was supposed to be doing something in school with Simon and maybe Roy and Dick White, can’t remember now. I went to try to find the bus station but hadn’t been living in Exeter very long and took a wrong turn and ending up somewhere beyond St Davids Station, near Duryard, before abandoning the attempt to catch the bus. So I never made it to Ottery that day. Later I phoned Simon to tell him what had happened, and that at least I had written a new song despite not turning up. The rhythm guitar in this version is my first guitar, the old Kay Les Paul copy that was stolen. The bass sounds like Excalibur. I rather like the tone of the lead guitar, and the performance was quite expressive. Surprisingly few cringe moments. It has a vibe and a groove, don’t you think? This was the longest song I’d written at that point, although The Distance could be quite long if we gave it more than the one ‘verse’.

Coping with the Runs in Mexico Blues: Oh my! This was a giggle. You can tell from the guitar in the intro that this is going to be a bit odd. We wrote this on the teachers’ balcony that overlooks the main school hall during Project Week of 1982. Naomi started things off with “Woke up this morning, I was walking down the street…” and then the rest of us took it from there. Dave, Jon, Simon and me. I can still see us all sitting there on the balcony, me with guitar and the others inventing lines and all of us laughing. What an odd tale. A tragic comedy about a guy who overdosed on everything he could possibly get his hands on. I rather like this version, it’s has a comical feel to it. Rough Terrain played it live many, many times. Stuart would join us on stage and play blues harp. Mad Blind Screaming Blue Stu. He wasn’t blind, although he wore glasses, and was certainly as mad as a bucket of frogs, bless him.

The Drain Song: This is one of the heaviest songs I ever wrote. My younger sister had properly cheesed me off, as she was prone to do often, and I wrote this. She is a narcissistic sociopath, very entitled and difficult to get on with. I used extreme EQ settings on the Boss HM2 pedal – one guitar was maximum bass and minimum treble, and the other was the opposite. There’s a little guitar solo near the end on the bassy guitar which I composed when I was writing the rest of the song. It’s a bit Sabbath or something. I offered this to Wud and Rough Terrain but they didn’t fancy it because it was too heavy. I quite like it!

That ends Volume I Side A of the Band of Georges. Volume I Side B is next.