Volume III Side A

Volume III Side A of the Band of Georges.

These are songs composed by George between January 1983 and April 1983. 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 III 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.”

Shadows: I don’t remember the exact story here but there were some strange goings-on at my parents’ house around the time I wrote Shadows. Some people think it’s all nonsense, but there was something uncomfortable in the atmosphere, visitors or elementals or something. There was even a poltergeist. It might have been my younger sister who was approaching puberty, these things can happen people say. I don’t remember exactly when it was, although I certainly remember being absolutely terrified by the sudden cold and creepy, sickening feeling and things flying about for no apparent reason. It was so weird. I used to keep a diary and if I ever find it again it’s all in there. Anyhow… this is in B minor. Oh! There’s a new riff into the instrumental section that I completely forgot about, I rather like this! The solo isn’t too horrible. Influences from Budgie, and Gong perhaps? I always associated this song with One Day, the song about the cat being run over. Nicodemus playing the lead and the Ice Maiden the rhythm. The bass picks the song up and drags it along in the quiet moments, it’s quite good. No band ever did this song, shame really. Yes, I like this one.

Hard Times (Flashback Part 2): In my mind this had such a big sound. I remember playing this with Marc the first time and his bass suddenly gave this such kick, I was blown away and it gave the song a new dimension. When we played this with Wud it ended our set. Before Graham joined the band, we had this drummer who didn’t rehearse with us much, he missed the final rehearsal because I turned up about three minutes late from having to arrange an improbably amount of things. It was very frustrating. When we played the show with him the next day, he simply didn’t get this song at all and just sat like a dummy on his drumstool looking embarrassed. We sacked him shortly after the show and never saw him again. Poor chap. I remember as well, in our last rehearsal my Dad was there in the room and and about to leave. I had my hands full of things and the guitar started feeding back loudly, making our conversation difficult. I told my Dad he should just touch the strings on my guitar to still them and stop the feedback, but what he did he do? Try various other things that were never going to work, he could never listen to anyone. So with a loud sigh of exasperation I put everything down and touched the strings of the guitar and it stopped feeding back at once, of course. That change of feel after the first verse is Dmaj7 and Fmaj7 and the little noodly bass melodies come from what Marc played that first time. Richard helped out with some words that I didn’t like, but by now I don’t think his are so great either, haha! I quite like the way the lyrics end after all these rather heavy, doomy, troublesome ponderings, “…shall I wear my hat?” which was actually a trivial rhetorical question, although some people might fret over such a question a lot before going out. I can no longer remember why exactly this is Part 2 of Flashback, but it is.

A Rumour: You know, I really like the guitar part in this. It’s not played, or recorded very well, but that’s a classic progression in the chorus. This one was never taken on by a band and this isn’t a terribly good rendition, but there’s something about this. It’s another song about the duplicity of teenage girls at college. Those people were wretched, honestly. It was such a relief when that all ended and went away. Choose your friends carefully, a wise person once said!

Magic: Oh no, this is a tough listen. Yucky, horrible lyrics. I kinda like the chords though. This one’s in G minor. All those D and D minor shapes, and an actual D7 to end the phrase. Somehow a Steve Miller or Moody Blues vibe. Back in the day I used to love the album Difficult to Cure by Rainbow, and there was a song on there called Magic, which may have been an influence on this. Actually, a few of these lyrics are not so bad, but others are just… oh, shuddersomely dreadful. They totally ruin it.

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

Give Me Your Money: Oh! This was written in some haste, haha! I was studying Communication Studies for ‘A’ Level at exeter college and had to make a radio programme. It was rather fun! I decided to make the subject of my programme: busking. I’d been a few times with Simon, it was a bit like being paid to practice, although we never earned very much and it was always hideously cold. So I interviewed a few of exeter’s buskers. There was an old guy who played the accordian and pretended to be blind. He only used C major and D minor of the chord buttons and sounded pretty ghastly, but he was certainly a face on the streets of exeter at that time. The other one I remember was a man with Robert Plant curls who I never saw before or since and he did a pretty decent rendition of a song that he had written. There may have been one or two more. I decided my programme needed a theme tune, and I was going to write it myself. This was it! Written in haste and a fairly poor effort of a song, but there we are. A version of it was used to introduce my radio programme, all mixed to cassette, and I think a I had decent mark for my work. I was a dreadful student at college, really dreadful, never did more than the absolute bare minimum of what I could get away with and was almost expelled for having such an appalling attendance rate. Blimey.

There Are Times: Ah… and now, a piece of doomy, self-indulgent twaddle. In C minor. This was therapy. It was never performed by a band. Nobody really cares about forlorn lovesick teenagers wringing their hands in private, so it’s probably just as well. This rendition was an attempt of sorts to build triads using the bass as the root and then the Ice Maiden and Nicodemus for the two top notes. This song has something interesting perhaps in the “What’s the use…” sections, with all those muted strings making the rhythm, but I don’t really like the song much to be honest.

Flashback Part 3: An artistic fade in! This song is made from the original lyrics for Flashback, the Part 1 version, that Simon wrote new words for. There was something about the lyrics I still liked in 1983, so in the end I came up with new music for them. The music actually came about after a long road trip listening to Sky. All those funny voices made using the varispeed knob! I think the shouting might have been an influence from the Kings of the Wild Frontier album by Adam and the Ants, which I was rather fond of back in the day. For the guitar that’s more to the left, I tried to play the strings as close to the bridge as possible on the Ice Maiden to get that bright, trebly sound. It’s not too bad this, it certainly isn’t the worst song amongst these. Although I set the bar pretty low, haha!

Loving You: Even in 1986 I knew that my lyrics cut a bit close to the bone sometimes. I used to write a lot of songs just for therapy, it helped to draw the poison from my soul. My guitar was my best friend and confidante. Later on, performing such songs in a band and airing my innermost thoughts to the public was tough. It adds unnecessary vulnerabilities to your life, you know? This was one of those, for sure. It was never taken on by any band. There were three verses of pure lyrical ghastliness. I felt the best thing to do was just scrap them, play the melody as a guitar part, and keep just the chorus. Instead of three verses, which I felt were unnecessary in what had become a virtual instrumental, I decided that just one was sufficient. So it’s fairly brief, which is good, and nearly all of the lyrics, which were far too yucky to ever be heard, were gone. Thankfully. The guitar is an Ibanez Roadstar II into a transistor HH 5-Channel PA system with reverb, via a Boss OC2 octaver, an EHX Electric Mistress, the best flanger ever made, and a Guyatone analogue delay, with perhaps a Boss GE7 shaping the EQ a little. Thank goodness I ditched the yucky lyrics! This one is reasonable. I wouldn’t have been able to listen to the original version without my skin crawling off its bones to go and hide under a bucket in a dark corner.

That’s No Way to Pay a Bodyguard: This one has a bit of a backstory. My Dad knew this young guy in Kingskerswell, you see, and he was somewhat… minted. He was going to give my Dad – ahem – pirate copies of a whole load of Apple II software. This man had at his house a music room and a big fast motorbike and a beautiful wife, who was very pregnant and rather quiet and subdued. So Dad took me there with him and I spent the day trying things out in the music room. There was a Fender Stratocaster and a drum kit, and the thing that I had the most fun with was the organ. It was a proper full organ, with so many sounds, and bass pedals, and a rhythm machine, the full works, it was just tremendous! I tried playing the rhythm machine and bass pedals and the Strat all together, probably not very successfully. At the start of the session, when my Dad’s friend was turning everything on for me, he played those first two chords of Bodyguard on his Strat. Of course, that A minor 7 was an old friend already, but the second chord, where he slid that Am7 shape up two frets, was a new one on me and I rather liked it. So after a few hours of playing mostly on the organ it was time to go home. The man seemed oddly grumpy. Dad said he’d told him how much every piece of pirate software cost, it was thousands of pounds, and there was something of an atmosphere between him and his wife. Apparently she had wanted to become a parent and he wasn’t keen on the idea, Dad said. What a shame. Anyway, a day or two later, I wrote this song, using those first two chords the bloke in Kingskerswell had played. The verses were originally longer and the lyrics were a bit foolish, about sheep running in fields with greener grass or some such thing. This was where it goes up to C, B flat, F and G and so on. I abandoned those lyrics quite early on and just played the melody as a lead guitar break that goes right before the chorus. The bass goes from A to E rather A to D, as the second chord is a kind of D major I guess, but somehow it gives the things a special tension that just works. Was that Marc’s doing? I don’t remember now. We played this song in Wud and some other bands and people still seem to like it, even today.

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