Volume III Side B

Volume III Side B of the Band of Georges.

These are songs composed by George between April 1983 and December 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 B 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 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.”

Two Timer: Might as well start a new LP by hiding behind the sofa and cringing, with fingers in my ears shouting “Blah blah blah blah blah!” for five minutes to drown out all the horribleness! Is it done yet? Four minutes 46 seconds of needing to scream with anxiety and irritation! By the stars and moon. Yes, I wrote this when I was 17, so there is a mitigating circumstance right there. Apparantly it was also written on the same day I wrote That’s No Way to Pay a Bodyguard. Rough Terrain played this one live a lot, but I doubt it was my idea. It was probably something that Danny heard when I passed my demo tapes around the boys, so that anyone in the band could suggest something they fancied. They were even rougher than these recordings, just guitar and voice onto cassette, nearly always one take with various amounts of gribulage in between. The guitar for this one was quite fun to play, the Rough Terrain version guitar even more so, but this is such a cringeworthy song. Just horrible!

Too Many Times: Ah, yes, I remember writing this. My Dad came in after a few minutes and said he liked it, which was nice of him. This was another therapy song, it was never performed live by a band or anything. There was an issue just there with a track that was live and I stepped on the punch pedal by accident and had to record some of the song again. It was tricky due to its nebulous atemporal nature. I remember being irritated by my clumsiness. It has to be said, I don’t really like this, it’s far too much like… self medication. Another case of ghastly self-indulgent rubbish, unfortunately. Wow, it goes on a bit, doesn’t it? How long is this? Over ten minutes! By the stars and moon. Still droning on! This could easily have been about three minutes. I do wish that wretched guy would STFU! How come it’s so long? Weird.

Leaving Me Here: Oh no, another cringer! Three in a row! Is there anything on here that won’t make me want to gnaw my own leg off and batter myself over the head with the soggy end? Actually… the guitar is decent in this. It’s just that hideous vocal and OTT lyrics. Horrible. Ken could sing this really well, OTT was something he excelled at and he really got into it. The original idea came from a song called Woman in Love by Barbara Streisand, always makes me think of the beautiful crazy Sally W, bless her. I think it was the uk number one in about 1979 and the idea for those chords, A minor to D minor and back again, then G and F major 7, came from there. Then there’s the oddly jazzy instrumental break, which came from something completely different. I’d been having a few guitar lessons after college at the local music school and was introduced to the phrygian mode by my teacher, Jon Mills. The lead melody is something I wrote for a homework assignment for that first lesson. We did a whole load of modes, it was fascinating, but it wasn’t until some years later I came to understand them properly. The part with just the lead guitar sounds frantic, and is a bit sloppy to be honest. It always seems to be the same finger being sloppy! And then it ends on an A major chord for the ultimate cliche. The memory of the song may fade a little, but the cassette doesn’t lie.

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

They Painted Their Bodies: This song was written in the summer holidays in 1983, in a caravan in some woods near Dunsford. My girlfriend and I stayed there for a week, the plan being to write all of the songs for The Concept Album. Although in reality we spent most of the week doing… other things. We did at least manage to write this one, and then in 1986 Senga helped edit the lyrics a bit. The Concept Album never had an actual name. It was probably going to have one, but that never happened. The story told across the album was based on a computer game called Wizardry, on the old Apple II computer. A group of adventurers embarked on a difficult and dangerous quest to defeat a terrible evil and then returned home in triumph, you know the kind of thing. A lot of the music for the album became manifest fairly quickly, but the lyrics were more evasive. This was the first finished song for the album, and the second one in the running order. Not sure if I ever finished the whole thing, there’s a folder somewhere. I think it’s brown. Even though this version of the song is rather shabby, probably with lots of first takes, at least it doesn’t make me want to hide in the cupboard!

Wait Until the Morning: Ah, and speaking of hiding in the cupboard, it’s back to the cringers. Apart from the surprise Hendrix chord, this is about as cheesy and cliched as things can be really. Although it’s kinda sweet in a way, but I do wish it was someone else that had written it so I could absolve myself of all responsibility. Now can you understand why nobody ever heard it before? Is there anything on this tape that isn’t horrible?! I mean, what was I thinking?! And it’s six minutes long?! Oh my… I think I wrote this after going on the train then walking for about an hour to see my girlfriend and being somewhat underwhemed by the reception I received, like she really couldn’t be dealing with having me about the place at that time. And the secrecy! What was that about? We had to keep our relationship a secret from all members of her family and the friends she had from before she knew me, for some reason. More red flags than a Russian military parade, and I was fool enough to put up with it all. But then, I was only 17. Listening to this, I was clearly hoping things would get better. Spoiler alert: they didn’t!

Will I Still Be With You Tomorrow: Here’s one I actually quite like! This one is for the concept album, despite the title making it seem like a continuation of Wait Until the Morning. It’s a bit like a mix of Pink floyd, Rush and the snooker music. For the verses I used the same positions and changed the chord shapes, so it starts with E-shapes, giving D, C, G, F and A. Then I used A-shapes, then D-shapes, but always positions ten, eight, three, one, five. This is the third song on The Concept Album. It describes when the heroes are thinking about what might happen to them when they face their enemy. As they leave their homes, they look around at their companions, and themselves, and think of their families and their responsibilities. Will they survive, or will any of their companions survive, or will they not? Senga helped out with editing the lyrics a bit.

Wish You Were Here: This song has a number of esoteric chords, and key changes. I don’t remember much about writing it to be honest. Laughing Sun played it a few times, but it never developed much and certainly never reached as far as their live set. That Electric Mistress guitar sound though… Yes, a rather odd song.

1984: New Year’s Day 1984? Sounds about right. It was written in the afternoon. We had celebrated the New Year together, Marc and my girlfriend and me, at Marc’s place in the caravan at Straightway Head just outside Ottery. That was a night! We drank barley wine bitter splits in the King’s Head, then walked up the hill to Willow View. The fluj-bollip-pinkie-parcel was queebed. Unfortunately I succumbed to smeejbarf during the queebage, but had recovered enough to continue partaking long before it was completed. Marc’s Dad’s friend Terry had left a couple of tea chests full of porn mags in the caravan and we spent a while looking through them and reading the stories and laughing. Marc showed us his oscillator. That’s not a euphemism. The next day, my girlfriend and I hitchhiked home, on what was the old A30 and is now a little country lane. It was a very grey day with not much light, and after a while of trudging along the grass verge with cars whizzing past, we decided that I should try to remain incognito while my girlfriend did the hitching. After all, she was female and therefore far more likely to be picked up. When someone did stop to give us a ride back to exeter, he asked which one of us had been hitching because we both looked so alike! This song was played a lot. I always quite liked it. Especially the guitar, it’s a fun thing to play. Wud did a decent version of 1984, apart from Ken’s outburst of strangeness from The Prisoner. Not sure why exactly he chose to do that, but at least he did it with conviction. Marc’s bass gave this such a kick. I remember being wiith Denise and Angie and Alice and some others, pretending to be a rock star with Denise’s old acoustic, turning the lights off while I played the first bit, then having my friends turn them on when the rhythm kicked in. How silly! This is the full-length version and it isn’t great to be honest, the guitar needed to be livelier and liable to feed back here and there and it’s all pretty rough. The old Boss Dr Rhythm couldn’t do the three bars of six eight, so there seems to be a bongo or fur drum or something. Possibly an echo of Graham and his buckets in Wud. At the time, the cold war’s icy fingers were prodding us all with worries, so I did wonder from time to time if we were all going to be blown to oblivion in a nuclear war. I think those concerns come across in the lyrics. This might have been a song for the Mark Drower production and stage adaptation of the Orwell novel, although I think by then I had long since come to accept that it would never ever happen.

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