Volume IV Side A

Volume IV Side A of the Band of Georges.

These are songs composed by George between January and October 1984. 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 IV 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 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.”

Victims: The music for this song was probably not supposed to sound as much like We Used to Know by Jethro Tull as it does, but it sounds really a lot like it. Goodness. So… my girlfriend had been away somewhere for a university interview and I went to meet her off the train at exeter St. Davids with Angie and Eva and Cliff. Eva and Cliff were an item at that time, and when my girlfriend didn’t emerge from the crowd who got off the train, we all trudged back up St. Davids Hill to Eva’s bedsit in Richmond Road. It was freezing cold and Eva only had a little one-bar electric fire in her room. Angie and me sat close together by it, trying to keep warm, while Eva and Cliff did some unmentionable things under the covers involving a jar of Marmite, which Angie and I found a bit… ghastly. There was a wait of a couple of hours before the next train came. Of course, there were no mobile phones or anything like that in 1984, so none of us knew what was going on. You see, you have to understand that Angie was incredibly beautiful, and we were cold and alone apart from whatever Eva and Cliff were doing under the duvet, and… she was so tempting, but all we did was hold hands and talk. After a couple of hours had passed, we walked back down the hill to St. Davids station and my girlfriend was on that next train. I often wondered what would have happened if… a sliding doors moment, perhaps.

Playing the Field: Another horrible song! Virtually no memory of this at all, although it sounds as if I was mightily cheesed off with my girlfriend at the time. Red flags are not just for decoration! This was surely a therapy creation. No band ever did it. There are a couple of quite nice Sabbathy riffs, and I always quite liked “fit like books in a glove” for a line. But there’s really very little to recommend this one, unfortunately.

Why Don’t You Go to Hell: Not liking this a whole lot to be honest. It isn’t completely awful, but it isn’t very good either. Wish I still had that Electric Mistress. Best flanger ever. Best pedal ever! Never mind… This is a simple song, and one of disgruntlement, disappointment and feeling underwhelmed. I really remember nothing of the circumstances of writing this, other than I was probably in the middle of ‘A’ level exams at the time. It was never performed by a band. Guitar tones are good, although the lead part was not played very well at all. Probably one take.

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

Dream: To say this was the full-length version would be something of an understatement. Tell me the time, don’t build me the clock, as someone once said. The lyrics are so cheesy! Oh no. Horrible! I remember recording this, the whole song was done in one afternoon. It felt good. I wrote Dream during a boat holiday on the Norfolk Broads just after our ‘A’ levels were done and we’d moved into a new flat. The place would be the first Wud HQ. We’d somehow rented the biggest boat the company had, a proper wooden canal boat built in 1904 I think. We were soon reasonably adept at handling it, even in tricky situations. It was tremendous fun! However, as can be seen from the previous few songs, I wasn’t particularly satisfied with the relationship with my girlfriend, and had started to think about a previous flame quite a lot. I was thinking both of her, and another lady I knew and admired, who was a charismatic and unique dancer, and a regular at a club I used to go in exeter. Dream evolved quite a lot over time, such as the changes of tempo and the dirt – or no dirt – on the guitar, and it just grew longer and longer. It was probably only about four minutes or so to begin with. Ken had the idea for the tempo change for the second verse and much of the arrangement. Maybe I should blame him for this being so ridiculously long! A lot of the ten-minute-plus [10:30 – Ed.] guitar solo was fairly definitive at one point. Wud played it and Ken, bless him, was great at bashing out a simple chord sequence with conviction. He did exactly that for the Cander version of It’s a Blue Sky Don’t Hold No Rain, if you remember. It was exactly what Pok wanted at that moment. Anyhow, there were a couple of times when the tape machine was running and recording us rehearsing, and I just went off on one. Later I tried to learn those parts I’d improvised. A year after Wud had ended, The Subterraineans played Dream as well. I still remember playing it live at Bicton College for their xmas bash, completely smashed on booze. We did a decent job of it. Again, it was a nice simple thing for Dean and Jerry to grind out whilst I did the melodics. Lots of flange from the Electric Mistress, it was such a key part of my sound. I marked four settings on it in crayon that I used a lot, and it might have been the green setting to start and the red setting to end. To be honest, this isn’t a super-great version of the guitar solo and it could have been a bit more concise. Probably a lot more!

The Pig, the Peg and the Egg: Ha! This was a homage to the late great Ivor Cutler. It’s based upon his song Barabadabada from the Jammy Smears album. There is absolutely nothing remotely serious or sensible here, I can clearly remember writing it. It was with Jack the Frag and Graham at Flat D, also known as Wud HQ. We were all giggling and being very silly. It was probably created after some hot knives. In the middle of writing this song, my furious girlfriend, who had been watching some television in her room, stamped up the stairs to bellow her displeasure at our myrth. Once she had finished and stamped away again, we continued until the song was done. None of us knew why she was so annoyed at the time, although she was probably feeling a bit left out and jealous of our foolishness and fun. I was never into television much.

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