Volume IV Side B

Volume IV Side B of the Band of Georges.

These are songs composed by George between November 1984 and April 1985. 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 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.”

Planets: This didn’t fit on the previous side of the tape so it was done again on the B side. All of the gribulage at the beginning is totally unnecessary. That’s a minute forty just of… space sounds and intergalactic… hiss. Never mind. Always rather liked the chords for this and the pretty guitar. That very first chord, an Em7, has a very special quality because the guitar sings a note all on its own that isn’t really there. It was a beautiful and profound moment. We played this one in Wud with Ken singing and playing the rhythm part. It’s a bit long and soft, and it just seems to go on and on, labouring the musical point ad nauseum. I find it rather tiresome today. Perhaps it could somehow be revived as an instrumental? There might be a Flicker album emerging from all of these old songs! I mean, those ghastly lyrics, by the stars and moon. They’re just so hideously yucky. Pass the bucket! Why did I write this crap?! It was fabulous when I started working with Pete and he wrote the lyrics, that man was blessed with a rare talent. I never liked my lyrics very much.

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

Change: This is one I still like! I wrote this at Flat D, and a day or two later a guy called Rudy, who was our neighbour and one of the cool kids, was round at our house. I remember talking with him about the lyrics because he had been the singer in a few hard rock and punk bands. What he said was very interesting. He told me that for him, vocals were a percussion instrument. He liked words with hard consonants so he could make the vocal part rhythmic. He said that soft consonants like Ls, such as in ‘less lean’ in the first line of lyrics, were for him not good letters. He said they were too soft and he couldn’t work with them. His lyrics were all about the sound and the rhythm, not the meaning. I found Rudy’s philosophy regarding vocals fascinating and it was something I always considered when writing lyrics from that point on. It felt good nailing this song. There’s something incredibly satisfying about the moment when you realise you have the song in the bag. I think it took a bit longer than normal to write, but it was all done in one session. Of course, Ken had moved to exeter by now and we were starting to work on the Wud set under the dreadful name of Lemming Meringue. Whichever one of us thought that up should be ashamed. Anyway, I counted the guitar chords one day and there 42 different ones, apparently. Just about all of the guitar is absolutely definitive and always remained the same. Even Ken’s two notes that he played for a solo at the beginning! I wanted to try to make a lead break at the end of the choruses that was very unique and original, so I gave it big intervals – root, seven, four, it starts. The second verse has a different ending to the other two verses. I remember when we played this live for the first time in the drama room at Exeter College. It was still pretty new and I was worried that it might not go ok, but it actually went very well. The people who were there came up and said how they had liked it for the next few weeks. The piano is a Challen 988. I remember going to the Challen factory near where we lived in London as a small child in about 1970, and seeing all the pianos in various states of construction. The old piano in the family home was of a dark wood and must have had real ivory keys. The middle C and the E just above it were slightly pinker than all the rest of the notes and I used to play them together, and move that third interval up and down the keyboard. I found it a pretty sound and that was what gave me the idea for the piano hook in Mirror by Dark Company, many years later.

Indian Summer: Indian Summer was a collaboration between myself and Ken in the early days of Wud. A guy I knew called Paul Kay, who could play sweet guitar, played that little slidey riff that’s in the chorus. I saw him do this and tried it myself, then the rest of the guitar just came, all on its own, such as that G6 add 9 chord slid up to a B flat. That was a moment! There were no lyrics though, so I asked Ken to write some, and he did. It’s a song about Ken remembering an Asian girl he was fond of, rather than warm weather in October. A lot of people seem to like this song and a while back I made a short video that’s up on YouTube for how to play it. Within a few hours, I’d been told I’d actually played it wrong in the video! So maybe we should make another one sometime? Marc sang “Carry me away” when we played this with the band and it was the only line of backing vocals he did in the whole performance, which we all found rather funny at the time. Laughing Sun did a version as well, it may have been the very last thing that Ken ever sang with us. Simon played percussion and then a delightful jazzy electric guitar solo. When Rough Terrain had a crack at this, the words ended up being mutated to “Burning insects on the breeze float of your room…” instead of ‘incense’. And “It’s raining golden showers on the lawn…” instead of ‘rainbow dancing showers on the lawn’. I still have people ask me to play this, 40 years on. Amazing!

So Begins the Crying: In a way this one is like Indian Summer, because I wrote the guitar part and then gave Ken a tape so he could write some lyrics. Rough Terrain played So Begins the Crying live many, many times. It’s rather a fun thing to play and not very hard. I think we gave it a big crash ending, then changed key up a semitone to G, and then went straight into Coping With The Runs In Mexico Blues, with Mad Blind Screaming Blue Stu on blues harp. I think this was probably about a mutual friend of ours, who had a lot of self-doubt and problems with his confidence and paranoia. Sad really, he was a lovely guy. Fantastic guitar player too. He was in Laughing Sun for a while in 1987 when they were an octet, he was playing the bass. I remember a show they did where there was a big heavy black curtain at the back of the stage, and thinking there was a wall behind it, he leaned on it. There wasn’t. It’s the only time I ever saw anyone fall off the back of a stage! The bass made a great CLANG! and everyone in the band looked around to see what the bass player was doing. As far as they could see, he’d just vanished! There were a few moments of confusion and bewilderment, and then a slightly dazed and sheepish looking bass player stood up and emerged from the folds of curtain, to great applause. Fortunately there were no injuries to man or bass.

Doing Fine: This was rather a fun song to play, although the old Dr Rhythm couldn’t manage the odd bars of 6/8. I had to turn it off for those. Back in 1985, if you looked at all alternative, you were likely to be targeted by the police. We called them “thatcher’s gestapo”. They would use stop and search most times they saw one of us out after dark, which became rather tedious. They were also inclined to use violence first and ask questions later. I tend to think the battle at Stonehenge, as described in the song Battle of the Beanfield by The Levellers, and the poll tax riots in London, were the height of it. Very happy to say that the uk police are now much better, much more tolerant to the way people look and much more professional these days. You probably won’t be dragged into the exercise yard by the hair and punched in the stomach for reporting your bicycle stolen nowadays.

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