Volume VI Side A

Volume VI Side A of the Band of Georges.

These are songs composed by George between July 1985 and. 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 VI 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.”

Turn with the Tide

Powerful start. A bit U2 or Fleetwood Mac. Melodic. Some decent guitar parts. That ending! Very good.

It tells a story, of sorts. I believe my hippy-girl muse of the time was planning to move overseas and I had been waiting for a good moment to make a move. Four of us had been camping on Exmouth beach, building a fire from whatever old wood we could find on the clifftop and throwing it down to the sand. It was all good fun.

Then, one night as I was walking home, there was this group of drunk people. One of them people had gone absolutely beserk. He was attacking the others, punching them and knocking them down. There was a lot of blood. The women in the group were screaming. Goodness knows what was up with the guy who was doing it all.

I felt pretty vulnerable, I was alone after all, and there were a lot of them. I managed to sneak into some shadows and then a dark alley that led behind the church in St Thomas, and was lucky to be spared being the subject of the next attack.

As this song was written over the course of three days, the violence may have occured between the first and last writing session.

Epilogue

One night I was at a club called Timepiece in exeter, and went into the chillout room downstairs. My ex was there at a table with three of her friends.

As soon as she saw me she started screeching something incoherent, and babbling incomprehensible nonsense. Her friends looked embarrassed and uncomfortable. Probably not the best way to approach another human when you want something from them.

Some of those riffs on the guitar are quite good. The lyrics for this aren’t too dreadful either, thankfully. For someone who was allegedly a hardcore rock and metalhead, I used a lot of acoustic guitar parts in these songs.

Drowning in Your Eyes

This is a song of lust and desire written for a girl with the most beautiful blue eyes. She had very short hair and often wore different wigs. She was a posh girl who lived in a big house. I remember she was into archicture and retro songs. She played me The Windmills of Your Mind on her record player one day.

This was very first song The Ug Brothers played live at a show. It was at the Cavern in exeter on xmas eve 1994, and was often their set opener. Dave and Graham on bass and drums were just awesome. It’s in C# and is quite a simple thing to play on guitar. Funky.

Song for Hannah

Now this one is pretty good! Those riffs are cool and the weird wonky chord at the end of the chorus. Lyrics are reasonable. The vibe of this is that it has… time. The riffs and groove are not hurried, they’re simply stated and just… right there. I wonder why no bands ever did this song? No matter.

Hannah was a beautiful young maiden from Cheltenham who somehow befriended some of us weirdos. She only lived in exeter for a couple of months. Hannah lived with a girlfriend above a vegan restaurant called Gaia at the bottom of Fore Street in exeter. Pok and me went there one evening and Hannah and I had an all-too-brief snuggle.

About half an hour after we left, I was picked up from the street and whisked away by the police for an hour or so of questioning. It rather ruined the day. In fact, it marked the beginning of some sort of decline following the awesome summer of 1985. The police were searching for a man with long hair, so it must have been me, right? The uk police were not good under thatcher. Anyhow, it didn’t take long and I left as free a man as anybody else was in thatcher’s england.

Hannah had a wonderful voice and a real presence. She had charisma. I held this hope of being able to do music with her. And then, suddenly, she was gone. Pok knew her the best and he said she had moved to Brighton. Apparently she had formed a band there called Pan. They were very good and started to make a name for themselves.

I ended up seeing them play live at Glastonbury. They were on a big stage early in the morning and hardly anyone else was there. It might have been 1994? I don’t think Hannah remembered me, judging by her quizzical expression when I waved and shouted ‘hi’ at the end of their set. Haha!

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

How Does It Make You Feel?

Let’s begin with an epic! I always rather liked the guitar in this. It was written from the guitar and the rest came afterwards. This song is quite introspective really and it was never part of the set of any band. I may have wanted to make it a Masters of Drone song, but don’t really remember now.

A few bad things had happened. My Nan had died under horrible circumstances. A few lovers had come and gone. The band Wud had definitely ended. I’d been in trouble with the police for a tiny crumb of ganja, which my lawyer said had a street value of “…well under 10p.” It was so ridiculous that almost everyone in the courtroom laughed, and the judge had to bang his gavel and call for order. And of course, by now, the summer was over.

This was written during the days of Laughing Sun rehearsing at my place in Cowick Lane. So in a way this song is a bit of a lament for the passing of that wonderful summer of 1985. Something new was coming!

It’s Just a Game

Oh, I like the chords. Pretty guitar tone. That’s the Electric Mistress, on the red setting. My vocal is good! Wow! That’s a rarity! Some of these chords were later recycled and reused in the song Lullaby, which I wrote about a month or so later.

This was a strange period of time. The summer of 1985 had been awesome and it was over. Now the band Laughing Sun was coming together.

My friend Cliff was having a very odd time of things with a new girlfriend. She was Iranian and had a somewhat mysterious background. Cliff suspected she had royal connections.

He had a tarot deck, the Crowley one I think. I like the Rider-Waite deck much better as the boards have such wonderful pictures. They tell you everything you need to know without referring to the book if you just look.

Anyway, I sat by him for moral support as he did his reading. It was revealing. These things can often open up new possibilities. How much of it was true was anybody’s guess and I don’t remember too much about it now. At the end he said he’d burned his cards out.

That wasn’t all. A few months earlier, Dad had given me a second-hand bicycle, after my good one from WV Fish in Sidmouth had been stolen. This bike was blue, and a weird foldy-up thing with a three-speed Sturmey-Archer – except the third gear wouldn’t engage. So it was a two-speed Sturmey-Archer. It was the most ridiculous contraption, but it worked. Sort of.

So one day I went on a bicycle expedition with Graham and Denise. We were on the A30 under the M5 bridge and I’d stopped and Graham, who wasn’t looking where he was going, crashed into the back of me. The only casualty was my trousers. They were horribly ripped in a very bad place. Denise found it hilarious. We all did. I was a bit bashful.

We searched in some fields along the way but didn’t find what we were looking for. That would be another tale. When we got to Ottery, Denise went to find a friend in town and Graham went to visit Marc, who had a caravan at Willow View. I went home on my own and met Richard and Tiggy, who also had a caravan at Willow View by then. I remember that Tiggy was furtively looking next to the loose flap of cloth hanging from my loins for the whole time during the conversation.

I stopped off in town to visit a friend on the way home, probably to borrow a safety pin, and whilst I was in their place somebody stole my bicycle. It was parked outside and was a big surprise to say the least. It was such a ghastly machine I couldn’t believe anyone would want to steal it. It was even locked up with a big fat chain and a padlock, and the thief had broken it open and stolen that as well.

So I walked the rest of the way home in a grump. I didn’t bother reporting it to the police after my previous experience of reporting a bicycle stolen.

The next day my Dad asked me about the bicycle and I said it was stolen. He was angry about it and we argued for about five seconds, then he told me to move out of the house at once. I sighed, got up and left. I was unable to secure any of the bedsits in the paper that day and spent the night on a friend’s sofa. The next day I went home to do some packing and my Dad was looking rather sheepish. He couldn’t say ‘sorry’. Mum said “Don’t go, he didn’t mean it,” so I stayed a little longer.

I wrote It’s Just a Game either that day, or the day before at the house of the friend where I stayed the night. Life did feel a bit like a weird game at the time, but at least after that episode things began to improve again.

Look At It From The Outside

Here’s a curious song. It’s not too bad actually. The lyrics are a bit yucky, but less yucky than some of the earlier things I wrote.

The guitar is decent and the chorus is kinda catchy. It’s played on the Ice Maiden and she has a floating trem, so those intervals with bent notes and open strings might be painful for the purist.

The tempo is somewhat fluid in places, which is absolutely by design. It was never part of the set of a band. The rest of the band would only have played where the Dr Rhythm is if there had been a band behind it.

This was another one I wrote about my hippygirl muse. It seems there are several of them for her! Goodness. Was this the last one?

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