Volume VII Side A

Volume VII Side A of the Band of Georges.

These are songs composed by George between January 1986 and May 1986. 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 VII 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.”

Fool in the Sea of Sharks

Fool in the Sea of Sharks is quite a complex song really. It changes feel and tempo a few times. I rather like the way it starts! Even my lyrics are not completely dreadful.

It’s a strange song, isn’t it. I tried to do this with Marc and Graham in The Masters of Drone, but the band folded quite fast. By then I had become somewhat disillusioned and exasperated with the other musicians I knew because they seemed to be so unreliable.

That was when I started looking into the possibility of owning a portastudio. Zaphod had one, and the idea of recording my songs exactly the way I heard them was very appealing. Admittedly it was all a bit hindered by the limitations of my playing skills, and lack of experience for how to record a song properly.

Sometime around the start of 1986 I tried recording a load of my early songs using Dad’s Tandberg reel-to-reel machine. You could do an overdub on that and bounce the tracks together, then make a new overdub and bounce those together, and so on. Horrible degredation, but it was better than a pair of cassette machines. Marginally.

This was the last song I wrote as a teenager was it? And already a musical veteran!

Aquarian Spirit

This is a fingers-then-plectrum-then-fingers-again song on guitar, for the right hand. Unless you’re a lefty.

So this was the first thing I wrote as a 20-year-old, and no longer a teenager? It has some kind of merit. I like the chords and riffs. The breakdown is cool, it has a touch of funk to it. The guitar solo is horrible.

I wrote Aquarian Spirit for Graham. He’s five days older than me and for some years we felt a brotherly bond of sorts, I think. Can’t remember now what he was going through at this time, but I do remember there was something going on with him.

My girlfriend and I used to visit him when he was living at 62 Victoria Street. That was a place of much music and Graham had his first drumkit there. Bizarrely, there was an Asteroids machine in the dining room. Graham would just ignore us and go out somewhere, so we stopped visiting for a time.

Graham had so much musical talent. He wrote songs, some of which were played by The Ug Brothers and The Subterraineans. He played guitar to a decent standard, and drums of course, and sang a bit as well. Fabulous drummer, very musical with definitive parts.

I think Graham lost his musical mojo during the days of the second incarnation of The Ug Brothers. It was so frustrating. As far as I know, he never did any music afterwards. Lost touch with him about 15 years ago now. Maybe he’s done music in the time since, but I doubt it. All that potential. What a shame.

The Dance of the Four Legged Duck

Haha! Cool! I’d forgotten this one. It’s rather fun. A potential Flicker tune perhaps? It was never performed by a band.

That’s the Wasp playing the main riff. There’s a certain Gary Numan or B52s vibe about it.

It was probably just a jam that felt good under the fingers. This would have been lost completely without the 4-track. The name is a descriptive of the music, don’t you think?

My Roommate

Oh, this was weird. There’s a story here. I don’t remember much about writing this song exactly, but the circumstances that caused me to write it were certainly memorable.

There had already been a poltergeist that had bothered me in that very room in 1983. It might have been due to my younger sister’s puberty. Some people believe those things can happen in that way. I don’t really know what it was. But it sure was weird when it happened.

Now, fast forward to 1986. I had moved out of my parents’ house, and moved back in again. And there were some very, very peculiar things going on in the atmosphere, in a spiritual sense.

When we were all alone, my girlfriend and I often used to feel that there was something in the room with us. She was very spiritual and intuitive, and she had a good feel for these things as well. We used to comment on it and talk to the spirit. It didn’t answer, but it knew we knew. I think that pleased it. We felt this presence was male, a bit of a joker, and we named him Peter.

There were also some very peculiar events taking place out at the caravan site at Willow View at this time. Some of our friends had rented caravans at the place and there were rumours that some of the people there were getting into… dark rituals. You know. Magic and such. Eye of bat and wing of newt. A little community in the countryside. It can happen.

Another rumour coming out of that place was that – allegedly – there was a group of young women among them. They were, for reasons of their own, not happy about the partners some of the other women they knew had chosen. As far as they were concerned, these young men were somehow not good enough for their girlfriends. So the group of young women set about breaking up their relationships.

How much truth there is in any of it I will never know, and how much power they were able to actually wield was probably negligible. But it did make for a good story, and Peter, our presence, was also the name of the head of the… coven? Whatever you want to call it. But I believe the young women, or witches perhaps, were acting independently from his wishes.

This story continues later, but for now we’ll just leave it with acknowledging Peter’s presence and wondering who he was.

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

The Man Next Door

The slapped acoustic guitar song! Lots of Electric Mistress flang all over this one, especially the bass. It has a certain similarity in places to Dean’s song Short and Sweet that The Subterraineans performed. However, no band ever performed The Man Next Door.

So this is a tale told from the point of view of our cat, William. He had long black fur and his two best friends were Suzy, a silver tabby, and a ginger tom whose name I cannot recall. They both belonged to the family next door. The three cats used to hang out together a lot. They would play together, and all curl up together for a big snuggle. Cuteness overload.

The family next door consisted of the protagonist of this song, his wife, and four or five of their children. I forget how many there were. The man was a big cheese at the city or county council and a nasty piece of work. I don’t think he was very bright. He never bothered us at all, but his kids learned and copied his behaviour.

They were horrible as well, but it wasn’t really their fault. They would just brawl and fight in the garden all day, either with each other or with other kids from the neighbourhood, if any of them were fool enough, or hard enough, to visit.

He would wallop his kids in the back garden. I saw him do it through an upstairs window. We could often hear him yelling at them through the walls.

One night there was a lot of yelling and banging. Police and ambulances came. A day or two later I saw his wife walking along with her arm in a sling and a plaster cast. I’d felt so sorry for her for ages, living with a thug and a bully like him. It must have been awful.

They all left after a few more days, taking their cats with them of course. I think he lived apart from the mother and children afterwards. Our cat spent days searching for his friends, looking as forlorn as a cat can, and not eating his fish. Poor old thing.

Cloudbreak

The riffs at the end of this one arrived some time before the rest. In fact, there is an early version of it I remember Wud jamming as a warm-up before a session. It’s on the Wudsongs collection, simply called Jamming.

I rather like a lot of this. The chords and transitions are pleasant and the riffs are pretty decent. A lot of one-take guitar twiddlings are ubiquitous in these recordings, and this one is no different. It’s not a terrible jam, it’s quite funky. I had to turn the tempo knob on the Dr Rhythm up a bit during the recording as there was no other way to do it. It’s a bit Heath Robinson, as a lot of these recordings were.

The lyrics are about a memory I have from the spring of 1978. I still remember it now, the feeling of it. I was 12. We were living in Sidbury, a temporary situation whilst we were between the wonderful 16th century cottage in Honiton and the new place in Sidmouth, which wasn’t ready for us yet. There had been a lot of snow and it had finally all gone.

I was in my football kit, lying on the grass in the front garden. The world was beginning to warm up. It was a spring day and the wind was blowing the clouds away. I just lay there on the grass and in the mud, watching them.

Come to Me

This is a sort of folky singer-songwriter acoustic pop kinda thingy. Probably. In the key of C major. Nice.

I really don’t remember the circumstances of writing this song, but I do remember the song itself and could probably play it. This one was for my teenage muse, who was brutally removed from the part of the world we lived in by her parents, very unexpectedly.

When we were children, we lived on either side of the main road that goes through the centre of Honiton. We used to say hello, and our Dads were friends, I think.

One day, when I was about eight years old, I was with my mate Nick. We were riding up and down the pavement in our go-karts.

Suddenly these girls came and attacked us with a box of itching powder! A couple of them were a bit bigger and older than we were, which was a challenge. Nick got the worst of it, poor chap. We were on the little bridge over the river Gissage, at the bottom of the hill by the bakery. Trying to escape on our go-karts, which were very, very slow. What a scene.

Anyhow, my muse and I ended up at grammar school together in Ottery. Then, when I was 15, she blew my mind.

It’s quite easy to blow a teenage boy’s mind, don’t you think? A smile, a lingering sidelong glance, a little touch. The sound of her laughter.

She lives in Wales now, with a three-legged dog. Bless her.

Same Old Road Again

That’s the first one with the new drum machine! The Boss DR 220A. It was an upgrade from the DR55, but it did require a lot of work to programme a song into it.

I made a load of tables on paper and photocopied them to store my data. The thing didn’t have a lot of memory, so to make a new song the old one had to be deleted. It might have had 32 1-bar user patches and 256 bars of memory all together. I used it a lot over time, including on Dark Company’s Signmaker album.

What’s this song about? Well… You see, I have this wretched tendency to give people another chance. I can be persuaded to believe in someone who previously let me down. It’s not a terribly good character trait, but it’s one I have. I forgive and forget too easily. Well, not forget perhaps, but forgive.

Anyway, I wasted a lot of time trying to do music with people who had an amateurish attitude, and who were fundamentally unreliable. Especially during my teens and twenties.

This is a song that airs that frustration, at myself mostly, as much as anyone else. I have to take the blame, for knowing better but still repeating the same mistake.

It would have been far wiser to say, “Haha! Get lost.” – and then walk away, rather than waste a lot of time and effort trying to make music with flaky, unreliable people. Raw talent doesn’t equate to professionalism.

Many, many musicians are flaky. This is because the music helps them deal with their own flakiness. It’s a bit like self medicating.

So, I would say to anybody doing music, be careful who you invest your time into. Your time is precious – to you. It may not be to anyone else.

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